Monthly Archives: May 2007

Tea

Douglas Adams on making tea: helpful, and funny, as always.

Everything is Miscellaneous

David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous talk has some fun moments.

The Unconsoled

I had started reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled last year, but didn’t get into it much. I felt it was a bit intriguing, but too weird for me to take up at that time. Last week, when I was late for work one morning, and looking for a book to read while commuting, I finally [...]

Wordnet and Emacs

Something else I did to pass the time. This is going into my posts.el file, with the keybinding C-c w. (defun get-current-word () "Returns the current, or the last entered word." (save-excursion (backward-word) (setq start (point)) (forward-word) (setq end (point)) (buffer-substring-no-properties start end))) (defvar wordnet-bin-path "C:/Progra~1/WordNet/2.1/bin/wn.exe" "This should point to the full path of the [...]

Reader stats

I just went over to the Trends page at Google Reader, and here’s what they say: From your 148 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 2,502 items, starred 0 items, and shared 12 items. I was shocked for a minute, then I realized most of the items I’ve ‘read’ are from the programming.reddit.com [...]

Google Experimental

Check out some up-and-coming Google features at the Experimental Search page. The Timeline view seems very interesting, but it does not seem complete just yet, and I don’t particularly know how it works. There results are quite sparse, which is surprising. The Keyboard Shortcuts feature is cool. Use j, k to navigate, o or Enter [...]

New UI

I’m un-decided about Google’s new interface. Google Analytics’ new interface, on the other hand, rocks.

Liskell

Haskell + Lisp = Liskell.

Epic Fantasy

Stephen Donaldson’s essay on Epic Fantasy is a must read. An excerpt, where he’s talking about Tolkien: He restored the epic to English literature. Roughly a century after the epic became an impossible literary form, he made it possible to write epics again. But — a crucial but — he did it by divorcing his [...]

The Elegance Paradox

The Elegance Paradox is this: to create elegance requires entirely inelegant preparation, but nobody should be able to see that. How many times have you said to yourself “that person makes it look so easy.” [via Reddit]