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Monthly Archives: February 2006

Poland or bust!

Monday, February 27, 2006

Tomorrow morning at 9:30 my flight leaves for Prague. Wednesday I’m taking a bus to Harrachov, then struggling through the snow to an unmarked border crossing into Poland, where I will vanish into the untracked wilderness. Hopefully I’ll emerge again, at the Szklarska Poreba workshop. Then it’s pragmasemantics and skiing for a long weekend, before [...]

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“Samson” Czech beer

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Just in time for my trip to Prague (on the way to the Szklarska Poreba workshop next week), Marieke brought be a bottle of this beer. (For my extensive lurking readership, “Tikitu” is officially my middle name, I’ve been Samson for most of my life. If I smoked, it would be my tobacco of choice [...]

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Vellum: mixed feelings

Sunday, February 19, 2006

I finished my second time through Vellum, by Hal Duncan, and I’m trying to put my impressions in some sort of order. (I also finished Cloud Atlas, but I might have to reread that before I can comment coherently.) The short version on Vellum is, the ideas are great but the execution is just enough [...]

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But we train software engineers!

Monday, February 13, 2006

The UvA is introducing a new system for tracking expense claims (travel, conference fees, &c.). Actually, they’ve already introduced it, a fancy web app which only runs under IE on Windows machines, and they’ve already decommissioned the old-fashioned paper system. If you send your paperwork to someone who can do anything about it, these days [...]

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First take on Cloud Atlas

Wednesday, February 8, 2006

One of the books Amazon sent me was David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. I started reading it over breakfast this morning, and took the tram in to work so that I didn’t have to stop. Here’s an excerpt from the first page, followed by some thoughts (there’s a long post brewing about Vellum, also, but that [...]

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WP upgrade, bugs

Wednesday, February 8, 2006

I just upgraded my WordPress installation to 2.0.1. If you spot any glitches, please let me know. I already know that posts say “0 comments” even when they’ve been commented, I guess this is my old theme gone out of date. I might fix it… or I might just wait until the site-wide redesign.

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Amazon profiling cuts a bit close to the bone

Monday, February 6, 2006

Last week I broke down and made an Amazon order. Two Perl books (it’s a programming language, Mum) padded out for shipping with a recent science fiction novel. It seems that they’re doing some customer profiling. I just got this in my email: Valentine’s Day can be a minefield of disappointment, so why not hedge [...]

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