Category: Boston

No kidding. We got a solid 22–26″ of snow starting at about 5 PM last night and continuing right up until now, with the plow drifts at greater than three feet. Right after breakfast, during a lull in the storm, I got the snowblower out and cleared the driveway, and it was a good thing—more than a few drifts had crested above the top of the snowblower mouth, and I had to really get creative to clear out the driveway entrance. (And, of course, when I had just put the snowblower away, the plow came back and I had to go and shovel again.)

This has been a hell of a storm. Local TV is calling it a “winter hurricane”—some coastal regions are seeing gusts up to 60 MPH and there is an “eye” to the storm. (Coverage of the storm: Boston.com, New York Times, BBC.)

We bought a lot of groceries, and I’m looking forward to doing some cooking this afternoon as soon as my fingers warm up.

Hard to believe I was laughing a year or so ago about the surface of Mars being warmer than the surface of much of New England. Today it maxed out in the low teens—I think it was about 7° F when I woke up this morning and it’s that again now. It would have been a nice day to go skiing, rather than just hanging out in the house.

Following my weather-reporting father’s example, I’ve ordered the Oregon Scientific Cable-Free Thermometer, an indoor-outdoor thermometer that combines an indoor console with one or more wireless remote stations. The idea is you could have the inside temperature, the outside temperature, and maybe the temperature from your wine cellar all on one device. Mostly I’m just interested in finding out how much of my body will freeze before I stumble out the door with the dogs at sunrise on cold days.

(Source for the title, though the specific track, “Plainsong,” isn’t on the iTMS at present.)

New photos from our tour of Old North Church on Tuesday and from yesterday’s visit to the Harvard Museum of Natural History have been posted and are available from the gallery. We had a good talk with the sexton at the Old North Church, and he let us know that the belfry is opened for visitors once a year, in December. I’ll have to look for that opportunity. With an elevation like that I can imagine the view must be superb.

At the HMNH, in addition to revisiting the glass flowers, Esta, David and I checked out some of the other exhibits, including the vast gallery of whale skeletons, the slightly dusty cases of slightly cracking taxidermied specimens, and the ethnography exhibits. I was particularly impressed by the latter—I don’t think I’ve ever seen Aztec carvings in person, and the Mayan artifacts were also impressive.

It’s been snowing since about this time yesterday, aside from a brief intermission last night. We only have a few inches’ accumulation, but I’m already getting tired of it, since it means I have to put the dogs in their coats every time they go out and then blow dry the snow and freezing moisture off their legs when they come back in. And they like to go out twelve to fourteen times a day.

I really should have more of a sense of humor about this, and I know it’ll get better as soon as the snow stops and I can shovel out the walk and a “pee path.” But right now it’s just making me grumpy.

…we decided to take an extra day in New Jersey after our whirlwind drive back from North Carolina yesterday. Judging from what I read at StephenEsque regarding the snow in Boston (see Stalingrad. We Are Surrounded), it’s probably a good thing we did.

Incidentally, Stephen Baldwin may be one of the most original writers in the blogosphere right now. Writing daily on some odd topic or other, reading his blog is like getting the best parts of a new Mark Leyner collection in your RSS reader. Sample:

So. I return to Boston from Christmas Day spent at my two-year-old nephew’s house in the cacophonous company of the hauntingly cadaverous Murray Wiggle and his antipodean friends, only to find the city in the icy, double-fisted clutches of a capricious winter blizzard. Beacon Street, in particular, I thought, stepping out of the airport cab I had managed to commandeer into curbside dunes of thick white flakes, could most definitely have provided the contents of a highly effective snow globe, myself with suitcase and duffle bag cast in the role of tiny plastic figure standing stationary forever outside the minature two-dimensional brownstones in this swirling souvenir of some tourist’s inability to discover the location of TV’s “Cheers” bar, having walked four blocks down the road in the wrong direction as they invariably do.

All through the remainder of the night – or so it seemed to travel weary people – Boston Public Works departments were out in force, ploughing the road with their huge urban tractors and scooping the unwanted snow up on to …. the sidewalks, which consequently become impassable by all except mountain goats, extremely experienced Himalayan guides, and the yeti, none of whom, at least as far as I am aware, live in Greater Boston area – definitely not in the Back Bay, at any rate.

Boston Herald: Newton mom ousted for taping gay acceptance ‘lies’. In the middle of an optional student assembly that was put on as part of Diversity Week, a mom in the Boston suburb of Newton decided she didn’t want what she was hearing from the stage, so she started videotaping the discussion—presumably so she could have a record of what she called “propaganda, false information, and lies.”

Lots of nasty bits here. First, the mom, Kim Cariani, had already kept her kids home that day. —Which itself brings a question: why home? The article says that kids who didn’t want to attend could go to the library or the computer lab. Was Cariani afraid that being in the same building with the speakers would contaminate her kids? —Anyway, Cariani wasn’t objecting because of her children. This was definitely a woman with an agenda.

Second, the moment that supposedly pushed Cariani over the edge was when one of the speakers on the stage first discovered that he was gay, in particular describing the first moment he was attracted to another man. Was this the “false information and lies” that Cariani wanted to have a record of?

Third, what was she planning to do with the tape exactly?

I think there’s no question that the principal at Newton North High did the right thing. In general preventing taping of students without prior parental permission is an intelligent thing to do, and especially in an assembly like this where the kids who want to learn, or who may be coming to grips with some feelings of being “different” themselves, could get scarred by feeling that they were being watched by disapproving eyes.

This overzealous parent wasn’t thinking about the children, though. She was thinking about her own agenda, and to hell with anyone who stood in her way.

InfoWorld: Mazu scores VC lifeblood from Symantec, others. Always good to hear that a software firm in the Cambridge area is going to be investing in product development… generally that means there are product management investments to be made too. Mazu looks interesting—pattern based network intrusion prevention.

After the conference ended on Saturday, I wandered around Harvard Square for a while and then made my way up to the Hong Kong, where I gathered with a few other folks. In addition to catching up with Dave, I met a few interesting people, including a guy who is working on his first podcasts; some of the software developers from DownhillBattle who are working on BlogTorrent, which aims to simplify posting BitTorrents; and Betsy Campbell of MIT’s Community Innovation Lab.

An aside about Betsy: she made what I felt was the most cogent point in a long afternoon of spiraling abstractions when she pointed out that the motivating force that gets most people involved in issues outside their family or community is shame. Her thesis (approximately, since I don’t see a good transcript of it in the conference sources) is that something has to make you feel that you won’t live up to your own image of yourself as a good person for you to do something about it. Which is, I think, spot on.

Incidentally, the work that Betsy is doing in making cross-boundary connections between non-profit community activist groups and people that could help them is enormously worthwhile. If anyone from Sloan is reading this, working with this lab could be a good Socially Responsible Business project…

At a time when everyone is going to their corporate holiday party (unless you work for a company that’s too fiscally responsible to have one), we poor unemployed bloggers have to shift for ourselves. So I was delighted to see Dave’s message about the Scripting News Christmas Party next Saturday at the Hong Kong in Cambridge. I’ll be there!

It’s been a while since I posted photos, but the cameras haven’t been idle. I’ve been keeping in practice both with the Nikon and the phonecam (since I don’t always remember to keep the Nikon handy). Check out this highlights series, featuring my voting booth photo, the first snow, a cold afternoon at Downtown Crossing and Government Center, an extremely windy stroll around the Common and Beacon Hill, and a skip around the Harvard campus and in the Fogg Museum.

The phonecam photos here are attempts to adhere to my new phonecam rules, which I made up over the last week. Phonecams are, I believe, good for the following three kinds of shots:

1. Large blocks of color. This example, like my winning phonecam shot, is mostly interesting because of the intense color saturation of the shot.
2. Extreme close-ups. (In this shot and others, I like finding out what statues in museums are looking at.)
3. Capturing events where no other camera can go. So far, this polling booth shot is my only example in this genre, but it’s probably the most intriguing possibility of the three.

I am obviously still exploring the technology and having fun playing around with it, so I’m sure I’ll find other kinds of images.

This posting is a two-fer; the photo to the right is also my LensDay entry for the “modernity” challenge.

We just saw my in-laws off, back to New Jersey. It was a fabulous weekend with far too much food, including last night’s clam chowder and salmon with “Asian glaze” (soy, hoisin, brown sugar, ginger, hot pepper) followed by homemade pie (lemon meringue). Now that they’re on the road the house is quiet, and will be eerily so once Lisa takes off for the first of three less-than-24-hour business trips this week.

On the positive side my Mom should be back from her pilgrimage to Guatemala by now, so I can catch up with her.

Otherwise, not a lot to say. I’m kind of enjoying the silence.

I have been remiss: I should have posted a big congratulations to Jenny on finishing her first marathon a week ago in New York. Her write-up is funny, and thanks to her I’ve now got “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” stuck in my head.

…every single last nasty thing I said about the Arlington vicinity and our grocery options. No, Stop’n’Shop(’n’Hop’n’Pop) didn’t suddenly become more attractive. We finally visited Wilson Farms. A farm stand that shops more like a Whole Foods, on acres of actual farm land just off Mass Ave in Lexington (who knew?).

We were encouraged when we saw baskets of chestnuts, thrilled to find two local apple varieties we’d never seen before, encouraged by the general look and feel of the produce, and surprised to note the presence of packages of chicken fat for sale in the freezer. Then we checked out the meat department. Holy cow. When was the last time your supermarket differentiated between fryers, broilers, roasters, and stewing fowl? To say nothing of the duck, the steaks…

Needless to say we’ll be returning. Thanks to Jenny Brown for the tip.

Our very local paper, the Arlington Advocate, just ran an article about local bloggers. I was one of the people profiled, along with Mimi Kirchner, Jane Morgan, and Jen Langley. Thanks to Jenny Brown (whose blog I haven’t plugged before in this space) for writing the article, and thanks to her husband Adam Medros (whose blog seems to have fallen off since his son was born—funny how that goes!) for introducing us.

First, the good news from the MBTA. Soon the T token is going to pass into history and be replaced by the CharlieCard. As someone whose first subway system only used the little cards, I won’t miss the tokens. A card is a hell of a lot easier to carry in a wallet “just in case” than tokens. And I love the name, having memorized the song at age 8 long before I knew what the M.T.A. was (though I’m grateful I wasn’t there to hear Mitt sing it). Now if they would just bring back Scollay Square Station…

Then the bad news from the Big Dig: more leaks, or, as Bill Cosby said, “How long can you tread water?” If I were the state, I’d sue Bechtel for everything they’ve got.