Very few updates recently. It’s been an incredibly busy month. I just finished two weeks of singing Mahler 2 with MTT, which ate up all of my evenings but was an absolutely thrilling experience that will be a fantastic album. My parents were here for the past two weekends to celebrate my birthday, which was […]
"Autistic Social Software" talk by danah boyd
One of the few blogs I try to keep up with is the Many-to-Many blog at Corante, because the work they’re doing involving studying community fascinates me. One of the posters there is danah boyd, who posted an interesting talk that she gave at a conference, noting that social software has many of the same […]
Bringing Down the House, by Ben Mezrich
Amazon link I read a Wired article a couple years ago about the MIT blackjack team, a group of MIT students who used their ability to count cards to beat the system at Vegas and make a lot of money. Millions of dollars allegedly. This intrigued me both because it was about MIT students, but […]
Keeping Score
Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony have apparently launched an effort to bring more people into appreciation of classical music and how it fits together (here’s the Chronicle article this morning). The effort is called Keeping Score, and is going to be a five year multimedia effort. The first fruits of that effort […]
Zoning at Burning Man
I went to Burning Man in 2000, mostly because a bunch of my friends were going, and I figured it was one of those things that everybody should experience once. It was an interesting experience. I think the best part from my perspective was getting there early before the party started (I was there nine […]
Shutter Island, by Dennis Lehane
Amazon link I’m a big fan of Dennis Lehane’s Kenzie/Gennaro series. I didn’t enjoy Mystic River as much, although the movie was well done. So I didn’t know what to expect from this novel, which I picked up from the library. It was okay. Pretty standard psychological thriller. Interesting characters, breezy writing. I should have […]
Word Wars
Official movie site I’ve been a big fan of Andrew Chaikin for a long time. He’s an amazing vocal percussionist who I first saw performing with the House Jacks, but now does a variety of independent stuff. I’m on his email announcement list, so I get a heads up of all the neat and cool […]
Inside the Tornado : Marketing Strategies from Silicon Valley’s Cutting Edge, by Geoffrey Moore
Amazon link After reading Crossing the Chasm by Moore a few months ago, I had some interest in reading his next book Inside the Tornado but didn’t quite get around to it. However, one of my coworkers brought it into work last week, and I borrowed it and read it over the weekend. Inside the […]
Moral Politics, by George Lakoff
Amazon link I’ve been pretty interested in the work of George Lakoff recently, so I figured I should read one of his books to learn more. Moral Politics was the one available in a bookstore when I stopped by, so that’s the one I picked up. It’s also the one most relevant to my political […]
Colin Powell
I saw a link to this article about Colin Powell over at GQ. I was skeptical initially because GQ didn’t really seem like a place to find an in-depth story, but I thought it provided a nice profile of Powell and his struggles within the Bush administration. Admittedly, I’m totally biased against Bush and his […]
