My Volvo has been in the shop at Concours Cars for the past month having its annual makeover, coinciding with a bunch of business travel I had for DevExpress. This time it was the gauges (tachometer, oil and water temperature, speedometer, fuel gauge, oil pressure, and clock) that needed to be refurbished or renovated and replaced. As there was also a split in the dashboard cover, that was replaced as well. […]
READ MOREDonna just sent me this link to a news article about Irv Gordon approaching his 3 million mile goal in his original 1966 Volvo 1800S. He’s only 40,000 miles away. Blimey. […]
READ MOREJust under a year ago I purchased a Dell XPS 15z to replace my 13-inch MacBook Pro. Since then, I’ve used the machine as my main workhorse PC, retiring my UDR desktop completely. […]
READ MOREWhen we were in Paris in April (yes, April in Paris!), I read Le Figaro every day to catch up on the election news (Sarkozy vs. Hollande vs. Le Pen) and to help try improve my French comprehension. While the latter was fairly successful, I was diverted by the puzzles page. Not only was there a Sudoku puzzle, but there was another puzzle I hadn’t seen before called Takuzu. […]
READ MOREWhen we were in Paris back in April, I picked up the latest (and final) Inspector Wallander novel. Yes, a Swedish book translated into French and read by an Englishman. There was method to my madness (just): the first Wallander book I read, I’d picked up as a French translation (it was Firewall, or, La muraille invisible) in Montreal in order to try and recover some of the French I’d known and learned when a child. Fairly successful, except I then read the rest of them in English translations. So, when I saw this in the bookshop on the Champs Elysées, I picked it up along with a couple of other books to celebrate the end of the series as I’d started it, dictionary at my side (this time with a Larousse French-English dictionary app on my iPhone rather than the physical Oxford I’d used last time). […]
READ MOREI was reading some JavaScript code the other day, because, you know, reading someone else’s code gives you insights and inspirations to improve your own, when I came across this function to calculate the maximum element in an array: […]
READ MORERaymond Chen’s post this morning was about one of the most bizarre uses of GUIDs I’ve ever heard about. I’ll quote the relevant bit: […]
READ MOREI know the answer to this conundrum, but I still have problems recognizing the answer. If you’ve never seen it before, it is really baffling. […]
READ MOREI was getting coffee from Starbucks this morning when I looked at Pikes Peak in the early morning sunlight. There was the waning moon setting over the snow-clad mountain. (Yesterday was a day of drizzle and damp; obviously this settled as snow at higher elevations.) I laid down some rubber to return home and get the camera to take a shot. […]
READ MOREWithout a doubt this article was an absolute hoot to write. I had the most fun researching the subject, buying an iPhone app, photographing my toy stuffed hedgehog, writing the article, reading press releases about Nintendo’s 3DS (it had only just been announced when I was writing this). In fact, doing everything except, you know, actually watching any 3D TV (we don’t have a telly, let alone a 3D one). […]
READ MORE