My brother the master coder
My younger brother Kevin is not only a great guy with a great sense of humor, but he’s a valued member of the Benchside team. Recently, my new Benchside teammate (and professional coder) Anuraag suggested that I start using the Python programming language’s formal exception handling system to handle errors gracefully rather than rely on [...]
Mid-Year Check-in
At the start of the year, I made a list of four resolutions for 2010. Given my tendency to formally track things on an ongoing basis I thought I’d do a mid-year check-in on my resolutions seeing how roughly half the year has passed: Finish a Rev 1 of Benchside – Status: on track; My [...]
Happy Fourth of July!
Happy fourth of July to all my American readers out there. Although this is coming a little late in the day, I hope your day was full of fireworks, barbeques, and reflecting on what makes the US such a great country to live in and be a part of. For those of you who aren’t [...]
Firefly
In addition to seeing the Grounds for Sculpture museum on my whirlwind vacation to the East Coast, I had the pleasure of finally sitting down and watching Joss Whedon’s short-lived Firefly TV series and the Serenity movie which tied up the series’ loose ends that letters from fans of the canceled series helped make possible. [...]
Smallville wishes
As anyone who knows me or has read this blog knows, I’m a big fan of the CW’s Smallville. This Fall, it will be going into its 10th and final season. About a week ago, the writers went back to work, and given my love for the show, I can’t help but chip in my [...]
Where Ben makes a fool of himself around sculptures
Apologies for the lack of blogging – have been on a week-and-a-half-long vacation! While visiting my college roommate Eric at Princeton last week, his fiancée Jen took me to an amazing local attraction: Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ. “Sculpture garden” doesn’t do the park justice in terms of how beautiful the scenery is, how [...]
Reading for value
My buddy Bill shared an article on Google Reader about the demise of Newsweek which linked to this New York Times article (does anyone else find it ironic that one newspaper experiencing financial problems is calling out another publication’s financial problems?): American newsweeklies were built on original reporting of Large Events, helping readers make sense [...]
The Same Four Chords
This video of Australian comedy group Axis of Awesome has been making the rounds on the internet lately, so I’m probably late to the party, but if you haven’t seen it, watch this hilarious and well-done (annotated!) medley showing how a huge chunk of major pop hits use the same four chords again and again… [...]
PARO
At the Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival in San Francisco’s Japantown, my girlfriend and I expected many things. We expected to see beautiful performances of Japanese dancing. We expected to be thrilled by taiko. We expected to gorge ourselves on street food. We even expected to see odd American tourists wearing panda gear, even though [...]
How is it that I did not know about this movie until today?
I love comics. I read them for fun. I watch the movies. I am subscribed to a whole bunch of comics blogs. Heck, I even wrote my college application essay about comic books. So, how is it that I didn’t learn about the movie Kick Ass until now? (Warning, trailer below is NSFW) Won’t be [...]
