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…

Read on →

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…

Read on →

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…

Read on →

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…

Read on →

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…

Read on →

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…

Read on →

Tahoe delivered lots of snow. The boy enjoyed playing in the powder, and so did his parents. The girl couldn’t really tell the difference… yet. Northstar was family-friendly and worked well for us, despite two frustrating bottlenecks: their gondola at the bottom of the mountain and their shuttle buses around the resort. I remembered why…

Read on →

The real origin of the word blog? While I know the real history of the word blog*, I’ve found a word that’s too refreshingly close, in meaning and spelling, to be a total cosmic coincidence: blague. On December 29**, in my Forgotten English calendar, the word of the day was blague, with one definition given…

Read on →

The boy is excited for some snow, which we’ll drive to today. He’s seen, and played in, the snow before, but I hope the reality lives up to the anticipation this time, as he’s old enough to really experience it for himself this time.

Read on →

There is never enough bandwidth. I’ve used dial-up as recently as this summer, and I survived. But I can’t say I enjoyed the experience. Earlier today, I had a few interrupted iSight conversations with various family members in New York, and the connection did not hold up. DSL on my end (SBC, not SBC Yahoo,…

Read on →