Last weekend my wife and I went to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk and I had a moment of clarity after playing Whac-A-Mole. We had run out of tokens, and had already burned through about $20 on various games, but I wanted to play a few more. When I was a kid, running out of tokens […]
Last Tuesday I reported for jury duty at the Superior Court of California, County of Alameda’s Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse. The last time I actually had to go to report for jury duty was in May of 2006. It was for a civil case relating to this: Esteemed UC history professor hit by truck and […]
Shortly before 7am GMT on February 12, 2009, Amazon.co.uk slowly began refusing to fulfill MP3 orders. By 8am, the MP3 store was failing to fulfill 95% of all orders and continued to do so until almost 2pm. I often wondered how things like this come about and now I have first hand knowledge. I was […]
At work I am on the photogs mailing list where a number of people share their monthly best/favorite photographs they’ve taken during the month. I posted my 10 favorite, and 3 of them appear below. In addition, I checked my photo stats and apparently in mid-November someone submitted a store to Digg about mountain goats. […]
It seems that one of the canonical examples of the power/simplicity/elegance etc. of functional languages/recursion tends to be an implementation of Quicksort. In Pragmatic Programming Erlang it appears on page 62. qsort([]) -> []; qsort([Pivot|T]) -> qsort([X || X []; ([Pivot|T]) -> QSort([X || X Q = fun([],F) -> []; ([Pivot|T],F) -> F([X || X […]
“We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers.” – President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address, 2009-01-20 I interpret this to mean Christians, Muslims, Jews and Hindus are believers, or more generally, believers are people who ascribe to a religion. However, why shouldn’t it be the other way around, that the […]
Registration for the Sunday 12am, 50 person maximum, $70 No-Limit Texas Hold-em at Caesars opened 2 hours prior to the start. As luck would have it, I attempted to sign up for it at 10:05pm (thinking it might fill up and giving my wife and I time to eat dinner beforehand) but it hadn’t been […]
In October of 2002, Obama publicly condemned the use of force in Iraq. During the 2008 US Presidential Election, I kept wondering, had he been a senator, would he have voted Nay on H.J.Res. 114 A joint resolution to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq. With the release of the NYTimes […]
While I’m waiting for the Amazon.com “Gold Box For Gamers” which begins at midnight PST, it seems like a good time to comment on completing LostWinds. This was my first WiiWare purchase, 1,000 points (10 USD) and it provide exactly 7 hours of gameplay. 2008-12-28 – 2hrs 54min (co-op with my wife) 2008-12-30 – 2hrs […]
One of the things I struggle with is resisting the temptation to, “build vs. buy”. Certainly I’m capable of writing my own blogging software or designing my own theme; however, my goal is to start keeping track of my thoughts and ideas and embarking on either of those endeavors would not be productive. Initially, I […]
