malvasia bianca

A while ago, I went looking for Cole Porter DVD’s; unfortunately, there wasn’t much available. (For all I know, not that many of his musicals ever made it on film.) I ended up with a five-movie box set, which sounded good until I started actually watching them. High Society is actually pretty good; I should […]

Hey, this is cool. Makes me wish I were still teaching. Well, not really, but still.

I’m starting to really miss good food. I’m not up for going out to eat right now, I’m not up for grocery shopping, I’m not up for cooking, and my body is only just now up for eating. But I was watching Iron Chef last night, and my taste buds let me know that they […]

After sleeping for about 14 hours each of the last two days, my flu seems to be getting under control. I’m not healthy yet, but I’m pretty sure I’m on the mend. Anyways: when I was a kid, I read a lot. Miranda, however, hasn’t shown any real interest in reading yet. She has lots […]

Forty minutes or so ago, I turned on the computer (actually, Liesl rebooted it out of Windows), and when I selected ‘Linux’ from the boot menu, it wouldn’t boot. Either things went black immediately or it said “GRUB” at the top of the screen and froze. Not good. At least Windows was still booting. So […]

When I was looking for podcasts, I ended up going to iTunes and browsing the top rated ones. I found some that I like, but the best is the They Might be Giants podcast. Only one episode so far, but it’s really good; I should go and get more of their albums. Other podcasts I […]

I’m in the habit of, when going on a plane trip, picking up a copy of Games magazine. (If I can find a copy; it doesn’t get very good distribution, and in particular airport stores almost never have it.) Which I just did; it turns out that the magazine has changed recently. They used to […]

WordPress has an option to do ‘pingbacks’ on links referred to in your blog. I thought I’d had this turned on for a while, but I don’t really know; at any rate, when upgrading the blog, I found that I’m now pinging back my own blog. Which, on further reflection, is probably actually a good […]

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 1.5.2. I still don’t know what was causing the problems I had the last time I tried this, but it seems to work now. Let me know if there are any problems.

In an RSS feed, you get some text plus a link. The link is the link to the original article that the entry in the feed corresponds to; the text is either the entire original article or an abbreviated version of it. Or at least that’s the way it’s conventially done. But in Simon Phipps’ […]

I finished reading an introductory SQL book. (Which seemed decent enough.) So now I don’t really have many excuses to avoid starting the transition of dbcdb to an SQL back end. Which I don’t really feel like doing, even though it’s clearly the right thing to do next. This means one thing: I should split […]

Martin Fowler just revised his The New Methodology paper; it’s a nice introductory exposition/justification of agile methods.

Some management writers that I respect think that it’s worth learning about Meyer-Briggs personality types, on the theory that you need to realize that most people are different from you, and that there are concrete differences in their motivations, approaches, and so forth that can be helpful to know. The Meyers-Briggs types categorize your personality […]

More changes at my sudoku site of choice: First, they’ve added a new tool to help you solve puzzles: they’ll highlight all squares where you’ve filled in a given number (either as the only choice for that square or as one of the possibilities for that square). Which I appreciate: for one thing, it helps […]

Gosh.

I just read On Talking Terms with Dogs: Calming Signals. Its core is a list of about thirty different signs that dogs do when trying to calm themselves or each other dog. Some of which make sense in retrospect, like not walking straight at a dog if you don’t wan tto make it nervous (arc […]

As I said last month, we’ve finally started doing a full planning game; we did it again this month. And I’m really glad we did: for one thing, November’s planning rubbed in our faces some of the things we were doing wrong. One basic issue, as I see it, was that we were focusing too […]

I was pretty excited to get Sid Meier’s Pirates!: I’ve spent many a pleasant hour with the various Civilization games, and the reviews talked about how you couldn’t put the game down, how you’d find yourself playing it at two in the morning. The reality wasn’t so great, however. Its resemblance to Civilization was very […]

I bought a Nintendo DS; the triggers were that we’re going on vacation soon, plus the release of the new Mario and Luigi RPG and the new Animal Crossing. We also got a puzzle game called Meteos, which seems decent so far, and which at least uses the input mechanism well.

My registrar was having problems yesterday, so name lookups for bactrian.org and gobooks.info weren’t working. Seems to be fixed now.