malvasia bianca

I’ve been on a bit of a Christopher Alexander kick for the last couple of years. At first, I started reading his most famous books, but those were good enough to leave me curious about what else he’d written. Not all of which is great, but enough is to keep me going.
Still, it’s [...]

I’m on the fourth chapter of my Japanese textbook now, enough for a new set of difficulties to surface. All of which ring vague bells from a decade ago; I’m trying to do things right this time, which means that I need better strategies for facing these difficulties than I had last time.
One problem: [...]

Some random notes from our recent trip to Boston and its environs:

T tokens are no more. Which made me a little sad, but I was very happy that, when arriving Tuesday evening for a trip where we’d be leaving the next Tuesday morning and would spend three days outside of Boston, there was a [...]

Ayse Sercan’s thesis work sounds really cool.
I’m just linking to this list of Ruby techniques so that I’ll be able to find it a year from now when I’m in a position to better use it.
More good stuff from Karl on copyright.
Rice paddy art.
Echochrome looks like an Escher video game.
Quite the summary of the latest [...]

Amazing walking wind-powered sculptures.
Impressive optical illusion.
Oh yeah? I’m building a topos in my attic.
Not easy to make a shift like this.
I’m a sucker for things like this. Given that I am interested in some sort of physical training and don’t seem to be getting around to restarting aikido, maybe I should give the [...]

I’m a fan of authors on construction whose works I can read in a programming context. On a related note, here’s a bit from Gerald Weinberg with a building/programming analogy that I like. (Quality Software Management, v. 4: Anticipating Change, pp. 216–217:
Imagine building a house by bringing all the parts to the lot, [...]

In response to my previous post, Stuart asked: “So, what do you do with all your books?” The answer got a little long, so I’m forking it out as a separate post.
I don’t have any great solutions. But, if you assume a fixed capacity, there are basically two tacks you can take: get [...]

Looking back, I had my lean book-buying revelation more than a year ago. As I said at the time, “right now, I have … lots of books to read before I can start buying again”, and while I have hardly sworn off from buying books since then, I have made an effort to read [...]

I’m in the middle of rereading Gerald Weinberg’s Quality Software Management series, which is motivating me to type various quotes on mailing lists that I’m on. Not sure that they’ll do much without the context (actually, I have no reason to believe that they did much for anybody even with the context!), but if [...]

Since I finished rereading the Earthsea books more than a month ago, I suppose it’s time for me to say something about them. To be honest, I’m feeling a little intimidated by what I wrote last time; I should have done a better job of taking notes right after finishing the books. Ah [...]

What a glorious day yesterday was: the seventh Hikaru No Go DVD came out, and the ninth book. And now I have to wait another two months for the next DVD, another four months for the next book. Aargh!
We finished the DVD today, after which Miranda asked me if we could play through [...]

A random factoid from Cheaper by the Dozen:

Also of exceptional general interest was a series of tricks whereby Dad could multiply large numbers in his head, without using pencil and paper. The explanation of how the tricks are worked is too complicated to explain in detail here, and two fairly elementary examples should suffice.
1. [...]

On Mary Poppendieck’s recommendation, I’m reading Cheaper by the Dozen. Two paragraphs into it and I’m already a fan!

I want to write about the Earthsea books, but before doing that, I thought I’d dig up some old notes on the topic. As far as I can tell, these were written in 2002, just after the fifth and sixth books came out. I’d read the fifth book; doesn’t look like I’d read [...]

I haven’t kept up my go book collection recently, but I was once a serious go book collector: as far as I can tell, I have copies of all but five books in go that were published in English before the year 2000.
I am pleased to report that the list is now down to four: [...]

Another quote from The Toyota Product Development System (p. 102), in the section on checklists:
A company that cannot standardize will struggle to learn from experience and is not truly engaged in lean thinking. Indeed, any company that simply tries new things without standardizing along the way is “randomly wandering through a maze,” repeating [...]

A quote from Morgan and Liker’s The Toyota Product Development System:
Toyota does very little “information broadcasting” to the masses. Instead, it is up to the individual engineer to know what he or she is responsible for, to pull what is needed, and to know where to get it.
Here’s the full context (pp. 95-96; [...]

A passage I occasionally reread when I get in a certain sort of discussion:
Among the ancient gods of Naucratis in Egypt there was one to whom the bird called the ibis is sacred. The name of that divinity was Theuth, and it was he who first discovered number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, as [...]

Random trivia from Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: when moving your eyes slowly from left to right, the left side of your brain is controlling the actions. Like when, say, reading English.
I don’t want to make too much of this: I assume it’s true, but exactly what to derive from this isn’t clear. [...]

Miranda’s reading rather more comfortably now than she was in the past; at least partly because of this, she’s noticeably expanded the range of her desired sphere of competence.
Examples:

We’re finally letting her play Animal Crossing, because she’s reading well enough that she won’t constantly be nagging us to help her play. And she really [...]