clock … watching time, the only true currency

Sam Adams or Hefeweizen?
Cousins were over for casual pizza dinner tonight, and I sent the boy into the living room to ask his uncle whether he would like a Sam Adams or a Hefeweizen. He got the whole question out wonderfully, and returned to me in the kitchen with a coherent answer (the latter). I [...]

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Movie: Master and Commander, The Far Side of the World
On Wednesday, I went to see Master and Commander, The Far Side of the World (warning: this website brought my computer to its knees… is Flash the culprit?), the first movie made using the Aubrey-Maturin characters from Patrick O’Brian. I read Master and Commander long before [...]

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The problem of depth
Rajesh Jain at Emergic cites a NYTimes article about the sudden interest in Friendster and other community sites (yes, we’ve been down this road before… anyone remember SixDegrees and TheGlobe?). From the article:
When two people greet each other on the street, neither can see (nor hope to grasp) the range of the [...]

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Panther is running
New version of MacOS X, Panther (aka 10.3), is now running on the desktop as well as the laptop. I wasn’t in a hurry, until my sister bought an iSight in the Burlingame Apple Store yesterday. We wanted to test iChatAV between the laptop and the desktop, so that set off an afternoon [...]

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Thanks for family
Several made the trip out here, and talked to several more throughout the day. Turkey is still in the oven, but we’re enjoying ourselves. Had a nice surprise this morning when we went on a walk in Golden Gate Park, and found the Conservatory of Flowers open and uncrowded. It re-opened a couple [...]

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Hard to keep up to date = search engine decoder
A bit slow, but interesting: Search Engine Decoder. [via Emergic]

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How would you draw the map?
I just reviewed an illuminating re-think of mapping the California recall votes, thanks to a pointer from Jeffrey Veen. Wow. You can really lie better with pictures than numbers, if you want to. I visited the Exploratorium here in San Francisco yesterday, and smiled my way through various hands-on and [...]

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It’s not enough to be cranky, you have to suggest a solution
Just read this IBM developerWorks article about the poor state of documentation. Fair enough, but whining about it without providing more specific examples, for real-world products, isn’t tremendously helpful. (I rarely write documentation, but I have done some for internal tools.) The only tip [...]

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Who’s in charge here?
Bookmarked this NYTimes.com article on the digital home and its discontents several days ago. Written by James Gleick, whom I’ve read regularly, this essay points out that our implementation of technology in the home is ahead of the maturation necessary to make the technologies used invisible. Plug and play? No way.
Once you’ve [...]

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Comics without the newsprint
I’ve been reading five daily comic strips using NetNewsWire, via RSS feeds from Tapestry. This morning, I learned about iComic, a dedicated application just for comic strips. I’m guessing it works much the same way, but maybe I’ll try it out. I am not a big fan of the San Francisco Chronicle [...]

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