No new books this week

This is the first week I haven't finished a book this year. Quite amazing! Part of the reason is that I'm reading Richard Powers's "The Time of our Singing", which is a 600+ page book. That will take me some time. I've also been reading the news in the morning and listening to more podcasts. The most interesting one that I've read was:

Daniel Tunkelang talks about Endeca, Search, and ‘Reconsidering Relevance’ from Talis's Nodalities.

It's an interesting interview that discusses things that I can relate more than the usual discussions about SaaS and linked data. As this is not my technical blog, I won't get much into why I found this interesting. Eventually I'll write some notes about it.

Things at work have been a little stressful lately. And it's not really because of work itself, but mostly because I have been a little unfocused. Maybe it's the new house, maybe it's because I'll have visitors in town this weekend, maybe it's because the cleaning people killed my lucky bamboo this week, or maybe it's just the moon, I don't know. I just hope it will go away soon.

What else can I talk about my week here? Well, last weekend I decided to finally do an actual hard cheese. I chose one of the easier ones to start with: cheddar. Last Saturday to Sunday I did the whole preparing the curds, cutting them, heating, and pressing. This week it was drying and today I applied cheese wax to seal it from mold and let it age for at least a couple of months. The trick now is that, without any experience, when will I decide to open it?

Also in two months I should open one of my bottles of plum wine to try. I tried a little when it came out of the clearing up process and it was alright... Won't win any prizes. I've been thinking of starting a new batch of something, but I'm not sure what yet. It's not that hard, it's just such delayed gratification and moderate risk that is tough to be very excited about it. And I think I do need some excitement in my life right now. Just too many things to be worried about that I feel I don't have full control over. Like my poor lucky bamboo.