malvasia bianca

I was hoping that I’d be using Fedora Core 3 the next time I wrote an entry here, but ’twas not to be: I can’t get the damn CD’s written. I’ve eliminated all variables, using two different CD writers, two different CD readers, two different sources of blank CDs, two different downloads of the images […]

I used to play go a lot, and I collected a lot of go books. In fact, by the time I was in grad school, I had copies of all but 10 or 15 or so of all the go books that had ever been published in English. (Just under 100 at the time.) The […]

There was a good article in The Nation recently about religion and our founding fathers. Normally, I don’t pay much attention to that sort of thing – I’m aware that present-day religious fanatics would like to paint our country as inherently steeped in religion, and that many of the founding fathers could be better described […]

Thursday, a week and a half ago, we had our monthly classroom meeting (for Miranda’s kindergarten class). And we learned that Miranda’s school is probably going to be closed next year. It was public knowledge that one school was going to be closed, but I had kind of been in denial over the issue – […]

The DVR developed a new failure mode yesterday – it forgot the TV schedule for the next week and all the recordings we had scheduled. Sigh. Electronics are getting too complicated these days. There is an update for the software available for it; it doesn’t say anything about that problem (or the DVR strange recording […]

When talking about the new DVD/DVR, I forgot to mention one advance: improvements in random access. DVDs aren’t better than video tapes just because they look better: they’re better because you don’t have to rewind them, you can jump to any scene (once you get past the annoying ads at the beginning), because they look […]

George Lakoff had an interesting article in The Nation recently, called “Our Moral Values”, where he analyses progressives versus conservatives in terms of the morality expressed by a nurturing family versus the morality expressed by a family with a strict father, and gives some tactical suggestions based on that. Pretty sensible; I should really read […]

We bought a new DVD player (and recorder, not that I really care) last month, with a built-in hard drive. Noteworthy aspects: In Spanish, it’s called a “Grabador de DVD con disco duro”. This amuses me, for no particular reason. It is nice having a DVR, though we watch little enough TV that we’re not […]

Now that Miranda’s bed time has moved up (since she no longer takes naps at daycare), we’ve finally been able to watch movies not suitable for 5-year-olds. We usually can’t finish a whole movie in a single night, and most evenings we watch various Food Network programs that we’ve recorded instead of movies, but at […]

We bought one of the tables today – a lovely dark purple rosewood one from a Chinese furniture store. So now we’ll actually be able to have more than two people over for a meal. And the piano was looked after today. It really does look like the piano guy from the store was incompetent […]

I just finished Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Davis, and it reminded me how screwed up we are about prisons. I read an article (in The Progressive?) a few years ago which said that the US locked up between 5 and 15 times as many people per capita as countries in Western Europe (admittedly, for […]

We went to see The Gay Divorcee on Wednesday. (The Stanford Theatre is showing a bunch of Fred Astaire / Ginger Rogers movies over the next couple of months.) I’d forgotten that old movies are in a 4:3 aspect ratio, or something close to that – not nearly as horizontal as modern movies. A couple […]

It’s election night. And what a depressing campaign it has been. I voted for the Green candidate for president (David Cobb), but if California had been close, I would have voted for Kerry: I don’t like him at all, but Bush’s team is evil. No matter what happens, I’m going to feel guilty: I’ve been […]

My house has been struck by plague. On Tuesday, Liesl stayed home; on Wednesday, Liesl and Miranda stayed home; on Thursday, Liesl, Miranda and I all stayed home; on Friday, there wasn’t anybody else to pass the cold to (the dogs don’t get colds from us, fortunately, and they stay home all the time anyways), […]

I just read Arundhati Roy’s article “The algebra of infinite justice” in her very good and very depressing Power Politics. It was written on September 29, 2001; I’d forgotten that “Operation Infinite Justice” was once the code name for our war on Afghanistan. Anyways, I was struck by the following quote in the article: The […]

I bought a new watch earlier this year. I liked my old watch, but it had some scratches on the face and was getting kind of chipped around the edges, so since I’d had it for most of a decade and the battery had died, I figured I might as well buy a new one […]

I saw a bumper sticker the other day saying “Kerry/Edwards: A Stronger America.” Which would seem to be their slogan. And which makes me unhappy. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of ways that one could mean that phrase that I would approve of. He could mean that we’re strong enough to share our […]

Miranda’s taking dance lessons (tap and ballet for 5-6 year olds). The second one was today. At the first one, I got to see what a girl-dominated world might look like: all 10 kids were girls, 8 of the ten were wearing light pink, one was a mixture of pink and black, and one was […]

Welcome to my blog. It’s implemented using WordPress, which seems pleasantly nice to use. (And is GPL‘d.) Many thanks to the good folks at Red Bean for their assistance, especially Ayse Sercan and Karl Fogel. (While I’m mentioning people, I’ll say hi to Jordan Ellenberg, since he promised to read the thing.) Great things await. […]