Payam Mirrashidi: SF DaysReflections on the City, Sillicon Valley and other places and events near and far.Imprecision- February 18, 2004 Last night, Joshua Marshall linked to a great piece in Slate about a New York Times article that completely missed the mark on the differences between the peoples of the Middle East. Arabs, Iranians, Muslims and even Pakistanis are all lumped into one amorphous political group called Arab-Americans. This is a common mistake about which I have written about previously. And while I can understand if the guy down at the local coffee shop doesn't quite grasp the nuance, I don't afford the Gray Lady.http://www.mirrashidi.com/sfdays/archives/000084.html Fuzzy math at luncheon- February 11, 2004 Every engineering group has a different lunch time dynamic. In some groups, it is considered odd if a teammate doesn't join the lunch crowd at exactly noon; in others, it is a free-for-all, with everyone doing their own thing. Also, in large, corporate settings, there is a distinction between people that always eat lunch at the company canteen, those that never step foot in there and those that mix things up. Now with the crowd that experiments with intrepid jaunts into the local restaurant...http://www.mirrashidi.com/sfdays/archives/000083.html Hiatus- February 1, 2004 I haven't been posting regularly for quite some time due to problems with my Movable Type installation. The recent MT upgrades did not install as prescribed but I think I've finally worked through all of the issues. It turns out that the MT plugin Bookqueue that was the source of the problems - it was getting versioning errors when it tried to save its state to the database. To be frank, I gave up trying to get it to work again and simply removed the plugin to get things back into working...http://www.mirrashidi.com/sfdays/archives/000082.html |