Monthly Archives: December 2007

I’ve been spending most of the xmas vacation season reading and hanging out with family. A couple of anecdotes: We bought my parents a copy of Microsoft Word for their new iMac, but when they got around to installing it, … Continue reading →

Santa’s missile launchers made hash of the black helicoptors. The copters were perfect targets against the snow, wallowing into range over the flat ice pack; they lit up up like flares on the elves’ radar as they lumbered over the … Continue reading →

A nice collection of papers on editor implementation.  Link (I’ve been using Emacs since 1979, and Epsilon, my favorite Emacs-like editor, since 1991.  It’s amusing to do something in a few seconds in Epsilon that makes a Visual Studio or … Continue reading →

Books I would like to see written: A Children’s Treasure of Treason Terrorism for Toddlers (When Trantrums Aren’t Enough) The Littlest Stormtrooper Goodnight Moon – The True Story of the NASA Moon Landing Cover-Up It’s Pat the Bunny The Gas … Continue reading →

The spammers won; I’ve more or less disabled fyyff.com (yes, I’m going to keep the domain).  

The clock here at the US government’s Digital Television conversion site . . . that clock, at 433 days plus some hours as of this writing, is the countdown to revolution.  Because when the daytime soaps go dark in households across … Continue reading →

Some history of Spacewar! (And some wistful stuff about E. E. “Doc” Smith). Link Hey, a bunch of Doc’s books are on Gutenberg! Here’s the one that got me hooked, when I was about 10. (My dad’s comment when he … Continue reading →

A nice video on using git (Google video).  link.  

One of my recent finds in “low” (historical-like, zero-magic) fantasy is “The Engineer Trilogy” by K. J. Parker.  Set in a steel-and-arrows technological era, the first book, Devices and Desires, starts with the conviction of an engineer for a peculiar … Continue reading →