January, 1, 2004 archives

с новым годом

i’ve considered switching to russian and spanish for all of my writing on this site. but i don’t currently know enough of either language to really pull it off. but i’m going to work on that.

i’ve thought about writing more here about work, but on the other hand, i’m well past being one of those people who gets all rah-rah about their work. 5.0 binaries were dropped on the world right before christmas, and things are definitely heating up on all sides of the company.

i think i’m going to take “basic drawing 1” through the ucla extension visual arts program. there’s also a one-day seminar on urban design that looks interesting. i’d link to the courses, but the ucla extension site doesn’t believe in that whole linking thing.

the o’reilly open source conference 2004 call for papers is out. i need to decide what i’m going to do about conference speaking this year — the “extending php” talk is dead-and-buried. i submitted a talk for php québec 2004 but haven’t heard back. i may recycle that idea (and talk, if they accept it) for the o’reilly conference, and maybe for the mysql users conference.

moneyball by michael lewis

this book did not fail to live up to any of my expectactions. i don’t follow baseball at all, and am only a baseball fan in the sense that i really enjoy bull durham. but i still got a lot out of this book, which details how the low-budget oakland a’s were able to field teams that got to the world series despite the bleatings of bud selig (and others) about the impossibility of doing so.

happiness™ by will ferguson

this was one of those cases where i judged a book by its cover, and decided to give it a shot. i think if my expectations hadn’t been raised quite as high by some cover blurbs comparing it to douglas adams, i would have been more impressed. don’t get me wrong: it’s a good book. just not douglas adams good.

serious play by michael schrage

actually, i’m not quite done with this one yet. not a lot of stunning insights, but at least a few, and an interesting look at the nature of innovation within companies.

prey by michael crichton

this is apparently a novelization of tremors where the graboids and entertaining characters have been replaced by half-hearted nanotechnology handwaving. it served it’s purpose of giving me something to read on the plane, but just barely.

paycheck

the reviews of this movie that i’ve seen have been pretty harsh. it wasn’t movie-of-the-year, but i didn’t find it terribly offensive overall.

the lord of the rings: the return of the king

it’s been a very long time since i read the novels, and i’m not sure whether that is a help or hindrance to enjoying the films. it was an admirable film, and positively gorgeous.

big fish

another fine film, but i think i expected a little more from a tim burton film with carnival sideshow elements.