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 […]
2005 Review
Inspired by the year-end reviews done by Jofish and Batman, I’m doing one myself, except, y’know, a month late. Rather than a best of, mine is going to be more a snapshot of my life with some best of mixed in. Organized vaguely into categories: Work I changed jobs in May, moving to Applied Strategies […]
Incomplete realities
Responding to my End Times theory, Brian commented “Can we show that one reality is better than another? I hope so!” I’ve been struggling on and off with this question of what makes one reality “better” than another for at least six years. In that rant (itself a follow-up to these thoughts on morality), I […]
Home page update
I updated my home page. I hadn’t really re-designed it since I first put it up in the fall of 1994 (compare the old page to this 1997 snapshot), so it was kind of overdue for a redesign, especially because I had just kept on adding bits on here and there over the years. So, […]
Three realizations
Last week, after getting back from the work trip to DC, I went to a holiday party hosted by Chris Heuer, organizer of BrainJams. I figured I’d stop by, chat with a few people, and head home. Instead, I ended up in this fascinating conversation with Brian of CivicEvolution (thus meeting the challenge from my […]
Stravinsky chorus page update
I finally got around to updating my chorus page to this year, with entries on the Messiah and the just-finished Stravinsky run. Man, I’m exhausted. I actually got a bit sick last weekend, which never happens. Of course, between working long days at work trying to get another client release out the door by last […]
