Book Report: Draft № 4
John McPhee, a great writer, writes about writing instead of about rocks or oranges or what-have-you. It turns out that behind-the-scenes at "The New Yorker" is less interesting than rocks and orange...
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My mom just sent me a "go link" not from some high-tech startup, but rather from the National Park Service. Maybe all those computer nerds migrating to DC are having some effect! In case you're wond...
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Book Report: This is Improbable
It's a book collecting and compressing "Improbably Research" topics. This book convinced me to go back to reading the Improbable Research blog. A chapterful of this stuff is a lot to get through in a...
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Milestone: 27 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 27 millionth it. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits s...
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OMG you guys, one of Leon's neighbors in "Midnight Madness" is Wally THORPE. If I can just find seven more Thorpes in Puzzlehunt-related media, I'll be well on my way to creating a thematic octothorp...
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I asked the nice lady at the Preservation Society if she knew about any buildings that had # as a prominent design element. She laughed. Even when my puzzles don't come together, I still bring mirt...
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Link: Cosmo, the Hacker "God" Who Fell to Earth
This article about an identy thief is pretty amazing. Perhaps 25% of its amazing-ness comes from the story itself: how on earth does a 15-year old kid get so good at navigating bureaucracy that he ca...
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Tron and WarGames: really thick doors
I'm "researching" for WarTron. I.e., I'm watching movies while waiting for batteries to recharge so that I can bring lots of batteries. I re-watched WarGames and Tron. Looking for elements in common....
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The Wooly Pig Cafe is better than Ike's
(Sorry, out of towners, this blog post is only of interest to San Franciscans.) The best sandwich place in my neighborhood is the Wooly Pig Cafe. They put together some awesome sandwiches from ingre...
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Potential Puzzle Hunters are everywhere, even St Louis
While I was in St Louis to volunteer for DASH, I did some shoe-leather investigation in search of potential puzzlehunters. I had a lot of fun helping at DASH... but we only had two teams this year. T...
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Comic Report: Planetary
It's superheroes, so you think I wouldn't be interested. But the emphasis is on information-gathering, not just beating each other up. If there's some bad guy who seems invulnerable, most comic books...
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Book Report: Pervasive Games (Theory and Design)
Several months ago, I ran into a little post from a blog called "Pervasive Games". The blog post was interesting, so I wrote a little blog post about that, as one does. But I didn't really notice th...
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Book Report: Knowledge Sharing in Software Development
I was in meetings most of this last week at work. Meanwhile, one of my co-workers was learning a new style of programming--and thus was trying to learn about four big new things at once. She sent m...
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OpenID, OAuth, Learning by Gossip
Last weekend, I did some programming. Well, not much programming. Mostly I did research preparatory to programming. Well, not exactly research. It was more un-research. I started out learning ho...
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Information Architecture: There Oughtta be a Law
I recently read an article by London Times writer Alan Brien in which he wrote "I used to think that I was the first reader, enraged by the difficulty of tracking down a passage in a long work of r...
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Book Report: Essays in Computing Science (Hoare)
It's a collection of essays on Computer Science by Tony Hoare, dating from the 1960s through the 1980s. This isn't what you'd expect to find on my reading list, but the essay on Communicating Sequen...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere; but so is Problem-Solving
A while back--long enough ago that I'm probably getting details wrong--someone told me how the Scoobies tackle a puzzle. They set the puzzle out where everyone in the team can look at it. They look...
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Book Report: Don't Make Me Think
The SF Minigame was awesome. But I can't say much about that now, since other folks will still get a chance to play in that game. So... a book review about Don't Make me Think This is a book about ...
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Embedded Reporter Seeks Team
Is your team playing in the upcoming Back to Basics/Midnight Madness game on April 5? Would you let me play with your team and then write about it afterwards? If so, please get in touch with me (we...
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Book Report: The Social Life of Information
It was six months when I started looking for work and it was just this last week that I got my first phone screen. There aren't many technical writing jobs in San Francisco, thus phone screens are ra...
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Book Report: Better
You think I read this book because of my recent hospital visit, but I swear it was already on my to-do list. And it's not just about medicine. Sort of. This book, by Atul Gawande, is sort of about...
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Irony in a Library Catalog
I want to check the book Ambient Findability out of the UC Berkeley library. So I looked it up in the catalog: 1. Morville, Peter. Ambient findability / Peter Morville. Sebastopol, Calif. ; Fa...
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Book Report: the Algorithm Design Manual
Stir craziness > geek craziness. I got a new computer today. I was really excited! But not for the reason you think. Sure, it's a sweet new machine that actually works with my DSL connection, ...
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Book Report: New York Underground
You might remember a while back I read the book RE/Search Pranks 2 and found out about Julia Solis, who together with the organization Dark Passage set up a LARP based around New York and an abandone...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Sweden
Oh, cool! Raymond Chen posted a comment about rebusrally. At least I guess it was Raymond Chen. Maybe it was just some other Swedish/English speaker, and they wanted to mess with my head.Labels: p...
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Book Report: Guanxi
This book is about how Microsoft set up a research lab in Beijing. This was a pioneering effort. China's economy had opportunities for kids who wanted to Make Money Fast in computing--but not so mu...
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Book Report: BAE05: Andrea Barrett's "The Sea of Information"
Early Saturday morning, my friend Tom Lester drove me to the Emeryville Amtrak station from Berkeley. He pointed out the bakery called Sweet Adeline, and said that they had good cookies. My memorie...
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Book Report: Cravan
In honor of Wondercon (which I'm not attending (yes, I am lame)), a comic book review: How often do you finish reading a comic book and think, "I wish there was a bibliography."? Arthur Cravan was a...
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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...
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