Author: Steve Ainslie

Although I don’t suffer from a fear of conflict and have a long track record of facing problems directly, my preferred choice is to avoid confrontation when possible. Instead of striking out, verbally or physically, if someone doesn’t deserve my attention, I will purposely ignore them. I’m good at this. I’ve been doing it my…

My neighbor and I have nearly identical houses built by the same builder, the same year, with the same floor plan – except for a few minor details. I was dog-sitting for him this week so I made a dozen visits to his home and spent several hours there. The feeling of being in my…

For my entire life I have professed to be a dog lover. There’s a picture of me taking my first steps as a toddler on the beach with the sweetest smile on my face, as I reached out to pet a giant golden retriever. I had dogs when I was little. My grandparents had dogs….

When I was younger, people used to pray for things all the time. They prayed for money. They prayed for money, love, happiness and health. They prayed for good things to happen and bad things to not happen. They (me, for sure) prayed for good weather, better Christmas presents, and my parents to not get…

Kevin Kelly’s, “Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier”, is a book of aphorisms that he wrote for his adult children. I used to love reading aphorisms and famous quotations. They inspire me. They sound so wise. They usually come from someone, like Kelly, who has been successful. The problem for me…

So Reddit just made a major change to its API access. Beginning next month, they are charging 3rd party developers for access to its APIs that had previously been free. Over the past 8 (?) years, 3rd party developers have created software to make Reddit better. This included reading apps that added functionality and blocked…

Many households in my neighborhood are run by children. I see evidence of this everyday. Stay-at-home moms spend long afternoons sitting outside watching their children and/or actively playing with their children. I could add a dozen other examples to this list. What they all share in common is that there are activities that center around…

My friend is lonely so he bought a motorcycle. It won’t solve his problem. Buying things never does. He’ll be excited for a few weeks. He’ll buy accessories and will work on his new bike customizing it with gear, attachments and doodads. He’ll take a few trips on it. Then, after his initial burst of…

I am currently reading “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” by Jared Diamond. In it, he researches ancient civilizations and presents reasons for why they no longer exist. He covers societies including Ancient Egyptians, Maya, Inca, Vikings, Anasazi and several others. A striking similarity in almost all of these collapses was over-consumption of resources…

None of the milestones in my life turned out the way I expected them to. Growing up, my head was full of fantasies about how things would go when I hit major milestones: None of them happened the way I had imagined. Happy Days, Revenge of The Nerds, Welcome Back Kotter, My Three Sons, The…