A good piece in yesterday’s New York Times about sugar in the American diet:

How sweet it is! The American diet, that is. While the current rec­om­men­da­tion is a maximum intake of eight teaspoons of sugars a day, one 12-ounce can of regular soda (or a 20-ounce bottle of Vi­t­a­m­in­Wa­ter) delivers eight or nine teaspoons. That means you are at or over the limit before you’ve eaten a single cookie or container of fruit-flavored yogurt, or even some commercial tomato soups or salad dressings with added sugars. The result is an average daily intake of more than 20 teaspoons of sweet calories.

Marshall Brain demon­strat­ed the amount of sugar in …continue.

As you can see from the attached picture, I just created Facebook Groups for three social or­ga­ni­za­tions that I’m involved in: Freely Speaking Toast­mas­ters, Wild Geese Players of Seattle, and BiNet Seattle.

I set up a LinkedIn group for FSTM too.

Liam Neeson is Bryan Mills, a former CIA “pre­ven­ter” who re­luc­tant­ly lets his teenaged daughter visit Paris. Kim is abducted by an Albanian pros­ti­tu­tion ring and he sets out to rescue her. Non-stop mayhem and action ensue.

Taken works fairly ef­fec­tive­ly as an action movie in the Bourne mode. The plot moves fast enough that you don’t have time to reflect upon the gaping holes or the improbable ef­fec­tive­ness and in­vin­ci­bil­i­ty of Mills.

Neeson carries the movie, convincing as the pissed-off hardass who’ll go to any lengths to find his daughter.

I talked to my mother this afternoon. She’s still in Dublin, helping Michelle out with Harry. My father went back to Cape Town in mid-January to enjoy the golf and the South African summer. My parents spend several months a year there.

They have a small cottage in Hout Bay, in a res­i­den­tial complex. The buildings are terraced together. The other night, the cottage two doors down caught fire and the woman inside died. My father slept through the whole commotion forty feet from his bedroom, and knew nothing about it until the next day.

We knew he was a sound sleep­er—and a heavy snorer—but this tops everything.

It’s time to start thinking about this year’s reading of Ulysses for the Wild Geese Players of Seattle. The next chapter to be tackled is Circe, the nightmare scene in the brothel.

Most chapters require a lot of work to tease apart into a staged reading, to make sense of the different threads of Bloom’s inner monologue, or to attribute fragments of con­ver­sa­tion to different characters, for example. This chapter is written in the form of a play; at­tri­bu­tion is easy.

But Circe is also enormously long: some 60,000 words. For comparison, many novels are in the range 80–100,000 words. Last year’s chapter was 20,000 words and I cut 5,000 words off. It took …continue.

There’s a flamefest going on at the moment between Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin and Joel Spolsky over the value of Test-Driven Design and the SOLID principles. I find TDD valuable and I’m reading Martin’s Clean Code at present.

Poking around in the links led me to Uncle Bob’s Bowling Game Kata, a Powerpoint deck demon­strat­ing using TDD to score a bowling game.

Ron Jeffries has a very ugly OO im­ple­men­ta­tion and a cleaner procedural version of the Bowling Game. Digging around in the archives of his XP Magazine turns up many other ru­mi­na­tions on the Bowling Game

At Atlas, I was loaned to one group that used the Bowling Game for a pair-pro­gram­ming interview. I found …continue.

For a long time, I disliked Facebook. It seemed to consist entirely of annoying ac­quain­tances attacking me with vampires or sending me pointless “gifts”.

I’ve used Facebook more in the last month and it’s been less annoying than I remembered it. I check it once or twice a day and see updates from people I know. More en­ter­tain­ing than ex­as­per­at­ing.

Twitter, though, has not clicked for me. Brevity is good, but Twitter is too minimalist. Stream-of-con­scious­ness ejac­u­la­tions. Opaque URLs disdaining ex­pla­na­tion. Feh.

Scott Hanselman has a different take on Twitter.

Maybe I need to “follow” a better class of people.

I’ll go and yell at those damn kids to get off my lawn now.

Sequel to For a Few Demons More. Best read in sequence.

Rachel Morgan: witch and private in­ves­ti­ga­tor. An unknown enemy is summoning a demon every night to kill her. She learns some surprising things about her past and her place in the world.

Previous books were heavy on the action; here it kicks in very late and the book is very talky.

Moderately en­ter­tain­ing but weaker than earlier books in the series.

On the 9th or 10th of January 1989, I flew from Dublin to New York. That was the last day that I ever lived in Ireland.

I came to the U.S. on a tourist visa. It was no lie. I had a round-the-world ticket and I would go on to Australia in early March. In June, I left Australia and traveled to Bangkok and Hong Kong. Sometime in July, I landed back in Ireland to settle up my affairs. I fit in a trip to the South of France with some old friends.

In August, I would return to America to attend graduate school. I have lived in the U.S. ever since.

I …continue.

Frank Rich in Sunday’s paper on the Re­pub­li­cans who’ve run out of ideas:

The crisis is at least as grave as the one that confronted us — and, for a time, united us — after 9/11. Which is why the antics among Re­pub­li­cans on Capitol Hill seem so surreal. These are the same politi­cians who only yesterday smeared the patriotism of any dissenters from Bush’s “war on terror.” Where is their own patriotism now that economic terror is inflicting far more harm on their con­stituents than Saddam Hussein’s nonex­is­tent W.M.D.?

…

The current G.O.P. acts as if it — and we — have all the time in the world. It kept hoping …continue.