malvasia bianca

For the non-EU flights in Schiphol (at least where we were), they place a metal detector at each gate, instead of having a central bank of metal detectors that everybody goes through. And I can’t figure out why. This seems like the worst possible solution from a queuing theory point of view: you get your […]

I now have braces. Or a brace, perhaps I should say: it’s only on my lower jaw. Not for cosmetic reasons: though I am, of course, shockingly vain, my teeth are really pretty straight. But I’ve had annoying amounts of buildup behind my lower front teeth for years now, and even going to the dentist […]

What a glorious day yesterday was: the seventh Hikaru No Go DVD came out, and the ninth book. And now I have to wait another two months for the next DVD, another four months for the next book. Aargh! We finished the DVD today, after which Miranda asked me if we could play through the […]

The CD database that Max uses lists the artist for Deep Voices as “Various Whales”. Yay.

Last week, I went to a talk by Mike Cohn on “Agile Estimating and Planning”. Good timing: I’d been thinking that I should get around to reading his book on the subject. Which I won a copy of at the drawing after the talk; apparently my recent remarkable good luck has (correctly) decided that I […]

Liesl is playing through Bust-A-Move ’99. And there’s this one song that’s the most insanely perky, catchy song ever. Dah da. Da da da dah da. Da da da da da da da dah dah dadadadah… Wii version next month!

Elite Beat Agents is a music game for the DS. It takes its mechanics and much of its style from a Japanese game called Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan; apparently, however, Nintendo of America thought that my country’s youth would prefer secret agents to male cheerleaders dressed in black, and American pop to J-pop. (Imagine that.) The […]

I’ve finally finished backing up all my CDs which are filed under the letter B. Of which there turn out to be 176, approximately a third of the collection. The distribution: panini$ ls | cut -f1 -d- | uniq -c | sort -rn 62 bach 29 beethoven 24 britten 14 beatles 10 brubeck 10 berio […]

A random factoid from Cheaper by the Dozen: Also of exceptional general interest was a series of tricks whereby Dad could multiply large numbers in his head, without using pencil and paper. The explanation of how the tricks are worked is too complicated to explain in detail here, and two fairly elementary examples should suffice. […]

On Mary Poppendieck‘s recommendation, I’m reading Cheaper by the Dozen. Two paragraphs into it and I’m already a fan!

I want to write about the Earthsea books, but before doing that, I thought I’d dig up some old notes on the topic. As far as I can tell, these were written in 2002, just after the fifth and sixth books came out. I’d read the fifth book; doesn’t look like I’d read the sixth […]

I haven’t kept up my go book collection recently, but I was once a serious go book collector: as far as I can tell, I have copies of all but five books in go that were published in English before the year 2000. I am pleased to report that the list is now down to […]

I didn’t realize that it had been four years since I added Divine Intervention to my list of movies to check out, based on a review in The Nation. (The link won’t work unless you’re a Nation subscriber, alas. Which I would recommend you all do, actually, despite that annoyance.) That list never got too […]

The life of a Mii. Neat pictures. (And a bit more discussion.) Line Rider Super Mario Bros. 1-1. I do not like that my government does evil. Planarity is a neat idea. Though I admittedly didn’t feel like playing it for too long. I played Boomshine for a while, though: it’s sort of a humane […]

A few short flash games that I’ve run into recently. (All via Game|Life.) Nothing fabulous, but I enjoyed spending a bit of time with each. Binary turns out to be kind of fun. Not great: aside from the limitations of the subject matter, I found it went too quickly from a bit too easy to […]

I’ve been back from vacation for more than two weeks now; I really should find some time to clear out the backlog of blog posts to write, shouldn’t I? Maybe if I write them down here, that will give me some incentive to knock out several of them over the weekend. Things to talk about: […]

My apologies if you’ve had problems accessing the blog the last few days – our ISP had AC problems. Should be fixed now, but we may be ISP shopping soon. Any recommendations for good colocation facilities in either the Bay Area or Chicago? I’m not sure what our monthly bandwidth is – last time I […]

Given that I’ve been back from vacation for a week, I suppose I should get around to blogging about what I did during those two weeks. After all, there’s nothing more fascinating to read than bloggers talking about trips they’ve taken! Which, among other things, included playing video games. Bringing us to the topic of […]

I am happy: I’ve managed to max out everything on Grow Cube.

I just turned on Akismet, for spam filtering. (And upgraded to 2.0.9, but that should be a minor change.) Let me know if you see any problems…