24. Apr 2008 
3 comments
For a long time, I have resisted buying a house in Los Angeles - the pricing was simply insane. But lately, thanks to the subprime mortgage disaster, things are actually moving into an affordable direction. The question is, how to be well prepared?
22. Apr 2008 
0 comments
For Earth Day, my company organized an outing - we were going out on the streets of Westwood, picking up trash. (Well, OK, and we had a picnic after that).
There are a couple of things I learned from this:
The famed hypodermic needles lying around - urban myth, at least in Westwood. There’s a reason people who [...]
16. Apr 2008 0 comments
Turns out almost a week has passed since my last post. What did happen to all that time?
Well, actually quite a lot. First of all, Petra and I took a dolphin watching trip to Dana Point. Which was especially fun considering we’ve just been whale watching in Mexico - I could get used to being [...]
08. Apr 2008 3 comments
For a long time, I’ve been a member of the ACM. They over a ton of really invaluable services, not the least of them the ACM Portal - a giant resource of pretty much every important computing-related paper. And, since they’re a big organization, it’s inevitable they wanted to give me a gift for my [...]
04. Apr 2008 3 comments
Told you there’d be some changes this year. One of them: I’ll become a citizen of the United States (the INS willing). I’ve just filed my N-400 application - have a read if you want to have some fun. It’s a ton of paperwork, and it’s expensive. $695 filing fee. I’ll expect to get a [...]
10. Mar 2008 5 comments
If you’re running a blog and you actually want people to look at your archives, please don’t have the stupid “Previous” and “Next” entries at the bottom of each page. Nobody seems to be able to agree on what they mean. So, how about instead using “Older Entries” and “Newer Entries”? That way, we poor [...]
10. Mar 2008 0 comments
This is mostly here as a note to myself (Google is my outboard brain), but if you maintain a website, it might be helpful…
Should you dare to specify inline CSS style in a <span> tag, be sure you separate the property name and the value with a colon, not an equal sign. Especially tricky if [...]
10. Mar 2008 2 comments
This Christmas, Petra and I had some time to ourselves, and started sorting through old pictures and clothes. As we did that, we realized that we’re carrying around a ton of stuff that has no real use for us. In an effort to get some space in our apartment, we have been working on cleaning [...]
26. Feb 2008 0 comments
Like presumably many Mac users, I use iTunes to receive and organize my podcasts - I simply like having all my media in one place, and it makes syncing to my iPod very easy. But there’s one glaring omission in iTunes’ podcast handling - you have no fine-grained control over how many episodes of a [...]
05. Feb 2008 0 comments
Just in case you missed it, today is “Super Tuesday“. If your state is one of the 24 involved, go and vote. Unless you’re not a citizen of the U.S., there’s no excuse if you don’t. It’s a rather important one - we’re in the early stages of selecting somebody who gets to clean up [...]