malvasia bianca

My bookshelves have been getting tight, so I just wandered through the house, and found about a hundred books to give away. Given the frequency with which I’m using the library these days, that should give me a good couple of years more space on the shelves, I hope.
I would seem to be ready [...]

Another thing that I’d forgotten since the first time I read the GTD book: not everything that advances a project is a Next Action. Some actions are for the future (and hence belong on your calendar or tickler file); some actions need to be carried out by other people.
One concrete effect of this realization [...]

Jim pointed me to this article a few weeks ago, and I’m annoyed to say that I can’t get it out of my head. It’s about a guy who claims to have an algorithm (implemented by a computer program) to help you remember a lot more stuff a lot more solidly than you can [...]

Time for another tour through my saved items queue in Google Reader. No new categories since last time; the numbers of items in those categories, with the difference from last time, are:

blog: 7 (+5)
book: 32 (+7)
commented: 0 (-2)
flash-game: 10 (+2)
long: 28 (+14)
music: 13 (+6)
podcast: 28 (+8)
recommendation: 17 (+6)
short: 0 (0)
think: 12 (+3)

For a total [...]

I’m sticking with Twitter, at least for the time being: twittering turns out to be reasonably fun, and my earlier blog post plus a mailing list query turned up enough names to make a critical mass of both people I’m interested in following and people interested in following me. Including a couple of other [...]

I went back and reread the GTD book to see what I’d forgotten from my first read-through a year or two ago. Quite a lot, it turns out (in fact, almost everything except for the definition of a next action), about which more later, but one of the concepts that struck me the most [...]

The latest victory of my new, organized self: after putting up with quite bouncy floors in this house for the four and a half years that we’d been living here, we finally got it fixed!
The barriers here were was psychological as much as organizational: my brain was imagining all sorts of possible causes that were [...]

A bit video-heavy today.

The power of continuous improvement.

A cool-looking physics “game”:

(Via BitWorking.)

Zefrank on complicated stuff:

Falco PA!

(Via Game|Life, which also links to a Guitar Hero version.)

An fun variant on presenting minigames.

Time to add The Muppet Show to my Netflix queue.

(Via Cosmic Variance.)

Brian Dettmer book autopsies. (Via Signal vs. Noise.)

Fun for your jailbroken iPhone:

(Via Pink Tentacle.)

Warning: While I don’t intend for anything here to be a spoiler for the “primes and fractions” post I wrote before it (the post following this if you’re looking at the front page), it’s possible that you’d have more fun working out that brainteaser if you didn’t read this post first.

At the time when I [...]

I was nosing around my home directory, and ran into a file with the following contents:

From The Mathematical Intelligencer, vol. 3, number 1, p. 45.
Problem is by J. H. Conway.
Problem 2.4:
A Prime Problem for the Ambidextrous
17/91, 78/85, 19/51, 23/38, 29/33, 77/29, 95/23, 77/19, 1/17, 11/13, 13/11, 15/14, 15/2, 55/1.
Write down 2 (with your right hand). [...]

Recently, we’ve been watching some videos on our TV via our Mac, using an appropriate video adapter and Front Row. Which works pretty well; I don’t plan to make a habit of it, but it’s nice to know that the option is available for the times when I want it.
Actually, I take that back: [...]

I still haven’t figured out Cursor*10, but it has some neat ideas. (Via GayGamer.)
An ActiveRecord tutorial; a nice little introduction to the concepts, I liked the way they get their hands dirty with showing you the SQL.
Yeah, that’s kind of the way I feel about Obama…

For no particular reason, a random bit of Sesame [...]

I have rarely been so proud of my alta mater as when I learned that they (or at least Arts and Sciences) adopted a rule requiring faculty members to make their research be freely and openly available. I have no idea why academic presses didn’t start crumbling five or ten years ago; open access [...]

I’ve linked to Hans Rosling before, but his 2007 TED talk makes him worth a second mention:

A good speaker, with some very interesting facts to present and ways to present them, and make sure you stay for the surprise ending! (A warning, it’s 19 minutes long.)
Found via Presentation Zen, who also links to several [...]

I’ve been in a state of disillusioned disconnect about presidential elections for the last 15 years or so. (I was excited about Bill Clinton; that lasted until he made a 180 degree turn on his campaign promises within days of being elected.) To some extent, I was wrong about that: I underestimated George [...]

I’ve been tinkering with my GTD system in the two weeks since I first posted about it; I’m quite pleased with the system, and wanted to talk a bit about how it’s going and the changes.
First: I really am getting things done. Simple things that should get taken care of immediately are, in fact, [...]

A year or two ago, my brother gave me a copy of the Getting Things Done book. I won’t go into the details here (partly because it’s been more than a year since I read the book, so I don’t remember the details!), but it’s basically a system for organizing tasks in such a [...]

About two and a half months ago, I had 89 saved items in my feed reader. I noted that I wasn’t shrinking that number as quickly as I expected, and predicted that, two months later, I’d have shrunk the list by a further 20 items. It’s a more than two later; how am [...]

Pretty sand pictures:

(Via Backreaction, which has links to more.)

Those are some big crystals.
Van Jacobson on networking. More than an hour long, which is why it took me more than a year to get around to watching it, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff here.
You’re probably already all aware of Why’s (Poignant) Guide to [...]

Liesl’s dad gave her a set of Get Smart DVDs for christmas. Miranda thinks that they are absolutely hilarious. (I won’t disagree.)