malvasia bianca

I just finished reading The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley, and I’m finding it both interesting and interestingly unsettling. Its subtitle is “How Prosperity Evolves”, and it’s a look back at various aspects of human development from an optimistic libertarian point of view. Basically, his thesis is that new ideas lead to new niches for […]

My very first impression of Rock Band 3 was surprisingly negative. Liesl, Miranda, and I sat down to play; I’d assumed that we’d go through career mode on Miranda’s band. The game, however, created a band for me and then refused to let us change to one for her. (I didn’t look into it too […]

One of the things I got out of Agile Open California this year was a decision that I should work harder at removing database access from the unit tests for our Java code. It will probably be a pain, but I’ve dealt with legacy code before, I know the basic ideas of what to do, […]

Another good day, and as always a quite successful conference: I came into the conference with two areas in which my testing doesn’t feel right, and I came out with concrete suggestions for what to do next on both of those; my off-the-wall session went much better than I could reasonably have hoped for; and […]

I’m seeing a lot more familiar faces at Agile Open Northern California 2010 than I had been in previous years: before, I’d always been surprised at the low percentage of repeats, but this year I’m seeing people I know everywhere I look. So: glad others also find this valuable enough to keep coming back! (Or […]

It’s been a while since I’ve done a recipe post here; but this is a recipe Miranda came up with a few months ago, we’ve made it several times since then, and it’s really quite good. (Not good as in “good for a recipe my daughter came up with” but good as in “better than […]

The main question that I’d like to understand better in the current Vintage Game Club playthrough of Super Mario 64 is how the game fits into the taxonomy of the genre of platformers. Or, indeed, whether it fits into the taxonomy of that genre: while, at the time it was released, Super Mario 64 seemed […]