malvasia bianca

Warning: this post consists of discussion of management of queues that matter only to myself, and is therefore extremely unlikely to be interesting to anybody else. Despite which I insist on writing it, because of my excessive fascination with the effects of and management of queues. Two months ago, when discussing my lists of saved […]

xkcd: One person, one vote in the Texas legislature: (Via Lawrence Lessig.) Starlings flocking; it starts to get good at about 2:00, though if that’s not good enough for you, go to 3:20. (Via Cosmic Variance.) Weird Hand-Drawn Game certainly qualifies on the first two counts… (Via Game|Life.) I don’t have much to say about […]

Now I know what an earthquake feels like. About time; I’ve been living in the Bay Area for nine years, after all.

My favorite bit from my employer’s counterclaim in the NetApp case: COMPLAINT PARAGRAPH 3: NetApp is a pioneer in the design of data storage systems marketed throughout the United States and abroad and continues to innovate new advances in data storage technology. NetApp’s patents cover a host of advanced features found in NetApp’s award-winning Data […]

I spent Monday and Tuesday at the first Agile Open California. I learned several things there, which I hope I’ll find time to blog about over the next couple of days, but I want to start by talking about the format. Actually before getting into the format, I want to talk about the setting. It […]

Deterministic and probabilistic software product management. Pen tricks. I’ve been doing what he calls “the helicopter” for decades (though in a slightly different way); obviously I have more to learn. Beautiful movies. (Sorry about its non-embeddable nature, and for all the talking and the fact that it’s an ad; I couldn’t find anything else to […]

I was quite impressed by Apple’s recent iPod announcements. Most companies, I think, would have been coasting for some time if they had as dominant a product as the iPod. Apple, however, is continuing to push ahead with a constant stream of improvements ranging from the subtle to the groundbreaking. Which is awesome: what I […]

Apologies for my recent silence; the cause is a combination of watching movies (well, DVDs, mostly Last Exile) and being pretty busy last weekend. But now I am, for once, caught up with my other odds and ends (i.e. reading blogs) early enough at night to actually be able to write something. As I mentioned […]

As I mentioned before, I’ve started tagging my saved items in Google Reader. I did this partly because of a general worry about the saved items getting out of control, but also because there were three specific categories of saved items that I was afraid were getting buried: items that I wanted to read but […]

Jordan asked: Could there be, even in principle, a lean math department? What would it be? Which is a great question, to which I started a rambling response; I figure I might as well turn it into a rambling blog post instead. Where do I even start thinking about that? What does a math department […]

Ninja Town. I love the character names. A great video review. (Even though it’s of a demo of a game I’ve paid no attention to.) Tim Bray speaks sense on drugs. “Um, let’s see… the cost of pushing back a brutal ugly slow path to death is getting high from time to time. Yep, I […]

I just accepted an invitation from a coworker on LinkedIn; when I did so, it presented me with a list of “People You May Know”. The creepy thing was that I do in fact know about half of them, but I can’t figure out how LinkedIn knows that. If it could go through my address […]

Maybe I’d have more free time if I were capable of writing blog posts that are less than three pages long?

For the last several months, Miranda has been repeatedly talking about ideas that she has for a computer game. I idly encouraged her without thinking too much about it; recently, however, she’s been actually filling up notebooks with designs for the game, so it looked like time to start getting serious. She doesn’t show any […]

Jordan responded to my earlier post by adding: If you would like to be driving 5 mph faster than you are, but someone is preventing you, stop and think about how much difference the extra 5 mph makes to your overall life goals. If the answer is “not very much,” then try to keep from […]

Warning: boring whining about other drivers follows. And no, I don’t claim to be a perfect driver myself. One of my coworkers has been known to say something like “east coast drivers are assholes, west coast drivers are clueless”. Having driven on both coasts recently, I’m inclined to agree. And, while I’ll take the clueless […]

A few months ago, I lost the foam covers on my earphones (standard iPod earbuds). I didn’t worry about it too much at the time; they sound fine without them. A month ago, the left ear in one set of earphones died. I didn’t notice exactly when it happened; I chalked it up to kinking […]

Several months ago, the Washington post wrote an article about Joshua Bell performing in a D.C. subway station. Almost nobody noticed him; he made some money (probably a good amount for a subway musician), but certainly didn’t attract any crowds or anything. My first reaction was: I hope that I would recognize the quality of […]

Another thing I learned on the trip: I can see why Ford retired the Taurus. (Though I guess they’re bringing it back.) I didn’t like ours from the moment I sat down in it, mainly because I felt like my head was banging against the ceiling. I realize that I like to sit farther forward […]

Miranda is currently under the impression that the name of The Blue Danube Waltz is “the burping song”. She practiced some on vacation; she’s not nearly as good yet at burping melodically on demand as Wakko, but she’s definitely improving. (Trivia: that’s not actually the regular Wakko voice doing the burps: they are stunt burps […]