Archive for October, 2006
Sunday, October 29th, 2006
I've just finished Mark Helprin's picaresque novel Freddy and Fredericka. It's a good book that could have been a great book--or, perhaps, a pretty good book that could have been a good book--with better editing. It's conceit is wonderfully ludicrous: Freddy and Fredericka, the Prince and Princess of Wales, (based ...
Posted in Books, Literature, the Arts | Comments Off
Saturday, October 28th, 2006
Check out Seth's fun with lasers post, and be sure to click on the pictures. Maybe not the coolest thing ever (that would be recursion), but pretty cool none the less.
Posted in Whim | Comments Off
Thursday, October 26th, 2006
Dick Cheney: Keep in mind that -- I think, Gen. Casey made this point this morning in his briefing -- we've never been defeated in a stand-up fight in Iraq in over three years.
Wikipedia: Cheney was of military age and a supporter of the Vietnam War but he did ...
Posted in Politics and News | Comments Off
Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
Sarah Vowell spoke at the Dowagiac Dogwood Fine Arts Festival tonight. She read from her books for about half the time, and took questions the other half--about 45 minutes each. I enjoyed her most when she was slightly off script while reading--making side comments of various sorts about the topic ...
Posted in Politics and News | Comments Off
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
This is a sermon I preached at the Church of the Sojourners, October 15, 2006, with kind thanks to the Linda, Mark, Carolyn and Katie for singing with The Child of Grace with me.
HTML format; text format.
Posted in Religion | 1 Comment »
Thursday, October 12th, 2006
We way cool. We
loved school. We
Work late. We
Code straight. We
Plugged in. We
Bloggin. We
Balloon. We
Show soon.
(with apologies to G. Brooks).
Posted in Search technology, Whim | 5 Comments »
Sunday, October 8th, 2006
How White and Nerdy Are You?
(At least I only took a white and nerdy quiz; didn't make it up.)
Posted in Personal and family, Whim | 7 Comments »
Saturday, October 7th, 2006
Bess and I made a quickie visit "up north" to see two of my brothers and their families. Here are a few pictures from our visit to Ed's house.
Ed just bought a pretty cool chipper--he does a lot of part time work cutting down trees, and chipping them.
Even cooler, Ed ...
Posted in Personal and family | Comments Off
Thursday, October 5th, 2006
Fred Clark has a provocative article, Dirty work, that makes an interesting point about people who do the 'dirty work' of torture, such as our American agents who engage in tortuous activities such as waterboarding. First, he notes that these people, at the end of the day, must enjoy their ...
Posted in Personal and family, Politics and News | Comments Off
Thursday, October 5th, 2006
ITunes 7.0.x for the Mac, at least, is very, very buggy. Here are instructions for reverting to iTunes 6.0.5, based on instructions found in various places on the web. ITunes 7.0.x hasn't worked for me at all for more than 10 minutes since I installed it. The 7.0.1 release did ...
Posted in Science and Tech | Comments Off
Thursday, October 5th, 2006
An article in Ventureblog about Powerset, the company I work for, has kicked up a minor storm in the blogosphere about Powerset and the very idea of natural language search. I'd just like to point people to a weblog post by Barney Pell, our CEO, on Powerset and Natural Language ...
Posted in Personal and family, Search technology | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006
OK, so we decided to join AARP...it's cheap, and has some good benefits. Our cards arrived today, and I'm a little worried. It says, "Expiration: Sep 2009."
Posted in Personal and family, Whim | Comments Off
Sunday, October 1st, 2006
(made with commix beta 1.0; commix art by Fay Ryu).
Posted in Music, Whim | Comments Off