Category Archives: Personal

What shall I call my newsletter?

I’ve been blogging since 1999, first at weblog.searls.com, and since 2007 here. I also plan to continue blogging here* for the rest of my life. But it’s clear now that newsletters are where it’s at, so I’m going to start one … Continue reading

Posted in Personal | 15 Comments

Why the Celtics will win the NBA finals

Marcus Smart. Photo by Eric Drost, via Wikimedia Commons. Back in 2016, I correctly predicted that the Cleveland Cavaliers would win the NBA finals, beating the heavily favored Golden State Warriors, which had won a record 73 games in the regular … Continue reading

Posted in Personal, Sports | 4 Comments

Remembering David Hodskins

A hazard of aging well is outliving friends and other people you love. For example, two of the three in the photo above. It dates from early 1978, when Hodskins Simone & Searls, a new ad agency, was born in … Continue reading

Posted in Friends, Obituary, Personal | Tagged | 8 Comments

TheirCharts

If you’re getting health care in the U.S., chances are your providers are now trying to give you a better patient experience through a website called MyChart. This is supposed to be yours, as the first person singular pronoun My implies. Problem … Continue reading

Posted in Business, data, Health, Personal, problems | 9 Comments

Remembering Kim Cameron

Got word yesterday that Kim Cameron had passed. Hit me hard. Kim was a loving and loved friend. He was also a brilliant and influential thinker and technologist. That’s Kim, above, speaking at the 2018 EIC conference in Germany. His topics were The … Continue reading

Posted in Identity, Obituary, Personal | 13 Comments

Going west

Long ago a person dear to me disappeared for what would become eight years. When this happened I was given comfort and perspective by a professor of history whose study concentrated on the American South after the Civil War. “You … Continue reading

Posted in history, Life, Personal | 10 Comments

A happy 75th anniversary

My parents (that’s them, Eleanor and Allen Searls) were married on 17 August 1946, seventy-five years and two days ago. I would have posted something then, but I was busy—though not too busy to drop something in Facebook, where much … Continue reading

Posted in Family, Past, Personal, Photography | 4 Comments

Speaking of character

It seems fitting that among old medical records I found this portrait of Doctor Dave, my comic persona on radio and in print back in North Carolina, forty-five years ago. The artist is Alex Funk, whose nickname at the time … Continue reading

Posted in Art, Friends, North Carolina, Personal | Leave a comment

Enough with the giant URLs

A few minutes ago I wanted to find something I’d written about privacy. So I started with a simple search on Google: The result was this: Which is a very very very very very very very very very very very … Continue reading

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Be the hawk

On Quora the question went, If you went from an IQ of 135+ to 100, how would it feel? Here’s how I answered:::: I went through that as a kid, and it was no fun. In Kindergarten, my IQ score was … Continue reading

Posted in education, history, Ideas, Personal | Leave a comment