I am off work all week, to spend Trish’s last week before the PhD crunch begins hanging out with her and Sarah.
This will either mean lots of blogging (if I get to sleep in) or no blogging (if Sarah wears me out.)
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the nature of adaptations, in particular adapations to film, but also to other media. Partly this was brought on by my reflections on Wodehouse and how first person works necessarily lose something in the translation to film1. Partly it is in reaction to all the discussions about adaptation [...]
So, some concerned parents in Gwinnett County, Georgia are try to get Harry Potter taken out of school libraries. Sigh. It’s like they really want us to think of it as Jesusland….
Laura Mallory of Loganville filed an appeal last week to get the best-selling book series out of the schools’ media centers. She is [...]
Let’s close some tabs in Firefox, shall we?
First, I am just loving this story about the big mafia don’s encryption scheme. We live in a world where essentially uncrackable public key encryption is freely and easily available, and this guy–the “boss of bosses”–is using a substitution cipher that my 20 month old daughter could crack. [...]
Three sets of links today to useful software lists.
First is the eConsultant.com list of free software that solves common problems. This list is going to be useful to every level of computer user–at least for Windows users. If you can’t find at least a dozen things on here you can use then you aren’t really [...]
I don’t often do job blogging, but these articles are worth pointing out.
Let’s start with the latest essay from the always interesting Joel on Software: The Development Abstraction Layer.
I’m going to pull a very tiny segement out of this article, and the emphasis here is mine:
Your first priority as the manager of a software team [...]
Man am I jealous of Walter Jon Williams–not only is he a great writer, but he has one of those adventurous lives that I always wish I was living…
But I’ve seen a lot more than a solar eclipse. I’ve seen the Dervishes whirl. I’ve flown in a balloon over the lunar landscape of Cappadocia. I’ve [...]
It’s been a while since I’ve gone on about U.S. economic policy and currency issues (although I’ve certainly talked about the currency thing enough over the years).
Partly this is because the story isn’t changing: the value of U.S. currency keeps dropping–even against ours, which is so tightly integrated with it.
Here’s the long term chart:
(I’d like [...]
I’ve always been kind of interested in Core Wars. (See also the main Core Wars page, and the King Of The Hill page.) Not enough to actually compete, you understand, but enough to run a local server and let some of the more “famous” programs battle it out, and maybe to throw in one or [...]
How is it that I can be married to a woman who, even after being married to me for five years, can’t tell a porter from a stout?
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Helen Thomas, who appears to be one of the two last journalists in America1.
Remember back in 2003 when no one in the White House press pool was asking any questions and Bush could do no wrong?
Well, Helen was asking questions then:
THOMAS: My follow-up is, why does he want to [...]
So, an Administration official says Iran “could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in 16 days“. Well that sounds scary.
Of course over in the reality-based community we can read that “Western nuclear analysts said yesterday that Tehran lacked the skills, materials and equipment to make good on its immediate nuclear ambitions“, and [...]
How else to explain how much pleasure I got from this piece on that important question: Who would win in a fight between Cthulhu and Godzilla?
Just in case you don’t click through for the metatextual analysis, here’s the best sentence from it: “He’d eat a few thousand people, make a giant throne of their bones, [...]
Last year my impression of Bill Moyers as a stately intellect was shattered when I discovered that he is actually a really intelligent rabblerouser.
Well, this year he’s still rousing the rabble, this time about campaign finance and K Street corruption, and making a lot of sense while doing it. He starts out with a pithy [...]
FARTHER/FURTHER: according to the AP style guide you use “farther” to refer to physical distance and on “further” to refer to an extent of time or degree. So you had to wait a further two hours past the appointed time because I had hiked 10km farther than I expected.
So, what happens if the extent of [...]
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