malvasia bianca

We just spent most of a week in Oberlin, visiting my parents. We got to see two of Miranda’s cousins for the first time in over two years; they are truly excellent. (It was nice to see my parents too, to be sure.) Downtown Oberlin has changed somewhat since I lived there. More restaurants, which […]

In regards to my last post: the bibliography to the XP book doesn’t seem to mention The Production of Houses, but it has this to say about The Timeless Way of Building: Outlines Christopher Alexander’s view of architecture and construction. The relationship described between designers/builders and the users of buildings is much the same as […]

Some quotes from the chapter on “The Architect Builder” in Christopher Alexander’s The Production of Houses: This requires, then, that decisions about design can be made, individually, house by house, and that they can even be made while construction is under way. (p. 69) It requires a system of communication in which the building is […]

We went to a (quite nice) party yesterday. Hosted by friends of ours, lots of people around our age present, most of which were couples with kids. I’m pretty sure that Miranda was the oldest kid there; in fact, she may have been two years older than any of the other kids. Which is pretty […]

A month and a half ago, I was toying with the idea that maybe signing up for Amazon prime would actually save me money. I still don’t really believe that, but the general idea of not buying books until right before I’m going to actually read them seems sound to me. I’m going on a […]

Doctor Fun has ended its run. The last remnant on my bookmarks page of the early days of the web…

These sound to me like desirable characteristics for open source decision makers.

I finally got around to putting up pictures of us (well, mostly pictures of Miranda) from last summer.

One thing I wanted to learn when I started reading about lean: given that Toyota is supposed to be so great at everything, why is it that, when I last shopped for a car, fully intending to buy one of their models, the experience was so bad that it (or rather they, I tried two […]

We got back the results of Yosha’s blood work; it would seem that his kidneys aren’t functioning at full capacity. Which might even explain the vision problems: kidney problems can lead to high blood pressure can lead to vision problems. We’ll see; we’ve gotten bags of special “easy on the kidneys” dog food, and hopefully […]

Apparently there was only one AIDS death in Santa Clara county in 2004. A ways to go still, but that’s real progress. We just finished watching the version of Angels in America that HBO did a couple of years ago; fabulous.

Translators, beware. Banana phone! Just in time for the primaries. No, we don’t need webcasting rights. Fun with flash. Um. Well.

Our beloved Alyosha is fourteen years old. He’s been showing his age for a little while now – aside from slowing down in general, he started getting excessively grumpy three or four years ago. At a vet visit not too soon after that happened, the doctor said his thyroid levels were low; he went on […]

I looked into using delicious for this, but its automatic blog posting doesn’t quite do what I want. So I guess I should cook up some way of transforming its RSS feeds, or something. (An excuse to learn about XSLT!) In the mean time: This seems to be sticking with me. Glad I didn’t buy […]

I’ve been really curious about lean manufacturing (which basically means the way Toyota does things) for a couple of months now. I was aware that people had made some analogies between it and agile software development, but my interest got more concrete when I started reading Silk and Spinach: that’s a blog that spends a […]

I’m in the middle of reading some Christopher Alexander, which of course gets me thinking about how our house works. And my conclusion is that I quite like it, but that Miranda can take almost sole credit for that. The downstairs has one largish L-shaped room, a small kitchen, and a small den. The upstairs […]

Antibubbles. More IP insanity. I wish I could get more info about this, but I haven’t yet been able to find German sources. Links to pretty bug pictures I could watch this for hours. How to tell if your methods are too long. Another Octavia Butler tribute.

I was really glad to see all the pro-immigrant protests last week. Nice to see a bunch of students willing to cut school for that, which I totally wasn’t expecting – I wouldn’t have though a priori that immigration would get that sort of response. Shows how much I know, I guess. (Of course, I […]

Every time I read My Name is Asher Lev, it makes me want to spend hours hanging out in art museums. Or even start drawing or painting, but I always come to the conclusion that I don’t want to take that up only to drop it before I get even vaguely competent, and I never […]

A good DMCA policy paper. Maybe I should switch to zsh… Microsoft is evil. Mit Gott an unserer Seite. Yes, that is a static image. A different Z-Machine. Hmm. Laser monks! Pretty. Hmm: having been confronted with a few posts that look similar to the above in other blogs, I am starting to see the […]