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This widely-circulated article popped up today and something needs to be said about it. In a nutshell, the article seeks to change readers’ notion of traveling by calling them to appreciate quality over quantity, claiming, for instance, that one month living in Ethiopia is “better” than one month visiting sights throughout Africa. It says it…

We rented a car today in Porto and embarked on a small, but significant, 60-km trek through the Douro valley to get to our next “port” of call, Peso da Régua. It’s hard to describe the feeling of being transported back in time without leaving the comfort of your Jeep Escalade. As we drove into…

I love the randomness of travel, in particular the chance encounters with people and cultures and art that you don’t plan for but seem to always happen anyway. Take Porto, my second day here. It has been drizzling all day but not hard enough to stop a day’s worth of sightseeing. But come nightfall, the…

It’s incredible how quickly first impressions of a place take hold. It takes a lot of work to undo them. Take Portugal–my first day here. Landing at the airport, looking out the window, there was debris on the tarmac: rusted over equipment, tires, very old-looking construction dozers. It was a surprising thing to see on…

They say on the seventh day God rested. After making an entire world, one day seems like an appropriate respite. I wonder what He would have done in 2019. Probably would have stretched out on the couch binge watching Game of Thrones before the Season 8 premiere. I, for one, have always loved a good…

Venturing into Queens on a Saturday night, on the elevated track looking out on fluorescent tenement windows sliding by, hugging the creaking shell of the train as it pulls around a turn, spying through a lone lit office window a hunched worker hammering out a weekend project, feeling the blast of cold as the doors…

I learned today (three days early) that March 4 is the only date that is also a sentence. In this case, the imperative sentence “March forth!” I don’t know how I got to be this old without knowing this. I wonder what other silly tidbits like this lay ahead in my future just waiting to…

When it’s time to take my daily medicine, the only thing I can ever think about is the greatest comedian of all time, performing the best routine ever immortalized on television. It’s cliché to say ‘they don’t make them like that anymore,’ but there is a homey, innocent feelgoodedness embedded in classic I Love Lucy…

I always find that procrastination time goes by much, much faster than work time. So if you’re really looking to procrastinate, you can make the hours last longer by actually getting work done.

If you’re into the tech scene chances are you’ve read Paul Graham’s essay Do Things that Don’t Scale. It’s gospel for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs because it encapsulates an important principle for successful startups, that it takes an awful amount of work to get from 0 to 1, whether it’s dollars, users or customers. And that…