This is a letter that was on Peter’s computer’s hard drive. I assume that he actually mailed it; it would not have been out of character. I’ve tried to reproduce the formatting of the original, which was mostly ordinary, with a couple of exceptions. January 12, 2004 To Whom It May Concern: Today at 10:51, […]
Here’s part 2 of Peter’s “neat words” list. (See earlier entry for part 1 and background.) These are the words starting with F through I. There are quite a lot of F words, for some reason. fandango fanfaronade fantoccini fantod faradism farfel fasces fatuity filch flaccid flang flange flapdoodle fleer flense fletch flibbertigibbet flimsy flinch […]
Some of the first email I ever sent was to Peter, back in college, back in the days when you had to specify the full path from one computer to another of how to reach a recipient. But I don’t think he was ever all that into email. I think there were periods of years […]
Kam rescued a bunch of files from the hard drive from Peter’s computer. Most of them are either mundane (mostly syllabi for the classes he taught) or not suitable for public display (private letters). But two of the files are titled “peters neat words” and “peters neat words 2”; they consist entirely of lists of […]
Yo, Jed~ Your detailed sign-in instructions are perfect. They remind me, however, that my kids have often observed that I take “logical sequential” to an anal-retentive extreme. A couple of years ago I tired of the charge and wrote them an eleven-page memo refuting it, including bullet-points, footnotes, and an index. But back to the […]
On looking through some old files, I found a file from mid-1989 titled “peter.anecdotes.” He must have sent me these notes in email at some point (see a forthcoming entry about Peter and email), but I don’t know exactly when (probably early ’89), and I’m not sure whether these three paragraphs were all in the […]
I posted this back in 2005, in an entry in my main blog, but I think it’s worth reposting here. One of the few things other than papers and photos that I brought home with me after that first week was Peter’s slide rule. I always wanted that slide rule when I was a kid. […]
When I was a kid, at one point my school sent home a form that asked for various bits of info about the kid’s home life. One of the blanks on the form asked for a list of the languages that were spoken in the child’s home. Peter wrote: “English and Gibberish.” (I don’t actually […]
In an entry from late 2007, Dobe asked what happened to Peter’s books. I was going to finally post a comment on that entry to supply some answers just now, when I realized that I might as well make it a full entry instead of a comment. So here goes: Peter had a lot of […]
A bunch of things conspired to cause me to stop posting here two years ago. I was feeling that my entries weren’t coming out the way I wanted them to; the things I was posting always seemed to make better stories in my head than on the page. Which is unusual for me; usually a […]