malvasia bianca

If you do a Google search for “bonny doon”, the top three entries are currently: Bonny Doon Vineyard, Bonny Doon Engineering, and Bonny Doon Alpacas I do not currently have a need for “Exceptional Alpacas for Stud”, but it’s good to know there’s a local source, should such an eventuality arise.

I didn’t manage to get a Wii on launch day, but I was more successful today. I got to a Best Buy at around 7:10, a mere 2 hours and 50 minutes before it opened; that was good enough to get me the 19th of 26 Wiis that they were handing out. Fortunately, I had […]

I hope that those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving had a nice one. We did; a congenial bunch of guests, a meal headed by cambodian chicken curry. Though there were other nice bits on the menu – in particular, Liesl made a very pleasant beef soup, also from The Elephant Walk Cookbook, and we made […]

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.5; let me know if there are any problems.

Some people at work were talking about LinkedIn, so I decided to finally give it a try. I’d been a bit put off earlier by receiving an invitation that was trying to look like it was written by a human and failing badly (well, it was written by a human, but not the human who […]

There’s this list of categories on the right side of my blog. And it’s starting to annoy me. I don’t post on baseball much these days; does it deserve its own category? Go started as a category, got deleted, got added back. In my last post, I started to think that I should add a […]

I should really catch up on my blogging; in the mean time, some random links: Will it blend? I know where I’m buying my next blender from. John Baez on the state of fundamental physics. Just the link for the panda fan in your family. A followup to a traffic experiments article that I mentioned […]

It turns out that getting to my local Target at 6am wasn’t good enough to get me a Wii. Sigh. I guess I’ll get a copy of Bully to tide myself over until I manage to find one.

It seems that I should have pushed my earlier gardening/programming analogy further. After all, we all know what happens when we rip out code with plans to rewrite it: rewriting always turns out to be harder than we thought, and it usually would have been better to improve matters in place. In this particular instance, […]

I finished Okami at the end of last month. This left me with a three week gap to fill before the Wii release; what to do? I’d been thinking about Lego Star Wars II, but, for whatever reason, that wasn’t grabbing me at the moment. FFXII was tempting, but I’ve been thoroughly annoyed by Final […]

I was going over some pro games last weekend; as always, I was conflicted about how to approach that. Some options: Just play the moves as fast as you can. Go over as many games as possible, trying to get the moves into your fingers, without worrying about understanding them. Try to understand the key […]

I reread Le Petit Prince a month or two ago, for the first time in decades. I’d forgotten how completely, quietly charming that book is. Also, while browsing through Amazon, I see that they’ve finally started translating the Le petit Nicolas series into English. An excellent series indeed; perhaps not in the “timeless classic” status […]

One thing that’s been bothering me at work recently: our response time to bugs is absurdly slow. Even bugs that are marked as high priority take a while to get worked on; bugs that aren’t marked as high priority may well never get worked on. Now, some of this is a classification issue: maybe a […]

Some random comments, after four weeks of Netflix membership: One movie at a time works if you’re sure you don’t want to watch more than one movie a week, and if you don’t mind missing occasional weeks due to shipping vagaries. Neither of those proved to be the case for us, so we’ve switched to […]

Background: Miranda’s school recently changed its chorus time from lunch to after school. This means that Miranda won’t be able to participate in chorus this year, which makes all of us sad. I was going to rant about this on the PACT mailing list, but I’ve gotten chastized recently for complaining there near the start […]