December, 31, 2002 archives

while in vegas for the holidays, i saw shows by penn & teller and blue man group. both excellent, and recommended. p&t was a little less notable, since i've seen them live before and had seen most of the tricks, but the before-show music and new tricks made up for that. blue man group was just incredible.

dave barry's tricky business is a fun crime-caper-comedy set mostly on a gambling boat during a tropical storm. the plot is silly, but some of the characters are really fun.

tom perrotta's the wishbones follows a few months from the life of a guitarist from a wedding band after he proposes to his longtime girlfriend. it will no doubt be the basis for a decent movie some day, although i was somewhat left with the feeling that it already had been, and the movie was called high fidelity.

both quick reads (i read the first on the ride from los angeles to vegas, the second in the morning one day in vegas), and both recommended as such.

last year's non-resolution resolution was mostly a dud, so i won't pretend to really try this year. but if i were to make resolutions, here's the top three possibilities (in no particular order):

• get a life.
• move.
• end the campaign of sabotage against myself.

just for fun, linus torvalds' autobiography (written with david diamond) is a fun book. in addition to recounting his own (sketchily remembered) personal history, linus also lays out his basic philosophies in life, which i found remarkably resonant with my own. his golden rules:

1. do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.
2. be proud of what you do.
3. and have fun doing it.

words to live by. (although i'd quibble a bit with the first, simplifying it to do as you would have others do.)

one thing i was disappointed about in the book was the number of copy editing errors, including calling apache the most popular commercial distribution of linux.

jwz pundidates on how rss aggregation sites might get more useless when content providers freak out about their content appearing outside their control. online comic providers are already like this. the otherwise-excellent comictastic had to drop support for various popular comics. of course, it then has a flexible enough system that you can just add support for the comics manually. clue for content producers: once you've hung a piece of content off a http: url, you've lost any control over what client i may choose to view it in.