John’s Blog

Well, “we” started work on our backyard today, after several months of planning. For most of the day, we had about 10 guys in our backyard making sure that all our neighbors are really happy they stayed home for the holiday. Absolute chaos:

Anyway, I’ve started posting some of the pictures up on flikr.com, if you’re [...]

Since I’m leaving Reactivity, I thought it’d be appropriate to post the note that started it off back more than 7 years ago, for posterity’s sake. I’ll have more to say about leaving probably next week.
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Last Friday, Adam, Tom Kosnik (a biz school prof who teaches at Harvard and Stanford) and I were hanging out [...]

My dad visited us last week, and we had a great time. It’s the first time that he’s been to our house, so we were happy to share with him what we’ve done, what we’re planning to do — lots of things like that.
What I wanted to write about in this post, though, is [...]

I’m a sucker. Picked this book up in Boston just because it was this or a boring book that I had with me. Think of Jurassic Park, but instead of dinosaurs, you’ve got eco-terrorists and professors. Sort of like that. A LOT better than Timeline, which was just too bad for words.

Really interesting pre-release book that Mom sent — it’s about the history of electricity, from John Thomson inventing the telegraph (it wasn’t Samuel Morse) to Alexander Graham Bell, then the history of wireless from Hertz to radar (in the 40s). A short chapter about Turing & Shockley & how the computer came to be, then, [...]

This is an interesting book that looks at the common patriarch of the 3 major monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity & Islam. First Feiler goes through and talks about Abraham, what we know, what we don’t, then he starts talking about “all the different Abrahams” that we have. Put another way, each religion, and indeed, each [...]

Well, I’m not done with it yet, but this amazing book deserves some “in the middle” posts. I’m about halfway through Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and am absolutely blown away by it. This book makes me want to linger on every word, read chapters twice. Just flat unbelievable. I can’t believe that I’ve never [...]

Like Fluke, but about demon possession instead of whales. You get the picture. But a pretty funny book, and Moore’s first, I think. I’d put him in the category of folks like Christopher Buckley or Dave Barry in the sense of madcap, ridiculous adventures that have a bit of sci-fi in them.

Another slightly fluffy novel for me — quick read from Christopher Moore about whale researchers in Hawaii that realize some funny things are going on (like whales having “BITE ME” scrawled on their tails) and go from there. Good book to read during your 27 hour trips to Nashville.

First, let me say that we had a great Thanksgiving, and really enjoyed spending time with Mom, Bampa, and Myra.
Second, let me say that getting to Nashville totally and completely sucked. Here’s a quick rundown of our lovely trip:
- got to the airport 2 hours before our flight, which was supposed to leave at [...]

A couple of weeks back, I had an interesting trip where I had meetings Monday in Toronto, Tuesday in Rochester (NY), Wednesday in Montreal, and Thursday in Manhattan. Lots of different things made it interesting — each day was in a different country for one, my first trip to Montreal for another.
First, I have [...]

Some of you know that I’ve been struggling a bit lately with back pain — every once in a while my lower back just starts killing me, making it hard to bend, and sometimes hard to walk. Started a few months ago in August — suspiciously the day after the girlies’ birthday party when I [...]