malvasia bianca

I think I first got interested in the idea of working while standing up when I was reading the book Brain Rules. That book, in fact, doesn’t just suggest that you work standing up: it suggests that you work while walking, by installing a treadmill at your desk! I’m not about to put a treadmill […]

From Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, p. 102: Cna yuo raed tihs? Aoccdrnig to rscheearch, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are; the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses, and you can sitll raed it […]

You have doubtless noticed the new widget in my blog’s sidebar. It’s for Child’s Play, a charity that gives toys, video games, books, etc. to children’s hospitals around the world. It’s a wonderful cause, and those of us in the Vintage Game Club thought that it would be fun to try to pool our energies […]

Game | Life on the death of next gen consoles in Japan. The Gallery of Fluid Motion. I like the second one too, though it takes a while to get going. Arlo Belshee on planning without estimating. As with his earlier promiscuous pairing experiments, there’s a lot to think about here… Interesting way to think […]

On Wednesday morning at AYE, I attended a session that Don Gray ran on personality types. The session was focused on the MBTI temperaments; so we broke up into groups based on our personality types, with each group given 10 minutes to come up with a definition of teamwork and 10 minutes to come up […]

On Tuesday afternoon of AYE, I attended a session on the clinic method that Jerry ran. The idea: surprises always happen on projects, and they’re generally bad. In cities, we have institutions (e.g. hospitals) to go to for help when we run into trouble; maybe our development organizations should have the same? One way to […]

On Tuesday morning of AYE, I attended Esther Derby’s session on organizational change. This session’s simulation was about a factory that had decided to enter the lucrative “fancy pinwheel” market. She started out by dividing us into four groups (cutters, assemblers, testers, managers), and plunked us down in a room without a lot of information. […]

The Monday afternoon AYE session that I attended was one by Gerald Weinberg on “Remembering Your Resources When Stressed: The Self Esteem Toolkit”. This is basically the material from his book More Secrets of Consulting: some reminders to help you act more congruently in difficult situations. For example, the Yes/No Medallion, to help you say […]

One complaint about twitter (and other websites which I have less experience with, e.g. Facebook) is that they provide a sham of real connection: you’re not really friends with all of those people, it’s just a sort of faux intimacy. This is true, but it’s actually a strength rather than a virtue, and being at […]

The session that I attended at AYE this morning was Steve Smith’s session on the Satir change model. The meat of the session was a simulation, where one person was going through the stages of the model and the rest of us were broken up into teams representing stages: the Old Status Quo, the Foreign […]

Some tidbits about introverts and extroverts, prompted by today’s MBTI discussion: When I got to lunch, about half the group from the tutorial session was in the lunch room, but it was almost completely quiet. I’m fairly sure that what happened was that none of the introverts wanted to stay around and chat after the […]

Today is a warmup tutorial for AYE; the morning session ended with a discussion of Meyers-Briggs personality types. What struck me the most this time was the discussion of the J/P split. This split is related to how you act: the J side (judging, scheduling) likes to have a plan and lists, while the P […]

A warning: this post will perhaps come off as excessively self-indulgent: I’m only doing it because, within the last week, two different people asked me about this in person. (I’m happy to do more posts like this if y’all actually find them interesting, though.) Occasionally, a friend of mine asks me how I get stuff […]

I trust you are all aware of The Big Picture? I thought this one was particularly beautiful. And unrepresentative, in that the pictures are all taken from a single source, the Earth from Above exhibit. My favorite video game business analyst giving an exegesis of a recent Nintendo interview. The backlog as a map. I’ll […]

I’m only a sixth or so of the way through The Process of Creating Life, but the ideas there are really getting my brain racing today for some reason. He gives these beautiful little examples of evolving living structures step by step: looking at those, you (or at least I) say: What a great paradigm […]

Achilles’ Phat Lewtz, on the Iliad and MMORPGs; huge amounts of fun from Roger Travis. Jordan on David Foster Wallace. My heart sank when I saw that Retronauts episode 49 was almost 3 hours long. But it’s all about the Dreamcast, including a great segment with Tycho, the best three hours of podcast listening I’ve […]

As expected, I found the second week of Deus Ex to be a lot more relaxing than the first week. I had a better feel for the game and my character had a full inventory; this meant that my brain could stop seeing potential disaster every time I failed to be perfect at something and […]

Hmm, been a while since I’ve done one of these; sorry about the length… Visualizing the Python commit history. Leadership, responsibility, and sausage. Solving sudoku games via package management. Japan, computers, appliances. (Via Niels ‘t Hooft.) Breakpoints as a checklist. Programmers, insecurity, source control. I linked to a movie of strandbeests (amazing wind-powered sculptures that […]

Through the start of the year, I was pleasantly busy: working, hanging out with family, playing games, reading blogs, blogging, reading books, learning Japanese, doing some non-work programming. Lots of stuff, but none of it was overwhelming, and I enjoyed the mix. This has, unfortunately, changed over the last few months: I’ve changed from feeling […]

After hours of phone calls (and weeks of calendar time) dealing with garbage disposal annoyances, I made an appointment to have the damn thing taken out today – I’d never had a garbage disposal in any place I lived before, why did I need one now? Turns out it’s not so easy: the building code […]