Year: 2007
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Movie: Word Wars
Metacritic gave this documentary a 61. I enjoyed Word Wars more than that. (IMDB link) I’m not a Scrabble fanatic, but I’m a fan. This film following the competitive world of Scrabble through four players preparing for and competing in the National Championship isn’t a well-done as Word Play, or Spellbound, but if you liked…
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Congrats to the team at FeedBurner
Confirmation of the rumors started with typical Dick Costolo panache: “Unlike the rumor that FeedBurner is nearly code-complete on a multiplayer Wii edition, the blog posts, phone calls and conjecture about our future as part of the Google family tree are now officially true.” What a great team and a great product. I first met…
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Saturday night links, June 2, 2007
Clearing out the inbox of various links, as part of a Saturday night cleanup. No promised connection beyond the simple fact these caught my eye and were “worth” more than a del.icio.us link. British history timeline, via Infosthetics. There are so many things I want to improve about this blog. First and foremost would be…
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Was Tuesday Google hiring day?
I got two emails on Tuesday from Google. Seems like Jeff Barr, whom I know a little bit got similar recruiting emails. Coincidence that all of this happened on Tuesday? Unlike Jeff, now at Amazon, I’ve never spoken to Google about working there, so there was less dissonance, just surprise. Although I have several good…
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Movie: The Lives of Others
The Lives of Others is the best movie I’ve seen since Amadeus. I won’t attempt to summarize, but I will share my comment regarding a story that starts in 1984: “It wasn’t that long ago.” See the film, and you’ll understand. Wow. Metacritic score of 89, 54th on the all-time list. Admittedly, all-time doesn’t go…
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Will Shortz even more fun than Giants-Mets
Unbelievably, it’s been two weeks since this event. But so it goes. A fortnight ago, the wife brought me to see Will Shortz over at Berkeley, as part of the Cal Performances series. The NYTimes crossword puzzle editor and enigmatologist extraordinaire just walked on stage, talked about the history of crossword puzzles, answered questions, and…
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Book: Variable Star
Spider Robinson wrote a very solid Robert Heinlein book in Variable Star. I didn’t realize it was so new (Sept, 2006) when I picked it up at the library a few weeks ago. I’m rarely so up to date. 😉 Variable Star weaves in some faithful sci-fi themes: space colonies, not-so-friendly aliens, faster-than-light travel, and…
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Books: The Chronicles of Prydain
The Chronicles of Prydain were one of my favorite series of books growing up. I just re-read all five because the boy dove in a couple of weeks ago. He’s now read them all and is re-reading them. The books sit in a stack on the floor, and he returns to Taran and Eilonwy and…
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NextBus comes through
I’ve known about NextBus, but today we took advantage of the service. We made the call to head down to the Ferry Building for a visit to the Farmers’ Market, and NextBus correctly said that the 5 Fulton was 4 minutes away. We made it, which saved 25 minutes of waiting. On the way back,…
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Shortcuts
You know how it’s hard to write something brief sometimes? We’ve worked hard to make shortcuts come alive. The power of DNS just got a lot easier to explain. Sure, you don’t need to care about DNS itself, but shortcuts are something you can see, something you can use…almost something you can touch. After improving…