Category: Other

Winning past the mud

Busy this morning, but I couldn’t resist following up on an earlier entry about my friend Greg and his work on Cathy Woolard’s Atlanta campaign. He just IM’d me to say she won the runoff. Unfortunately, no thanks to Andrew Young, who weighed in at the eleventh hour with a lovely letter to the editor (sorry, timebombed link) in which he made thinly veiled accusations of the openly gay candidate’s campaign hurting “our communities, our children, and our senior citizens.”

Convergence isn’t always pretty

Alison’s PantsCam: The best WebCam since the first one. This is why you want to keep Java programmers occupied, otherwise you get useful apps like this: “A client-side Java applet automatically refreshes the images of Alison’s pants and provides a simple chat interface for site visitors to discuss recent PantsCam developments.” I’m still scarred by the sentence before that: “The entire assembly is strapped to Alison’s belt and the camera is inserted in her pants, providing the entire world a constant live video feed of her underwear.”

Morning update

It’s a humid 60° here in Boston. I love fall. I was all excited for a freezing November and it’s only gotten down below 40° one week. Wah wah wah.

Three weeks left to go in the semester. I’m not going to sleep a lot for a while. But I do have some nifty music that the E-52s will be performing shortly. We’re going to larn us some hol’day stuff if it kills us, hyuh!

(B)Logout

So this is a notice. I don’t expect to update the blog until Sunday or Monday. We’re going to be driving tomorrow and eating a lot of turkey and stuff on Thursday. Happy Thanksgiving, all!

Recommendations?

Me again. 🙂 I have a good friend who will be stuck in London over Thanksgiving for a job interview. It’s been a while since I’ve been, and the only places I can remember for him to eat well on a budget are Belgo and RK Stanley. Anyone out there with more clue than me want to provide suggestions? I’ll forward them to him–the suggestions must be in by tonight for me to be able to email them to him before his flight leaves tomorrow.

“Mixing/Memory and desire”

The New York Times finally ran the profile on Doug Ketcham, my friend from Monroe Hill at Virginia who was in the World Trade Center when it collapsed. As should surprise no one, Tin Man wrote a much more evocative eulogy for him two months ago…. It still doesn’t seem real. I had lost touch with him after graduating and didn’t even know he was working in New York. Seeing it in the Times just adds to the unreality.

A more appropriate time to be re-reading The Waste Land than I had realized. From “The Burial of the Dead” (which is ironic since Doug is still officially “missing”):

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

more…

Spending => more spending

Home electronics upgrade month continues. We replaced our TV a few weeks back with a new model from Costco, and today we splashed for an Onkyo surround receiver. The audio sources are hooked up, and hooking up the video will wait for another day. However, there was a bit of disappointment about the remote control. It controls a wide variety of video devices, but not the CD player we have. And both the CD and the receiver have remote connectors on the back panels so that you can control one device with another–but the CD player is Sony and the two remote interconnectors are not compatible.

So I’m in the market for a universal remote control…

Good Morning

I’m a little slow moving this morning. I’ve been getting this wonderful almost-cold for a couple of days now. It hasn’t really blossomed into runny-nosed sneezing fits, but I’ve been lethargic and stuffy and it’s been really difficult to think. That probably explains yesterday’s scripting fit. Ever since I first started writing code–even the good old, bad old days of Excel macros for my physics professors–it’s been easier for me to sit down and write code and fight with it until it works than to do something that requires actually talking to someone….