Category: General

Spencer Lehman. At age 75, a U.S. national champion pole-vaulter. My favorite uncle. Mother’s brother, for you Norwegian-speakers (update: I misremembered, it turns out to be Swedish that distinguishes ‘morbror’ from ‘farbror’). And you know that archetype of the Malibu-dwelling hippie stockbroker that shows up in comic novels about California? That would be him.

reposurgeon 1.2 is shipped. This is the repository editor I wrote about back in 2010; description here, architectural lessons here. I did a conversion of the repo for the Roundup issue tracker, which had a messy history. It started out as CVS, got up-converted to Subversion, and I grabbed it with git-svn. Cleaning up the… Continue reading Return of the reposturgeon!

The kitchen in my house has a toaster oven tucked into one corner just under the wall cabinets. It gathered dust unused for years, because toaster ovens were a silly 1970s fad that disintegrated in the face of inexpensive microwave ovens. But I’ve found exactly one use for it that a microwave doesn’t emulate well.

My house is located less than a hundred feet from the Main Line, the principal passenger-rail artery out of Philadelphia to the west – Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, and ultimately Chicago and points west. Two dozen times a day passenger trains come bucketing by, but they’re barely a murmur through the dense secondary-growth woods between my back… Continue reading Night sounds, trains and timepieces

It is with some bemusement that I report that Google+ – not yet out of beta – has already changed my life. Bear with me because I’m going to talk about diet for a bit, but where I’m actually going is to a discussion of how our means of acquiring information is changing. So, I… Continue reading How Google+ just changed my life

Google+ is interesting. I was persuaded to try it by three things: (1) Circles, so I can structure my contacts rather than having an undifferentiated blob of “friends”, (2) I’m fairly confident that Google’s Data Liberation Front won’t let it turn into a jail, and (3) my best geeky friends seem to be joining en… Continue reading I’ve joined Google+

This is a happy story about how, sometimes, you can go home again. When I was a small child (this would have been a good 45 years or so in the mid-1960s), there was a style of ice cream cone with a sort of top cap of solidified chocolate and chopped peanuts on it. They… Continue reading Recreating the Nutty Buddy

Our cat, Sugar, is getting old. The final, swift decline one tends to see in aging cats is not yet upon her; she’s still the lovely creature we’ve known for nearly two decades – eyes bright, coat soft and glossy, purr ready and resonant. Our friends marvel at her apparent health at over 18 years…but… Continue reading Stolen jewels

See Unarmed but still Dangerous. Well, he says he’s unarmed but dangerous, yet I’ve seen no mention of empty-hand skills at all! (That was a joke. You can chuckle now.)

OK, to prepare for this read up on the legend of Lady Godiva, and then read the lyrics of the Beatles’ Lady Madonna. You might want to take the three minutes or so to watch it being performed. Now sing this to yourself:

I just got back from seeing the Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit starring Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon. I had prepared by watching the classic 1969 John Wayne film. The similarities and contrasts have some interesting messages about how audience tastes and filmmaking styles have changed in the last 40 years.

A little over a year ago I reviewed Dr. Wlliam Short’s Viking Weapons and Combat on this blog, finding it excellent on all levels. Now Dr. Short has given us a quasi-sequel, a sort of reader’s companion to Icelandic saga literature. While not quite as exciting as the earlier book, it is in many ways… Continue reading Dr. William Short’s “Icelanders in the Viking Age”: A Review

When the photographer from People magazine showed up to do a spread on me in 1996 (yes, 1996 – pre-open-source, it’s from my first 15 minutes of fame as a lexicographer), he taught me a useful term – “face people”. Face people are people who are famous for being famous, the vacant icons of celebrity… Continue reading Three cheers for Daniel Radcliffe, geek

(This is a repost. The original went of on 2010-11-14, a few hours before the spambot rape.) Last night I made a classic n00b mistake. I was in a rush to get a test finished because my wife had just gotten home and it was time for us to haul off for the weekly Friday… Continue reading INTERCAL justifies its existence

It’s not giving much away to tell you that the title of the new action comedy “RED”, stands for “Retired – Extremely Dangerous”. My wife uttered the most succinct possible praise of this movie when she said, as we were leaving the theater, “This was the movie The Expendables should have been.” Indeed it was.… Continue reading Retired, Extremely Dangerous