Larry Hosken: New: 2005

coincidence I was sitting on the streetcar and reading Martyr's Crossing by Amy Wilentz. A young lady sat down next to me and started reading Camus' The Stranger. And we rode on, a two-seat survey of literatur...
get on the bus My bus was not full; that broke my plan. My first week at the new job coincided with the company ski trip. I knew a few people at the new job, but not many. Now, on the bus ride back to the bay a...
I bet you get these mixed up all the time Last week, I read the book Managing Gigabytes by Witten, Moffat, and Bell. It's about storing and retrieving huge repositories of data. This week, I am reading Trilobite! (Eyewitness to Evolution) ...
location location location As we waited to get into the puppet show, Tom and I made small talk. I told him that I'd finished reading Linda Greenlaw's Lobster Chronicles, about her adventures getting re-settled at Isle au Ha...
Tech-Brain Candy When I commute to work, I change buses close to the San Francisco main library. Tonight, I took advantage of this. During the ride from Mountain View to San Francisco, I'd been reading Managing Gig...
Book Report: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures I enjoyed the Bill & Ted movies back when they came out. When Rob Pfile refers to my apartment's cross-street as "Wyld Stanyn", it cracks me up. It cracks me up every time. I enjoy Evan Dorkin...
Book Report: The Legend of Grimjack, Volume One I have been hearing about this comic book for years. It, along with "Sam & Max", were the great comics which I'd never be able to read because their rights were tangled up in legal limbo. One v...
Book Report: The Phenomenon of Life Summary: This is a good book if you skip the first four chapters, the last chapter, and half of the appendices. Christopher Alexander is famous as the honcho behind A Pattern Language. A Pattern Lan...
Book Report: A Rabbit in the Air David Garnett wrote this book, A Rabbit in the Air, about his experience learning to fly. This book was published in 1932. He calls airfields "aerodromes". He provides cockpit drawings. He provides ...
Book Report: Signal & Noise Of course you are glad that John Griesemer wrote a novel around the laying of the first transatlantic undersea telegraph cable. But you're also thinking A telegraph book would be far too nerdly to di...
Book Report: Y the Last Man book 4 (Safeword) It is another collection of "Y the Last Man" comics by Vaughn, Guerra et al. There is a dumb story arc which uses a brainwashing attempt to give us a glimpse into the mind of the main character. Why...
Hiding Data in Metadata I'm flipping through this telegraphic code book which E. E. Morgan's Sons used for encoding messages long ago. Most of it consists of code words to convey phrases. E.g., instead of sending "one hund...
Link: Hello Kitty BE@RBRICK iPod Looking at ads for these toys made me imagine Hello Kitty hanging out with some BE@RBRICKs. "Sometimes I wish I had a mouth." "Some of us have mouths. Most of us do not." "How are we even having t...
Outsourced the "New" page I started using the Blogger service to maintain this page. Now you can use your favorite RSS aggregator to keep track of how rarely I write! Tag: siteLabels: feed addiction, site...
Saw I recommend this photo. Tag: photosLabels: link, photo...
Site Update: Fave Reads I finally figured out my Fave Reads of '04. Usually I upload those on New Year's day. But this year I was in Seattle. And then I went to Tahoe. And then I started a new job. Hey, at least I finish...
Under-utilized Set The next time I'm called upon to provide names for a set of [computers|meeting rooms|secret projects], I would like to use names of famous carnies and freaks. jojo chang eng petomane tomthumb Tag:...
Ask Not For Whom the Klaxon Peals As I stepped up to the library exit, the stolen-book alarm sounded. I stepped back from the door and waited for some nice librarian to wave to me, to tell me to open up my backpack. But no nice lib...
Book Report: Chicago Stories When I bought this Cometbus book, I didn't realize that all of the stories had already appeared elsewhere. But I had forgotten the stories, so it was fun to read them all again. I felt like a bozo s...
Book Report: Cyber China (part 3) Yet more essays in Cyber China... Patricia Batto; Government Online and Cross-Straits Relations This paper gives an overview of some China- and Taiwan-related web sites.Something interesting perhaps...
Book Report: Cyber China (part five (last (whew!))) Two last essays in Cyber China... Ngai-Ling Sum: Informational Capitalism and the Remaking of "Greater China": Strategies of Siliconization This interesting paper talked about how various government...
Book Report: Cyber China (part four) Two more essays from the book Cyber China Barry Naughton The Information Technology Industry and Economic Interactions Between China and Taiwan This article had an interesting factoid. A large part ...
Book Report: Cyber China (part one) This book is a collection of papers about the intersection of society and computers in present-day China. Karsten Giese; Speaker's Corner or Virtual Panopticon: Discursive Construction of Chinese Id...
Book Report: Cyber China (part two) Notes on a couple more chapters from Cyber China: Françoise Mengin: The Role of the State in the Age of Information This paper mentioned a few topics: hackers, Taiwan, Democracy. It implied that th...
Book Report: Earth Abides George R. Stewart wrote Earth Abides, a story in which about 9999 out of every 10000 humans is wiped out by a big plague. What will happen afterwards? Will our hero preserve civilization's triumphs ...
Book Report: Juked Vol. 3 Fall 2004 This is a collection of short pieces lovingly skimmed off the top of Juked. So I'd already read these. I guess I got juked. One good story: Public Access by David Gianatasio. You can buy this at Cod...
Book Report: The Process of Creating Life The Process of Creating Life is the second book of Christopher Alexander's Nature of Order tetralogy. That is, this is a book that is Alexander's theory of the universe and how this nature should gui...
Book Report: Ready Made #16 I read an issue of Ready Made, a magazine for crafty re-users and recyclers. I am not sure what I think about it. It is witty and amusing. It was inspiring to read instructions for making furniture f...
How it Would Have Gone Down I think the conversation would have gone something like this. Me: Let's trade books. Her: Excuse me? Me: Please trade books with me. Just for the duration of this streetcar ride. Her: Wait, what...
Site Update: Photo, Comments, Geo Happy Pi Day! I made some little site updates, no biggie. Tom Lester took a nifty photo of me, so I added a thumbnail link at the Portrayals page. New messages on the comment page. GeoURL snapped ...
Site Update: Shinteki Untamed with the Lester Tang Conjecture Uploaded a write-up of the Lester-Tang Conjecture's Experience at Shinteki Untamed. That is, I wrote about a puzzle hunt. It's a big week for puzzle hunts. There is gobs of new info at the Genome G...
Arms and the Man, Canoe Following up on my recent trip to New Zealand, I read Two Voyages to the South Seas, a summary/translation of the memoirs of Captain Jules S.-C. Dumont D'Urville. This guy was a French ship's captain...
Book Report: Giant Robot #36 I am always glad to see an article by Claudine Ko. But I am not sufficiently secure in my whatever to start reading Jane Magazine, where she spends most of her efforts. So instead I read her intervi...
Book Report: Two Voyages to the South Seas As a French explorer, the great ship's captain and navigator Dumont d'Urville helped advance English colonization. D'Urville explored some uninhabited spot on Australia's Eastern coast. This told t...
Book Report: What's the Matter With Kansas? Thomas Frank, a member of the liberal intellectual elite wrote this book for other members of the liberal intellectual elite to tell them that the formerly-liberal working class is tired of liberal ...
Compliance At the front of this library book, it says In compliance with current copyright law, U.C. Library Bindery produced this replacement volume on paper that meets the ANSI Standard Z39.48.1984 to repla...
Follow Up: Ready Made #16 You may recall that I reported not getting much from Ready Made #16, the magazine of creative re-use and recycling. It was well-written and amusing, but I could not apply it to my already-have-enoug...
Found: Postcard At the back of this copy of Jane Eyre that I checked out of the UC Library, there was a postcard. Names changed to protect the whatever. Dear Ver, It sux to write a postcard instead of the nice l...
Happy National Library Week Today there was art in the central stairway/atrium area of Doe Library: dozens of books suspended in air by wires. Meanwhile, there's a book I want which is currently unavailable because it's in the...
Hungarian Notation Not Brain Dead (If you are not a computer programmer, this item will not make sense.) For years I made fun of Hungarian Notation and Charles Simonyi. Now, thanks to Joel Spolsky, I find out that Hungarian Notation...
Book Report: Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man This comic book by John Porcellino was informative and thought-provoking. The mosquito abatement men walk through nature, learning its beauty. And they slaughter millions of insects along the way. ...
Book Report: Epitaph in Rust This is an old novella by Tim Powers. I liked it. It recently showed up in a two-novella conglomeration with The Skies Discrowned. I'd already read that novella, and hadn't liked it. So it was a ...
Book Report: Road Fever What does it take to drive from Tierra del Fuego to Prudhoe Bay in less than a month? Will, determination, and paperwork. A big stack of paperwork. Folders and folders of paperwork. Visits to con...
Book Report: Something From the Oven Laura Shapiro wrote this awesome book about home cooking in 1950s USA. There are many interesting stories here. There is the tragic tale of Poppy Cannon who tried to convince the world that canned t...
Link: Joel on Hungarian Notation Just when I thought I was going to have to read the papers myself, Joel Spolsky wrote a readable paper about the non-braindead version of the software engineering technique Hungarian Notation. Is th...
Rest in peace, Grandpa Al. I miss you....
Book Report: Consider the Oyster Holy moly, M.F.K. Fisher sure could write. I don't want to eat oysters, but I could read Fisher's writings about oysters all day. Except I can't really, because this was just a short little book. ...
Book Report: The Cruise of the Acheron Sheila Natusch did a lot of research tracking down logs and reports for this description of "her majesty's steam vessel on survey in New Zealand waters 1848-51". She figured out that two documents i...
Book Report: the Founding Fish John McPhee writes about shad. Shad are fish. That description should make you want to read this book. Go. Go! Maybe you read his shad articles in the "New Yorker". Maybe you think "Surely I now k...
Book Report: The Hero's Walk Anita Rau Badami wrote this family drama set in an India in transition. It's a difficult read because so many of the characters waste so much effort being mean to each other. You grit your teeth at...
Book Report: Innocents Aboard It's a book of short stories by Gene Wolfe. There are some winners and some losers and some, uhm, averagers. It's Gene Wolfe, so even the averagers strike an interesting mood. I liked a ghost sto...
Book Report: Oxford Pocket American Dictionary This evening I picked up a copy of the OxFord Pocket American Dictionary. Such false advertising--it's much bigger than any of my pockets. Tags: book | title | foreshadowing |Labels:...
Book Report: Sacrifice (Age of Bronze collection vol 2) It's another volume of Eric Shanower's great comic adaptation of the Iliad. Learn the strange story of Telephus. Feel even queasier about the fate of Iphigenia as you put a face to the name. See w...
Book Report: A Storm of Swords It is another book in the series A Song of Ice and Fire. It's Shakespearean History meets Tolkienoid high fantasy meets Howardesque barbarian epic meets soap opera meets... It's a guilty pleasure. I...
Link: Elizabeth Graves @ AlternativePhotography.com Check it out. Elizabeth Graves is a photographer. She makes some normal-looking photos, but she makes some by unusual methods. Some of these were sufficiently unusual to win her a spot at Alternativ...
Link: Parallel Analysis with Sawzall People ask me what I do at work. I did not write the academic paper Interpreting the Data: Parallel Analysis with Sawzall (Pike, Dorward, Griesemer, Quinlan 2005). But I did revise the tutorial for t...
Meme: Banned Books Here's a list of the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've read part of. Put an exclamation point by the ones you've never heard of before. Read more. Convince ot...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere I walked from U.C. Berkeley towards the BART station. I was at the tail end of a comics and library run. I'd picked up a few good books, and many good comics. So my pack was heavy and it was hot a...
Rest in peace, cousin Art. I miss you, too....
Bay Area Night Game Wiki Puzzle hunts are everywhere, but it's not easy to find out about them. Some mysterious person started a Bay Area Night Game wiki, so now BANGers will have a place to look for information. A place th...
Book Report: American Hero It's a noir political thriller. It kept promising to turn into something very interesting, but did not keep that promise. Tags: book | yawn |Labels: book, snore...
Book Report: Game Physics David Eberly wrote this computer programming book about physics and numerical methods. Where "numerical methods" means making quick accurate calculations. It's an interesting subject, and this is a...
Book Report: The Man Who Would Be King A U.S.A. citizen went to Afghanistan and got mixed up in the local wars and politics. In the 1830s. This is his story. Ben MacIntyre wrote this book about Josiah Harlan, foreign meddler. Unfortuna...
Book Report: Sister Age A collection of short stories, some of them autobiographical, by M.F.K. Fisher. I was not so fond of the Twilight Zonish ghost stories, but the rest were awesome. There was one story about going ou...
Book Report: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again In this collection of essays by David Foster Wallace, I was glad to read the title essay. It's about his experiences on a cruise ship. I've always wondered if I would like being on a cruise ship, a...
Book Report: A Walk In the Woods Bill Bryson confirms that hiking is difficult. This book was OK. Tags: book | Appalachian Trail |Labels: book, ok, pedestrian...
Comic Book Shop News After spending all of yesterday tinkering with the New Zealand travelog, I needed to get out of my apartment today. So I walked to Isotope Comics' new location. I got my fortnightly fix and looked ...
Current Events This is a blog; it is largely about books. Today the blogosphere is abuzz with news about a book: the new Harry Potter book is out. I spent the day sailing. Thus, I had a fun time with Piaw and Li...
Current Events This is a blog; it is largely about books. Today the blogosphere is abuzz with news about a book: the new Harry Potter book is out. I spent the day sailing. Thus, I had a fun time with Piaw and Li...
Not Quite Letting Go of Spring Did I mention that White Mughals mentions a doctor treating a bladder infection? And the doctor is named George Ure. Ure should totally be the root of the word "urea", though it isn't, really. Tha...
Park Challenge Today Team Unwavering Resolve (a.k.a. Steven Pitsenbarger, Paul du Bois, and I) played in Park Challenge, a puzzle hunt game organized by the Desert Taxi folks. It was a fun stroll in Golden Gate Pa...
Practical Physics Outside the San Francisco main library, there is a bin where one may return borrowed things. I walked up to it, ready to return a few books. A lady was already there, looking inside, noticing somet...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere Peter Tang just rented a new apartment. Today Steven, 'Lene and I went over to paint some of the walls. Watching paint dry is not interesting. So between coats we headed out for lunch. As we walk...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere I stepped off the streetcar two stops early tonight. I wanted to walk a ways. I had recovered from my wild and crazy weekend. I was no longer hobbling around--I could walk. So I wanted to walk, g...
site update: New Zealand 2004 Travelog Waaaay back in December, I went to New Zealand. I caught glimpses of puzzle hunts, looked at giant ferns, paddled kayaks, talked about old telegraph equipment, snapped lots of photos, rode a train f...
Summer Reading For Fourth of July weekend, the U.C. Berkeley libraries are closed. Nevertheless, they recalled the book I was reading. I'm not sure how that works. In theory, I was returning the book because some...
Switching Gears Today I felt like I'd lost a fight with the interior of a passenger van, but that wasn't the problem. I'd had a great weekend playing in the Griffiths Game, a 24+ hour puzzle hunt run by the Burnina...
Baby vs Bathwater: Fight! Yesterday, I talked with Griff, who I'd seen at a couple of recent puzzle-hunt activites. Griff used to work at Microsoft. He may have interned there, since he mentioned, On the first day of summer...
Book Report: Cork Boat As an occasionally obnoxious person who tries to talk his friends into strange activities, I was glad to read the autobiography of an occasionally obnoxious person (John Pollack) who talks his friend...
Book Report: Giant Robot #37 This issue of "Giant Robot" features interviews with a few Chinese-Jamaicans who were part of the music scene back in the early days of reggae. You want to send a message back in time to these guys:...
Book Report: History of Pi This was a fun book about the history of Mathematics as viewed through the lens of pi. I don't much enjoy reading history-of-mathematics books. I halfway remember my history of mathematics. That me...
Book Report: the Murder of Abraham Lincoln This is another comic in Rick Geary's series "A Treasury of Victorian Murder". There are probably other places you can learn about John Wilkes Booth's various attempts upon the life and liberty of A...
Home Games I sit here wheezing and sick at home in front of my computer, cheering myself up with memories of happy days. E.g., the previous six days. Wednesday my department at work had an offsite outing. ...
Publishing News: XXtra Online magazine My new plan: finish up my existing writing projects by June 2006 so that I can apply at XXtra Online magazine. Tags: foreshadowing | fave celebs |paparazzi |Labels: foreshadowing, lin...
Publishing News Tom Manshreck is in town. Tom was living in NYC, working in publishing. There's a lot of publishing around there. Tom was working on engineering textbooks, but he still cares about the literary st...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Seattle Because I am a lame-o, I didn't play in the recent Mooncurser's game. But Matthew "Defective Yeti" Baldwin did, and he's a better writer than I am. Go read his write-up. As of today, there's just ...
Site Update: Comments If you want to post a comment on this blog, now you can--even if you don't have a blogger.com account. To prove you aren't an evil spambot, you will need to identify a captcha. That is, you will lo...
Book Report: The Big Rock Candy Mountain Back when I was telecommuting, I'd listen to DJ Toby's show on KUSF Tuesday afternoons. Some days, she'd play the song Big Rock Candy Mountain, a song about the Promised Land for Bums. In the Big ...
Book Report: Birth of the Chess Queen Did you know that Al Gore chartered a couple of planes to help out people in Katrina-smashed areas? It's enough to make you wish the nation had put some more resources at his disposal. But let's no...
Book Report: A Book of Common Prayer If you're walking along the street and you see a Joan Didion book sitting on a garbage can, pick it up and take it home. I did, and I wasn't sorry. You know all of those logic puzzles where you're ...
Book Report: Giant Robot #38 I read the latest issue of Giant Robot magazine. There were photos from the opening party of the new Giant Robot store in New York city. One of the photos was of ace reporter Claudine Ko. And I th...
Book Report: Me and What Army This collection of short storylets by Michael Van Vleet was nice. Loosely-related stories about hypothetical armies. Zombie soldiers, shifting sands. Tags: zine | Amanda Summers | green g...
Book Report: Mr. T #1 This comic book shows us a Mr. T who stays concealed in the shadows. Why? If he emerges, then bad men will hurt good citizens so that they can frame Mr. T. But like King Arthur, we know that one d...
Book Report: New Yorker Feb 14 & 21 2005 I read the New Yorker in stack order; magazines are not pushed on the stack at publish-time, but are queued elsewhere for a nontrivial time; that is, I don't read them in chronological order. So you ...
Book Report: Rex Libris #1 "I, Librarian" Oh, "Rex Libris" is a a comic book about a librarian, this sounds interesting. Oh, he's a time-traveling librarian. Oh dear. He's a time-traveling librarian who can withstand a vacuum and has super...
Book Report: Sixgun Samurai #1 Once upon a time in old St Louis, a kid walks into a bar and starts waving around a katana. Just when you hope that this comic would descend into a blood-soaked massacre, a priest calms the kid down...
Book Report: Smoke and Guns Women in short skirts fire guns at each other. But it works. When does the movie come out? Tags: comics | cigarettes | violence |Labels: comic, explosions...
Book Report: the Super-Scary Monster Show (featuring Little Gloomy) #1 Walker and Jones continue to explore the cute/horiffic world of Little Gloomy. I liked the stories in this issue. I liked some of the art. I think they need to find someone to fill in their blacks...
Book Report: Y the Last Man / Ring of Truth This collects comic books 24-31 of "Y the Last Man". The tail end of this story arc is in San Francisco. And it asks me to believe that our heroes successfully follow an evasive ninja through the P...
Book Report: Zachary's Chicago Pizza Newsletter vol. 5 Winter/Spring 2005 I have nothing original to say about the unfolding disaster in New Orleans. All I know how to do is point out interesting reading material. One more reason to free Tibet: We can make it easier for h...
Link: Shigabooks.com Jason Shiga's site has erupted from inactivity to interactivity. He makes these wonderful interactive comic books, some of which he has translated to web-o-matic form. Because this blog is more abo...
Publishing News: Opposite of Google Print Today I went to a talk by best-selling author Neil Gaiman. There was a question and answer period. Someone asked for Mr Gaiman's take on the recent Google Print kafuffle. (Some authors did not dei...
Site: Milestone Wow, it's the site's four-millionth web hit: 66.249.64.68 - - [28/Sep/2005:23:09:05 -0400] "GET /self/MBrooce/MBbruce.html HTTP/1.0" 304 - "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)" Ah, t...
Site Update: Jan 05 Road Trip Report Just nine months after the fact, I uploaded a write-up of the road trip that Tom Lester and I took back in January. You could argue that in 2004-2005 span, I thus completed another unemployed travel...
Book Report: The Curious Life of Robert Hooke Robert Hooke was a scientist during the 1600s. Did you read Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle? Of course you did. Or you at least got started. Robert Hooke was one of the mad scientists that figure...
Book Report: the Girl Who Talked The other day I picked up a handful of mini-comics by Daniel Merlin Godfrey. "The Girl Who Talked" was my favorite, but they were all good. "The Girl Who Talked" is an interview with a girl who was...
Book Report: The Three Musketeers I bet that those long stretches of dialog between people from different social classes--I bet those were pretty funny back when they were relevant to the culture. Unlike now, when they're kinda bori...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, but not in my apartment Another thrilling tale of behind-the-scenes Game Control action from yesterday's YABA 2005 game... Registration was done. Teams had their first batch of clues and were spread out on a lawn, solving...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, But Not Everything is Puzzle Hunts I was walking with some Gamers around my neighborhood. Specifically, we were right across the street from my apartment. One of my colleagues stopped and looked at a parked vehicle. Specifically, lo...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, including outside a local cafe Today was the YABA 2005 treasure hunt game, run by Alexandra Dixon. I volunteered to help out. Game control has to do many things. Scout the course, design puzzles, playtest, print puzzles, set up...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, including San Francisco's Union Square [ There was a blog entry here. It was kinda long for a blog entry. And then I added some photos, and it was even longer. So I moved it to its own article/web page/whatever: BANG 13 Notes ...
Rest in peace, Uncle Dan. I miss you....
Site: Uploaded St Louis Photos Last weekend, I went to St Louis. I didn't emerge with any exciting stories, but it's an exciting time for St Louis--there's a lot of rebuilding going on. I took some photos of some old St Louis bu...
Blog Infrastructure Update: "Add to Google" Link Yesterday was Buy Nothing Day in the USA, so I bought nothing. Actually, I didn't do much of anything yesterday. I went cold turkey on caffeine. I'd been hitting the sauce pretty heavily lately, a...
Book Report: Dealers of Lightning Sometimes, it's good to be wrong. For example, I claim to be pretty jaded. But when I saw a little dog, a Yorkshire terrier-style dog, walking along this morning carrying a rubber chicken, I was fil...
Book Report: Dreadnought My cousin Betsy was in town this last weekend. She was full of energy. My parents and I had to take her in shifts, and we still got worn out keeping up with her. I accompanied her to a couple of m...
Book Report: The King of California This book by Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman ranks up with Cadillac Desert and City of Quartz as great books about the intersection of geography and history in the Western USA. It's about the history of...
Book Report: Polly and the Pirates #1 In this comic by Ted Naifeh, a girl is kidnapped from a boarding school to become a pirate queen aboard the Titania. This comic shows promise: all it needs now are monkeys, ninjas, and robots. Tags...
Book Report: the Psycho Ex Game Question: Under what circumstances will Larry read a romance novel? Answer: If one of the co-authors is Andy Prieboy. That's right, Andy Prieboy. Question: Wait, is that a good reason? Answer: As ...
Book Report: The Super-Scary Monster Show Featuring Little Gloomy #2 Earlier, I complained about the way the black areas in this comic had been filled in. I rectract that complaint now. They're doing some interesting thing with textures and hatches, and it's growing...
Book Report: Why We Buy Reading this book in 2005 was a waste of my time. When this book was first published back in 1999, it was probably pretty interesting. So interesting that everyone was talking about it. So I had a...
Link: ExistentialTraveller In June of 2005, Tom Manshreck drove from Brooklyn to Alaska. And he wrote about it. Tags: travelog | Canada | baseball |Labels: road trip, travel...
Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Including Far From Redmond I typed up some notes about the Microsoft Puzzle Hunt. No, I wasn't at this weekend's Microsoft Puzzle Hunt IX. I wasn't cool enough to get invited. So what did I write about? I finally type...
Site Update: More BANG 13 Photos, pointer to YABA photos Tom Lester sent in three awesome photos from the recent Bay Area Night Game. So I put them on the Bay Area Night Game 13 page. In other puzzle-hunt photo news, Wesley Chan posted his photos of YABA ...
Site Update: Shinteki Decathlon Write-up Posted It's late November, and NaNoWriMo people around the world are in the final sprint, churning out huge amounts of fiction. Me, I'm just horking up little bits of reportage. For example, I just posted ...
Book Report: Garlic and Sapphires I am basically over my cold, but the sore throat remains. Thus, I wanted soup. Citrus Club, a soup place on the Haight, was closed. I guess they wanted to enjoy their holidays or something. So I ...
Book Report: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the Edge of the World This book has two parallel storylines; one is interesting and one is not. I almost stopped reading the book because I found one of the storylines so boring. But it turns out that the two storylines...
Book Report: Metropolis I am sick today. I lost my voice. So it's a bad day for conversation. But a good day for napping, blogging, and reading. Out of sympathy for my plight, I think you should read Metropolis. Go read...
Book Report: Old Goriot It's a French slice of life showing how petty greed and ambition amongst the middle classes can lead to zzz.... I only made it a few chapters into this book. Tags: book | once ground-breaking&...
Book Report: Portuguese Irregular Verbs I posted a new travelog on this site, but I don't think it turned out very well. So I'm not going to link to it from here. I won't take the time to point out stuff I've done that doesn't read well....
Book Report: A Secret Life This book by Benjamin Weiser has interesting ethical choices, history, and spycraft. A Polish navy officer became a traitor to Soviet-controlled Poland; which is to say that he arguably became a her...
Book Report: Swimming to Antarctica Yesterday, I was walking to the library. A cold wind blew. A light rain started to fall. I considered fetching my rain jacket out of my backpack, but talked myself out of it. I thought What would...
Book Report: Tuxedo Park Jennet Conant's biography of Alfred Loomis is fascinating. Loomis was an interesting character. He was a physicist, founding a Physics lab in the hoity-toity community of Tuxedo Park, NY. When WWII...
Link: Sam and Max Game Announcement Holy moly, it's an announcement of intent to produce a game starring beloved freelance police officers Sam & Max! OK, I concede that the last few such announcements haven't led to any games that...
Site: Uploaded Sailing Story When everything goes right on a sailing trip, there's usually not much to tell. Maybe you've read some of my "very boring sailing travelog"s. They're not so interesting; not much happens. Earlier t...