In the weeks since the precipitous and brief stock market crash on May 6th, I have found myself answering questions about it from people outside the capital markets and discussing it with insiders on many occasions. While I have some thoughts about what went on, I’m often unable to satisfy people’s desire to blame a [...]

Lately I’ve been looking at a lot of houses. I’ve also been reading A Timeless Way of Building (ATWB). The net result has been a deep dissatisfaction with the available housing stock in Arlington, and probably in the entire United States. So while I would like to recommend the book, it comes with the disclaimer [...]

In computer science, the halting problem is very well known. The problem states that it is impossible to build a software program that can analyze other software programs to determine if they will eventually terminate, or halt. This is a useful problem to understand, because many software problems that look possible at first can be [...]

My last post ended with me losing the house due to being outbid. In a strange turn of events we may have won the bidding war without ever submitting the highest offer. I’ll try to provide more details at a future date, if it turns out they are interesting. At the moment we are still [...]

I was going to favor you all with a post about Java’s System.nanoTime. That post will have to wait until tomorrow. Instead, I spent the day (arguably the weekend since 3:15pm on Friday) putting in a bid on a house. I won’t bore you with the details of property, inspections, financing, etc. However, I think [...]

It’s been a few weeks since I posted, partly because of a vacation spent in Puerto Rico. I have a few posts in the works, but before I get to those, I hope you can indulge me in a bit of travelogue.
It started with a quest. On our way to Arecibo we had seen this [...]

The MIT Mystery Hunt starts this Friday at noon, and I’ll be participating seriously for about my 10th year. In the hunt, teams solve a collection of puzzles to discover the location of a gold coin hidden somewhere on campus. The puzzles may be numerous (sometimes over 100), are generally provided without instructions (except when [...]

Nearly everyone who goes to work for a startup gets options, and the first question they ask is “how much are these options really worth?” When you are considering a job offer, particularly competitive job offers, it’s important to understand the value of the whole package. Putting a value on an option grant in a [...]

I started this post shortly after bringing my first child, Patrick Tibbetts, home from Mount Auburn Hospital. Now he is nearly eight months old, and I am finally getting around to posting it. In the interim, I have shared this advice verbally with several friends. I’ll keep it short, just three pieces of advice that [...]

Matthew Crawford’s essay in New York Times Magazine last weekend, “The Case for Working With Your Hands” really resonated with me. The primary focus is the intellectual challenges and rewards of repairing motorcycles, as compared with “knowledge work” jobs that our society seems to value. But one point at the end captured my attention:
The visceral [...]