malvasia bianca

Following a suggestion from Chris, I gave the desktop effects from Ubuntu 7.04 a try; not the nicest experience. To be fair, it warned me that the feature was experimental, and gave me a chance to turn it off right after selecting it; for better or for worse, though, I didn’t realize immediately that something […]

After my post yesterday, I picked up Gradius III again; this time, on my first try, I not only made it through the first level for the first time, I made it through the second level on that same first try. The latter is a fluke, but I am managing the former fairly reliably now. […]

Just started playing Etrian Odyssey and Gradius III. And both are kind of kicking my butt. I seem to remember being decent at the latter’s predecessor, and finding its initial levels routine; not sure how much of my troubles are that the sequel may be harder, how much are due to my declining powers, and […]

I just upgraded to Ubuntu 7.04; seems to have gone smoothly. Haven’t noticed any vast improvements, but that’s fine: I’d rather have a distribution that subtly improves frequently than one that saves up for big bang changes. Nice to be able to do it (in a supported fashion) by downloading packages over the net, instead […]

Wii Play is a fifty dollar game packaged with a forty dollar controller. There’s not much point in buying it if you don’t need an extra Wii controller; if you do need an extra controller, however, is it worth paying an extra ten bucks to get the game as well? My answer: sure, why not, […]

I’m in the middle of rereading Gerald Weinberg’s Quality Software Management series, which is motivating me to type various quotes on mailing lists that I’m on. Not sure that they’ll do much without the context (actually, I have no reason to believe that they did much for anybody even with the context!), but if I’m […]

One of the least pleasant aspects of hiring is rejecting candidates. (More actively unpleasant for them than for me, to be sure.) It’s something which, until recently, I did almost exclusively over e-mail. Sometimes, rejection over e-mail makes sense. I typically put candidates through up to three stages of filters. (Not counting the initial resume […]

A bit from Bob Sutton’s Weird Ideas That Work (pp. 59–60) that caught my eye: People sometimes get annoyed when I say job interviews are a weak, often useless, way to select new employees. I’ve had executives, middle managers, engineers, scientists, lawyers, a fire chief, and a minister respond with anecdotes that “prove” how skilled […]

Forget Halo 3, GTA IV, and all that: it’s starting to look like the real reason I’ll get an Xbox 360 this year is that there’s an RPG coming out for it starring Frederic Chopin. Yes, that Chopin. From IGN’s capsule summary: Three hours prior to [his death], Chopin saw a dream of a fairy-tale […]

I’ve finished my somewhat quixotic effort of backing up my CD collection. (Or rather ours: most of them I bought, a few Liesl bought. Miranda’s are, alas, not backed up.) They’re all backed up both on-site and off-site, with the sole exception of Rongchun Zhao: Master of the Erhu. Which last is a pity, since […]

I felt a bit uncultured never having played Grand Theft Auto III. I’d played GTA: SA, and was quite impressed by it, but I thought I should go back and see where the series really took off. And, for a while, I wished I hadn’t. GTA: SA drops you off right in the middle of […]

I was looking at the HTML version of the HTTP standard on the W3C web site today. Apparently there’s a bug in their text-to-HTML conversion program, causing some words to lose their initial letters. Which led to this: 4.If the message uses the media type “multipart/byteranges”, and the ransfer-length is not otherwise specified, then this […]

I learned about the band GrooveLily from an episode of Next Big Hit. I wasn’t paying too much attention when the song, “No Room In Your Bag”, started: a patter song over a drum backing. But then some chords on the piano came in, the instrumentation started getting richer (electric violin, yay), and I started […]

Game 5 was in Dallas; the Mavs went up twenty, I decided that it just wasn’t the Warriors’ night. I wasn’t worried about them not winning the series or anything, but the Mavs were a good team on their home court, and the Warriors were obviously having an off night. And then the Warriors started […]