clock — watching time, the only true currency

I am in the Adirondacks, in northern New York, and the weather has been brilliant so far this week, so I guess we were due for a bit of grey. Enjoying the high-speed access at the Paul Smiths College library.

[Read more →]

Going to be quiet for another stretch, so let me leave you with a definition from my “Forgotten English” daily calendar.
lipwisdom - an appearance of wisdom in discourse without practice
Attribution: Daniel Fenning’s Royal English Dictionary, 1775
If I ever need another name for a blog, I’ve got it!

[Read more →]

OK, this is ancient, but witty all the same. Read this GameSpot review of the biggest game of all, real life. Or read the thread on Slashdot. Someone knows how not to take their job too seriously.

[Read more →]

I have various things I’d like to read/scan at some point, mostly gathered over the past several weeks. But I hate the clutter in my Safari bookmarks bar, so I’ll dump them here… easier to find in the future. Follow at your own risk.

5 patterns quiz - Gotta love self-assessment, hokey or not
Caring for your [...]

[Read more →]

I need to do some work to figure out the best way to use two computers in the house effectively. The problem is most applications, and their data stores, are designed with single-computer use in mind. I have server-based storage spage, but it’s not the easiest thing to manage documents/data on the server at all [...]

[Read more →]

And the drumbeat continues. I just finished The Ionian Mission, the next Aubrey-Maturin novel. O’Brian must have felt the momentum of his series building by this time, since he spends very few pages on (re)introducing his cast of characters before launching them off to the Toulon blockade. Overall, this stanza feels like a quieter part [...]

[Read more →]

Since I only brought three of the Aubrey-Maturin series on my vacation, I wanted to slow down and wait before jumping into the last of the three. So I found a paperback thriller, A Certain Justice, by John T. Lescroart. About what I expected. 500-odd pages fly by. The author throws in a few twists [...]

[Read more →]

The Surgeon’s Mate jumps right into the breach where The Fortune of War left off, in Halifax, Canada. I wish these books had maps in them, as geography matters a great deal. I know Halifax is a seaport on the eastern shore of Canada, but I cannot pinpoint it more thoroughly. Nor, when Aubrey, Maturin, [...]

[Read more →]

Vacation led me to take up Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series once more. I left off with Desolation Island, so next up was The Fortune of War, where Jack and Stephen start in England, lose their ship to fire east of Brazil, and are taken prisoners of war by the Americans (yes, it’s ~1812). Much of [...]

[Read more →]

I would prefer to be sleeping, but instead I’m typing because I couldn’t fall asleep. Can I bore myself enough to put myself to sleep? An interesting philosophical discussion for another time. Right now, I’ll just try and catch up on 500-odd posts in NNW. Argh.

[Read more →]