BenCrowder.net

This blog is now defunct. I've started a new one at Blank Slate to chronicle my creative and design activities, and all future posts will show up there instead. (It's too much of a pain to migrate past posts over, though, so they'll stay here.)

I upgraded to Leopard this past Saturday. Generally a good thing -- I love Quick Look and use it far more than I ever thought I would, and I'm a big fan of Spaces as well (Linux window managers have had the same functionality for years, ...

I haven't been as frequent on here as I was expecting, but hopefully that'll change soon. :) As winter approaches and there'll soon be ice on the sidewalks again, I got to thinking about my dress shoes and their alarming lack of traction. I wear them every day to work, ...

For the past few days I've been playing around with a Sony Portable Reader (for eBooks), and I have to say I'm not that impressed. The typography was atrocious, the interface didn't feel smooth enough, and even if those weren't the case, the page switching thing (flashing black for ...

So, I've decided to rechristen this blog. I don't write often enough about programming to really justify having a separate blog for it, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. But what I do have a huge itching to start writing more about is design. Not ...

It's been a while. :) So, I ended up buying a Mac Mini, and last week I upgraded the RAM to 2 gigs so I'm sitting pretty well right now. (With the original 512 megs the Mini had at first, things were dog slow, especially when I tried ...

Since I never was able to get this box to boot off the install CD, I've left it on and have just made my changes from there. (Which has saved some time, I've got to admit.) So, up until a few hours ago I was using Xfce, but I switched ...

I'm writing this from my "new" Linux box. (I bought a flatscreen monitor off Buy.com and then a computer from a guy on Facebook Marketplace.) It's Xubuntu 7.04, and at the moment I'm running off the guy's installation, but as soon as I can get the drive to ...

Came across Lisp: The Ducati of Programming Languages over at defmacro.org yesterday: "When you drive a car", he said, "there is a disconnect between your thoughts and the machine. You sense it, but you're never really conscious of it until you get a bike. You want the car to accelerate, ...

I'm not doing so hot at updating this blog regularly, am I. :) School's keeping me busy (seems like I say that a lot) but I'll try to figure out a focus, something that'll get me writing. (And be interesting to read.) In the meantime, I think I want ...