I’m an avid cook. I love the opportunity to try out new recipes, especially those from another culture. Sometimes my wife is pleasantly surprised by the results, other times, she’s just surprised. For Christmas, I recieved Rick Bayless‘ cookbook Authentic Mexican. My first foray using a recipe from the book involved making chicken enchiladas. To [...]

Heard any good books lately? So asks Neil Gaiman on NPR in a story on audiobooks.  It makes for riveting listening, thanks to Gaiman’s ability to make the mundane fantastic and because he has a mesmerizing British accent that holds me rapt. Gaiman makes the point that audiobooks continue on, strong as ever.  The rise [...]

In what now seems like an eternity ago, I saw Nathan Huening of Sprocket House give a talk at Refresh The Triangle back in July on Edward Tufte.  Nathan’s talk was his attempt to highlight Tufte’s main points about design. Looking back, I don’t remember all the points Nathan highlighted, however, at the time the [...]

At the May raleigh.rb meetup, Kevin Smith gave a talk on alternative databases, in which he covered CouchDB and Redis. The talk convinced me that Redis would be the perfect database to underpin Get Encouraged.  Redis is a key-value pair database that is blazing fast: perfect for a small Twitter app that really only needs [...]

A while back I wrote about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  In a serendipitous coincidence, NPR ran a story recently that directly relates to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: Shakespeare Had Roses All Wrong.  While the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis isn’t mentioned, it clearly is involved. The story touches on languages and how gender in languages affects thinking.  It is highlighted [...]