Tuesday, 04/15/03

Three quick things from my vacation week in the Bay Area:

I was informed last week that Chinese dictionaries, for lack of a better mechanism, order characters by their number of strokes.

I spent an afternoon with Tim Holmes at his new venture, the Zocalo Coffee House in San Leandro. The unfathomable energy he used to pour into his former job at Apple, which he modestly called "shortstop" but I always thought of more as "nexus", is now being channeled into development of an unvirtual community center and the sale of tasty beverages. He seems considerably happier, and Apple's great loss is San Leandro's great gain. I want to go back when they're running the roaster.

I have what I think is a rather droll story about my taxes, but it's going to have to wait until I find out what the IRS does. Let me say now, and not even to suck up to the IRS, that I am shocked and awed by the computational power required to translate Congress' idea of helpful tax legislation into algorithms almost any nitwit can do with a pencil. It's a serious programming achievement, and should not be belittled. 02:21AM «

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