I loved this game! I bred every last piñata and tracked down every last achievement. Who knew it could be so much fun to tend a garden, breed piñatas, fend off pests and fiddle with the landscape? I had figured Rare for dead, but VP is a clear sign that some good people have stuck around and convinced their bosses at Microsoft to let them make crazy games. Bravo!

This is an exceptional book, made all the more so by the fact that it calls out the last hundred years of work in architecture (and by analogy numerous other disciplines) as a stark naked Emperor. Architecture has gone particularly far astray and is especially amenable to his central thesis, which is that there is a timeless way of building in which all decisions stem from human nature and the natural interplay of existing forces in the environment, and that one must particularly strive to leave their ego — and its desire to express itself in any act of creation — firmly out of the process.

At times I felt that what he was saying was so obvious that he had failed to capture anything insightful at all but was rather describing the way a human brain goes about the task of building and how it represents and shares the knowledge necessary to undertake that task. By the end, I realized that his brilliance was in fact to recognize the fundamental importance of that very process and to point out how far we have strayed from it in our pursuit of economies of scale and so called artistic expression. We have done so to the detriment of our basic human happiness and to the fullness of the lives we lead in these unnatural, inharmonious rooms, houses, neighborhoods, towns and cities.

I’m still contemplating how I can incorporate these ideas into my own information constructions (and how to look at the patterns and processes I’ve used with an egoless eye in hopes of weeding out those that fail to create the quality that cannot be named from those that help). I find it fascinating that the software engineering community has embraced the notion of patterns largely based on the popularity of Alexander’s other work, A Pattern Language. I wonder how many of those pattern enthusiasts have read The Timeless Way of Building, which actually explains the theory and philosophy behind those patterns.

Such an extraordinary film. The brilliant choice of mixing a fairy tale with the real world repression and terror following the Spanish civil war reminded me of the similarly amazing film La Vita è Bella. Experiencing such a deft and poignant blend of fantasy and historical drama makes me almost embarrassed to have enjoyed such comparative fluff as the Harry Potter films. For penance, I vow to read something long and brooding by Dostoevsky.

What a brilliant idea to take puzzles and place them in a larger context, providing stronger motivation to play the puzzles and a greater feeling of satisfaction on their completion. If only we’d have thought of that. Ribbing aside, this was pure puzzly goodness and Popcap are rocking the house rather than sitting on their bejeweled bottoms.

A fascinating account of the colonization of the West. There were more triumphs, tragedies, colorful characters, and interesting cultures than you can shake a stick at. The author gives a pretty even handed account of things, if perhaps taking a bit of extra care to emphasize the unrelenting travesties that were perpetrated on the Indians, and the differing cultural histories and values that fueled those fires. I wish I’d known history could be so interesting when they were trying to shove it down my throat back in high school. Maybe they just picked the wrong books.