Jofish recently pointed me at a recording of Cry If You Want To, a song performed by the Holly Cole Trio. I really liked it, and started listening to it regularly. Interestingly, the more I listened to it, the less I appreciated it. It became a song I listened to as a whole, without listening […]
The Rhythm Section, by Mark Burnell
Amazon link After reading the Economist’s recommendation, I’d been keeping my eye open for works by Mark Burnell, thinking that his books about “a proficient, imaginative, world-class assassin” would be interesting. I finally saw The Rhythm Section in a used book store a few weeks ago and picked it up. It was kind of disappointing. […]
A Feast for Crows, by George R.R. Martin
Amazon link I’ve been a big fan of George R.R. Martin since I was introduced to the Wild Cards books in high school. I’ve been buying the Song of Ice and Fire books in hardcover because I want to read them right away, which is stupid, because the elapsed time in between book releases is […]
Logisticizing
Man, I expected to be doing more posting with my time off, but I haven’t been inspired. Alas. Lots of logisticizing getting done instead. Taxes were done and mailed today. Two moving companies have come in to do estimates, and I’ll pick one by the end of the week (the scheduled move date is Monday, […]
Rules as thinking substitutes
[ed. note: I’ve been mulling this post over for a while (I wrote about half of it last week), and it hasn’t quite come together yet (probably because it’s more like two or three posts), but I figure the only way to get it done is to just post it.] This line of thought was […]
Douglas Hofstadter at Stanford
Douglas Hofstadter, of Godel Escher Bach fame, gave a lecture at Stanford this evening. I happened to hear about it, and convinced DocBug to go with me (which worked out great when I didn’t allow enough time for traffic because he was able to save me a seat despite a standing-room-only crowd). Hofstadter’s a great […]
Social butterfly
It’s one of those perfect storm social weekends for me. I’m hanging out with an out-of-town friend tomorrow afternoon, and then I’m invited to three parties tomorrow evening, with three completely different social groups. And it got me thinking about my social network. I don’t tend to consider myself a very social person. I’m not […]
Moving to New York
That’s right. Crazy as it sounds, I’m going to move to New York. I’m still somewhat in disbelief myself. Here’s how it happened. Four or five years ago, I found this guy on the web who wrote about software development and software management and called himself Joel on Software. His ideas made a lot of […]
Meta-BrainJamming
As mentioned in a post last month (gosh, it’s been a while since I’ve been blogging), I co-led a session on “Meta-BrainJamming”, aka “Building a Better BrainJam”. It was interesting to me primarily because there is no “right” way to run one of these things; each of the choices is a design choice. One of […]
Talent in a free agent world
A few weeks ago, I was talking with a friend of mine who is working as a consultant these days. We worked together at Signature, developing research prototypes together. He’s interested in doing similar work as a consultant, but it’s difficult to pull together a good team of research scientists and engineers when there is […]
