malvasia bianca

For the last month or so, Miranda’s been really into helping out with cooking dinner. I’m not quite sure what triggered it; part of it, I suspect, is that with her current bed time, she doesn’t get to spend much time with us in the evenings, and the best way to maximize that time is […]

I was just listening to a collection of Stan Freberg singles. Satirical musical comedy from the 1950’s; pretty good stuff, though it is, of course, somewhat dated. Reading through the booklet that came with the CD, though, it’s amazing how much pop culture we’ve lost from only a half-century ago. A few of us have […]

The board finally voted last night. Actually, they voted on two things: they changed their vote of a month ago, and agreed to not close any school this year. And they voted on which school they would close next year: they’ll close Slater (my daughter’s school), PACT will move to Castro, but the rest of […]

Even though I’ve been blogging for half a year now, I get the feeling that I’m not doing it “right”, or at least I’m not doing it the way normal bloggers do. Whenever I read other people’s blogs, they’re usually taking part in actual conversations: I dipped into several blogs a couple of weeks ago, […]

Another meeting at Castro last night. Not too much excitement in the community comments. I did admire (?) the chutzpah of a certain group of parents in the dual immersion program who talked about how horrible it was to close a school in that community, and then floated a plan which would turn the school […]

When we last left our refactoring saga, I was regretting having done a State extraction too early, and was about to throw it out, doing some more class extractions first. Which is what I did, and it was clearly the right decision; I now have some significantly smaller classes, and they’re a lot easier to […]

At the last school board meeting about school closure, they put forward a plan where the school to be closed would be Castro instead of Slater. (The latter being the school that Miranda goes to.) They wanted to give Castro parents time to complain about this, so they’re holding a couple of community forums at […]

I recently read an article by Herb Sutter that claims that the long rise in processor speed is finally coming to an end. I certainly believe that this is going to happen eventually, maybe within the next decade, because we do seem to be approaching some physical limits; I didn’t think that it was happening […]

I used to play go a lot, and I collected a lot of go books. In fact, by the time I was in grad school, I had copies of all but 10 or 15 or so of all the go books that had ever been published in English. (Just under 100 at the time.) The […]

A few random iPod-inspired thoughts: The first time I imported a CD with iTunes, it reported doing it at a rate of about 5x. But the next time I imported a CD, it reported a rate of under 2x, and stayed there. And it was a real problem: it took all evening just to import […]