Category Archives: Uncategorized

Happy Birthday to Me!

By | June 3, 2011

So, it’s my birthday, again. This is, in fact, a very important one, as I’m 32, which is 25; in binary, I’m 100000, a suitably venerable age, I think. Only 224 more years until you can’t encode my age in a single byte anymore. A couple of people asked what I’m doing to celebrate… For… Read More »

Exporting from Facebook

By | May 7, 2011

While I’m not terribly concerned about the privacy implications of Facebook having access to the fairly insignificant drivel I usually post there, what really bothers me about it is the fact that it represents a whole chunk of my life wrapped up in a company database that I can’t get access to, except through the… Read More »

HTML5 – what is it, exactly

By | May 5, 2011

If you’re paying any attention to web technology, you’ll know that there’s excitement building around the possibilities of HTML 5. For the lay-people out there, HTML is the language used to write web pages. We’ve been using HTML 4 since the late 1990s, and while it’s pretty great, there’s things that are a real pain… Read More »

Nuclear update 2011-03-18

By | March 17, 2011

Despite the crazy, panicked reporting about people fleeing Tokyo, the latest information I can find (from the Wall Street Journal, citing the Tokyo Metropolitan Government) states that radiation there has been steadily dropping; now down to 0.05 microsieverts/hr, one 16th of the level reported on Tuesday. Apparently this is within the normal range of radiation… Read More »

Lady Mondegreen

By | March 17, 2011

Been meaning to post this for a while – the December 2008 issue of ‘The Army Lawyer’ containing, on page 66, an article entitled For All “Intensive” Purposes: A Primer on Malapropisms, Eggcorns, and Other Rogue Elements of the English Language, describing a range of common mutations of the lingo. Found one of my favourite… Read More »

Quake Status Update 2011-03-12 10:24JST

By | March 11, 2011

Aftershocks up and down the country over night. Woke up once or twice, but they’re pretty mild up here. What’s interesting is the area over which they’re occurring – no longer confined to around the fault, they’re happening in four clusters; one under land in Nagano, another under the ocean west of Akita in the… Read More »

Mushrooms

By | March 3, 2011

When the earthquake struck last week, it felt slightly disrespectful to write enthusiastically about anything else, let alone the little, joyful things in life, like food. In the face of such tragedy, they seemed so trivial. For a while I wondered: when is it OK to be happy again? To laugh? How soon is too… Read More »

Christmas sentiments

By | December 24, 2010

Reading through my Google Reader backlog, I found this poem in a Thanksgiving post on Get Rich Slowly. I think it serves just as well as a Christmas sentiment, so here you go: Desiderata, by Max Ehrmann (1927) Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.… Read More »

Bill Buxton – NUI: What’s in a name?

By | November 3, 2010

Took a break from running my Cthulhu game tonight to go see a presentation by Bill Buxton for the Puget Sound SIGCHI entitled “Natural user interfaces: What’s in a name?”. Here are the key ideas I took away from it: Know your history – Bill talked a lot about history in design, how many of… Read More »

Hagakure – The Way of the Samurai

By | October 15, 2010

I’ve been reading the “Hagakure”, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo1. The name translates as “In the shadow of Leaves“, but you might know it as “The Book of the Samurai”. It’s a distillation of commentaries made by Yamamoto between 1709 and 1716, mostly about bushido, the samurai’s warrior code, but also about a fairly wide variety of… Read More »