Archive for March, 2005

I loved the movie, bought it on DVD, so when I saw the book by a retired US Navy captain, Peter Hughthausen (say that 5 times fast!) I grabbed it. VERY interesting – gives the whole story of the sub, the shoddy and unsafe reactors and nuclear history of the former USSR, the human...
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Last week I read Krakatoa, the Day the World Exploded, by Simon Winchester. When I picked it off the shelf, I was looking mainly for the science and info-porn behind the disaster … how big, how much, how hot, how loud, etc. etc., but the book delivered a lot more. Winchester situates the event...
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OK, OK, OK. Language pet peeves today. Why, oh why, must reporter types write like this: Sony on Thursday released its $249 PlayStation Portable (PSP) to the North American market. Is that not one of the most awkward, twisted, and, frankly, stupid-sounding constructions in the English language? Sony on Thursday? What is that? Is...
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I had the strangest experience late last week: talking with a total stranger on the phone for 30 minutes – who might be a close relative. My son Ethan was featured in the local paper. He was at the library during a ‘science’ demonstration, volunteered, and a news photog took a series of snaps...
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This is a visual map of my del.icio.us bookmarks. Note: this is just Some Guy’sâ„¢ website; it may disappear at any given moment for reasons and destinations unknown.
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Teresa and I took the kids to the Chilliwack Blue Heron Wetlands yesterday, which being Good Friday (the day Christ was crucified) is a holiday in Canada. The nature reserve is about 20 minutes from our home in Abbotsford, and it was well worth the drive. Here’s some pics of the festivities … This...
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As I previously mentioned, Aidan cut his head open on our fireplace hearth just a few days ago. How’s he doing now? I thought I’d post a photo of him two days after the accident … Still happy, still crazy, still doing insane stuff. In other words, the same old incorrigible loveable kid. That’s...
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This has to be seen to be believed …. Check out this photostream of laptops and computers that people are putting a desktop pic on that exactly matches the actual background. The visual effect is as if your laptop screen is completely transparent. Very cool! I’m sure it’s a ton of work to get...
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I was foaming the other day (not at the mouth, foaming is my word for trolling recent submissions to del.icio.us) when I saw this article on why it is so hard to learn Chinese. More specifically, why it is so hard to learn to read Chinese. This is of interest to me, because I...
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It’s every parent’s worst nightmare – your child has had an accident, and you have to take him to the hospital. We have a raised hearth at one end of our living room, and it’s tiled with slate. Slate happens to have very sharp edges … and when my son Aidan fell towards the...
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It was very interesting to see that Apple has acquired SchemaSoft, a company that specializes in data munging … getting data translated between different formats, etc. I’ve met and talked to the the CEO of SchemaSoft at an XML seminar half a year ago – a very clueful guy. If memory serves, Schemasoft has...
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Well, well, well, the debate heats up. I noticed Zeldman’s report from SXSW on the Flash versus HTML game show. I’ve previously written that Flash and Ajax are starting to compete and noticed that toolkits for making Ajax easier are just starting to come out. The HTML crowd above included, as Zeldman says, designers...
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This one might be both at the same time: the dullest blog. This blog totally captures, at one and the same time, the stupidity and vapidity you can find in blogs (why, after all, do I care that you clipped your toenails today). But at the same time, the dullest blog is a great...
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Somewhere in the bowels of Google some strange science goes on that probably all makes great sense on many levels. But sometimes you just gotta wonder. How the heck can you explain a posting on my blog coming up as the FIRST result on Google for the word “unimpressive.”. Impressive! [ update - March...
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Google is a lot of things, and search is certainly at the top of the list …. but it’s also social software. I just happened to see this post by Steve Woods … we used to work together on a now-defunct site called MacTimes (the domain is now owned by some site called Absolute...
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