This morning I competed at the Santa Cruz Scottish Festival and placed quite well. This despite what I felt to be grave problems with my performances, which goes a long way in support of the advice, “No matter what happens, keep playing!” My mind and fingers went completely blank midway into my first tune butContinue reading “Lesson Learned”
Category Archives: Practical Applications of Knowledge
Nothing New under the Gubmint
So, this week people are getting pretty exercised about how the NSA, in some super secret operation code named “PRISM,” has been watching everything people are looking at on the web and keeping track of what phone calls are being made and received. Wil Wheaton posted on Google+ that he’s gonna cancel all his VerizonContinue reading “Nothing New under the Gubmint”
Log of Damocles
I took the weed trimmer to the grass on the creek side of the house this afternoon. The grass had grown unchecked since, well, last fall. When we moved to the woods, I was really happy and thought, “Yeah, this is great! I’m never gonna mow the lawn again!” Except that knocking the grass downContinue reading “Log of Damocles”
Practice Makes Better
I’ve just spent the past hour and a half practicing on my Deger pipes. I’m tired but feel like I’ve just made significant progress on several pieces of light music. I’m also now completely in love with the crunluath a mach.
Let’s Play a Game
I like to play games. Who doesn’t? But not just any game, I’m actually kind of particular about what games I like. I happen not to like zero-sum games; my favorite games are those where, by careful maneuvering, the players can achieve a win for everyone. I also like games where there’s complexity, because thatContinue reading “Let’s Play a Game”
Next Homework Program: Ratio Exercise
The Badb just had a couple of weeks of reviewing ratios. This was a good limbering-up exercise, since the problem sets were all about converting between different units and manipulating fractions. After all, ratios are just a different way of writing fractions. The general form of the problems wound up being, “Given that the ratioContinue reading “Next Homework Program: Ratio Exercise”
Miscellany
A lot of things have been going on, but I don’t have a lot to say about any one of them. On Saturday I played at the Dixon highland games. Dixon is about two hours away from Boulder Creek, so rather than driving out the night before and getting a hotel room, I figured I’dContinue reading “Miscellany”
Trust Your Kid
Earlier today I tweeted this gem: “I don’t worry about my girls’ future boyfriends. I trust my daughters to be smart and capable.” I’d like to expand on that a little. This was inspired by a quote I read on the Freakonomics blog: “I want my girls’ potential boyfriends to think I’m a crazy lunatic,”HaleyContinue reading “Trust Your Kid”
Sometimes Continuity Sucks
Facetime stopped working on my laptop sometime this year. I don’t know anyone far away with whom I actually want to chat, so I only use it when Junglemonkey goes out of town. She’s out for a few days and today the Badb came back from camp and of course we all want to seeContinue reading “Sometimes Continuity Sucks”
PDF::API2 and Landscape
I’m currently working on a way to generate a custom PDF of a Bugzilla record (which, in turn, contains a bunch of custom fields). One of the requirements of the spec is that the PDF is targeted at US letter size paper in landscape orientation. I’m looking at using PDF::API2 and PDF::Table but one ofContinue reading “PDF::API2 and Landscape”