Once upon a time, in a house not that far away, considering, there lived a cat called Aristaeus. He was nominally a brownish tabby, but he had a wonderful white bib, white paws with a signature black toe on one of them. Because of, or to live up to, that sophisticated white bib, he craved the good life and got it in spades. This cat loved roast chicken, fresh salmon, smoked salmon, fresh tuna, tinned tuna, prosciutto di Parma, and even freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. When we had pheasant for Christmas dinner, Ari wasn’t that far away asking for nibbles from the dining table. Sadly, Ari died this afternoon at about 1:40pm, leaving an enormous cat-shaped hole in our lives. […]
READ MOREFile this one under “I’m gonna need this again one day, m’kay?” […]
READ MOREMy wife (who is a Senior Deputy District Attorney) is preparing for a major homicide trial at the moment – it starts on Monday, January 6, for an estimated 8 weeks – and so spent New Year’s Day at work. I was left at home and, after having tidied up, I was at a bit of a loss as to what to do. Yes, I could write some code, but I was in more of an artsy fartsy mood. Ideal thought: since it was the first day of the year, design and make a calendar. […]
READ MOREFile this one under the “I wish I’d known about this a long time ago” label. Yes, it’s one of those rabbit holes you jump down thinking it’s dead simple and quick, and then spend some inordinate amount of time and sweat following what turns out to be just one dead end after another. […]
READ MOREFor fun, and also because they look good framed, hanging on a wall, I collect old maps. And, I’ll admit it, I just love looking at the intricate detail and marveling at the cartographer’s ability to create these figures with, what is after all, some very primitive tools. Sometimes you can get some sense of the history of a region by looking at its maps. […]
READ MOREFor the past two years, I’ve carried an essential bit of kit along with me on flights. Given that I make at least one trip – two flights – per month (this year will actually work out at 38 flights all told for the year, so three flights per month), I actually spend a lot of time on planes. Not as much as some travellers, to be sure, but enough. To help pass the time, I’ve got into the habit of ripping and downloading DVDs onto a mobile device (or equivalently buying the download from Amazon) so that I can watch them on the flights. […]
READ MOREI had occasion the other day to mess around with a particular web page. The page was designed to provide an overview of a particular topic (essentially a list of high-level headers) and that had detail sections that were hidden. The user had to click on a “more” button on a particular header to show its individual detail section. Not only that, but should a detail section be shown, the “more” button was changed to a “less” button, so that the user got a hint that he could close that particular detail section (at which point, the “less” button became a “more” button once more). […]
READ MOREYes, it’s another rave from the grave: a retro calculator from Julian’s past calculator history. This one is from 1976, so I bought mine after I’d finished school and before I started university. It’s the Commodore SR 4190R, made in England (take that, oriental factories!), and a more fabulous button-oriented jabberwock of a calculator is hard to imagine. And, unlike graphics calculators of the present day with their menus and pixel displays, this is “just” a calculator. […]
READ MOREIn August last year, I read Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges, which turned out to be an excellent biography of Alan Turing, especially so since 2012 was the centenary of his birth (I’d bought the Centenary Edition). Hodges is a mathematician and I certainly appreciated the way he described Turing’s inventions and mathematical insights. Despite (or in spite of) that, Hodges detailed Turing’s life and death in great detail, without causing the reader to flag and get bored. The description of the war years were extremely interesting, and the book contains the best account of the cracking of the Enigma Machine I have read anywhere. And, as always, whenever I read about Turing’s final days, I get angry at the mores and laws of the 50s (which, if you think about it, is a bit futile: it was what it was). […]
READ MOREWhile we were on vacation in England at the beginning of the month, we visited Rievaulx Terrace and Temples. This is kind of an 18th century folly, a landscaped terrace on the hill just above Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire where the designer cut views in the woods on the slopes so that you caught glimpses of the ruins below as you perambulated through the gardens. To top it off, the owner wanted a couple of temples on the terrace as well: at one end the domed Doric Temple and, at the opposite end, the Ionic Temple. For rich-as-heck industrialists in the 18th century, about par for the course really. […]
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