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Archives for November, 2004

morality

George Lakoff had an interesting article in The Nation recently, called “Our Moral Values”, where he analyses progressives versus conservatives in terms of the morality expressed by a nurturing family versus the morality expressed by a family with a strict father, and gives some tactical suggestions based on that. Pretty sensible; I should really read […]

dvd/hdd player

We bought a new DVD player (and recorder, not that I really care) last month, with a built-in hard drive. Noteworthy aspects: In Spanish, it’s called a “Grabador de DVD con disco duro”. This amuses me, for no particular reason. It is nice having a DVR, though we watch little enough TV that we’re not […]

the singing detective

Now that Miranda’s bed time has moved up (since she no longer takes naps at daycare), we’ve finally been able to watch movies not suitable for 5-year-olds. We usually can’t finish a whole movie in a single night, and most evenings we watch various Food Network programs that we’ve recorded instead of movies, but at […]

kent beck

I just finished reading Kent Beck’s Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns. Not because I’m about to start programming in Smalltalk – it would be an interesting language to experiment with, but I’m way too busy for that right now – but because I really wish I could program like Kent Beck. This book had a couple […]

cities and overworlds

I’m (well, we’re, but more about that some other time) in the middle of Paper Mario 2 right now, and it’s setting off such a cascade of reactions, I figured I’d better start posting about it now instead of waiting until I’m done with the game. It’s not that the game is so stunningly excellent […]

virtual functions and access control

I was just reading Exceptional C++ Style, by Herb Sutter, and one of the recommendations (Item 18) threw me for a bit of a loop. That item talks about access control for virtual functions. (We’ll ignore destructors, since that’s a special case.) My habit is to provide public virtual functions if I want all of […]

followups

We bought one of the tables today – a lovely dark purple rosewood one from a Chinese furniture store. So now we’ll actually be able to have more than two people over for a meal. And the piano was looked after today. It really does look like the piano guy from the store was incompetent […]

prisons

I just finished Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Davis, and it reminded me how screwed up we are about prisons. I read an article (in The Progressive?) a few years ago which said that the US locked up between 5 and 15 times as many people per capita as countries in Western Europe (admittedly, for […]

gay divorced tables

We went to see The Gay Divorcee on Wednesday. (The Stanford Theatre is showing a bunch of Fred Astaire / Ginger Rogers movies over the next couple of months.) I’d forgotten that old movies are in a 4:3 aspect ratio, or something close to that – not nearly as horizontal as modern movies. A couple […]

election night

It’s election night. And what a depressing campaign it has been. I voted for the Green candidate for president (David Cobb), but if California had been close, I would have voted for Kerry: I don’t like him at all, but Bush’s team is evil. No matter what happens, I’m going to feel guilty: I’ve been […]