A friend of mine invited me to join his group on Dungeons & Dragons Online, so the other night I logged on and gave it a shot. My MMO background is a two-week trial of Star Wars Galaxies, and a brief stint with Puzzle Pirates. The former was a terrible bore. I really did give…
Read moreI just finished re-reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. After watching the sixth film I was left with a nagging feeling that some crucial plot points had been left out, so I had to go back and check. As with many good books, once I started I…
Read morePsychologist Philip Zimbardo (of the ’71 Stanford Prison Experiment) has some pretty crazy ideas, but I think he’s on to something with his talk at TED 2009 (6:34). He suggests that the way we cope with temptation (and eventually our overall success in life) is tightly linked to a personal trait that we don’t give…
Read moreRecently I was working with a database where certain tables were reporting page overflow errors. I subsequently learned a bit about how Microsoft SQL Server works, and this is my attempt to write it down. SQL Server has a page size of 8KB. In simple terms, that’s about eight thousand characters of text. For a…
Read moreI recently read three excellent books: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. In each case, this was my first exposure to the author’s work, and in each case I was thoroughly impressed. Each author has a powerful…
Read more