Brugge Blog

I think the librarians at our local branch have been infected by the idea from TheFunTheory.com: that if you inject some fun into a drab but useful task you can alter the behavior of a community. Get more people to take the subway by turning the stairs into a piano keyboard, or make a park […]

Some authors grow on you. Others resonate with a clang right away. Michael Perry turns out to be of the second variety for me, hooking me hard with Population: 485.
I got it from the library just hoping it would be a reasonable book to read while traveling, but a page or two in to it […]

It isn’t easy writing down what you believe, to commit to words the feelings you hold, either strongly or vaguely, but at least privately. Words may not be the best instrument, but they’re what most of us can use, and they give you boundaries to work within. And I think that what a lot of […]

It barely got to zero degrees today, so it feels like time to stay indoors and do some cleaning up. From real and virtual scraps of paper, here are some excerpts from books I’ve wanted to keep around.
From Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. At one point he’s talking with […]

So Bill Lueders, the long time news editor for The Isthmus weekly newspaper, has finally discovered Farley Mowat. Bummer. He is someone you want to discover early if you want to have any chance of catching up with his output. And I guess I haven’t been paying attention, because he apparently released another […]

For the last few years, I’ve found myself in a reading rhythm where I finish one book and immediately pick up another. Not the next day, but the next minute. It doesn’t feel like I’m racing to get through them, just that I’m somehow thinking that I can squeeze more books into the day. I […]

One of the advantages of a June birthday is to replenish my book stack just at the right time. Even if it's not exactly vacation time for all of us, the slivers of time I get to spend in the hammock or resting at the pool are opportunities I'll take. This year I got a […]

While googling around recently, curious to know of any news of an old friend and methodologist, Jeff Alger, I came across a recent blog post on his methodology, Solution Based Modeling (SBM), and the book that details it, Developing Object Oriented Software For The Macintosh. [Note: while the book is out of print, there is […]

I learned about BookBurro last month at a GreaseMonkey session at the Great Lakes Software Symposium, and if anything can make the value of GreaseMonkey real, this is it. GreaseMonkey’s idea is fiendishly simple, to let you attach some of your own JavaScript to a web page. There are tons of useful GreaseMonkey scripts out […]

As the mid-term elections this year were heating up, I came across Michael Lewis‘ book Trail Fever and started reading it. In it he is traveling the presidential campaign circuit of 1996, from the Republican primaries on through, describing campaign processes from the inside (or as close to it as a journalist gets). The effect […]