malvasia bianca

The A’s were eliminated from the playoffs last night. Unfortunate, though a third (or a half?) of the way through the season most people would have considered it a miracle that they’d come this close. A bit of a let-down after the amazing tear that they went on, though. All things considered, I’m quite happy […]

A while back, I wondered if I’d ever buy another GBA game, and decided that the answer was probably no. Which would have been correct based solely on the quality of upcoming games for various systems, but I couldn’t exactly bring my copy of Resident Evil 4 on vacation. (Well, I suppose I could have […]

Author pages now contain links to their books and series, and I can now handle books with two authors. (Not three, not four, just two. Or one, of course.) I wrote my first generic Java method; whee. There was one mystery there: Book is a subtype of Entity, and at one point, I passed a […]

I finally got around to plugging the digital camera I bought before going on vacation into my computer. It’s only been just over two months since we got back; to put this in context, right before going on vaction we developed a roll of film that contained pictures from not only Halloween 2004 but also […]

One of the things I realized while reading The Arcades Project: I don’t know squat about French history. There was this revolution at the end of the 18th century; I don’t think I care about French history before then. (1789? Yes, says the wikipedia; I guess I should read that article, shouldn’t I?) It’s supposed […]

My reading list continues to give me high-priority requirements: the gorgeous Kabuki: Dreams makes me deal with series whose titles aren’t simply Title of Series, Volume XXX. It was easy enough that I got it out of the way right now, instead of waiting until the weekend.

Congratulations to Jordan and Tanya on the birth of their son Caleb on September 15!

I was planning to make dbcdb look beautiful (well, something other than butt-ugly) this weekend, but reality intervened in the form of books that I’ve read that didn’t fit into my existing setup. And keeping it up-to-date with respect to my current reading list is my current highest priority, so I spent a couple of […]

When I first heard about the Nintendo DS, I thought it was a gimmick. And I still think it’s a gimmick, though one that’s doing surprisingly well: the system is consistently outselling the PSP in Japan, for example. (No idea how they’re doing in the US.) Part of that is due to cultural differences: some […]

I’ve been blogging for a year now. If the counters are to be believed, this is my 151st post, though it’s possible that I wrote some drafts that I deleted before posting. And I don’t seem to be done yet, despite the lack of posts this week. (We’ve been laid low by plague, while our […]

This version of the Tao Te Ching is pretty cool: click on any character and you’ll get loads of information about it and its possible meanings. Can you tell I’m spending a few hours going through my backlog of links to look at? Alas, going through the backlog is as likely to increase its size […]

This blog is remarkable. Alas, its only feed is in Atom, which Gnus doesn’t understand. Hopefully in half a year or so I’ll know enough to be able to write my own feed reader in Ruby.

The Ruby on Rails demo is pretty amazing.

My sample page now looks significantly different. The ‘Author’ field links to another web page (a very sparse one currently; more will be added eventually). And there are ‘Last Read’, ‘Rating’, ‘ISBN’, and ‘Own’ fields (all optional). The ISBN field links to an appropriate Amazon page. A quite pleasant afternoon of programming, all things said. […]

Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park closed last week. It’s vaguely possible that it will reopen – a lot of people miss it – but I won’t count on it. This is sad. Not that I went there all the time or anything, but I suppose I would have a decade ago if I’d been living […]

We saw a game at Oakland for the first time this season. Liesl’s company has season tickets to the Giants, so we’ve been there, but not Oakland. The game featured Felix Hernandez, whom Baseball Prospectus ranked as their top pitching prospect coming into the season, against Joe Blanton, whose star had dimmed coming into this […]

This page looks the same as it did last week, but it’s being generated using Java. Whee. (And I hope it will look a little different by the end of the weekend.) I didn’t spend too much time programming: my time was mostly spent managing and understanding infrastructure. There’s now an acceptance test which runs […]

I’ve subscribed to my first podcasts: Agile Toolkit and The Sound of Vision. It really is nice that I can enter the URL for an RSS feed into iTunes and it will go and fetch new shows for me. And the iPod is definitely the right place for this sort of thing: if the podcasts […]