malvasia bianca

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]