malvasia bianca

And now day 2 is over. Better than day 1: I enjoyed all four talks that I went to, and hopefully got something out of them. One of the problems that I have is figuring out which talks to go to. I have enough agile experience that I’ve been avoiding the beginners’ tutorials. The main […]

I’m here now. Getting on the light rail and taking it to the Nicollet Mall stop was easy enough. Then I got off, looked around for my hotel, and didn’t see it. Or any useful street signs, or anything like that. Most people were walking in one direction, so I followed them; after a bit, […]

I wasn’t sure what I thought about this article on removing warning signs when I first saw it, and I’m equally confused by this one. On a basic level: does this really work? I’ve never driven in Europe, I’ve never been to Italy at all, so I don’t have much context for many of the […]

The previous owner of our house was quite a gardener. One of the things I liked about the place: out the back door, there’s a patio with a table and chairs, covered by a sort of trellis with jasmine growing over it (creating a nice, cool space). In the yard proper, many flowers, large, colorful […]

Vacation’s over now; back to work tomorrow. Some random notes: Miranda managed to last through all five plays we went to. She fell asleep during one; I, on the other hand, dozed a bit during two. All good, but our consensus favorite was London Assurance, which we’d never heard of before. It turns out that […]

We feel fine. Ed Felten goes ski jumping. Lean healthcare. Trained to fear. Visual complexity. Files are not for sharing.

One of the things I’ve been doing on vacation is going through my backlog of magazines. There are too many ways to make your suitcase heavier on a trip; might as well find ways to lighten it, by bringing discardable reading material along. They only make some of their issues available online, so I can’t […]

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 […]