This weekend, I bopped up to Portland to visit my friend Jofish, who’s in Portland doing an internship at Intel for the summer. And since I don’t think I’ve ever actually been to Portland, it seemed like a good excuse to go visit. Plus, Jofish is fabulously fun and spending more time with him is […]
Month: July 2005
Information decay
Last week, I went to BayFF, an EFF-sponsored roundtable discussion on bloggers’ rights. It wasn’t as interesting as I’d hoped it would be, given the caliber of discussion participants, but that was partially due to uninteresting questions being asked (since I didn’t come up with an interesting question myself, I can’t really censure the rest […]
Emotional Speech Exhaustion
[Oops, wrote this over the weekend and meant to post it last night, but forgot, so I’m doing it now] Brad wrote a post two months ago about free speech and free will. And I liked it a lot. I even commented on it. But I wanted to write it up in my own blog […]
Technical mash-ups
My dad commented to me that the Google Maps Pedometer tool was a good example of a technical mash-up, a phenomenon he’d read about in BusinessWeek (subscription required or use BugMeNot) last week. Much like the musical version, technical mash-ups are mixing and matching tools from different sources that were not intended to be used […]
Unfinished books
Two books last week I started and quickly gave up on that I figured I’d document for the sake of completeness. I gave it a few days because I thought I might go back and give them another chance, but then my new Amazon order came in, so it’s pretty much a lost cause. One […]
VirtualBouncer adware removal
Last week at work, I was looking up a world map, and found a couple sites through Google, clicked around a bit, didn’t think much of it. Until a couple minutes later, when popup windows started appearing every 15 seconds on my screen. I had been hit with adware. I still don’t have any idea […]
Michael Mina
Last week, my friend Wilfred organized a trip to Michael Mina’s restaurant in the Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco. The attendees were the same group of six of us who went to the French Laundry last year (almost exactly a year ago, in fact). Unfortunately, that’s where the similarities end. Don’t get me […]
Good to Great, by Jim Collins
Amazon link This and Collins’s previous book, Built to Last, are two standard business books that everybody refers to. I’ve been meaning to read them for a while, but never got around to it. But, at the mega-library trip last Saturday, I saw it, I picked it up, and I read it yesterday on my […]
What should I do with my life?, by Po Bronson
Amazon link I’ve liked Po Bronson’s other works, but when this book came out a couple years ago, I didn’t really feel it was worth checking out. What was the point of reading about how other people had answered the question of what to do with their lives? But it stayed on my to-read list. […]
At Home in the Universe, by Stuart Kauffman
Amazon link This was referenced in the footnotes of some other book that I read, but I can’t remember which one any more (maybe Six Degrees?). Kauffman is a MacArthur Fellow who works at the Santa Fe Institute, which is a center for studying complexity theory (and a place I’ve occasionally dreamed of working at), […]
