I’d like to learn enough programming to satisfy my inner geek, even though I’m never going to be a coder. I have a project in mind which might be a useful tutorial. Nothing too complicated, but the end result involves HTML, forms, and a database. So I figured my lack of programming knowledge might be…

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Following a meme shared by Neil Turner a year ago, here’s 2005 in review, via the first sentence of each month’s first post. January: I won’t claim I’m back up to speed, but all the home email is read, the aggregator is showing only a day’s worth of new items, and I’ve got fewer than…

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The movie Adaptation is just meta-meta-meta, and nuts. Sometimes in the best way, but damn. I don’t comprehend where these visions come from, and how the screenwriters and director communicate well enough to create these internal mindscapes as a visual story that hangs together. I’ve never read The Orchid Thief, the book which is at…

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(Warning: LazyWeb request) Solved! See comments. Thank you, Ben. The format of my post links has changed from http://www.pencoyd.com/clock/2003/12/12.html#a293 to http://www.pencoyd.com/clock/2003/12/12/TITLE/ I need to use a regular expression redirect to change my 2.5 years of previous posts to something not broken (and I need a better 404 page, but that’s easier and separate), so I…

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With this much free time, and the end-of-year flood of Academy Award-wanna-bes, we’ve seen a flood of movies. Thursday night, we caught Good Night, And Good Luck. Instead of the Manchurian Candidate version of McCarthy, we get to see the real McCoy… er, McCarthy, as the CBS News team led by Ed Murrow use the…

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Driving around the city after Christmas, I heard a bit of David Cronenberg on Fresh Air, as Terry Gross was doing her 2005 retrospective of her favorite interviews. Cronenberg was answering questions about his most recent film, A History of Violence, which I haven’t seen. Later in the day, I was in Borders, taking advantage…

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Christmas afternoon, we ducked out for a matinee showing of Shopgirl, the Steve Martin-Claire Danes film. The theater was small, but it was quite full shortly after 1pm. We weren’t the only ones taking a break from the holidays, or maybe we simply joined those who don’t celebrate this one. Made from a novella, the…

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I started the holidays by reading Interface, a thriller by Stephen Bury. Who is Stephen Bury? Neal Stephenson. But the marketing of this 1994 book has clearly morphed over time. At the URL above, you’ll get no details on the author. The paperback copy I bought new has a red promotional circle on the cover…

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Monday before Christmas, we did dinner and a movie with friends. The movie? Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire I’ve seen at least two of the three previous films; I think I missed Sorcerer’s Stone. But I didn’t feel lost at all. The appeal (and curse) of sequels and series is that everything is…

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Cleaning out the Safari bookmarks from the past year or so, and dumping those worth keeping into my del.icio.us account. Along the way, I came across SFPD CrimeMAPS. This page describes the San Francisco Police Department’s CrimeMaps service, where you can view crime data mapped against the city. I think this was originally rolled out…

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