Recently updated blogs

With the UK’s most prestigious film awards returning this weekend (Sunday 18 February), it’s time to enter into a round of foolproof predictions on who will win at the 77th Baftas. The Baftas are traditionally seen as an indicator of Oscar winners, so the outcome on Sunday night will surely be seen as a predictor for the Academy Awards on 10 March. The post Baftas 2024: Our predictions appeared first …

Receiving comments about my usage of "light" mode makes me less inclined to use dark mode - Tagged: Rant, Skepticism, We live in a society

Parisian bass player Cédric Caillaud has very original and specific ideas about how to expand on the tradition. “There are plenty ways of creating new things in the standard repertoire.” He will be back in New York next week. More than two decades ago, Caillaud, as ambitious young lions are wont, started to check out the Big Apple scene. Now he’s reached the age of forty-eight and takes along his …

There's a reason the French love braised beef, simmered slowly for hours until it's just short of falling apart. Whether you call it bourguignon or daube as the French do, or pot roast or beef stew, it's a sumptuous, belly-warming meal that fills the house with its luscious aroma and can feed a crowd or keep a couple in dinners and lunches for days. It's also adaptable to different seasonings …

Album of the Week, February 17, 2024 When I was in high school, I knew that I wanted to have a tenor voice. My dad had a beautiful tenor voice that could ring the room. I listened to a lot of Sting, whose tenor voice seemed to dwell perpetually in a higher octave (and whose songs garnered me some much welcomed attention when I performed them). … And then l …

Band:IncurableCountry:RussiaGenre:Brutal Death MetalYear:2024Buy the original!BandcampDownload

According to its entry at the great BhamWiki site, this hotel was developed by D.M. Rush around 1919 and operated until about 1949. The 1945 Birmingham Yellow pages gives its address as 316 1/2 North 18th Street and the phone number was 7-09411. The small hotel occupied just the second floor of the building seen in the photo below, and was one of the few such accommodations available to blacks …

This past Friday I finished my last day on easily the greatest job I’ve had so far in my long, strange and oftentimes charmed career. I started at ODI, initially as a contractor, when it was still called the Office of Digital Innovation. I joined the team working on California’s statewide Covid site (covid19.ca.gov) as […]

Russian lawyer, political leader, and activist Alexei Navalny is dead. Yesterday, we posted Varya Gornostaeva‘s words on his unexplained death. Here are a few words from the award-winning Russian author and cardiologist Maxim Osipov, from a 2021 Facebook post in Russian, which he is allowing me to republish in English: Wise words from award-winning author/cardiologist Maxim Osipov A few months ago, a famous humanitarian, whose name I will not disclose, …

A selection of read volumes from my shelf What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading or planning to read this month? Here’s January’s installment of this column. When I’m not reading science fiction, I’m more often than not devouring history that touches on my decades of focus: 1945-1985. Recently that’s meant lots and lots of monographs on Cold War culture: from fallout shelters, suburbia, to analysis of the drama of …

I came up with a really slick trick to write E2E tests that deal with sending/receiving emails recently. This is the sort of thing that seems like it's probably usually sort of a nightmare — I wanted to write a test for registering a account on a website, where part of the flow was clicking on a validation link in a email. The slick trick is a test SMTP server …

Boosting innovation by teaching people to be tech entrepreneurs?

The Wedding Present Watusi Deluxe EditionGet It At DiscogsArriving after a Steve Albini-produced trove of mopey wonder (1991's Seamonsters) and a collection of relatively more lighthearted singles (1992's Hit Parade), the Wedding Present's fourth album Watusi found David Gedge and company hitting a particularly brilliant stride in terms of songwriting and creative development alike. Produced by Seattle personality Steve Fisk in a time when "grunge" was a breathless buzzword, there's …

I was surprised that I hadn’t heard of any of these ten novels and authors from The Shades of Orange YouTube review “The Top Science Fiction Books Published in 2023.” Is this an indication of how out of touch I am with new science fiction, or do my tastes just run much different from the reviewer? When and why did I stop reading new science fiction? Here are Shades of …