Category: Boston

…when greater Boston traffic goes completely and utterly to Hell the next morning. I swear, I spent 70 minutes just on the 10 miles of Rt. 2 between my home and 128, thanks to the four separate fender-benders I ran into.

I didn’t stay up for the end, and thus missed Colorado’s runs… and A-Rod’s hogging the spotlight. Dude, I think you could have picked some other night to announce that you are taking your punk ass to the market. You’d think that you would at least have waited until a few days after Red Sox pitcher (pitcher!) Daisuke Matsuzaka blew away your post-season RBI record…

The Onion: Terry Francona Announces Josh Beckett Will Start Games 1, 4, 7, 2, 6, 3, 5. In that order, of course, so that he can rest between games.

Heh.

My favorite take on the game last night had to be Fark’s Game One thread, which featured pix of poor overmatched Rox pitcher Jeff Francis with the caption, “Dude, he’s 12.”

But I like the way we’re starting: three up, three down from Beckett. He steps off the plate; the TV (and maybe in Fenway, I don’t know) plays the Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man.” Which has to be a first for MLB.

Then Padroia steps up, and whaddaya know? Home run. Then Youk gets a double, and Manny singles him in.

You know what, folks? We are downright spoiled.

I just hope they can play the game. The “drizzle” looks pretty heavy from here.

One of my neighbors was selling a Mitsubishi 3000 recently. I thought, “How nice, he’s outgrown fast cars.” Not so fast. Lisa pointed out a new car in his driveway when we were out on a walk, saying, “I think he got a classic Porsche.”

A closer look told me it was no Porsche (though the hatchback/fastback made it look a little like a 911 from the rear), but what it was was a little more obscure. Definitely a British sports car: right-hand drive, and the original British plate was still on the vehicle under its Mass. plate. But what model? Then I saw him start to back it out of the driveway, and it hit me. I told my wife, “I think that’s an Aston Martin—the James Bond car.”

I got a closer look as we went by. Sunroof with a cloth top, the famous winged Aston Martin logo on the back, gunmetal gray paint. I memorized the lines as best I could and went home to look it up. I was unfortunately unable to do the check that day, as that’s when the stomach flu that grounded me for much of the weekend into yesterday kicked in. But I looked it up today, and my neighbor is driving an Aston Martin DB Mark III. It is the James Bond car, but not the one that appears in the film. When Ian Fleming wrote the novel Goldfinger, he had Bond driving a DB Mark III, but this was upgraded to Aston Martin’s latest DB 5 when the film of Goldfinger was made.

As a longtime British car fan (I grew up with my dad’s project car, a 1967 MGB that he rebuilt or fixed from the chassis up, and drove my own 1977 MGB, his second project car, until an unfortunate carburetor fire), I am extremely jealous. Oh, to be in a small, potentially unsafe vehicle again, low to the ground, loud, and responsive…

Last night I came home from the second of three performances of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé with the BSO (the third is tomorrow night at Carnegie Hall), and stopped on the way to pick up eggs and bread for breakfast. Since the concert went until after 10 and I live in Arlington, it was almost 11 when I pulled into the Stop’n’Shop on Mass Ave and went looking for my groceries, still wearing my tux.

The place was pretty empty—it closes at midnight—and the only people there were the stock workers and the clerks, one of whom had to put away his soda when I walked up to his line. He started ringing up my stuff with a straight face—pretty good feat, considering I was in full formal attire—and then said, with no preamble, “I’ve never worn a tux…all my friends got married fifteen years ago now and I never had to wear a tux for any of their weddings.”

I said, deciding for some reason not to disclose to this random stranger that I had been singing in the performance, “Well, you could always go to Symphony Hall.”

“Oh yeah!” he said, brightening. “Is that where you were?” I nodded, and he asked, “So who was the guest tonight?”

The guest. Ah yeah. Thanks to years of marketing, the only thing most people remember about the classical performances are the guest stars. I knew the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet had played, but rather than butcher his name, I said, “No guest tonight, just the regular symphony and chorus.”

“Cool,” he said. And then, “So what’s that Keith Lockhart like, anyhow?”

I replied with a straight face, “Amazing,” and beat it before I started cracking up.

And yes, before you say anything, I am of course part of the problem by laughing at this guy rather than informing him of the existence of James Levine. But there is a time and a place for that kind of conversation, and it’s not after 11 PM in the check-out line of a Stop’n’Shop.

Regular Guy Rob Crawford is running for President of Red Sox Nation. Once you get past some of the aggressive populism of his candidacy, he reveals himself as a candidate with some seriously good ideas for making the Red Sox accessible to all:

Have you ever had a conversation with someone that revealed to you that the other person’s life would be deeply touched by tickets to a Red Sox game? And you knew that if you owned season tickets, you would give that four tickets right there on the spot? Perhaps their spouse, who is a huge Red Sox, is in the final stages of terminal cancer, and tickets would enable him to say “goodbye” to Fenway. Or perhaps she’s a single mother with three kids who’s struggling to make ends meet and could never conceive of taking her family to a game. The Red Sox Angels program would put season tickets into the hands of Red Sox Angels across New England who would go through their daily lives looking and listening for people to give their tickets away to…

My second idea to improve ticket access is called, Sox Tix for Kids.

Almost no season ticket holder actually attends every Red Sox home game, and almost every season ticket holder would love to donate at least one game’s tickets to a group of children who have never attended a game at Fenway, have no access to tickets to Fenway, but really want to go to a game at Fenway.
I envision a program that asks season ticket holders, on their season ticket renewal form, to donate one or more games’ tickets to the Sox Tix for Kids program…

That in and of itself gets my vote. And by the way—the Red Sox Angels idea is a pretty nifty example of grace in action. Not a bad follow-up for the son of the head pastor emeritus of Old South Church… a man who, himself, used to write poems to each of the principals of his kids’ schools at the beginning of each school year, apologizing in advance for the hooky that they would be playing to catch home games. And Rob’s regular blog is pretty darned good reading too. (Subscribed.)

Check out Rob’s blog and comment on it—by doing so, you vote for good sense, good grace, and a good fan for president of the Nation.

Universal Hub: Now that’s a wide-screen TV. Looks like WGBH is going to get into the lit advertisement space with a VERY large (30’x45′) outdoor display. Visions of 25′ tall Ernies aside, it looks like you won’t actually be able to watch television on the display; it’ll show a different image each day.

That relieves me of having to make the obligatory hifi comment, but I’ll make it anyway: with every TV in the world moving to 16×9, why on earth would they deploy a 3×2 TV instead? I could almost understand 4×3, but 3×2 is just puzzling.

More info about the Jumbotron LED mural can be found on WGBH.com’s design pages for their new building.

First, congratulations to Cluetrainer, Linux Journal editor, and Berkman Center fellow Doc Searls on hitting his swingin’ 60s. Second, I feel like I should welcome him to the neighborhood—though he hasn’t settled in yet, he reports he was looking at apartments in Ahlington yesterday.

Doc, if you do take an apartment here, we’ll have to have you over to the park for the best views of Boston.

After a long week, Lisa and I headed down to Harvard Square tonight to take in the Pottermania. We’re both a little too old, now, and have too many other responsibilities to stand in line until midnight to get a copy of The Deathly Hallows, so ours will arrive from Amazon sometime tomorrow. (And I will get to read it by the end of next week, if I’m lucky—Lisa has dibs.)

But we enjoyed watching the chaos. Coming into the Square past the Coop, the crowds of college students waiting for the doors to reopen at midnight were substantial; fortunately for my eyes, few wore costumes, though there were more than a few Gryffindor scarves in evidence. Walking from Eliot Street to the Harvard Bookstore along the back roads, we saw a little more cosplay, most perfectly safe (though the college age girls in school uniforms and plaid short skirts were a little much).

Der Spatchel points out that the Kendall Band, an interactive musical sculpture in the Kendall Square T station, is not functioning because the T can’t afford to maintain it. While I can sympathize with the T—when I was at Sloan, the piece seemed to be inoperative as often as it worked—it seems a shame for the single nicest feature of any T station to go mute. Particularly since it is right outside MIT.

I had no idea that the piece was by a descendant of Henri Matisse—or that Paul Matisse had other sonic artworks throughout the city. I’m particularly tickled by this description of the musical fence: “Its immense popularity proved problematic, however, in the urban environment. Passers-by played the fence at all hours, causing its relocation to the less residential environment of the DeCordova Sculpture Park.”

Next week is shaping up to be interesting for those of us in the Boston area who care about the direction of the Internet. First, there’s the O’Reilly Ignite session (an evening of networking, speakers, five-minute elevator pitches, and more). Then the next day, the Berkman Center hosts the 2007 Internet and Society Conference, on the topic of how universities stay relevant in the face of the erosion of traditional, hierarchical ways of structuring and mediating knowledge. Berkman fellow David Weinberger, whose Everything is Miscellaneous I just completed reading in the airport Legal Seafoods, should have some interesting things to say about the topic. Nice to see, too, that some other familiar faces, including Doc Searls, Dan Gillmor, and Jessamyn West, will be in attendance.

Gee, if I didn’t have to ship a product at the end of June, I’d be taking some serious vacation time next week.

Down in New Jersey this weekend for Lisa’s dad’s birthday. Thirty-one guests in a small two bedroom condo on the shore = party.

Back in Massachusetts: warm springlike days and nights. In from the grill, I smell like a bratwurst. There are worse fates. Our lawn is about to bite me.

I once again have an opening for a pre-sales engineer at my firm, iET Solutions. Details on our website and on Craigslist.

We’re a pretty exciting place to be right now—a consistently profitable company in the IT Service Management and CMDB space. Not only are we growing, we’re also making some big product investments, so Presales is going to be a critical part of the success of taking those to the market.

If selling isn’t your thing, we also have consulting and support positions open. If you’d like to discuss the job position further, just contact me.

Boston Globe: Voting device pact at issue. The municipal election in Arlington today raised this article to my attention. Voting machines by AutoMARK, which use a touchscreen to produce a paper ballot as part of a disabled voter assistance measure, were in use in some precincts in Arlington today. And Diebold would have liked to stop them: they’ve filed suit against the state for choosing the wrong product.

Yes, seriously.

I hope that AutoMARK’s machines passed some of the tests that Diebold’s have failed, such as not being able to be opened using an ordinary file cabinet key and not being able to be arbitrarily manipulated to rig an election. But even if that level of testing hasn’t been conducted, the premise of the suit is pretty hysterical. After all, why wouldn’t one want to purchase insecure, hackable voting machines that don’t leave a paper trail?

…when Maestro Levine breaks his baton during a rehearsal. Not even dress, yet!

I’m back with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, after a few months off, for a series of performances of Beethoven’s Fidelio. The BSO is going all out on this one, with downloadable previews (also available on their podcast, to which, I confess, I do not subscribe)—even an animated Flash ad that cycles through the soloists.

And quite a roster of soloists it is, too: I recognized half of them from the concerts I’ve done with the group over the last few years, including Johan Botha (Valdemar in Gurreleider); Mathew Polenzani (Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni), and Albert Dohmen (the Peasant, also from Gurreleider). Dohmen deserves special mention because his normal speaking voice can rattle window glass, it’s that low and rumbly. Also deserving mention is Christine Brewer, another Gurreleider alum, who is making a habit of last minute subsitutions with the BSO. Here she fills in for Karita Mattila (YAGA, yet another Gurreleider alum), who withdrew this week due to illness.

All of this wouldn’t matter if the music weren’t so sublime. I am, despite the catholicity of my tastes, not normally an opera fan. But the music in Fidelio is spectacular—er, at least the part we’ve heard so far, which is limited to the two finales. I’m looking forward to hearing the rest of the work at tomorrow night’s dress rehearsal.