I am DAVID L. PASSMORE.
My NOTES originate in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I have lived since 2020. I was a professor at Penn State for 41 years and in higher education for 51 years. My background, experiences, and accomplishments are detailed elsewhere.
how these NOTES are rendered
I live as a geeky nerd.
I use Obsidian to take and hold my notes and to organize digital resources and ideas that form the basis of my writing and other work. I write and code these NOTES in RMarkdown syntax in RStudio using blogging tools provided in the R programming package titled distill.
I render this blog through Pandoc into html from the RMarkdown code. Then, I push the html to my GitHub account, from which it is served publicly through the domain name, davidpassmore.github.io/blog/.
I do not implement cookies and other tracking tools with this blog site. So, if you show up here, I will not sneak behind you to follow you home.
what’s here?
I live a lot of my life doing reading, writing, and arithmetic.
These NOTES span topics that reflect the range of ideas, learnings, and challenges that I encounter daily as I sit at a table with my computers in front of large windows that look over trees, birds, and daily neighborhood activities from our 4th-floor condo in the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh.
Motivating these NOTES is a hope to engage with others. Perhaps more primary is the need to clarify through the writing process the meanings I attach to my perceptions of events, activities, and experiences.
I integrate my perceptions into essays using, where possible, the tools of data science to undergird my arguments. It’s not all a pile of grim, grinding screeds, though. I drop in a few idiographic memories of my experiences and my slanted opinions about emprises offered by life.
I don’t know whether I am a boho or just a lazy cad, but I rarely decide completely what I will write until I struggle to write it. As E. M. Forster, English fiction writer, essayist and librettist, reputedly once wrote, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
I ran a blog at the now out-of-service domain, motime.com, during the early 2000s. I retrieved some of my longer postings to this former blog from The Wayback Machine. I revived a few of these previously dormant postings here as new NOTES essays.
how I engage
I live my life as a retired person.
I rise at 4:00 am daily. Early rising is not my attempt to follow some monastic way. No, I see it as a quiet time, an opportunity to organize and prepare, and a chance to have a few accomplishments before the rest of the world starts moving.
I meet over my cup of morning coffee with long-time friends on Zoom meetings from 6:30 to 7:30 am on Mondays through Saturdays. I spend the remainder of my time on most days on projects selected from too many to do. Sometimes I hold video conferences with friends and collaborators worldwide to gain insights into issues and solutions to problems.
When the Pittsburgh weather cooperates, I read, study, and work in cafés such as the spare, but friendly, Yinz Coffee or within the art-adorned, arbor that envelops the outdoor porch at Biddle’s Escape.
Four days every week I eat a lunch provided by AgeWell Pittsburgh at the Jewish Community Center (JCC) of Greater Pittsburgh in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. I also swim at the JCC swimming pool.
contacts with me
Friends, I live in gated community of my own construction.
Send an email to me using the email address: dlp AT davidpassmore dot net. I take iMsgs and SMS messages at dlp@psu.edu. My Twitter (now, X) handle is @DLPPassmore, where I am available publicly. I also run Slack teams for my former students and family. In these student and family teams, I typically am available instantly.
I read Reddit (mostly r/pittsburgh), but I post there infrequently because I try to stay out of hand-to-hand combat at my age. Although I have placeholder accounts on many social media apps, I do not do in any depth the FaceBooks or the LinkedIns like the kids like to do. Those crazy kids, eh? How can you keep up? So, not much of me is available on most social media apps.
The telephone? Nah. I seldom pick up, except for family or for calls from close associates. Calling me without leaving a message results in number blocking.1 I do use Instagram, but I am only deeply hidden and accessible by family.
I live in a secure building. Instead of confronting me face-to-face like you are a member of the press heckling a public official being frog marched to a hearing on criminal charges, post any expressions of unhappiness and ill-will to me via email or Twitter, where I will incorporate good ideas2 into my life flow. Or, instead, as if kept awake the night before by a bit of indigestible potato, I will press flush to exhaust you into the cold plasma and, then, on quickly through the pipes to the vast, dark cesspool I keep in the corner of my private universe. You have been warned!
vr,
David
Last updated on
[1] "2024-02-12 17:05:07 EST"Please note: my car warranty is as I like it; my grandchildren do not require me to bail them out of jail; the Internal Revenue Service is not trying to reach me urgently. I will never own a timeshare, nor, I guarantee, would you want me to.↩︎
…even those ideas I never considered or initially might seem out-of-sync with my settled patterns↩︎