Year: 2004
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Movie: Cold Mountain
No happy ending. That’s my lingering thought about Cold Mountain, which we saw eight days ago. I write that happily. I thought the movie was solid, and worth seeing in theaters, even if I hadn’t had free babysitting! I just didn’t want a sad tale to be misconstrued. This story, when read, leaves the reader…
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MacOS X newsreader: NewsFan
I’m not switching from NetNewsWire, but always curious to see what others are coming up with. Here’s one I came across via Macintouch: NewsFan. This program appears to be developed in Japan, per the address at the bottom of the home page, and there are just enough oddities in the English language descriptions to underline…
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All the words you never…
If you’ve been reading the Patrick O’Brian Aubrey-Maturin novels, as I have (but not recently), then you’ve come across a full-on litany of sailing terms that make more or less sense depending on your literary experience and the context. Should you feel the need to actually understand each piece of early 19th century jargon, read…
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Area code map
Not as interactive as the zip-code map I posted two nights ago, but here is a useful area code map, from the comprehensive site LincMad, run by a telecommunications consultant here in San Francisco. Nice to be an expert in something. Seriously, I’m impressed (if mildly frightened) by the way this person’s vocation and avocation…
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Why I read
Rajesh Jain shared why he reads. One quote: There is something magical about a book, which can never be replicated by any of the other media — be it magazines, the Web or television. A book does not let us do multi-tasking. It demands undivided attention — there are no micro-moments. A book consumes our…
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Two map links
Since I want to keep those calendar days linked (i.e., post at least once every day I can), here are two links I found today which you might enjoy. Elegant zip code map in a Java applet. Slightly buggy, it seems, but wonderful narrowing of the focus as you provide more numbers in the zip…
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Surprise
I always appreciated a T-shirt popular amongst college athletes when I was in college that announced: “It’s not how you get hit, it’s how you recover.” This mantra was appropriate for rowing, with its obsessive training regimen and emphasis on peak fitness as a baseline for all else. I always recovered fairly well, although it…
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Off to a flying start
Two movies — Cold Mountain and Big Fish — in the first three nights of the year, thanks to mother-in-law babysitting (thank you!). No way we’ll keep that average up, but both good movies, in wildly different ways. More later…
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Book: The Corrections
A friend gave me a copy of The Corrections, a novel by Jonathan Franzen which garnered many heaps of praise when it was published in 2001. A significant reason this long-awaited literary novel became a bestseller and bubbled up out of the literary world is because Franzen refused Oprah’s invitation to have his novel as…
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Specs, I’d written a few…
Sung to the tune of ‘Regrets, I’ve had a few…’ Dare Obansajo works at Microsoft. His blog is full of strong opinions on software development, among other things. His post on specs in general and ATOM in particular was compelling. I have partially followed some of the RSS-ATOM ‘discussion.’ It was more the general thought…