Posted in slice-o-life on October 30th, 2004 No Comments »
Or, a vignette into life with a precocious not-yet-three-year-old.
The cast: Dad (30), child (2), Mom (young and beautiful).
The setting: Mom and child are watching grizzly bears fishing on TV.
Dad (to child): “Would you like to go to the grocery store?”
Satanic cherub: “Go away. Stop annoying us. We need our privacy. We need to watch these [...]
Posted in house on October 30th, 2004 No Comments »
Shannon went to the opening of the NowHouse in San Francisco yesterday morning. Being stuck with a deadline at work, I couldn’t attend, but we went back this morning. I brought my camera along.
The October morning weather provided a uniformly dreary light, so it’s very difficult to tell from [...]
Posted in slice-o-life on October 26th, 2004 No Comments »
Posted in python, software on October 22nd, 2004 No Comments »
I have a Python application in which, for my sins, I decided to use XML as an on-disk storage format. Unfortunately, when I made this decision, I neglected to measure the performance of the available Python XML processing implementations.
Bad, bad, bad mistake. I expected that I was going to trade a little saved [...]
Posted in slice-o-life on October 17th, 2004 No Comments »
Posted in music on October 16th, 2004 No Comments »
Another album that I picked up during my Borders trip last week was M83’s Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts. After I bought it and played it, I was stunned by the warm reception this album received at places like Amazon’s customer reviews and Pitchfork Media. At least I had my curiosity [...]
Posted in music on October 11th, 2004 No Comments »
I went to Borders the other day, to replenish my stock of commute music. I get restless when I have to rotate the same few discs more than a few times when driving up and down the Peninsula, and NPR is currently so focused on election politics that I can’t listen. Oliver Sacks [...]
Posted in music on October 11th, 2004 No Comments »
Tom Jenkinson has been recording as Squarepusher for years. He started out with genre-defining drill-and-bass albums, then moved on to his own peculiar interpretation of jazz. His latest, Ultravisitor, is a part-live, part-studio album, about evenly split between d’n’b and jazz.
The album as a whole is disappointing to me. The drill-and-bass tracks [...]
Posted in slice-o-life on October 7th, 2004 1 Comment »
While driving home from the climbing gym last night, I listened to some of British Jihad, a public radio documentary about the rise of radical Islam in Britain.
While most of the show was unsurprising, it was utterly bizarre to hear one of Michael Goldfarb’s interviewees introduced as Khalid Kelly, a Dubliner who had converted to [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on October 6th, 2004 No Comments »
I just noticed that Geoff Pullum contributes frequently to Language Log. One of the first books I read after coming to the US was his The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, which is fabulously entertaining. My lasting impression was a goggle-eyed “gee, Pullum must be smart, and stuff.” Until tonight.
Pullum wonders where the [...]