B E Hoch

Brian E Hoch Brian is an imperfect follower of a perfect Messiah. He is an IT professional, and tries to be the best husband, father he can be. He loves reading any book he can lay his hands on and will passionately talk your ear off about pens, coffee or mechanical keyboards. This blog is to journal and to practice and improve his writing. Please enjoy.
Brian E Hoch

Recent Posts

Technology Philosophy

Make Sure You FLOSS

Well, I suppose I’ve spoiled the ending with my title. But I want to talk about how my opinions on software have changed. I’ve been a “techie” for as long as I can remember, but over the past few years tech has been making me grumpy. The Beginnings I remember a story from 2009 about Amazon pulling copies of, believe it or not, 1984 and Animal Farm from people’s Kindles. There is some nuance: apparently the seller didn’t actually hold the copyright to the books. But it showed the world the Brave New World we were entering. People had paid for those books and thought they owned them, but what they owned was a license that Amazon could revoke at any time. People no longer own things; corporations own them, and we just pay for a long-term rental.

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Life

Updates

Updates I don’t actually know what I want to write about today. I have a lot of things I can talk about. A lot has happened in the last two years. We settled in to our house. My oldest graduated High School and started College. I formed a great group of close friendships in my small group at church. I wrote most of a thriller novel and have a solid outline for a sequel. My two youngest children were diagnosed with autism. I built a family hub app that I’m pretty proud of. My aunt died. My dog died. A friend I’ve had for 18 years died. My wife became a business owner. I’m sure there’s more. The point is, a lot of life has happened. It’s been a very full two years.

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Life

When Everyone Is an Impostor, No One Is

When Everyone Is Super an Impostor, No One Is My first instinct is to talk about how it’s been a long time and I’m turning over a new leaf and I’ll be writing more. But you’re a human (presumably), you can read and see the difference in date. And you can probably deduce from that length of time that I’m unlikely to keep up blogging again, like I didn’t last time. So what’s changed? Why will this time be different?

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Challenge

Challenges

Periodically, I like to do a challenge for myself. It started out as a modification to the 75 Hard challenge. I know, according to the rules of that challenge, you aren’t supposed to make any modifications to the challenge. However, I also believe in living in the real world, and as a person dealing with chronic illness, a full-time job and a husband and father of six, I don’t see how it is feasible to have two 45-minute workouts (one of which must be outside) every single day to succeed.

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Life Musings

And Thus, Like a Self-Conscious Phoenix …

Image by raquelraclette https://unsplash.com/photos/red-flame-MYjFOiVWWT8 I poke my head up from the ashes and look around to make sure I won’t look like a complete fool as I try to rise again.

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Life

Death with Dignity

In just over a year, my mother-in-law has lost both of her parents. They were wonderful people and we all miss them. My wife’s grandfather died first, last year, not long after the lockdown started. It was sudden, but not a surprise either. He’d been declining steadily over the past few years. He fell at home and just never recovered. After he passed, my wife’s grandma moved up and lived about 20 feet away from my in-laws. She seemed to be doing very well for a little while, apart from the deep sadness of losing her husband of over 50 years.

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Life Musings

Permission to Breathe

A little while back, I posted about my commitment to posting on this blog. But it’s been a couple of weeks and I haven’t posted. I haven’t abandoned my blog, though. I have been working through a lot that’s been going on over the past few weeks, and I needed to scale back on what I was doing. There simply wasn’t enough time in the day to take care of everything.

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Life Random

Keeping Quotes

When I was a young man, I started writing down quotes that I found interesting, inspiring, or funny. I think I was probably inspired by a book my grandpa published when I was twelve, 1001 Great Stories and Quotes. It’s a habit I’ve kept up over the years, though with waxing and waning consistency. When I hear or read something that sparks my interest, I try to record it for future reference.

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Health Life

Doctor StrangeVirus or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 On Halloween 2020 my wife was getting ready to visit her sister in Idaho who was going through an awful divorce and I began to feel a tickle in my throat. I knew it wasn’t COVID because I had been so careful; I never went anywhere without my mask, I hadn’t been around anyone who had it, and I washed my hands religiously whenever I returned home. Since my wife was flying, though, I went to get tested first thing the next day just to be safe.

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Professor-Graves

Professor Florian Graves

For a few years now I’ve had the idea for some detective stories floating around in my mind. I’ve always wanted to try to write murder mysteries. I finally began working on some and I plan to publish them here as I finish them. I know they are not great yet, but I want to share them all the same. I’ve created a page to house all of the stories on the website here Professor Graves Mysteries. The first story “Silence in the Library” is up now. I hope you enjoy and please provide feedback if you feel inclined. It will help me in my quest to improve as a writer.

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