malvasia bianca

Miranda’s really nagging me about wanting to use my Linux computer. But, before letting her do that, I want to do two things: replace one of the drives (the original one, which I’ve been using for everything but backups) with a larger one, and install Ubuntu. Following John’s suggestion, I’m moving /home and /usr/local to […]

Miranda’s reading rather more comfortably now than she was in the past; at least partly because of this, she’s noticeably expanded the range of her desired sphere of competence. Examples: We’re finally letting her play Animal Crossing, because she’s reading well enough that she won’t constantly be nagging us to help her play. And she […]

See, this is why Apple is so annoying. I don’t have a cell phone, I don’t want one. I don’t have a video iPod, I don’t want one. But the iPhone sounds awesome, despite being a jazzed up combination of those two. I’m not going to go out and buy one on release or anything, […]

I lost my iPod nano a couple of months ago; oops. Which gave me a chance to see some of how the iPod has evolved: I had to use my old iPod for a little while so I got reminded what the previous generation was like, and then I got to experience the newer model […]

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 […]

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 […]

I’m currently running Fedora Core 5 on my home machine. FC6 is out; following a sage reader suggestion, I’m going to reinstall the OS (in a larger drive) rather than do a simple upgrade. Which means that I could almost as easily switch distros. So: stick to FC6, or switch to Ubuntu? I’m actually quite […]

Yesterday, I moved more items off of my list of web pages to regularly click on and onto Google reader. Which emphasizes: Google Reader has too much of my state these days. I don’t care so much about the list of what I’ve read and what I haven’t read, but I should at least make […]

I was given a second hard drive for my computer recently. Some random thoughts: Annoying to have to buy a bracket to mount it in the computer, and even more annoying that Sun doesn’t want to sell me one directly; fortunately, it’s easy enough to get a used one for cheap. Having said that, once […]

By the end of the weekend, I’d copied enough of my CD’s that my laptop’s hard drive was beginning to fill up, so I thought it was about time to start backing them up. So I grabbed one of the USB drives that I bought for the purpose. (Half a year ago, when I bought […]

I’ve finally started backing up my CD collection, only half a year after I planned to do this. The goals are: To have lossless backups, including offsite ones, of the entire collection. To do whatever error correction is possible when creating the backups. (The vast majority of the CDs are between 10 and 20 years […]

What are good formats to use for purchasing and storing music and movies? I remember a time in the past where it was possible to pretend that Ogg Vorbis was a reasonable choice for many of your audio needs; that is, unfortunately, no longer the case. Desirable qualities for a format, in no particular order: […]

I just upgraded to iTunes 7; I wish I hadn’t. Downloading fancy album cover is nice (though I wish I hadn’t had to give a credit card number to do so); the reflected images of the album covers are a bit much, but whatever. We’ll see how gapless playback works. Unfortunately, it turns out that […]

I seem to be in a quiet mood these days. But I did like this video from my CEO’s blog. Andy is an excellent geek. I suppose I could even try joining the modern world and embed it. Gee, that was easy. Go web 2.0, or something.

If one is so eccentric as to use a Dvorak keyboard layout, it is easy to accidentally hit clover-Q with one’s thumb. Good thing Emacs has auto-save files; I should get in the habit of saving long e-mails while in the middle of drafting them, though…

So what’s the deal behind this story? 37signals is notable for, among other things, being minimalist (in many ways) and profitable. Like they say, they don’t need money (at least to do what they’re doing now); and, in the past, they have apparently been happy with (quite) small teams. (Indeed, DHH reinforces the latter in […]

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0.4; let me know if there are any problems.

Quite a launch today. The Galaxy launch had its moments, too – it got people ready to treat Sun seriously as an x86 systems vendor, and the machines were quite nice. But, at the end of the day, they were 1U and 2U Opteron servers, and those aren’t exactly hard to find. Today’s launch, however, […]

My first computer was an Apple ][+. I can’t remember exactly when we got it; some time around fifth grade (1982), I suppose. I used it through the time I graduated from high school (1989); I got a Mac (SE/30, woo-hoo!) when I went to college. I have very fond memories of (among other things) […]