Took a load of computers to the local Goodwill Computer Store today... total tally was one inkjet printer, one laser printer, one DEC dual Pentium-90, one DEC dual-capable Pentium 133, one PowerMac 6500, one 17" CRT, and one Dell Pentium III (with a WinME license). Oh, plus a basket or so full of clothes. The great thing about donating to them is ( Read more... )

I'm going into some kind of book-reading frenzy of late. Most of it's not interesting to a wider audience, ( but I'm mentioning it here anyway. )

After I posted my confession to partially reading technical books, which included a list of books I'd partially read, I continued to think about it. Naturally, I also continued to read books, including The Practice of Programming (as recommended by parsenome at the time). I am perhaps sufficiently arrogant to think that my list is valuable to other people ( Read more... )

I partially read a lot of technical books. A lot of them I put down when I've decided they're crap. But a lot more of them I've put down because I couldn't spend time on them, or something else caught my fancy, or I got what I needed out of them. And heck, a lot of them I pick up because they are related to something I'm working on, and then I ( Read more... )

This coming Sunday is the last day that I've volunteered to assist with first day school [0] at the Friends Meeting. It's been a lot of fun, but also not easy.

( Read more... )

I'm on vacation this week, enforced by my employer... and it's not half bad. Rather than sit about, I've had my head buried in 3-D trig, object-oriented design, and OpenGL. It's exhilerating going back to my math library and having a reason for it, even if the only book I've used from it is the oldest and least interesting (so far).

( For my amusement )

Hrrrm. Watched Narnia last night with misphit, and I really liked it ( Read more... )

...died yesterday, at the age of 93.

Her science fiction, including Beast Master, shaped my childhood, never mind the effect she had on opening up the genre.

Getting back into Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. It tries to show how mathematics is built on generic and basic cognitive functions rather than specialized skill, and so far it seems to basically succeed. It seems pretty clear, for instance, that set theory is a metaphorical extension of the ( Read more... )

(where 'it' is math... or maybe it's books?)

Picked up some books yesterday with a gift certificate; I decided to get something different, something I don't normally buy these days, to better mimic the way it feels to gett books as presents. Thus, I avoided the computer and scifi sections of Borders. Instead, I went toward math with broad strokes ( Read more... )