phik

Some friends came over last weekend, and said that the inner courtyard of my apartment building reminds them of a prison cell block. Of course they’re completely right, and now it’s all I can think about when I step outside.

I’m willing to put up with it for these few months — though Milhouse’s father would not look out of place in this apartment — but one thing I could tolerate no longer: the knives.

After enduring for weeks knives that were so dull that they were long past being dangerous, I discovered that they could not cut cold butter and my bottomless patience was exhausted.

It was suggested that if I were limiting myself to exactly one knife, it should be this 18cm santoku:

Using the Global santoku is like watching girls make out. I thought that I was keeping my knives sharp in Boston, but I was badly mistaken, and I cannot rest until I’ve learned to replicate this factory edge.

I bought a bushel of tomatoes, just to cut them up.

I sang a song while I did it.

Back in the heady days when Cluster File Systems was not a subsidiary of a Fortune 500 corporation, a near-constant thorn in my side were people who did not come anywhere close to understanding the protections (not) provided by copyright.

One partner got so worked up that I think they’d have actually sued if we weren’t so valuable to them, essentially because we reimplemented one of their APIs (and naturally, they wanted to claim copyright on our code). That they managed to find lawyers willing to litigate that claim was, I thought, impressive enough to let it go forward, but even a frivolous lawsuit costs so much in the United States that I never could have. In the end they decided it was not worth it.

Reading Wendy Seltzer’s “No Copyright for Games” today took me back to those days. Not exactly the same issues, but I feel for the Scrabulous guys.