August, 5, 2005 archives

life lessons from blackjack (via jason kottke) is a good piece on exactly what the title claims.

it also flirts with the idea of living as an exercise in optimization, which is something on my mind a lot. the context of how i’ve been thinking about that is just recognizing how much of an underachiever i am, and deciding how comfortable i am with that. (and the answer to that may just be “too comfortable.”)

this weblog about buying and renovating a house in alameda is a great read. it’s amazing to see the progress that has been made. that link is to the first entry, here’s the weblog itself, with the most recent entries.

although i know basically nothing about home repair and maintenance, i have the insane idea that it would be fun to do this sort of thing.

the washington post explains “why the red delicious no longer is.”

i guess delicious is a bit too strong of an adjective, but i still eat them pretty regularly. i think the crunchiness helps make the experience transcend the taste.

the new york times covers an interesting aspect of some startup funding — “when capital goes to the founders, not the company.”

there’s a certain mythology around the value of stock options to employees at startups, and i’m just jaded enough to know that unless you’re management, you’re not going to see much from stock options. it’s certainly hard to justify a reduced salary on the promise of future riches.

last night i saw george sarah and friends, part of the grand performances at california plaza. the music was okay, but i don’t think it was well-suited for live performance — it had a little too much of that “press play on the synthesizer” feel. i only stuck around for the first half, of which the highlight was monique powell, of save ferris, singing a couple of songs.

next tuesday at 7pm, zócalo will be having one of their events at the california plaza, a discussion with robert j. dowling, editor-in-chief and publisher of the hollywood reporter, and joel stein, columnist for the los angeles times. it could be interesting, since i think stein runs in second place to editorial cartoonist michael ramirez as the person people would most like to see gone from the op-ed pages of the la times. but ramirez has a pulitzer to hold his critics at bay, so i think stein is more likely to be the first to disappear.

democratizing innovation by eric von hippel is a fairly dry, academic business book, which made it tougher than i had expected to get through. there are some interesting observations and insights in the book, but they are perhaps too few and far between. you can read the book online.

over on planet mysql, the related topic of distributed version control has gotten some attention, with some shout-outs to free tools for doing distributed development. (i’ll add one for mercurial.)

ian bicking tries to argue in favor of centralized scm systems, but i think he’s neglecting the cost imposed on the center of the project by such centralized systems that the distributed systems do a really good job of distributing — you can impose something even better than his proposed “we don’t accept patches, we only accept pointers to branches in our repository” — “we don’t accept patches, we only pull changes from publically-available repositories.”

i can’t imagine the security nightmare of providing global check-in access to everyone, and the complexity of tools that would be required to manage the layers of dead-end branches.

earlier today i heard some shouting outside my window, and snapped a few pictures of what appeared to be an arrest in progress. when i first looked, one of the lapd officers was pulling a bicycle away from the scene.

nature noir: a park ranger’s patrol in the sierra by jordan fisher smith is a book that i thought might be amazing after hearing him read excerpts at the central library last march, and i was right. it is a wonderful book, and you are really missing out if you don’t seek it out. the way he weaves together stories about the park he patrolled (which was condemned to become a reservoir) and stories about people in the park is amazing.

which do you regret more: something you have done, or something you have not done?