Currently playing song: “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” by The Beatles on The Beatles (White Album) (Disc 1).
All things must pass
This morning, a moment of silence for George Harrison, who lost his long struggle with cancer yesterday. The Washington Post has a good eulogy, as does the BBC.
more…
Next: football on marble
A weird game played by my undergrad alma mater: basketball on ice, anyone?
Apolo-blog
Esta as usual writes a thought provoking piece this morning. I too have felt like I’ve been writing at the surface lately. It’s too easy to point to things that someone else has written, at least at the end of the semester. Well, I hope I can write some more significant things soon– right now it’s just really hard to concentrate.
Now playing
Currently playing song: “Walking & Falling” by Laurie Anderson on Big Science.
Walking and Falling
I feel really good this morning. I should know better than to resist Lisa — she told me hopping on the treadmill would be just the thing to raise my energy and she was right. Funny thing happened while I was on the machine, though–just as I was wrapping up my walk, it stopped dead. I checked the plug, the switch, the safety, the wall fuse–nothing. After about half an hour and a panicking call from Lisa later (she’s really addicted to our machine), I finally realized that the fuse on the treadmill had blown. Fun, fun, fun…
Now playing
Currently playing song: “Well Well Well” by John Lennon on Plastic Ono Band. Good old John. I can always count on him to do some primal screaming for me when I can’t.
Delayed reward
Regardless of how you feel about software patents, it’s always cool when one of your friends gets recognized for his work in a very public way, as my friend Jay did with this press release about his patent (#6,295,536) relating to enterprise data transfer. The irony is that Jay left American Management Systems about a year before I did and so receives no benefit from this patent.
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.”
Chilling net access to fight terrorism?
Ok, so it’s unlikely that this is a purposeful move to disenfranchise Somalis who want to communicate their plight with the rest of the world. But this is still one of the scarier headlines I’ve seen lately: US shuts down Somalia internet, says the BBC: “Somalia’s only internet company and a key telecoms business have been forced to close because the United States suspects them of terrorist links.”
Biting the feeding hand
This is one of the braver statements [WSJ, subscription required] that I’ve seen from Steve Jobs recently: “We’re baffled that a settlement imposed against Microsoft for breaking the law should allow, even encourage, them to unfairly make inroads into education — one of the few markets left where they don’t have monopoly power.”
Closure on a class
My last Finance II case writeup was completed today. This is a fairly big deal. I was dealing with a pretty big Black Dog last spring when I first tried to take Finance II, and facing incredibly complicated cases with lots of computation, no road map, and no teammates was about to send me right into the frozen Charles. I dropped it and decided to take it again this fall. It’s just about bearable this time, in spite of the fact that I’ve fatally screwed up just about every case so far.
The irony of course is that I had to finish the last case on my own, and so completely missed the instructions that I had to value the company using the APV method rather than WACC.
Signs of the Apocalypse
Now playing
Currently playing song: “Rebecca Sylvester” by Gastr Del Sol on Upgrade & Afterlife. What a weird, wonderful song by a weird, wonderful band. I think the great thing for me about this band (unfortunately defunct) is the way David Grubbs’ lyrical melodies seem so comfortable with the weird sounds that Jim O’Rourke wraps around them. Besides, how can you dislike a song that ends, “Why did the sharks watch him drown?” … I owe Tyler a big debt of gratitude for introducing me to the band (even if he did freak me out when he told me, “Their songs sound like the noise inside my head when it’s quiet”).
Requiem for the CoffeeCam
I spoke too quickly about web cams yesterday. I just saw that the Coffee Pot Web Cam has gone permanently offline (since August, apparently). I’m so sad! Where else can I get free images of coffee over the Internet? How will I know when it’s time to hop a plane to Cambridge to make new coffee?
Seriously, I remember seeing the coffee pot in early 1994 and thinking, that’s seriously cool. It was the first time that I got a real clue about the power of the Web to allow people to share things across wide geographic distances–in a more meaningful way than files on an FTP server, words on Usenet newsgroups, or nodes on a Gopher directory. In some small way, the coffee pot image server is probably responsible for my publishing on the web. I think a small moment of silence is in order.