malvasia bianca

I recently bought a 3-CD set of Beethoven’s late string quartets. (Performed by the Takacs quartet; quite good.) On my way into a meeting yesterday, I put in the third CD; before doing so, being somewhat geeky, I looked at the timings on the first few tracks; happily, the first four tracks, comprising the first […]

The dogs, or at least Yosha, have not been happy recently. First, they were kenneled over the holiday break – we didn’t go anywhere, but we didn’t realize that we weren’t traveling until after we had to drop them off. (Just as well: we really needed sleep for a few days there, and weren’t in […]

One thing I forgot to mention about Broadway Melody of 1940: I liked the way they showed the differences in ability between Johnny (Fred Astaire’s character) and King (George Murphy’s character). Right at the start, they’re dancing together; to my untrained eye, there weren’t obvious differences in the quality of their dancing. (I’ll watch it […]

I’m glad to see my local paper writing about the risks journalists face, but perhaps the article should have mentioned the risks that Al Jazeera journalists face. It bothers me a lot to see my government doing stuff like that. (Along with a lot of other things my government does these days, of course.)

Some nice rants. (Links from Rob Bray.)

I was listening to the radio part of the way home; something I normally try to avoid, but I’d done more driving than normal today, and my glove compartment had run out of CD’s. Anyways, I caught part of a segment about recent Supreme Count confirmation hearings, and part of the gist of the segment […]

Hey, this is cool. Makes me wish I were still teaching. Well, not really, but still.

After sleeping for about 14 hours each of the last two days, my flu seems to be getting under control. I’m not healthy yet, but I’m pretty sure I’m on the mend. Anyways: when I was a kid, I read a lot. Miranda, however, hasn’t shown any real interest in reading yet. She has lots […]

I’m in the habit of, when going on a plane trip, picking up a copy of Games magazine. (If I can find a copy; it doesn’t get very good distribution, and in particular airport stores almost never have it.) Which I just did; it turns out that the magazine has changed recently. They used to […]

Some management writers that I respect think that it’s worth learning about Meyer-Briggs personality types, on the theory that you need to realize that most people are different from you, and that there are concrete differences in their motivations, approaches, and so forth that can be helpful to know. The Meyers-Briggs types categorize your personality […]

More changes at my sudoku site of choice: First, they’ve added a new tool to help you solve puzzles: they’ll highlight all squares where you’ve filled in a given number (either as the only choice for that square or as one of the possibilities for that square). Which I appreciate: for one thing, it helps […]

Gosh.

Anybody have any good podcast recommendations? I’ve been listening to them for a few months now; the only ones that have stuck are agile toolkit, which can be very interesting but which doesn’t get updated very often, and the Mercury News video game podcast, which I enjoy but might well not listen to if I […]

I just got back from jogging, for the first time in about three months. Quite a three months it has been; I can’t remember whether the first cold or the massive lice invasion came first, but both started with Miranda and were passed to Liesl and me in short order. Then Miranda came down with […]

I hear about these conservative bloggers, but I almost never run across them. The one exception is Uncle Bob, who posts on the Object Mentor blog; I read that for the software development insights (and Uncle Bob knows much more about that than I do, believe me), but Uncle Bob also posts on politics there. […]

Most of you probably don’t care, but we’ve finally gotten around to putting up some 2004 pictures of Miranda. We don’t seem to have any 2003 pictures in digital form; some 2005 ones are coming eventually.

Miranda says: it’s good to wear a white shirt on Arts Focus days, because that way if it gets dirty and the stain won’t come out in the wash, it’s like a tie-dye shirt. One way of looking at things, certainly.

I was infatuated with sudoku for a little while, but then I got bored with it: I was at a stage where puzzles were either too easy or required random searches, neither of which I enjoyed. But I’ve started doing them again, and I would like to recommend the brainbashers sudoku web site. For one […]

The most recent addition to the list of web comics I regularly read is Questionable Content, and this strip is a pretty good example of one of the main reasons. I am completely ignorant about the aspects of the music scene that the characters are into, but I just like to listen to people delve […]

Two doctor’s visits later, it would seem that I have pneumonia. Sigh.