My friend and colleague Erik T. Ray, with whom I worked at O'Reilly and co-authored the Perl & XML book, died suddenly at the hospital last night while recovering from a traffic accident. He was a good guy, and showed up on an episode of The Gameshelf. I still have the strange Korean novelty pen he gave me at the studio that day.

This war is so strange. Boy oh boy. Some General Boy on the radio going on about all the hundreds of Al Queda in the mountains we've kill, kill, kill!!ed over the last week. While I appreciate frankness... I dunno. He just seemed to be really into it, is all ( Read more... )

Today I finished a draft of a column that I last week successfully pitched to an online publication (where I've appeared before) and asked some former cow orkers for a tech review. Got two responses, one helpful, one less so. Put it aside for now ( Read more... )

Joe called yesterday. I hadn't seen or spoken with him since that poker night, weeks ago, so that was pretty good. Notably, he said I was insane for agreeing to do another book. I'm glad someone finally has. Then again, he said this while in the midst of his own task of rewriting "Unix Power Tools" for the very same patron ( Read more... )

A smart person of whom I think highly just posted a fatalistic message to a mailing list discussion about palindromic timestamps, doubting that humanity will survive to experience 2112. This attitude, epsecially in such a person, I find deepy disappointing.
Sitting in the 1369 now, in the rear corner, very comfortable ( Read more... )

I just mailed Chuck a book proposal that actually looks something like a book proposal, instead of the flimsy thing I sent him last week. So that's good. One thing I realized: this book will have to be written bloody quickly. "Perl & XML" isn't trying to synchronize with any real-world events, but this one wants to be born in time for a big ( Read more... )

I sunk the better part of the last two days into Baldur's Gate. Yesterday I found myself wrapped up enough in it that, while riding on the T, I continued to feel real existential dread over my decision to accept a ranger and mage into my party over a probably stronger cleric. (The game limits your party size to six characters, so when you make new ( Read more... )

OK, here is my own friends-of-prog quiz. Tell me which is scarier.

a) The following email:

Hi Jason,

I'm wondering whether you might be available to work on "Mac OS X in a
Nutshell."

If so, please let me know. I've got a rough plan for this book and would
like someone to start working on it ASAP.
b) The fact that I find myself willing to ( Read more... )

OK, just glarmfed in all the changes I've made throughout the Book over the last month, and declared that to be The Second Draft, Dammit. Erik is now busily prepping it for production. This gives him no additional stress, since this is what he does all day long with other books, anyway ( Read more... )

The Globe finally got around to heeding my request for a front-page story about the weather ( Read more... )