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It’s confirmed. My Tuesday evenings are booked till December. I’m building a study group to meet once a week out of class. All students in either the Monday or Tuesday class are welcomed to join. (Which suggests we won’t meet on either Monday or Tuesday) Introductory Chinese Language and Culture “With an emphasis on conversation and an introduction to reading and writing Chinese characters, it focuses on the acquisition of basic communication skills for travel, business, and everyday use.” ...

“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.” William Saroyan (1908 – 1981)

This is a busy week. Monday is a Memorial Day in the United States, ostensibly a holiday. These days, holiday is code for catching up on specification writing, of course. But on Wednesday-Thursday I’m heading up to Google I/O. I’ll be in the social track. I didn’t see a single session in social track I want to skip. But one session stands apart as one I simply must see. ‘OpenSocial – Scaling and Analytics, Nuts & Bolts’ delivered by Nat Brown. ...

Churchill Route 3 miles 34m 12s 11.24 pace Buddha Belly Begone!

Last summer, I retired my old Titanium PowerBook G4 (800MHz) as the Company bought my a shiny new MacBook Pro (2.4GHz). Sweet! A year later, the latch on my laptop stopped latching. I sent it in for repair. In the interim, I Carbon Copy Cloned my hard drive and am using that hardrive to boot a 20″ iMac on loan from the office. I love it. One thing I do miss: I really do use my laptop as a lap top. I can lean back with feet up on the ottoman and work with laptop on my lap. Sometimes, I need a book under the laptop. It gets hot. ...

I’ve started a new online radio station at laut.fm It’s based in Germany. If you can speak or puzzle out a bit of German, you can navigate the site and find a station you like. I created this based on my playlist Blue Smoke. However, before they will play a station, you must have more than one hour of total track time in the playlist. ...

I’m going to 360|Flex San Jose (August 18 – 20, 2008). This is my first Flex conference. I had long maligned Flex as expensive and unnecessary. I have changed my religion! I saw Peter Armstrong (ruross.com) at the Ruby conference in San Jose. Here’s a guy who built a flex+rails app during his presentation. It wasn’t a slicky talk. No oily powerpoint slide deck. Just raw. Working with the actual tools. Fat finger typo’s in the terminal. There’s an honesty in that. ...

I take Mandarin classes at the Language Studies Institute. While studying Mandarin is fun, I wouldn’t say it’s easy. I’ve opted for the conversational track. We aren’t learning the characters; we use pinyin (romanized tranliterations) and focus on speaking. I bought the CDs recently which correspond to my textbook and ripped them to iTunes. Once a week in class isn’t ideal; listening to the CDs really helps. ...

My bookcase at work reflects what’s currently on my mind. Here’s the state of my mind in May 2008. Apache: The Definitive Guide — I don’t know that this book is a must have. I look something up now and then. Web Site Measurement Hacks — A goldmine. While written as a hands-on book, its value for me has been deeper understanding in the what, why and how of metrics. Err, measurements. ...

When nostalgia just isn’t the right word. I put this playlist together back in January. It’s not my favorite but somehow I find myself trotting it out again and again. I feel that swapping out two or three tracks would complete the list. I can’t put my finger on which ones to drop or what would replace them.