Downtime
After working pretty much non-stop the last couple of months I decided
to take a few days off ... well, everything ... but the internet in
particular. Vanessa is visiting her family for Christmas. I stayed
home with the cats, cooked some great food, drank lots of tea and read
a bunch of books:
-
In the Beginning Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson.
I've read this before but stumbled upon it going through my
books.
-
Across the Top of the World by James P. Delgado. About
finding the Northwest Passage.
-
Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton. Typography handbook.
-
Longitude by Dava Sobel. Descending from several generations
of watchmakers I found this hugely interesting. It's about solving
the navigational problem of finding the longitude by way of
chronometers. And an interesting story of technological pragmatism
and craftmanship vs. theroretical science. I bought this book a
while ago and never found time to read it. Recommended!
-
The Emacs Lisp Reference Manual. I first read this when
Emacs and I started dating in the early 90s. I am one of those
people that uses Emacs for pretty much everything but I'm mostly a
copy-and-paste Lisp programmer so it was good to revisit this book
and tinker a bit with Lisp outside the scope of .emacs
hacking.
-
The New New Thing by Michael Lewis. I inhaled this in a
single reading session. It's
about Jim
Clark who started SGI,
Netscape, etc. And about the .com bubble in general. I borrowed
this book from Master Wilcox a while back and thought I'd better
read it and give it back. Put both my time at SGI and our woes
at Linuxcare in
a whole new light. Especially so given that our interactions with
Kleiner Perkins happened after the events described in the book.
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