Common sense is hardly common…
I am feeling "fat", and I know exactly what I need to do to fix it. Eat less junk (not necessarily less *food*, just less junk), and be more active. …
Black holes, LHC, Star Wars, quantum uncertainty… if it is of general geek interest, but doesn’t fit into one of the other categories, it lands here.
String Theory
I spent an hour or so today looking at xkcd, which is a stick-person comic for geeks. Some of the humour is somewhat esoteric: math and statistics jokes, for example. …
Are we talking to ourselves?
I read a blog entry today giving an opinion regarding a book on the topic of whether or not user-created content is killing our culture (Is the web killing our…
War and Peace finished…
It took me over two weeks, which is a long time for me, but I finished reading War and Peace (the Project Gutenberg edition) yesterday. I even wrote a one…
Snowbird crash
My friend Chris and I make a regular habit of going together to airshows. I'm not terribly knowledgeable about aircraft, but I greatly enjoy the chance to walk up close and see…
e-Books: Leaping in early…
I've been watching e-Ink technology, waiting for it to be mature enough to make it a practical choice for supplementing/replacing my paper technical books. Products using this technology started to…
Voice recognition is fun
A couple of days ago I hooked up a USB headset. For fun, I also activated Windows Vista's voice recognition system. It works, after a fashion. Some of what I'm…
Some days I feel almost smart…
I’m a technical worker. I think that the more generic term for my kind of work is “knowledge worker”, but whatever you call it, my stock in trade is generated by my gray matter.
I am not a genius: far from it, in fact. Every complex thing I figure out takes a tremendous amount of effort on my part. I’m good at seeing correlations: logical interactions or the like. But that doesn’t mean that I just pick up a book and instantly understand something. I really wish I did.
Part of my work involves designing and writing computer software. I come from an era when it was actually possible to understand a programming language more or less completely. I develop in several language frameworks these days, but even the simplest of them seems to me to be beyond the capabilities of one person to truly understand.
The Death of a Dragon…
I was reading one of my new favorite comics (thanks, Leaha!), and came across a mention of this:
April 19, 2007 (BELLEVUE, Wash.) – Paizo Publishing and Wizards of the Coast today announced the conclusion of Paizo’s license to produce DRAGON and DUNGEON magazines effective September 2007.
Source: NEWS: Paizo Publishing to Cease Publication of DRAGON and DUNGEON
It is odd how the death of a magazine that I haven’t read in years has caused me to pause
Intel Veep wants you to play with his parts…
I found this quote on The Register from Intel's VP and Director, Digital Enterprise Group, Steve Smith, really tickled my funny bone: "Having enthusiasts play with our parts is our…