I just got back from a week in Jamaica, and I’ve been talking off everyone’s ear about the experience. That’s because the Franklin D. Resort has exactly one thing going for it: every family gets a full time nanny for the duration of your vacation. Larger families, particularly with multiple age groups of kids, often had two nannies. The resort seemed especially friendly to large families, with big multi-bedroom suites and reasonable rates for additional children. For our trip they were also running a “grandparents stay free” promotion, which I think they do every January. If you are planning a family-oriented vacation, particularly with young kids, you have to consider the Franklin D. Resort.

So while I’ve been recommending the resort to people verbally, I wanted to take a moment to write down what I learned vacationing there, and what people might want to know before they take my advice and book their own trip.

Click through for the list…

I’ve been spending a lot of time following my son Patrick around watching him explore the world. I’ve shared a few of his important discoveries with Twitter and with friends, under the tag “Toddler Science”. Key discoveries include that tissue boxes contain a finite supply of tissue and that cat magnets do not stick to [...]

As you may have heard, Delicious is going away, or at least being sold off, or otherwise being destroyed by Yahoo. In the last 72 hours, I’ve tried out the two leading alternatives, Diigo and pinboard. Along the way, I got to wondering why I keep all these bookmarks around. I do often search back [...]

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 [...]