malvasia bianca

One of my friends brough a PSP into work, and he let me play through a bit of Wipeout Pure. (Hmm: the official capitalization seems to be WipEout . Sigh.) Nice screen; a big improvement over the GBA. Good to have an analog joystick. Great graphics; not as good as the current generation of (non-handhold) […]

I just finished the new Zelda game for the GBA, and it’s quite good. A little while ago, I complained about how I don’t like 2D Zelda games as much as 3D Zelda games, but actually this game does a lot to alleviate my complaints. (Kind of spooky, actually.) For one thing, the overworld isn’t […]

WordPress, the blog software that I used, has gone through some changes recently, so I thought that I’d upgrade it yesterday. At first, I thought everything went well, so I started to write a post about how remarkably well designed the upgrade process was. Unfortunately, when I went to edit that post in progress, it […]

I heard back from Alfie Kohn in response to my question about John Holt and homeschooling. His anwser was that he likes a lot of what Holt said, especially in his earlier works, but he wouldn’t go as far as Holt and recommend homeschooling for two reasons: Public schools are an important democratic institution, one […]

(This is a lightly edited version of a post on an internal Sun mailing list on extreme programming). I just finished reading the Quality Software Management series, by Gerald Weinberg (which I learned about from the XP bibliography), and I heartily recommend it to anybody interested in XP, or for that matter other agile practices. […]

I went to a couple of talks by Alfie Kohn this week. I’ve been a big fan of his ever since I ran into an article of his in the Emacs distribution back when I was in college. His book No Contest was a big influence on my teaching when I was a grad student […]

I just posted the following to delany-list (and the last paragraph is a reference to another post there), but I figured it could do double-duty here as well. For those who don’t know, I’m a huge Delany fan. I finished Phallos a couple of days ago. On the one hand, I quite enjoyed it. On […]

Miranda’s cooking skills are continuing to advance: she’s working on presentation now. Last night’s dessert started with a meringue cookie, surrounded by 5 gummi bears (in a regular pentagon around it, one gummi bear of each color that we have). This represented a flower; on top of the flower, she put marshmallows, which she said […]

I just finished Jak 3, for the PS2. I didn’t play either of the first two games in the series, despite their getting generally quite good reviews: the first one was a platformer, whose only apparent distinguishing feature (as far as I could tell from reviews) was that the main characters had more “attitude” than, […]

Series work differently in video games than they do in, say, books. In books, a sequel continues the story of the previous book in the series. And, to be sure, there are a lot of video game series that follow that same pattern: I just finished playing Jak 3, and it did continue the story […]

I now have FC3 installed on my home and both work computers. So I spent the morning today upgrading packages on one of my work computers. It took forever, though, because the web proxy that I have to go through at work kept on corrupting data, as far as I can tell. Once I found […]

It turns out that, if you poke around enough at the boot: prompt, you get told about an option for where to find the images to upgrade from. So, a couple of hours of installation later and a couple of hours more of package upgrades later, here I am. Yay. No big differences are yet […]

I was hoping that I’d be using Fedora Core 3 the next time I wrote an entry here, but ’twas not to be: I can’t get the damn CD’s written. I’ve eliminated all variables, using two different CD writers, two different CD readers, two different sources of blank CDs, two different downloads of the images […]

Last year, I upgraded this computer from Red Hat 8 to Fedora Core 2. It was a bigger OS jump than I would have perhaps liked (skipping two OS versions), but now I’ve stuck with FC2 for a while, even though FC3 has been out for several months. At first, I was planning to skip […]