Sean’s Mental Walkabout

Susan is off at the farm right now picking our strawberry allocation for the week. The amounts get set daily, but it looks like due to the heat and fast rate of ripening, she’ll probably come back with a quart of the best tasting strawberries I’ve ever had.

Secor’s also just opened for early picking yesterday. We didn’t pick strawberries there last year, though we did pick 15 lbs of blueberries, which managed to last us the whole winter (we’ve still got a bunch we need to use up now). Susan’s pretty excited on hitting them up this weekend to get enough to jam and freeze.

And if that wasn’t enough, the Beacon Sloop Club does their Strawberry festival this Sunday. Hippies, strawberry short cake, chocolate covered strawberries, and strawberry shakes, always a good time. Susan and I ended up at the strawberry festival on our 2nd weekend of dating (6 years ago), so it has a special place in our hearts. Or maybe it’s just that Susan likes chocolate dipped strawberries so much.

And, the piece de resistance, is that we just got both an ice cream maker, and the ben & jerry’s ice cream book. There is nothing I love more than freshly made strawberry icecream with freshly picked strawberries. Our french vanilla experiment of last weekend went ok, but now that I’ve got my B&J book again (I had one in college when we made liquid nitrogen icecream), I’m much more excited for the output.

Update: Susan returned, the successful strawberry hunter, with 3 QUARTS, as the farm now has a policy where you can pay to pick extra quarts. Soooooooooo good on my cereal right now!

Popularity: 10% [?]

The beginning of my summer of popular non-fiction was started with Blink, on audio, that I finished a few weeks ago. Blink is about the way we make a lot of decisions at an unconscious level, some times for good, some times for bad. While I’d heard the “rss version” (i.e. the 1 paragraph synopsis), the book, as always, is way more nuanced than that. I’d highly recommend this book to others.

One of the things I found most interesting about Blink was changes done in police departments to prevent mistakes. It turns out, that once our heart rate goes above 145 beats per minute, we start to loose both rational thinking and motor coordination. Many of the police abuses in the last decade have come at the end of a high speed pursuit, which drives up adrenaline rates, and puts the people whose job it is to defend us into a state where their judgment is largely stripped away by biological constraints. It turns out that by banning high speed chases, and making officiers ride alone, so they need to stop and call for backup before approaching a scene, rates of mistakes and abuse go way down. It’s a simple structural change in the organization that benefits us all.

There are also great sections in there about reading faces, instinct over information overload in millitary war games, and the subtle biases that kept women out of many key roles in classical music until an unrelated circumstance caused blind auditions to be instituted. So many go things in this book, definitely check it out if you get a chance.

Popularity: 10% [?]

• James Governor’s Monkchips » Port 25 fighting the good fight: A story of SIP compliance and standards adherence at Microsoft Corporation
  It’s good to know that there are some folks in Microsoft taking standards seriously.
  (tags: microsoft standards)

Popularity: 8% [?]

I’ve been listening to The World is Flat on audio book, as part of my summer run through of popular non fiction of the last couple of years. One phrase really struck me on the way home, which was the assessment by Brian Behlendorf that

“software is lettuce, not gold”

Software is both a commodity and perishable if not consumed in a timely manner. For the doubters out there, check out the ranks of abandoned software on sourceforge.net some time. My proud collection of shirts from software companies that don’t exist any more is a less compelling, though more close to home, reminder of that fact.

Popularity: 13% [?]