Posted in slice-o-life on April 7th, 2008 No Comments »
Snipped from a small mailing list.
You can use fruit and vegetables’ as a voltaic battery but they could only power something like a small LED bulb, no way would there be enough power to charge an iPod
Depends on how many you use… you need to have enough in series to give a [...]
Posted in slice-o-life on August 8th, 2007 2 Comments »
Irish television hasn’t changed much since I left the country twelve years ago. The main national broadcaster, RTÉ, mainly serves up imported American and British shows, with locally originated fare dominated by vast quantities of sports coverage, a few soaps and talk shows, and the occasional documentary. It’s a tepid, uninspiring mix.
Except for one show, [...]
Posted in slice-o-life on June 30th, 2007 5 Comments »
Here’s a fabulous way to start a research paper.
In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o’clock news. When [...]
Posted in haskell, slice-o-life on January 1st, 2007 1 Comment »
I’ve lately become interested in the Haskell programming language again, after a long time (eleven years!) away from the fold. During the process of thrashing about and trying to find my footing, I discovered a new module, named Data.ByteString, which makes dealing with strings in Haskell both sane and impressively fast. So I started to [...]
Posted in slice-o-life on December 19th, 2006 No Comments »
Inspired by this Language Log article, a few newly minted words and fresh observations from home:
Indispensable kid’s verb of the year: to “attackle”.
Superman’s alter ego is Clark Dent.
The protagonist of the past summer’s flaccid offering from Pixar is Lightning the Queen.
Posted in slice-o-life on October 18th, 2006 No Comments »
I spent a few hours on Sunday putting together a web site for my friend Carole Moore, a talented San Francisco painter.
This was my first time paying any attention to web design in years. All of my prior knowledge dated back to HTML 3.2, circa middle-dot-com-boom. How pleasant it was to discover that [...]
Posted in slice-o-life on October 3rd, 2006 No Comments »
Among the line-up of trendy ethnic restaurants in San Francisco’s Mission district is Dosa, which has been open for about nine months.
Dosa purports to offer up South Indian food, which only vaguely resembles the North Indian fare usually served at Indian restaurants. As Silicon Valley is bursting with excellent South Indian restaurants, but San Francisco [...]
Posted in slice-o-life on January 6th, 2006 No Comments »
While it may appear that I gave up blogging over the nonsense a few months ago with Larry, in fact I’ve been otherwise occupied for over two months now:
The fact that the above picture is the most recent I’ve had a chance to upload should speak volumes. While R is the most excellent baby [...]
Posted in slice-o-life on September 8th, 2005 No Comments »
I had a chance encounter with Brad Neuberg today, who is trying to get a part-time coworking arrangement off the ground. The idea is that if you do one of those nebulous “new economy” jobs that involves dinking on a laptop in a coffee shop for endless hours, it can be a welcome relief [...]
Posted in slice-o-life on August 6th, 2005 No Comments »
One of our tenants is about to move out of her apartment in San Francisco. While we wait for the City to digest our plans to build a new house, we have two mortgages to pay; one on the house we live in, and one on the empty lot that, if pressed, maybe we [...]