A snapshot of my cognitive state at the moment, as viewed though a currently-relevant subselection of its outbound content-connections matrix.
Book of the moment: 5 Lessons: Modern Fundamentals of Golf, Ben Hogan. If you’ve ever heard that old saw about how you can’t learn to swim by reading a book, then you’ve no doubt heard the equally old saw about the professor who decided to do so. Curiously the story never includes anything about the professors’ field of study or notable works, so I think it’s safe to assume that he died during the process. Nevertheless, if ever it were possible to learn a specialized, intricate, mechanical process strictly by reading, this is the book with which to do it. It is extremely well written, and perfectly relevant despite being 50 years old. It is also 127 pages cover to cover, and has some of the most living illustrations I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how else to explain them except that in black and white line art, the illustrator (who has a history in anatomical illustration, it should be noted) manages to convey more motion and tension and life than a lot of art I’ve seen with a much richer palette at its disposal.
Restaurant of the Moment: Eggspectation. Apparently there is one in Vaughan Mills, one in the Eaton Centre, one in Quebec, and one in New Delhi. The overuse of “egg” puns is quickly quite upsetting, but the service was quick and competent, and the food was fantastic. I had an.. ahem… “egg-chilada” which is basically an omelette with green, red, and jalepeño peppers, 3 cheeses, and a salsa topping. It was delicious, and Amy was equally happy with her spinach and ricotta crêpes. It should be noted that she did find a piece of cardboard in there, but the staff was suitably appalled (and quick to take it off our bill) that I can believe it is a rare occurrence. They also brought toast with butter, margarine, and 3 kinds of jam. “Always have 3 kinds of jam” is one of the few real absolutes in life.
Link of the Moment: Liquid Sculpture. High speed camera tricks are always good for eye candy, but doubly so when somebody sets out to really plan the water droplets just so. Yummy.
TV Series of the Moment: Battlestar Galactica. We are caught up now and waiting for season 3. We are gobbling up the webisodes. You had us at hello. (Props to little Mikey Beltzner for forcing me to watch the miniseries.)
Car CD of the Moment: Best of Bootie 2005. They aren’t all good, but a lot of them are of sufficiently surpassing quality that the overall excellence quotient is above average to a statistically significant degree. I also can’t get enough of Justin’s Sexyback, Beyoncé’s Ring the Alarm, The Killers’ All the things that I’ve done, and Feist, but I appreciate that since all of those acts have publicity and airplay, enjoying their music makes me a mainstream braindead consumer culture pablum-fed red meat red state suv driving war in iraq gated community white establishment corporate whore, so I try to lead with the Best of Bootie.
[Image credit Martin Waugh]
Resumés are funny things because the one thing they don’t tell you is the one thing you want to know. As an employer, what I suspect I really want is a way to separate wheat from chaff. I want a way to say “Yes, fine, you have all the necessary checkboxes in place, but are you one of the good ones?” Even if you allow yourself the confidence necessary to believe that you are indeed one of the good ones, a resume is a terrible medium since, stylistically, it tends to force people down the path of enumeration-sans-substance. What is needed is a 
I don’t think it’s very normal of me, at the tender young age of 28, to enjoy the 
Software development, like most of engineering, and maybe like most of organized human production, has two sort of obvious approaches to solving a given problem. One is to start from the top and work down. Maybe the top is the higher level of abstraction. Maybe the top is the user interface. In some sense, the “top” is seen as the generic, “high-level”, gestalt view of the world. The style of development that begins from this point is known quite universally and unsurprisingly as “top-down”.
[This really isn’t an article for one person, but there’s one person out there who will think it is about her, and in a way it is – if she weren’t talking about this then maybe I wouldn’t be thinking about it and writing about it just this very second. Nothing in here is specific to her situation though, and with money it’s almost always about the specifics of your situation, so grains of salt all round.]
meandering wildly 