clock — watching time, the only true currency

A journal from John B. Roberts

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Entries from August 2006

Monday night links

August 28th, 2006 · No Comments

Monday Night Football (regular season) hasn’t started yet, and book group is going on in the other room, so time for me to clean out the inbox with the various links I’ve been meaning to comment on.

Jakob on log-log charts didn’t live up to the interesting headline “Data Visualization of Web Stats: Logarithmic Charts and [...]

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Tags: Everything

Movie: Little Miss Sunshine

August 23rd, 2006 · 1 Comment

“You don’t talk because of Friedrich Nietzsche.”
Steve Carell playing a suicidal homosexual Proust scholar in Little Miss Sunshine is funny, and he makes that line almost a howler. Trust me. He’s not alone in sparking laughs from material which by rights should not be so humorous. See this movie. The 78 from Metacritic feels spot [...]

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Tags: Movies

Track on Tuesdays

August 23rd, 2006 · 3 Comments

I’m noting this on Wednesday, but I occasionally get to the Kezar Stadium track on Tuesday mornings, if my friend Billy provides external motivation. Yesterday, 3×1200m and then 3×1000m. Felt good as I ran the first five at a very controlled pace with the group, so I went after the last one with the intention [...]

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Tags: Running

Book: Marker

August 23rd, 2006 · No Comments

I wanted summer reading, and I found it in Robin Cook’s Marker. Beyond focusing a broadside at managed care, Cook mostly skips right along with a semi-thriller. Not having read any of the multiple bestsellers Cook has written before, I don’t know if all of them are medical. I suspect so, since he touts his [...]

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Tags: Books · Everything

Movie: Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control

August 23rd, 2006 · No Comments

When I saw the title Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control in my coming Netflix queue, I thought it was a Vin Diesel type movie. I couldn’t remember why I had put it in the queue, but I was ready for a light film.
Oops…wrong movie. The movie was on my list because of The Fog [...]

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Tags: Movies

Book: The Quiet American

August 22nd, 2006 · No Comments

My one-week vacation gave me a chance to finish off some books, mostly during the travel to and fro.
I picked up The Quiet American by Graham Greene in a used book store on Polk Street in San Francisco, while killing time a couple of weeks ago. I knew very little about it, beyond the general [...]

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Tags: Books

Movie: An Inconvenient Truth

August 10th, 2006 · 1 Comment

I caught An Inconvenient Truth on Sunday. It met my expectations, which were high. Metacritic score of 74. It’s a well-crafted documentary, and you get a feel for how to tell a story. Al Gore says in the film that he’s given this presentation well over 1,000 times. The key? He remembers that every time [...]

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Tags: Mac · Movies

Not even 200 valid domains in Cameroon

August 9th, 2006 · 1 Comment

At work we spent a lot of time today providing OpenDNS users with a way to avoid the wildcarding of the .cm TLD (CNET News.com article). You can read all about the choices available at “Cameroon takes the ‘o’ out of .com.”
The most interesting part to me? There are fewer than 200 valid domains for [...]

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Tags: Domains · Everything · OpenDNS

On Point : Testosterone

August 9th, 2006 · 3 Comments

I didn’t listen to the whole 48 minutes, but the radio show exploration “On Point : Testosterone” covers interesting ground. (Thanks, Ken.)
In the wake of Floyd Landis’s fall, I was curious about two things. First, why did Floyd pass the other tests given during the Tour? Second, why testoterone, which I had understood to be [...]

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Tags: Everything

Time Machine…a popular version of Lifestreams?

August 8th, 2006 · No Comments

Yesterday’s sneak peek at Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X, included Time Machine. This archive/journaling/backup application has a nifty UI, at least in demo mode. We’ll have to wait to see if it’s actually useful or not, but it sells well.
But what I was struck by was that Time Machine appears to be [...]

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Tags: Everything · Mac · Tech · Time · Visualization