malvasia bianca

The combined obtuseness of KitchenAid and A&E Factory Service (with a tip of the hat to Western Appliance) has defeated me: rather than getting our broken garbage disposal replaced under warranty, we’ll just call a plumber to take it out and put in a pipe. In retrospect, I don’t know why we bought the garbage […]

Via a link from Niels ’t Hooft, I ran into Sean Malstrom’s Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy. By far the most interesting explanation of Nintendo’s business strategy that I’ve seen, and it turns out that he has a whole website full of articles like that. Which I’ve spent most of the evening reading. A warning: […]

I’m tempted to start filling this blog with complaints about recent customer experiences I’ve had, but on reflection I will avoid doing so. I am grateful to the nice person from KitchenAid customer support who spent a good half hour going out of her way to try to sort out an issue I’m having; the […]

I read a book on neuro-linguistic programming recently. It’s basically a way to reprogram your brain (e.g. to strengthen motivations or weaken phobias), using techniques like visualizing the trigger in question, then changing the way you visualize the scene. (Moving the trigger object farther away from you or closer to you, adding colors, adding theme […]

In response to a tweet and tumblr post from Brian Marick: According to the speaker in a talk I went to several years ago, it was the case until some time last century that educated Chinese people would have memorized hundreds of books going back as far as thousands of years. And these books wove […]

The SuperMemo ideas don’t seem to be leaving my head, and I’ve finally gotten my todo backlog under control, so I think I’ll take a shot at implementing them. Some notes: What algorithm should I use to schedule the reminders? I’ll work under the theory that each item that I want to remember is best […]

Anybody have a (landline long-distance) phone company that they like? I recently discovered that the long distance company that we’ve been using has been treating us badly (hint: grandfathering people into their plans only makes sense if their old plan is better than the plans new customers get), so we’re shopping around.

Untangle, a flash game about representing graphs as planar with straight edges. (Hmm, are there planar graphs that can’t be drawn with straight edges? Not clear to me.) I linked to another game like this before, but this one’s better. TypeRacer, if you’re curious how fast you type. (I’m usually in the 95-100 wpm range, […]

I was very sad to learn that Erik Ray died on May 14, after being hit by a car while riding his bicycle. He was more of a friend-of-a-friend than a direct friend, but I certainly enjoyed the time I spent with him when we were both living in the Boston area. For those of […]

Liesl’s car is getting a bit long in the tooth, so a week and a half ago we went and test-drove some cars. And decided on a Prius; one of the surprises was that I actually preferred its interior dimensions to the Camry’s. (I kept bumping my head on the Camry’s ceiling.) We didn’t like […]

In a bit of a shocker, I not only just put up pictures from 2007, I even got around to putting up the pictures we have so far from 2008. No, I don’t like zoos as much as you might think from these pictures, I just found more stuff that I wanted to take pictures […]

As I have, perhaps, alluded to previously, we spent the second half of April in Paris. Notes: It’s the most wonderful place in the world, but I’m actually not feeling particularly compelled to visit it again any time soon. Some of this has to do with the fact that I’ve been there eight times; some […]

My bookshelves have been getting tight, so I just wandered through the house, and found about a hundred books to give away. Given the frequency with which I’m using the library these days, that should give me a good couple of years more space on the shelves, I hope. I would seem to be ready […]

Jim pointed me to this article a few weeks ago, and I’m annoyed to say that I can’t get it out of my head. It’s about a guy who claims to have an algorithm (implemented by a computer program) to help you remember a lot more stuff a lot more solidly than you can with […]

Time for another tour through my saved items queue in Google Reader. No new categories since last time; the numbers of items in those categories, with the difference from last time, are: blog: 7 (+5) book: 32 (+7) commented: 0 (-2) flash-game: 10 (+2) long: 28 (+14) music: 13 (+6) podcast: 28 (+8) recommendation: 17 […]

I’m sticking with Twitter, at least for the time being: twittering turns out to be reasonably fun, and my earlier blog post plus a mailing list query turned up enough names to make a critical mass of both people I’m interested in following and people interested in following me. Including a couple of other people […]

The latest victory of my new, organized self: after putting up with quite bouncy floors in this house for the four and a half years that we’d been living here, we finally got it fixed! The barriers here were was psychological as much as organizational: my brain was imagining all sorts of possible causes that […]

A bit video-heavy today. The power of continuous improvement. A cool-looking physics “game”: (Via BitWorking.) Zefrank on complicated stuff: Falco PA! (Via Game|Life, which also links to a Guitar Hero version.) An fun variant on presenting minigames. Time to add The Muppet Show to my Netflix queue. (Via Cosmic Variance.) Brian Dettmer book autopsies. (Via […]

Warning: While I don’t intend for anything here to be a spoiler for the “primes and fractions” post I wrote before it (the post following this if you’re looking at the front page), it’s possible that you’d have more fun working out that brainteaser if you didn’t read this post first. At the time when […]

I was nosing around my home directory, and ran into a file with the following contents: From The Mathematical Intelligencer, vol. 3, number 1, p. 45. Problem is by J. H. Conway. Problem 2.4: A Prime Problem for the Ambidextrous 17/91, 78/85, 19/51, 23/38, 29/33, 77/29, 95/23, 77/19, 1/17, 11/13, 13/11, 15/14, 15/2, 55/1. Write […]