the state I'm living in

"At the keyboard level, writing code and writing prose are vastly different activities. I have to consciously shift gears from one to do the other. Code is a functional thing. It either works or it doesn’t, and there are tests which tell you if your code passes or fails. You spend a lot of time debugging problems. You have a lot more leeway writing prose. Whether or not it works is a more subjective assessment."

"NEWTOWN, Conn. — J. David Goldin, an eccentric 69-year-old with a handlebar mustache and an obsession with radio, was trolling eBay one evening in September 2010, looking for old radios and recordings, when he spotted an item that piqued his interest: the master copy of a broadcast radio interview with baseball legend Babe Ruth as he hunted for quail and pheasants on a crisp morning in 1937. For a moment, Goldin contemplated bidding. It was the kind of historic recording that would fit perfectly in his collection of more than 100,000 radio broadcasts, all meticulously enhanced and preserved on tapes stored in thin white boxes on a maze of shelves in his humidity- and temperature-controlled basement “vault.” Then he leaned closer to his computer, adjusted his thick glasses and studied the record’s photograph and description. What happened next would set in motion a federal investigation with a twist worthy of a classic radio drama. Goldin exposed what authorities have called “one of the most egregious instances of theft” from the National Archives, where the government preserves billions of historic documents, photographs and recordings."