Archives by date

You are browsing the site archives by date.

October 31, 2002 – Halloween

Worse is better. Tanjit. I wanted to get into the habit of writing journal entries that aren’t responses to other journal entries, but I read this bleat from Lileks and was desperate to post a link. It deals with several wonderful magical facets of music.   Anyvay. I spent most of last night watching a tape of Eddie Izzard, a transvestite British comedian who manages to weave a hilarious two-hour routine out […]

October 30, 2002

Patterns for Teaching The Anti-Mac Interface isn’t an anti-Apple page; it’s about challenging the classic Macintosh Interface Design Principles, upon which modern GUIs are based. The page raises all sorts of interesting issues, like: Metaphors are too constraining in a digital environment WYSIWYG tends to become WYSIAYG (What You See Is All You Get), in which functionality is limited to that which can be displayed on the screen […]

Monday, October 28, 2002

“If your right eye causes you to sin, if necessary gouge it out and throw it away.” — Jesus Christ (0–33 A.D.) Okay, I’m at work, and I can’t stare straight at my monitor any more. So, this is a good opportunity to write the journal entry that I e-mailed a few close friends about yesterday. Which strikes me as temporally complex, but then, I like that sort of thing. […]

October 25, 2002

Saalon: Check out SoulHuntersStoryCards (the overview) and SoulHuntersEngineeringTasks (the nitty-gritty). Okay, Brennen sort of threw down the gauntlet, so I’ll talk about schooling. Here’s the cycle that I see most students fall into in school (elementary school through college): The semester begins. The students read through the material along with the teacher every day, and do their homework, but that’s it. They don’t (or can’t) pay attention on a level that’s […]

Thursday, October 24, 2002

Arg! I’ve been trying to post this to my writing journal all day, but the FTP server keeps conking out on me. So, I’ll post it here and sort this out later (it should have been posted at 3:48 p.m. yesterday). So. I wrote five paragraphs last night. It was five paragraphs of fiction, and fiction I’m proud of, which was the important bit. Other than […]

October 23, 2002

“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,    As he landed his crew with care;Supporting each man on the top of the tide    By a finger entwined in his hair. It’s all too common. You sneer at something, like free verse, then somebody comes along and blows you away with an amazing example, this time courtesy of Brennen. This is how free verse has power, how it can […]

October 22, 2002

Just read an enthusiastic review in strategy+business for The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335–1410, the complete memoirs of an early Renaissance businessman. According to the review, the book is fascinating partly because Francesco faced such similar worries in his day as we do today. I just ordered a used copy through Amazon.com, out of idle curiosity. 1:53 p.m. Hmmm. Apparently AnimationStand provides a full-scale traditional animation suite, and it has […]

Monday, October 21, 2002

A few random notes today: Excellent article pointing out that open source systems aren’t inherently more secure than closed-source systems, and discussing some of the reasons why that is. Tsukikage Ran is my latest favorite anime series. It’s a parody of Japanese samurai “buddy” shows (wherein a competent samurai and his sidekick wander rural Japan), but presented as more of a comedy, where the two protagonists are female. […]

October 17, 2002

This is brilliant, but for programmers only (or at least those familiar with programming languages), I’m afraid. 10:32 a.m. And Lileks is a solid personal weblog/article site. I should note that the author is pretty solidly politically Conservative, but his opinions are well-grounded in what appears to be a lot of serious thought. Moreover, I find him to be extremely entertaining: “The US party calls in mortar fire on the enemy positions. […]

Wednesday, October 16, 2002

Saalon has an article about how he thinks he may have Seasonal Affective Disorder. Interesting. I’ll respond, but first: My first reaction upon hearing about another “disorder” is to roll my eyes. I think that a lot of disorders are simply labels of normal or slightly unusual behavior. OTOH, they may very well be accurate diagnoses. So, let’s dive into this one. I’m going […]

I work for Amazon. The content on this site is my own and doesn’t necessarily represent Amazon’s position.