malvasia bianca

I’ve made a couple of dbcdb changes. Now every page contains a link to let you search for all blog posts mentioning it. Which required a bit of WordPress futzing: it turns out that WordPress doesn’t let you search for double quotes by default. Also, I replaced the ISBN and ASIN fields that were really […]

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0.4; let me know if there are any problems.

I can report that Animaniacs holds up quite well. Miranda approves, too.

Miranda’s daycare occasionally goes on bowling trips, and the local bowling alley also handed out cards entitling kids to one free game a day (plus free shoe rental) over the summer, so she’s been asking me if I could take her bowling some time. Which I finally got around to doing today. Fun. First time […]

As previously threatened, I asked my team members if any of them would like to take charge of retrospectives. To which I got the response “but that’s not the way to do things: we try to share knowledge and skills wherever possible.” Oh, right – I’m glad somebody remembers that sort of thing, since obviously […]

I spent this morning hanging out in open space. The first discussion was a followup to last year’s talk by Arlo Belshee on promiscuous pairing. It turns out that a couple of experience reports were presented here on teams’ experiments with the practice. The good news: both teams saw similar productivity/quality/etc. boosts to the team […]

Thanks to Mark and Marissa, I can report that the warehouse district seems rather more interesting than the blocks of downtown Minneapolis between the light rail stop and my hotel. Certainly more places where I’d want to eat.

I spent this morning at a talk by Mary Poppendieck on lean. It was billed as a tutorial, but there were too many people for that, so it ended up as just a talk. As far as I can tell, the main thing that I missed from its not being hands-on was a chance to […]

The first session I went to this morning was on systems thinking / causal loop diagrams. They had us go through an exercise throwing balls around, talked about states of the system, and showed diagrams that explained the different states (why performance increased, then leveled off, then went down). Pretty good; I’d seen the ideas […]

A follow-up to my zombie sighting from Saturday evening: it turns out that the price they paid for livening up downtown was to spend two nights in jail. The police should be ashamed of themselves: any claims of “simulated weapons of mass destruction” or “intimidat[ing] passersby” are ridiculous.

And now day 2 is over. Better than day 1: I enjoyed all four talks that I went to, and hopefully got something out of them. One of the problems that I have is figuring out which talks to go to. I have enough agile experience that I’ve been avoiding the beginners’ tutorials. The main […]

The first day of Agile 2006 is now more or less over. It was just a half-day, really: only afternoon talks, and I don’t think quite everybody is here. I went to a couple of presentations. The first wasn’t too good: it was billed as talking about how agile had changed since the manifesto, but […]

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Whisper of the Heart. It’s a Studio Ghibli film, which is obviously a big plus. On the other hand, it’s not by Miyazaki or Takahata, and it somehow sort of shares a character or two with The Cat Returns, which isn’t the biggest recommendation. All in all, I […]

I’m here now. Getting on the light rail and taking it to the Nicollet Mall stop was easy enough. Then I got off, looked around for my hotel, and didn’t see it. Or any useful street signs, or anything like that. Most people were walking in one direction, so I followed them; after a bit, […]

I’m off to Agile 2006 tomorrow. Should be interesting; many thanks to the powers that be at work for sending me there.

I wasn’t sure what I thought about this article on removing warning signs when I first saw it, and I’m equally confused by this one. On a basic level: does this really work? I’ve never driven in Europe, I’ve never been to Italy at all, so I don’t have much context for many of the […]

The previous owner of our house was quite a gardener. One of the things I liked about the place: out the back door, there’s a patio with a table and chairs, covered by a sort of trellis with jasmine growing over it (creating a nice, cool space). In the yard proper, many flowers, large, colorful […]

I had not realized until recently that carpaccio only dates back to around 1950.

Quite a launch today. The Galaxy launch had its moments, too – it got people ready to treat Sun seriously as an x86 systems vendor, and the machines were quite nice. But, at the end of the day, they were 1U and 2U Opteron servers, and those aren’t exactly hard to find. Today’s launch, however, […]

My first computer was an Apple ][+. I can’t remember exactly when we got it; some time around fifth grade (1982), I suppose. I used it through the time I graduated from high school (1989); I got a Mac (SE/30, woo-hoo!) when I went to college. I have very fond memories of (among other things) […]