Stache of Goodness
When their hockey season ends, players start or continue work on their favorite off-ice activities. I’m thrilled by Zach Parise’s promotion of reading, and seeing large banners of #9 beats the daylights out of the “Reading is Fundamental” public service blips that ran during the Saturday morning cartoons of my youth. For every hockey player [...]
The Space Between
I I have a long list of projects and activities to keep me busy in my space between jobs (apologies to Roxy Music for the pun): I’m speaking at WordCamp Chicago on Sunday June 6 in the 9am hangover slot. Between now and then I’ll be working on my talk titled “Parsing Strange: URL to [...]
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I have resigned from Oracle. Like James Gosling I think that simplest statement is the best. I’m officially a technology free agent. It’s both terrifying and exhilirating. My last period of sustained unemployment (more than a 2-3 day frictional period between jobs) was in August 1984, when I started my first full-time job. I have [...]
Latest Unpublished Yoga Poses
My yoga adventures continue. I’ve come to some basic realizations about the practice of yoga and my body’s tolerance for it – namely, my hamstrings are short, my legs are not like Barbie’s (in that they don’t rotate neatly in front of me for sitting purposes) but very much like other men’s (they don’t open [...]
Coheed and Cambria Live
That was the view from the general admission, standing-room astroturf field at Central Park’s Rumsey Playfield, where Coheed and Cambria took the stage for what they claimed was their largest audience as a headliner. These guys put on an incredible show, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be listening to copious amounts of their [...]
Stymie Magazine and ESPN’s Fiction Contest
Stymie Magazine proclaims itself a journal of sport and literature. That’s not such a far-fetched concept; we love sports because we find stories in watching, playing, coaching and competing that we tell and retell to our family and friends. If there’s narrative, there’s something more than facts and figures. We’re captivated by stories, particularly those [...]
Parsing Strange
I’m busy working on my tutorial for WordCamp Chicago that’s now tentatively titled “Parsing Strange” – as in “parsing strange on the way to HTML content”. I’m basically picking apart the way WordPress takes a URL and turns it into an SQL query for the underlying MySQL database, getting into how and where taxonomies turn [...]
Innovation Frameworks
I originally posted this on my Sun blog, but a lunch conversation today made me realize it’s still quite relevant to the wider technology space, so I’m leveraging the shared copyright to repost it here with edits. This essay/rant evolved over nearly a year and the impetus for writing it down was a sales executives [...]
The Value of Pie
No, not 3.14159 or circumference divided by diameter or even the real but irrational part of the natural logarithm of -1 (e to the i pi references rule). Something natural, real, rational and not subject to circular arguments. It’s not even a thinly veiled reference to my favorite high school hockey goalie, best known for [...]
Nick Swisher Renews My Faith
Nick Swisher has renewed my faith in baseball players. For years I’ve thought of most baseball players as being too busy, too focused, or too impressed with their large contracts to pay much attention to the fans. Yesterday I attended the Nick Swisher autograph signing at Sports Express in the Livingston Mall, where I waited [...]