There’s a great list of how to get going with Git over at Ruby Inside. Git is going to be the model for my blue-sky 2d architectural drawing application with proper version control, working title “Cad Nauseum.” The big design issue will be figuring out how to make the flow of branching and merging visible enough to be understandable to non-command line folk.

We the Robots is just brilliant.

Well, that’s assuming you like humour that is less funny than deep in a shake-your-head, man-I-can’t-break-free-from-being-just-like-everyone-else-so-I-might-as-well-just-enjoy-life sort of tragically amusing way.

A woman walked into the aquatic centre the other day with a seeing-eye dog. The dog somehow managed to clunk himself into the turnstile on the way to the locker rooms.

“Oh, watch where you’re going,” the blind woman says.

Ok, we’ve got the virtual private server running (somewhere in the world), all blog code seems to be holding together, DNS entries are propagating and I’m back from the dark side of the MX record moon as far as email goes. Hopefully I can now shut off the server that’s been sitting in my living room for the last month or two and get some quiet.

So strange. I feel like I’ve seen the New Hampshire primaries already. Substitute Jimmy Smits for Barack Obama, Alan Alda for John McCain, Gary Cole for Hillary Clinton and you’re there. Bill and I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama makes McCain his Secretary of State.

Slate has an article today about how to game the LEED environmental accreditation for buildings.

It’s better to have a world with the LEED system than a world without, and we simply don’t have time to do nothing while we wait for a perfect system to come along (like Kyoto around 2003, before we ignored it until became ridiculously unachievable). I suppose it’s a valid point that the dominance of LEED might crowd out embryonic alternative rating systems.

One problem not mentioned in the article is that the original intent of the system was to be a voluntary performance “floor,” and that builders were encouraged to exceed it. By making LEED mandatory, it becomes psychologically more like the building code and becomes the hard ceiling to all performance, ie. the maximum that anyone will do. For some reason no one treats legislated measures as the absolute bare minimum that you can do without breaking the law.

Still, better a mandatory minimum than nothing…

Go see Juno if you want to see what it’s like when absolutely everyone in a project–from the screenwriter through to the marketers–is flying in formation.

I’ve decided to revive the blog for 2008.

2006 and 2007 were lean years as far as semi-deep thought and ideas were concerned. I’m chalking some part of it up to my low output of non-memorandumese written English lately.

Thus, you see before you two, count ‘em two, resolutions in action:

1. write more,
2. resist all urges to dick about with formatting until there’s something to format.

Good thing this “Stepping Stone” theme is giving me an improbably wonderful leg up in re-creating my old blog’s look.