Year: 2008
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Sunday night links
Cleaning out the personal inbox, I find… Long profile of Marissa Meyer at Google, from San Francisco magazine, strays from the tech, deliberately. An interesting application for a tablet PC, where physics acts on 2D objects line-drawn with a “crayon.” A mapping application for Facebook, which I haven’t installed. Worry about how to back up…
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Book: The Great War for Civilisation
The name Robert Fisk was new to me when my friend Chris dropped this weighty-in-every-sense book on me many weeks ago. A reporter for the UK newspaper The Independent for several decades, Fisk has his own unofficial website. This is an advocacy site, though not affiliated with Fisk himself. Why does a reporter who lives…
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Book: The Golden Compass
One reason I keep this journal, however infrequently, is to avoid re-reading. However, sometimes the act is deliberate. The boy poured through the three volumes of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and returns to them often. So, to keep up, I re-read The Golden Compass. Now when quizzed about my favorite parts or characters, I’ll…
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Movie: In Bruges
The dark comedy In Bruges brightened my mood a few weeks ago. Previews highlighted comedy and Colin Farrell as a foul-mouthed lout of a gunman. Both are true, but the comedy is balanced with a sad strain that was unexpected. The balance helped the story. Regarding the language: I was more bothered by the moments…
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Movie: Thank You For Smoking
Nothing like a good satire to cleanse the palate. I enjoyed the title sequence almost two years ago. Friday night, I watched Thank You For Smoking. Full bore fun, riding the commercial and political system we have to the (almost logical) extent…this movie doesn’t have a (cough) filter (cough). Metacritic: 71
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Psssssttt…OpenDNS is hiring
Engineering positions in San Francisco, available now. Even if you’re not an engineer, if you refer someone we hire, there’s a cash reward in it for you ($1K). (Just in case good karma wasn’t enough.)
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The geographic center of baseball
I’ve never heard of Alex Reisner before today. My gratitude to Adam Kalsey for the link. I just now realized that Reisner’s post is from March of 2006, almost 2 years ago. But this is timeless, not timely. What a marvelous, brief examination of history and its forces: Baseball Geography and Transportation. Effectively annotated with…
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Monday night links
Rather than spend time trying to buy an airline ticket I don’t want, I’ll clean out the inbox with a few links gathering dust. This weekend, I saw the $1 image stabilizer in action, and Rich got some great pictures of the kids. Pretty sharp! Last year, I saw the Windows Vista packaging in person…
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My favorite email subject line of the past week
Most spam I receive is of the usual variety of supplements, etc.. Only occasionally do I get a 419 scam, but I did enjoy last week’s subject line from the “Compensation Head Office” Dear Prominent User of the Internet Hey, we’re all famous somewhere.
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Movie: Catch a Fire
The domain is already parked, and that tells you a lot about a movie that’s less than 2 years old. Metacritic gave Catch a Fire a 62, for “generally favorable” reviews. My feelings about the movie…mildly favorable, at best. Not bad, but not worth your time. Based on a true story, this apartheid-era chronicle does…