While out eating breakfast at our little local place where we ordered the pies, Maribou made me read Mouse Bird Snake Wolf
That said, it gets it wrong to the point where you can see a child saying “but that’s not how it works, is it?” about the thing that the book gets wrong.
And, without getting into spoilers, I’m sure that that can lead to much more important lessons than most of the lessons that most books get right.
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
I am really enjoying the book I’m reading, but I’ll stop there because it deserves a post of its own.Report
I watched the first 7 episodes of season 8 of Dexter this weekend. I’m pretty sure the writers and producers are trolling us.Report
Good god man, we tried to warn you. This is all on your head now.
Over at AVClub in the Dexter recap comment threads (which were the only reason to watch the show), there was a gimmick commenter named The LaGuerta Memorial Bench.
It was glorious.Report
Dexter has kinda sucked since the first season, though I kinda liked the Lumen and Lithgow seasons, but this season is just insulting. It’s sort of like Season 5 of Fringe or the final episode of the American Life on Mars, in that the people who make the show are basically saying, “All that stuff you thought you were seeing for 7 seasons? We’re going to turn it into a lie.” Argh. Of course, I’ll watch the remaining episodes, because I’m stupid like that.Report
“The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind”, by William Kamkwamba. BH is watching…sports…of course.Report
Homeland was…pretty deeply stupid last night.Report
I saw Cloud Atlas this weekend. It was… powerful. Though I am not sure I can yet put my finger on why this is so. I am planning on re-watching it tonight (something I never do with a movie I have seen in the past year, let alone few days) in hopes of figuring this out.
Almost done with The Circle by David Eggers, which is pretty great. Also, much of the prose — especially the dialogue — makes me re-check the cover to see if I”m reading something Jaybird wrote.
Just stared the first of what I suspect will be all of David Mitchell’s books within the next few weeks.Report
Cloud Atlas (the book, haven’t seen the film) was awesome.
Black Swan Green was, IMO, kind of a waste of time.
number9dream was OK, and very Murakami.Report
Mostly I read my own Python code all weekend. I put in 13.5 hours on Sunday and some on Saturday too. But the app is done. Other than that, I read a LOT of kids’ books. The one Jaybird describes above is my favorite although I would not describe it in the way that he does.
In audiovisual news, I tried the L Word and was unimpressed, tried Weeds and I am hooked. I finally caught up to where Jaybird is on Bab 5 so we watched an episode of that together. I think tonight I will watch the sequel to St. Trinians.Report
I’ve been a Perl guy for a long time, and my coding these days is mostly for my own purposes. Is it worth my while to consider changing to Python?Report
Python’s a breeze if you know C.
Plus, it can compile to C (or use C libraries), which is always useful.
But what are you coding?Report
This and that. Cartogram algorithms, as well as code that wraps around other people’s core cartogram tools. Scripts to extract data for cartograms from peculiar file formats (typically simple logic wrapped around some ugly regular expressions). Scripts to convert data from various map/shape formats, and the beginnings of a tool to parse SVG in order to extract shapes (Wikipedia has some good data, but absolutely no consistency in how SVG is used). Some 3D animations (I’ve been using Javascript and WebGL, but the single-threaded Javascript event model makes working with the common libraries unpleasant). The beginnings of a tool to draw a particular style of Sankey diagram. Occasional non-traditional financial time series models and related statistics. Exploratory versions of algorithms for manipulating pictures of book pages to flatten, de-curve, de-keystone, etc. Software for running a peculiar form of fencing tournament. I have a >25-year-old piece of C that does simple manipulations on “scraps” as in the scraps of paper on which you jot down notes (and then promptly lose). It’s not sophisticated, but my fingers know it by heart. A re-implementation in a new language would probably be a good thing.Report
I dunno. Honestly I picked it because it would be easy to learn and because it’s what our systems guy uses at my workplace – my “learning goal” for the semester was “get over this dumb belief that I’ve picked up that programming is something that is ‘too hard’ for Maribous”. (it worked. also, i replaced a laptop screen and decided to get a Security+ cert this summer…)
I think if I knew Perl and I wasn’t trying to get hired places as a programmer, I would stick with Perl. If I was trying to get hired places as a (web) programmer, my first move would actually be Ruby? Seems more popular…Report
Michael,
Python loves algorithms. Doesn’t like text as much as perl.
That’s about all I know, though I’ve written some stuff in python myself.
I’d recommend it.Report