Crusty Blaa

I'd read some of Joel's articles
before, not never really got around to reading a lot of them. Maybe its
because I hate reading long articles on a computer; maybe its because I
only became aware of his stuff well after he was at his most prolific.

Anyway, I'm thoroughly enjoying reading the
book at the moment. Catherine gave me her typical "you're such a freak" look
last night as I chuckled to myself over this description of Architecture
Astronauts:

When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all.

A nice little pile of books arrived from Amazon yesterday for
my birthday. Being a slow reader, that should keep me going
for a good few months :-)

The one I've started with, "Unlocking the Sky: Glen Hammond
Curtiss and the Race to Invent the Airplane", was Tiemann's
recommendation on Red
Hat's summer reading list. It seems to be a really good read
which appears at first glance to be totally unrelated, but actually
very relevant, to what we're all doing here.

I knew of Wikipedia's existence, and
I knew what it was, but I'd never really spent any amount of time looking at
it. Seth was babbling happily about
it at one point while I was in Westford so I went and took a good look. What
really strikes you is not only the sheer size of the thing, but the quality
of the content. Very impressive.

Anyway, I added my own drop to the fountain of knowledge - an entry on the
famous Waterford Blaa.