Here’s how the holiday has been so far: Arrived Thursday afternoon after taking off Wednesday night. Spent the first evening chilling and getting over some jetlag. Friday we headed to Greenwich, walked through Greenwich park and looked around the Royal Observatory. Didn’t have time to see a planetarium show, but took a picture of mini-Elbeno… Continue reading London Calling
I’m in London
Catching up with family and friends on the UK side. Weather’s not bad at the moment, and I must have a sort of reverse jet-lag because I’m up at 6.40am on a Saturday (and nobody else is yet). Yesterday, went to a whole other hemisphere.
Unexpectedly Valuable
It’s come to my attention recently that my library of video games contains some that are now quite rare, sought-after, and therefore valuable. Many of the video games that you can’t buy new any more are available through eBay or Amazon sellers, although frequently (at least on Amazon) the items are without original manuals and… Continue reading Unexpectedly Valuable
Unexpected CS Book Bonanza
This weekend was another book sale, this time over at our other local library. It’s a smaller library and fairly new – I wasn’t expecting much. There were only about 10 smallish tables of books, so I was quite surprised to find quite a cache of computer science books on a chair in the corner.… Continue reading Unexpected CS Book Bonanza
Embouteillage
The arid highway subjugates the earth, A monument to mastery of man. Fantastic artifice: cement and steel, The world enslaved and trammelled by its span. A million ugly motors fight the road; Retch bitter toxins from a distant star. Miasma of a century’s exhaust Insinuates itself in every scar. Gentle infusions of jazz from the… Continue reading Embouteillage
Schmap uses more of my photos
For their second Australia guide. Princess Theatre, Melbourne Cockington Green, Canberra Fort Denison, Sydney
Why Reading Books Matters to a Programmer
The programming book market these days is small. Nothing like what it was eight years ago or so. And apparently, programmers don’t read books (any more). It’s mostly true. But of course, there are still books worth reading. I’m going to take as read the easy arguments: let’s assume that you’ve already pared away all… Continue reading Why Reading Books Matters to a Programmer
Hardy Heron
After a couple of days of slow servers, today it picked up a bit and I installed Hardy Heron without problems. Well, with a couple of minor problems. First, my /boot partition is still just a little too small, so I had to move a few things around to manage the recreation of the initrd… Continue reading Hardy Heron
LA Times Book Festival
I went with the family to the LA Times Book Festival today. We parked in the same lot as last year, avoiding the snarls off the 405 at Wilshire (signed UCLA) and heading up to Sunset to come in from the north side. This year, we had got tickets ahead of time for three panel… Continue reading LA Times Book Festival
Nostalgia corner: teletext
I want to share with my US readers a little known thing (at least over here) that goes by the name of teletext. This was (still is) a system in the UK that was sort of like the Internet before the Internet. Way back in the 70s the BBC invented a system for transmitting textual… Continue reading Nostalgia corner: teletext