I picked a fight a bit with Charlie on Thursday, saying that I thought this whole Give George Lucas A Chunk of the Lakefront For a Stupid Museum thing was bullshit, and I do think it's bullshit, but part of why I don't like it is that every time the landscape of the city changes it becomes something different from the thing I knew. Every photo I ( Read more... )

I only got an A-minus in the second semester of the Java class, but it's a legit grad-level grade (which I assume meant subjecting myself to a stricter rubric) and I can't pretend I didn't do some slacking there, especially toward the end of the semester when I had that whole death-in-the-family thing to contend with. I only had one long dark night ( Read more... )

There's nothing new to say about death, is there? Billions of stories that all have the same ending, but that we want to hear and tell each other. Stories we want to remember. So here are a couple ( Read more... )

Java, Take Two ( Read more... )

"I kind of hope she does sit here. She'll be like 'What are you reading?' and I'll tell her it's Noam Chomsky."
"Ha, I've actually got Žižek with me. Check it out, the cover is basically an illustration of an in-flight emergency"Okay, if you do change seats, will you 'accidentally' leave your book behind ( Read more... )

I don't feel like it's really necessary for me to wait to get my midterm grade back to say out loud that I'm doing just fine in this Java class. Like, I even do the extra credit stuff because it's easy enough and why the fuck not, so I'm running somewhere north of a perfect score at the moment ( Read more... )

As I halfway knew it would, registering for a class at Harvard's extension school involved retrieving information from whatever sort of records were created back in 2004 when I was dithering job-wise and bored enough to take a grad school class for fun. You can get a Master's in Linguistics at the extension school, and I totally thought in 2004 ( Read more... )

So, a few years back, when it was the thing, I got infected with the Miley Cyrus earworm "Party In The USA." Enough so that I acquired an MP3 of the song, dumped it into my ever-expanding "Cheeseball Pop Hits I Listen To While Running"* and consequently listened to it a bunch of times. While running, which is my go-to forum for overthinking these ( Read more... )

The " #confessyourunpopularopinion" Twitter fad is well-timed for me, because I'm in the research-heavy phase of planning a trip to London and Paris later this year for me and Andy, and my unpopular opinion is that I've never given much of a shit about Paris as a place to visit. I kind of hated Amelie, I don't really care for cathedrals, palaces, ( Read more... )

We do this thing where at the end of every two week development iteration where we throw up some slides for each team - how much did you commit to doing, and how close did you come to meeting that target? To quantify things, we look at commitment versus fulfillment in terms of user stories and total story points for each team, each iteration. As ( Read more... )