Have you ever screwed up a talk or high-stakes presentation? You thought it would be fine, had a plan, did well in practice runs, but under pressure you fell apart and fell flat. In short: you choked. There’s almost a binary switch: sometimes you can tell a few minutes into an hour-long talk whether it’s […]
I’m looking for a new personal weekend project that would be useful to others. Maybe there’s a useful book or useful piece of software I could create for fellow developers, tech leads, project managers, etc. Doesn’t have to be anything related to any of my current or past work (Linux, C, GTK+, Scala, etc.), but […]
This NYTimes blog post scrolled past the other day, a discussion of an article by John Gray. John Gray has this to say: The idea that religions are essentially creeds, lists of propositions that you have to accept, doesn’t come from religion. It’s an inheritance from Greek philosophy, which shaped much of Western Christianity and […]
My Dad died from cancer one year ago, today I’d like to write something about him. Dad liked animals, (certain) children, the woods, hunting, fine guns and knives, books, history, sharing his knowledge, strong coffee, and arguing about politics. He grew up partly at my grandparents’ summer camp in Michigan called Chippewa Ranch, and partly […]
As you may have noticed, this blog is a big old grab-bag of random topics. In that spirit, here are some products I enjoyed lately, that people may not have heard of. In several cases these products are from small companies and I think they deserve a mention for their good work. I’m going to […]
Software developers often find themselves considering a short list of west coast “tech hub” cities when they think about where to live. As Richard Florida points out, “the world is flat” theories are at least partially wrong; industries tend to concentrate in certain cities, where people can find each other, hire talent, network, and launch […]
Lots of people don’t like eggnog and then there are those with the energy to make their own from scratch. For those of us in between, here’s my favorite preparation so far. (Though experiments continue.) Put a mix of half brandy and half sweet whiskey such as Maker’s Mark in the bottom of the glass. […]
I wrote my own blog software in 2003, and today is the day I’m giving it up. My custom blog code just generated static files, so it never had a security bug or a performance problem. But it was kind of annoying to use. If all goes well and it doesn’t break, I’ve set up […]
Twitter (and mirroring it to Facebook) seem to be replacing this blog. I like what Valerie Aurora writes on her home page: For those of you born after 1980, a “homepage” is an ancient form of social presence on the web which has been superceded by more structured social networks like MySpace and Facebook. One […]