malvasia bianca

Today’s game: Shadow of the Colossus. Developed by the same team that did the excellent Ico, and it shows: Liesl immediately commented on the similarity between the two games’ graphical styles, despite being unaware of the connection. The gameplay of the two games is quite different, however. This game consists almost entirely of a series […]

This is great. Ricardo Semler would approve. (Found via the XP mailing list.) (My volume of posts that link to something else with minimal comment of my own has increased; I guess I’m turning into a more normal blogger. Which is okay; I try to have at least one more substantial post on any day […]

The Mercury News had an article this morning headlined “Gore says Bush broke law in use of wiretaps”. (The link may go stale after a week, alas.) Which really annoyed me for two reasons: Why can’t the newspapers venture an opinion themselves on whether or not the wiretaps are illegal? This isn’t entirely a straightforward […]

If I’m going to post random recipes here (not entirely random – they’re all good!), I suppose I might as well try out other recipes in blogs I read. The kung pao chicken recipe from this blog entry is pretty good, it turns out.

An excellent MLK day celebration. (You’ll probably have to watch a free ad first, though. Which might then dump you at Salon’s home page; I’m not sure.)

I like the way this looks. Though I’m not sure how comfortable it would be…

Despite my earlier planning, I still haven’t done any work towards switching dbcdb to an SQL backend. Part of this is other things intervening in my life, but most of this is the inertia of starting something new, and that I haven’t broken tasks down enough. Today is a holiday, so I can spend some […]

I finally got around to reading this report on fair use from the Brennan Center. (Which I heard about here.) Quite good.

Two authors I respect, Gerald Weinberg and Samuel R. Delany, have both recently published books on writing. I haven’t read either of them yet (other than the lengthy introduction to the latter in a recent New York Review of Science Fiction), but I bet they’re both well worth reading. Johanna Rothman recommends the former.

I didn’t actually watch or listen to the Alito hearings, but I liked Johanna Rothman’s take on the subject. Compare it to her other post her hiring blog that day.

One of the most interesting entries for me on the Agile Toolkit podcast is the one on promiscuous pairing and the least qualified implementor. What the interviewee proposes is that, when starting on a card, the person who knows the least about it should work on the card, pairing with somebody who knows more about […]

So I was just ordering a book for my dad’s birthday. (Cartographica Extraordinaire; I haven’t looked at it, but it’s recommended here.) Amazon was incorrectly claming that it hadn’t been published, and the publisher’s web site was a little strange, so I didn’t feel like ordering from either of them. After a few days of […]

I recently bought a 3-CD set of Beethoven’s late string quartets. (Performed by the Takacs quartet; quite good.) On my way into a meeting yesterday, I put in the third CD; before doing so, being somewhat geeky, I looked at the timings on the first few tracks; happily, the first four tracks, comprising the first […]

A week ago, we finally finished all the cards that we’d planned for the week. I am hugely embarrassed that it’s taken so long, given that we’ve been trying to do the planning game for about ten months. But we’d been getting it pretty seriously wrong for a long time – reading through that post, […]

The dogs, or at least Yosha, have not been happy recently. First, they were kenneled over the holiday break – we didn’t go anywhere, but we didn’t realize that we weren’t traveling until after we had to drop them off. (Just as well: we really needed sleep for a few days there, and weren’t in […]

The new Apple laptops look great; I’m pretty sure we’re going to get one. The CPUs should be plenty powerful enough, they have more than enough hard drive to keep me happy, the graphics card is better than I expected (I think; I have to look into its details). I’ll probably wait three or so […]

Another very easy Indian recipe, basically a vegetable curry on a bun. Some of the quantities may be a bit off: this recipe I’ve modified (much) more than most. (I like eating ethnic food on buns. Go tortas!) Pao Bhaji, from Pat Chapman’s Curry Club cookbook. 1 onion, chopped 5 cloves garlic, minced vegetable oil […]

Looks like there’s a new version of WordPress out. The features look neat, too. I guess I should consider upgrading soon, even though it’s only been a few weeks since the last time I upgraded…

One thing I forgot to mention about Broadway Melody of 1940: I liked the way they showed the differences in ability between Johnny (Fred Astaire’s character) and King (George Murphy’s character). Right at the start, they’re dancing together; to my untrained eye, there weren’t obvious differences in the quality of their dancing. (I’ll watch it […]

I’m glad to see my local paper writing about the risks journalists face, but perhaps the article should have mentioned the risks that Al Jazeera journalists face. It bothers me a lot to see my government doing stuff like that. (Along with a lot of other things my government does these days, of course.)