Charles W. Dickey, who was born on Maui, was from a kamaʻāina family and many of his buildings — plantation owners’ houses, for example — were built for the local elites.
The building style that he developed, on Maui and elsewhere, did not harken back to New England or some other imaginary place, but was instead distinctively Hawaiian. I believe that Dickey (1871-1942) did more than any one other person to shape what we think of as a distinctively Hawaiian architecture. Continue reading
Acme Industrial Distributors is a subsidiary of Gewürztraminer GmbH. Their IT organization runs a complex mix of enterprise applications including, at the operating system level, Sun Solaris, x86 Linux, Microsoft Windows Server, and an IBM mainframe running some crucial part of the business that everyone is afraid to touch. Plus there’s some old AS/400 (or VMS) rattling around, too, that they “haven’t been able to get around to replacing yet.” Continue reading
Something about this tiny square in the Dorsodoro really caught my imagination; the sweeping staircase at one end, the little canal, the bedraggled trees in the green, the foliage overflowing the brick wall, the whole thing of a piece. This 360° panorama captures the pieces but not the total effect.
I work from home and when I’m not travelling I spend most of my days stuck in my home office. I’ve been working like this for many years now and it’s hard to imagine changing. But I do feel socially isolated. Sometimes I go to my neighborhood coffee shop to work; I find that this works alright for a specific sort of task, but in general it’s not an effective work environment for me. One thing I like about my coffee shop, though, is that I can expect to run into friends there; it’s like a club in that way.