Happy New Year. Lets all look forward to the impending apocalypse. 
Justine: Life is only on Earth. And not for long.
January 1, 2012
2012!
February 24, 2011
Mount Analogue
Its summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human beings as nature made them. It must be unique and it must exist geographically. The door to the invisible must be visible.
August 24, 2010
The remorseless drought…
…had lasted now for ten million years, and would not end for another million. The reign of the terrible lizards had long since passed, but here on the continent which would one day be known as Africa, the battle for survival had reached a new climax of ferocity, and the victor was not yet in sight. In this dry and barren land, only the small or the swift or the fierce could flourish, or even hope to exist.
July 27, 2010
Ward Cunningham on Simplicity
Occasionally, I find myself “stuck” when writing code – the coder’s “writer’s block” I guess. This quote by Ward Cunningham is both inspiring and truthful:
Once we had written it, we could look at it. And we’d say, “Oh yeah, now we know what’s going on,” because the mere act of writing it organized our thoughts. Maybe it worked. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe we had to code some more. But we had been blocked from making progress, and now we weren’t. We had been thinking about too much at once, trying to achieve too complicated a goal, trying to code it too well. Maybe we had been trying to impress our friends with our knowledge of computer science, whatever. But we decided to try whatever is most simple: to write an if statement, return a constant, use a linear search. We would just write it and see it work. We knew that once it worked, we’d be in a better position to think of what we really wanted.
Next time you’re stuck, just write the simplest thing that could possibly work!
So when I asked, “What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work,” I wasn’t even sure. I wasn’t asking, “What do you know would work?” I was asking, “What’s possible? What is the simplest thing we could say in code, so that we’ll be talking about something that’s on the screen, instead of something that’s ill-formed in our mind.” I was saying, “Once we get something on the screen, we can look at it. If it needs to be more we can make it more. Our problem is we’ve got nothing.”
