Apparently the Oxford English Dictionary has blessed blog for inclusion in the definitive guide to the English language. (Thanks to Dane Carlson for the tip.)
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Month: June 2002
Home country
I arrived in NC this afternoon after stopping overnight with my sister in Richmond. Not a bad trip, though I was afraid that the car wouldn’t make it over Old Fort Mountain without running out of gas. I screened O Brother, Where Art Thou? for my parents tonight—Mom thought it was funny, but I don’t know if Dad thought anything about it at all.
Tomorrow I’ll be looking for one of the ancestral Jarrett cemeteries and attending a function at the Marshall Depot, which my uncle and grandmother had a role in saving and converting into a spot for live music. Details later.
Driving buddies
Does anyone else do this? I’m driving around by myself this week—Lisa has a houseful of friends in Boston for Kelley’s bridal shower—and this morning I found myself looking for a driving buddy. It goes like this:
- Find someone going approximately your speed (in my case, look for the person who’s considerately passing the other cars, traveling about eight miles over)
- Pass that person
- Pull back into the right lane at a reasonable rate of speed, to allow that person to pass if they choose
If it works out, you can travel keeping pace with the other driver for hundreds of miles this way. I think it only works with other solo drivers though. On long drives it’s one of my tricks to keep me from going nuts and talking to myself.
Blogaversary
Hard to believe that it was a year ago today that I started this weblog in earnest. At the time I certainly didn’t think I’d stick to it; the title (“Quarterly Update (i)”) indicated a certain… lack of optimism.
I hadn’t counted on the power of writing to overcome some of the loneliness of separation from my family and friends on a new coast, in a new job, in a new industry. Nor on the power of habit to keep me writing, and how practice would improve my prose. Nor on my sister jumping on board. Nor on the blog jumpstarting my programming, nor on my becoming an award nominee. Nor on becoming a realtime blogger.
This weblog continues to be a way for me to stretch in directions that I can’t predict and never imagined. I trust it will continue to be so as I move to Seattle at the end of the month.
On my way
A mostly unplanned journey this morning. We’ll be heading to Lisa’s parents the first part of the week to consolidate our belongings from a couple of different storage locations in preparation for the movers. Then Lisa will return to Boston while I head south for a few more days to see my family. Blogging will be erratic. Talk amongst yourselves.
Done.
Five hours of rain in 50-degree weather later, I’m done. Dinner at Terramia, dessert from Modern Pastry, late evening party with our friends. It doesn’t get any better.
Can’t sleep. Must blog. Graduate tomorrow.
Two years ago I was junking a promising career in IT consulting to put myself heinously in debt chasing an MBA. I was afraid I’d be losing my career momentum and my geek cred.
Today the jury is still out on the former, but I think I’ve answered the latter with a definitive yawp. Plus, thanks in part to this blog (which turns one year old, as a blog, next Tuesday), I have also regained my voice. Granted, I’m not writing poetry any more, but honestly some changes are for the better. 🙂 I think it’s been worth it.
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Silk officially rocks
Happy anniversary, M&D
Happy anniversary to my parents, who (as of yesterday) have been married for 31 years. As I continue in my own path through marriage, I realize just how impressive and difficult a feat this is.
(PS—yes, I’m a day late in blogging this (thanks to Esta for the prod), but I did make dinner for them last night.)
For those who are interested in KM…
Jim McGee is on fire today. What’s more impressive, and to his substantial credit as an instructor, is that a lot of it is the words of his students, esp. Courtney Mohr.
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Bit of a nasty Boston day
Oh well. The day started out ok, weather-wise, but quickly started misting, then raining, then blowing. Our first stop was to be the Boston Tea Party ship; had we checked ahead, we would have learned that a fire in the ticket booth closed the ship down some time ago.
We were luckier at the Museum of Fine Arts. I had never seen much of the museum’s exhibits of furniture, musical instruments, or china; now that I’m going to be a homeowner the furniture, especially, is fascinating. And lunch was good at Vox Populi. Now I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that the weather clears up for tomorrow.
Gray day
A good day for museums here. I’m taking my parents around Boston—my dad’s never been up to see us since we got here. Should be fun.
And suddenly your readers are no longer anonymous
Radio users used to be hidden behind the informative name “frontier.userland.com/xmlAggregator” in my referer logs. No longer! Now I know who’s reading this site! And some of them are darned interesting, like Nicholas Riley, whose blog is subtitled “thoughts from a computer science graduate student, medical student, and Cocoa programmer (this week).”
This alleviates an information asymmetry that’s existed since the beginning of writing…
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Mac OS X 10.1.5 is out
Apple released Mac OS X 10.1.5 yesterday; I left the install running last night while we went for drinks with our friend Niall and his parents, who are over from Ireland. I think the fact that I let the install run unattended says a lot about how much better Apple’s update process has gotten.
The update seems to have fixed a longstanding problem I had with connecting to my iDisk from home; apparently the “added support for connecting to iDisk using default DNS settings of AirPort” did the trick. This is really good. I used to have to dial up directly or go to the network at school to be able to connect to my iDisk. Now I can connect and publish software updates with no problem.
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The people in my neighborhood
Shout out to Mark Pilgrim for building a web service that visualizes relationships between web sites (via Google) quickly and succinctly. Going down my “neighborhood” list, I see a lot of familiar faces and quite a few I don’t recognize.
Question mark: has Google’s API obviated the need for data mining? It used to be that you needed very expensive algorithms and extensive data sets to predict these kinds of relationships (a la Amazon’s recommendation engine). Google has the data set now and has exposed the algorithm via “related sites.” Of course, the catch is your site has to be visible to Google to be able to play.
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