malvasia bianca

One of the things I realized while reading The Arcades Project: I don’t know squat about French history. There was this revolution at the end of the 18th century; I don’t think I care about French history before then. (1789? Yes, says the wikipedia; I guess I should read that article, shouldn’t I?) It’s supposed […]

My reading list continues to give me high-priority requirements: the gorgeous Kabuki: Dreams makes me deal with series whose titles aren’t simply Title of Series, Volume XXX. It was easy enough that I got it out of the way right now, instead of waiting until the weekend.

This version of the Tao Te Ching is pretty cool: click on any character and you’ll get loads of information about it and its possible meanings. Can you tell I’m spending a few hours going through my backlog of links to look at? Alas, going through the backlog is as likely to increase its size […]

Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park closed last week. It’s vaguely possible that it will reopen – a lot of people miss it – but I won’t count on it. This is sad. Not that I went there all the time or anything, but I suppose I would have a decade ago if I’d been living […]

In grad school, Jordan introduced me to Daniel Pinkwater’s books. And they’re great! Well, many of them are great, and almost all of them are at least entertaining. (He’s written a lot of books.) For an introduction, I highly recommend 5 Novels; Jordan will be peeved if I don’t mention Lizard Music, and among his […]

The Arcades Project has been sitting on my to-read shelf for a year or so. (I’ve finally started reading it, about which more later.) One thing that’s been bothering me since I heard about the book, though: I’ve been to Paris several times, and I don’t recall ever seeing an arcade there! Have they all […]

I ran into a manga called Crayon Shinchan a few months ago; I used to be a bit embarrassed at how funny I found it, but I’ve given up on that, and just accepted that it makes me laugh out loud on a regular basis. (I mean that quite literally: I really do inadvertently laugh […]

I did some book shopping in Paris. A bit silly, in these days of www.amazon.fr, but old habits die hard. And FNAC is still pretty cool, though not quite as impressive to me now as it was the first time I set foot in it. I bought most of Bruno Latour‘s books that hadn’t been […]

We went to see Howl’s Moving Castle last weekend. Actually, Liesl and I went the weekend before that, to make sure it was okay for Miranda; we decided that it probably was, though we checked first with Miranda to make sure. We all enjoyed it, though I don’t think it will end up as one […]

Prompted by Knuth’s delightful article “The Errors of TeX”, I just read his collection Literate Programming. (Which contains the aforementioned article, among others.) A fascinating read, for multiple reasons: Knuth is a really smart guy, whose opinions I very much respect, but he’s writing from a context that I frequently find very hard to understand. […]

Bonny Doon is the best.

The A’s are continuing to do pleasantly well: they haven’t gone on a huge win streak or anything, but they’re winning almost every series these days. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by Bobby Crosby’s return; call me a pessimist, but even though he was rookie of the year last year, he only batted .239 last […]

A little while back, I read Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel trilogy. A trilogy of thick fantasy novels, the sort of thing that I normally avoid, but I’d been getting the feeling over the last few years that I’d been avoiding fantasy novels more than I should. So when I ran into an interesting review of the […]

Reading Christopher Alexander reminded me of Jane Jacobs, so, since I had a copy of her latest, Dark Age Ahead, on the to-read shelf, I decided to read it next. She’s quite an author. She’s most famous for her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but she’s hardly a one-trick pony. […]

I just finished A Pattern Language, by that favorite architect and urban planner of programmers everywhere, Christopher Alexander. (Actually, while Alexander gets the lion’s share of the credit in subsequent references, the front cover lists “Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, Shlomo Angel” as authors.) My main reaction was “this […]

I see that I’ve forgotten to mention Kalpa Imperial, by Angelica Gorodischer, which I read a few months ago. I ran into it because it’s translated by Ursula K. Le Guin; I approve of her books, and her taste in general, so I figured I’d give it a shot. And it’s delightful. It’s a collection […]

At work, I’ve recently been reading through a collection of papers on software development. Pretty boring, largely, until I got to the last article: “The Errors of TeX”, by Donald Knuth. Which was great! It turns out that Knuth kept a log of every single change he made to TeX from the beginning of debugging […]

I heard back from Alfie Kohn in response to my question about John Holt and homeschooling. His anwser was that he likes a lot of what Holt said, especially in his earlier works, but he wouldn’t go as far as Holt and recommend homeschooling for two reasons: Public schools are an important democratic institution, one […]

(This is a lightly edited version of a post on an internal Sun mailing list on extreme programming). I just finished reading the Quality Software Management series, by Gerald Weinberg (which I learned about from the XP bibliography), and I heartily recommend it to anybody interested in XP, or for that matter other agile practices. […]

I went to a couple of talks by Alfie Kohn this week. I’ve been a big fan of his ever since I ran into an article of his in the Emacs distribution back when I was in college. His book No Contest was a big influence on my teaching when I was a grad student […]