After many months of not posting anything useful here, I'm finally deciding it's time to close this blog.
The blog, itself, will remain available for posterity (and to jog my memory about things once in a while!), but I'm not going to post anymore, and comments will no longer be allowed.
To those of you who have posted insightful and interesting comments here over the years: thank you very much for your participation!
I'm in Silicon Valley now! More details to follow.
As most of you are now aware, I am moving to Silicon Valley. That means this web site and all other web sites I host will be off-line for the duration of the move, which, depending on truck routes and all that other crap, could be up to about two weeks.
Exciting!
We're well into April, and it's been a few weeks since I've said anything here. For shame.
The three-year anniversary of my blog is coming up in May, but I fear the content I'm able to contribute here may be petering out. Writing about road blocks and orange juice and other things like that can only sustain me for so long, after all.
It would be nice to tell you about beer festivals and museums and travel, but, quite frankly, I've hardly gone anywhere lately. I may make an appearance at the American Craft Beer Fest in June, though, and if you're in the Boston area, you're welcome to come along!
Jugo de naranjaI love orange juice. And, what red-blooded, healthy American doesn't?
There's a problem with loving orange juice in America, though: we have awful oranges!
I just came across a BBC article (warning: it's from 2006) about Brazil's orange trade, and it rekindled my desire for really good orange juice. The people in Florida and other southern states may think they know how to grow oranges and make amazing juice, but when compared with Brazilian orange growers, those southerners certainly have a lot to learn.
About this time last year, I spent two weeks in Buenos Aires and drank, quite literally, gallons of orange juice and grapefruit juice that had been produced in Brazil and other places in South America. Normally, I wouldn't quite drink gallons of the stuff in two weeks, but it was just incredible! The flavors were so strong and sweet that, when I returned to Pittsburgh, fruit juice tasted like little more than water.
The difference wasn't just in the strength of the juice. It was an all-around different taste, and if the boxes of orange juice hadn't been labeled jugo de naranja and stamped with pictures of oranges, I may have never realized I was drinking something that came from what we Americans naively call an orange.
I have searched for juice from Brazilian fruits in grocery stores across the northeastern United States since my orange juice revelation, but I have come up dry, empty-handed, and decidedly unjuiced. Where do I find this life-giving nectar?
Today, Newark's finest have implemented a road safety checkpoint on the street below my apartment. Ostensibly, it's there to check for seat-belts and inspection stickers, but I wonder what else they do?
The officer apparently asks some percentage of drivers to pull over to the side of the road and submit to a quick "safety" inspection of their vehicle. However, I've seen a few cars and a utility van towed already.
I found a Road Block Registry for New Jersey on the web, but it mainly seems like a bunch of complainers. I'd probably complain, too, if I were delayed by a checkpoint on my way to work or I thought I were being racially profiled by the police. Unfortunately, I was unable to briefly locate any other substantial web-based documentation of these checkpoints.
At any rate, I took some pictures. Enjoy.
Today, Slashdot links us to an article at Network World about the 14 greatest engineering challenges for the 21st century. An interesting assortment of people, including my buddy Bob Langer at MIT, came up with this list, and it sounds like they hit the nail on the head in most respects. "Engineer better medicines" must have been one of Bob's entries.
The most reasonable of these goals, I think, is to "make solar energy affordable." We've come leaps and bounds in the past 10 years in this field, thanks to generous venture capital funding and some really bright guys who, incidentally, are also mostly graduates of MIT.
The most vague of these goals must be "engineer the tools for scientific discovery." I suppose that probably means building better microscopes, telescopes, and tweezers (not kidding), but perhaps its wording could be somewhat more definite?
Overall, setting goals like these is a Good Thing. I can only hope the NSF is actually going to form task forces and invest heavily in achieving these goals.
According to WebMD's cold and flu symptoms comparison chart, which I have bookmarked, I have a bit of a cold. It started Sunday night with a sore throat, and it's blossomed into wondrous aching and general grossness since then. I'm also blaming it for a wild dream I had last night, in which Arin was a tabby cat (think a gray Puss in Boots from Shrek the Third, complete with huge eyes but without Antonio Banderas), and he and I were having coffee outside a café before heading off to catch a flight.
In other news, I would like to thank everyone for their enjoyable comments on my video with Dorian from the weekend, both on this blog and on YouTube. I showed the video and comments to Dorian, and, based on his new critical acclaim, he now thinks he will be the next Puss in Boots. He doesn't seem to understand he needs to work on that sexy Antonio Banderas voice first!
Dorian and I are on YouTube now!
I love kim chi, South Korea's spicy pickled cabbage staple, and so does Ko San, South Korea's first astronaut. Kim chi starts off with the fermentation of cabbage, a process that produces a number of bacteria that would potentially be harmful to have aboard the International Space Station, however, and to combat this, scientists have devised a version of kim chi that does not include those "necessary" bacteria. Read more about Mr. Ko and his sterile kim chi at the BBC.
Also, check out this photo of an amazing kim chi market stall. Mmmmmm...
Every American who reads this dusty old thing is familiar with Super Tuesday and the fact that it happened this past week. And, if you aren't, well, you should come out from under that rock for a while and read the news.
Mitt Romney dropped out of the Republican race after spending $35 million and getting a few doughnuts and cups of coffee for it. John McCain is the comeback kid at 71, according to the BBC, and Mike Huckabee probably really wants to be McCain's vice president. Ron Paul, the grassroots campaigner from Texas, didn't fare too well, but nobody really expected him to fare well, anyway.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are roughly tied, and, well, are there really any other Democrat candidates?
Since the 2004 presidential election started heating up, Andy Tanenbaum has run a lovely election prediction site at electoral-vote.com, which I use to keep an eye on various interesting elections around the country. It's worth keeping in your bookmarks or on your del.icio.us page.
I've often wondered when the Internet would be mature enough to allow people to save their own content in an easily accessible and globally usable way. We're getting to that point, and one of the shining examples of the personal content evolution, if you will, is del.icio.us.
This service allows people to save web bookmarks, share them with friends, and even recommend bookmarks to other people. I started using it yesterday after exploring its capabilities and deciding it was exactly what I was seeking: bookmarks I can use anywhere!
I've added a link to my del.icio.us bookmark index at the top of every index page on my blog. If you ever find yourself at work, wondering what you bookmarked at home, or if you simply would like to share links easily, it's definitely worth checking out. Meanwhile, go have a look at my bookmarks!
Well, it's 2008, and I haven't updated my blog since December 16, 2007. I really haven't been doing much that's noteworthy lately, but for your reading enjoyment, I'll post a brief summary of it here.
I was in Houston for Christmas and then snagged Helen and drove a calm and uneventful but exhausting 24 hours with her up to New York City. She was here for a whopping 36 hours before flying back to Texas to attend to a family emergency. She returns tomorrow, and hopefully, we can peel her car out of my neighbor's extra parking space, which he very generously lent us.
I traded (some of) the past three days, and I had my most successful week so far. It's encouraging, but there's still tons of learning and trial-and-error to go.
Meanwhile, there's this addictive Nintendo Wii destroying the last of my will to be productive. On that note...
What a fun way to waste some time... check out Meez.
Here I am with my penguin!
In other news, we had a Nor'easter here today, and for the next 24 hours or so, we're expecting freezing stuff to fall from the sky in various forms and wind gusts up to 45 mph. Here's hoping the PATH train isn't suffering awful delays in the morning.
Snow in Newark. Click to enlargeThe New York and New Jersey area's first accumulation of snow this season happened this morning, creating a beautiful white cover over the homes and streets around my apartment. With virtually no wind and a pleasant 25- to 34-degree range of temperatures throughout the afternoon, today has culminated a relaxing first weekend of December.
Of course, tomorrow, that will all change. The National Weather Service made the following statement at 4:18 PM this afternoon.
The Wind Advisory is now in effect from 1 PM Monday to 3 am EST Tuesday.
West to northwest winds 10 to 20 mph Monday morning will increase to 25 to 35 mph with gusts in excess of 50 mph by midday Monday in the wake of rapidly deepening low pressure. These strong winds will continue into Monday night... before the sustained winds and strongest gusts begin to weaken.
Wonderful. I'm almost shivering, just reading that.
From my perch high atop Newark, New Jersey, I bring you a photo of a raging structure fire about one or one-and-a-half miles southwest of here. Exciting!
Structure fire in Newark. Photo taken at 5:26 PM on November 30, 2007. Click to enlarge
An appropriate end to a really awful day of trading, a train collision in Chicago, and a hostage situation in New Hampshire.
For every word in this vocabulary test you choose correctly, 10 grains of rice will be sent through the United Nations World Food Program by the advertisers on the Free Rice page to poverty-stricken locations around the world. Read more about it.
My "vocab level" in the game swings between 39 and 42. The highest level is 50, with very few people scoring 48 and above. What's yours?
The DARPA Urban Challenge took place this morning in Victorville, California, where 11 teams let loose their fully automated robotic vehicles on a course designed to determine which robot can autonomously handle urban driving the best.
I'm happy to report that Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing was one of only three contestants to cross the finish line. Virginia Tech and Stanford were the other two teams. Apparently, the course was different for each robot, so the judges are still figuring out which team really finished first.
Two other competitors, the robots from MIT and Cornell, ended up in a funny, slow-motion collision.
Go Tartan Racing!
(Update at 7:49 PM: Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing Team is granted the first prize, of $2 million. Stanford finished in second place with $1 million, and Virginia Tech in third with $500,000. Go Tartans!)
(Update at 8:22 PM: This news is now officially covered on the Carnegie Mellon web site.)
As Hurricane Noel passed the New York City area today, we had high winds and a bit of rain under dark and cloudy skies. With a high of 49 degrees, Noel provided a much-needed segue from the unnecessarily balmy weather of the past couple months into more pleasant winter conditions.
Earlier today, I was set up to take a panoramic picture of the reds, yellows, and oranges that make up most of the tree-tops to the west, but when it came time to hit the trigger, the rain started pouring. Rather than sacrifice my camera to whatever the rain brings down from the skies above the New York City metro area, I capped it and walked back inside.
Soon, I hope to have the opportunity to take another panorama. The unending miles of bright, colorful trees are a sure sign the weather is becoming nicer, but about five percent of those trees are already stripped bare of their leaves. Photos of bleak, lifeless flora generally just don't evoke the same sort of warmth and exuberance, so I need to be quick about it! When the masterpiece is finally created, I'll be sure to post it here.
So far, I'm quite enjoying November.
Well, this page has been empty for a while. Sorry about that!
I don't have much to report, other than day trading is going well, the Red Sox are kicking ass, I finished watching all 10 seasons of Stargate SG-1 today, and I had a wonderful time with Helen in Dallas last weekend. The weather has turned cooler, and the forecast is predicting lows in the 30s and 40s for four out of the next five days. Excellent.
I hope all is well with you!
Virgin Mobile's banner outside the New York Stock Exchange last Thursday. Click to enlargeTwo days ago, Virgin Mobile (NYSE: VM) had an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. Sir Richard Branson and crew rang the opening bell, and there were attractive women dressed as angels walking around the Exchange floor. It was quite a big deal and fun to watch, especially since Branson is just as eccentric as he is wealthy. CNBC even aired footage of him base-jumping following the opening bell.
Walking past the front of the Exchange on Broad Street later in the day, I saw the giant red banner pictured to the right; along with a big, red carpet; a stage presumably to be used for a concert in the afternoon (though, it rained, so I don't know what happened with that); and those lovely angels milling about. There was also a sound system playing the song "Maniac", which I thought was particularly appropriate for something associated with Sir Richard.
While I thought the fanfare surrounding the Virgin Mobile IPO was rather extreme for Wall Street but nonetheless entertaining, it seems Soleil Securities didn't feel the same way. In the afternoon, they initiated coverage on the Virgin stock with a "sell" rating. Ouch.
I was browsing Wikipedia today and found an interesting article on the Political Compass. Previously, I've found those types of tests are biased or not thorough enough to be accurate, but this one seems spot-on.
My result and the presumed results of world leaders are below. Perhaps you would also like to take the test? Let us know how you score!
My actual score was 0.25 (economic neutral) by -4.31 (socialist libertarian).
In next year's presidential election, I will not vote for Barack Obama. This is because he wants to raise capital gains taxes through the roof. All my income is capital gains, and it's already taxed at 35% (maximum), so I doubt anything else he has to say is going to change my mind on the matter.
Hillary has apparently said something about the possibility of raising capital gains taxes to "help the middle class", which is one of her big campaign themes. I can't find anything about her taxation intentions on her web site, but that declaration does not bode well for my vote, either.
I wonder about the other candidates, though? Aside from those two items about Obama and Hillary, I haven't heard much from the potential candidates about capital gains taxation. Have you?
I've spent a fair amount of time in cities, living, working, learning, hanging out, you name it. As diverse as the cultures, economics, and opportunities of cities across the world may be, however, they always share one thing in common: the street beggar.
This person comes in many forms and may even not be noticed as a beggar at first glance. The messy drunks sitting on dirty sidewalks while wearing torn clothing are probably the easiest to spot, but I've also been approached by a guy who made up a freestyle rap involving my name and occupation, a migratory South African with a story about being held at gunpoint and forced to give up all his cash, and a lady who thought her shoes might have been in Montana. Those odd things happened in Portland, Buenos Aires, and Seattle, respectively.
A New York City hot dog vendor. Image borrowed from hu:User:Totya at WikipediaA bit more than a month ago, Stephen Dubner wrote a blog entry about street charity over at The New York Times. To some friends of his, who include Mark Cuban (and whose succinct response is my favorite), he posed the following question.
You are walking down the street in New York City with $10 of disposable income in your pocket. You come to a corner with a hot dog vendor on one side and a beggar on the other. The beggar looks like he’s been drinking; the hot dog vendor looks like an upstanding citizen. How, if at all, do you distribute the $10 in your pocket, and why?
The article, titled Freakonomics Quorum: The Economics of Street Charity, is very interesting and definitely worth a read.
The situation of concern is far more academic than it is a practical treatment of reality (since both beggars and hot dog vendors are everywhere in New York City, for example), but I provide my answer to it here, nonetheless. Four years ago, I gave a $20 bill to a beggar to eliminate any future moral objection I might have to walking past a beggar without so much as a glance. Thus, I feel my "street charity" work is complete, and if, at any point during the remainder of my life, I feel the need to further assist the impoverished, uneducated, war-stricken, or neglected, I will write a large check and send it to an aid organization that operates in Africa. As such, if I were in the situation described by Dubner, I might buy a hot dog (with chili, cheese, and onions, thanks), but I would not give $10 or any portion thereof to the beggar.
Also, in a peculiar twist of fortune, it should be noted I found his article by searching for information on the nutrition of vendor-bought hot dogs.
I passed my Series 7 exam today with a score of 86.4% (216 correct out of 250), well above the 70% required to pass and a far cry from the 73% national average score. The two parts of the exam took about three hours to complete, only half the allotted six hours. I can't say as much for the guy sitting next to me, who started before I did and was still on the first part when I started my second part, after I took a 45 minute break. Ah, well, I guess these things come more easily to certain people!
Tired, mentally exhausted, and still upset about waking up before 6:00 AM today, I think it's time to play some video games and veg out. I start work at 9:15 Monday morning, so I have three days to do absolutely nothing. Fantastic.
My friend Aidan was in New York City yesterday for some interviews, so we met for dinner at Triomphe, which was fantastic. After spending a few hours there, Aidan wanted to check out Times Square, so we dodged tourists for a couple blocks and exchanged group photos with some other people standing in the middle of all the fuss. The upshot of this is the following picture, which, well, shines an interesting light on how people look in the glow of Times Square, I guess.
Click to enlarge
After visiting Times Square, we had a Scotch or two at St. Andrew's and parted ways. Two and a half hours mostly involving standing on train platforms later, I walked through my front door, took a couple Tylenol, and resigned myself to sleep. It was an exciting night, and it was really good to see Aidan again.
Luciano Pavarotti, one of only a few true opera legends of our time and, arguably, the most globally well-known artist of the past century, has passed away today. He died of kidney failure at his home after a year-long battle with pancreatic cancer. The BBC is covering the story.
I have been a fan of opera since the mid-to-late 1990s, after being exposed to a selection of operatic works during my time with my high school's Academic Decathlon team. I still have the CD that was provided as part of that program, and it remains one of my favorite compilations of opera music. In fact, a number of my friends have requested copies of it over the years because it provides such a varied range of musical styles and evokes the entire gamut of emotions.
The world will remember Pavarotti alongside other great contemporary artists like Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Frank Sinatra, and Andy Warhol. I'm sure the Italians will have an amazing memorial service for him, and it is truly unfortunate I will not be able to attend.
Study material on the beachLast Friday, I drove to Massachusetts to spend some time with family at a party on Sunday. Leaving New York City by way of Connecticut on a Friday afternoon is insane: the traffic was bumper-to-bumper on I-95 and CT-15 (I switched highways in Norfolk to see if one was better than the other) almost all the way to I-91. By the time I got to Massachusetts, the sun was beginning to set, and the traffic became much more favorable.
The party's attendees were relatives from the Massachusetts and New Hampshire area, including New Hampshire's most famous person. We had loads of fun, as always, and I've finally been roped into getting a kilt in the tartan of our beloved Clan MacLeod. Apparently, the best place to get a kilt is Atholl Brose, a store run by an old witch in west Boston. Exciting. I don't know when I'll get the chance to wear it, except, perhaps, to The New Hampshire Highland Games, which my sister and I would like to check out soon-ish. I won't have my kilt for this year's games, though, I'm afraid.
Yesterday, still on the island and enjoying the weather, I decided to spend some time studying for the Series 7 exam on the beach. The picture above shows my studying arrangements, complete with bright yellow beach chair overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. I spent two or three hours studying there before the chair started becoming uncomfortable, and I accomplished quite a lot.
Now, I'm back at home in New Jersey, with my cats whom my parents smuggled from Houston to Boston on Saturday. The return drive wasn't as bad as last Friday's drive, but I am compelled to point out using the Cross Bronx Expressway around 5 PM is a horrible idea. That said, I still managed to shave about 90 minutes off the time it took to get to my destination in Massachusetts.
I hope all you fine readers had a wonderful weekend and were able to experience at least some of the beautiful weather that appeared across most of the country on Sunday.
Saoirse, freshly awake, on a pillow on my couchTamara and her baby kitten spent some time here this week and last, and we had a great time hanging out and doing touristy stuff in Manhattan. We didn't have a great time dealing with a little car trouble, but when that was all fixed, some fantastic Cuban food at Victor's Cafe cured all that ailed us.
Tamara's kitten, Saoirse (SAIR-sha), is possibly the most active cat I've ever met. She runs around everywhere and constantly pines for a toy to be thrown her way. She's also super cute, as you can see in the picture above.
As for Manhattan, I gave Tamara the whirlwind eight-hour tour of touristy things over the course of two days. It included, in order, Times Square and the Theater District, upscale ethnic dining, subways, the World Trade Center, Wall Street, Battery Park with views of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, the South Street Seaport and Fulton Market, Grand Central Terminal, shopping on Fifth Avenue, Central Park, and Columbus Circle. Most of that happened in the evening hours, so we didn't get to any museums, but that leaves plenty of things to do the next time she visits the city! I also wanted to get to Chelsea and poke our heads into some art galleries, but we ran out of time in the end.
The lady and her cat are safely back at home in Texas now, so I'm relaxing by trying to determine how the current sub-prime lending mess is going to affect real estate mutual funds over the next few months. It really numbs the mind.
The results of the BBC UFO pollI was just browsing the BBC Science & Nature site, when I found a poll (near the bottom of the page) about whether people think UFO sightings are hoaxes, mistaken identities, or actual alien spacecraft. When I selected "mistaken identities" and pressed the vote button, I was surprised at what I saw!
Do 53.2% of people really think the unidentified objects in the sky are alien spacecraft? Seriously?
It's possible, albeit very unlikely, that we've had visitors from outer space. I'm certain there's life out there, perhaps even intelligent life on par with our own technological advancements, but would that life visit Earth and simply make a fly-by over London or New York or Roswell? I doubt it.
Until we have much better propulsion, habitation, and sensing capabilities, we're unlikely to see much of anything truly alien, save the odd bit of organic meteor remnants that happens to impact someone's house and tear a hole through the living room.
I'm up too late to write a long article on how we might go about finding extraterrestrial intelligence, so I won't. But, really, 53.2%?
For studying, what more could I ask of August weather than to be in the 50s and 60s with a bit of rain and a cool breeze?
As I mentioned previously, I'm studying for the Series 7 exam, which, upon passing, provides me with a license to be a stock broker, dealer, financial adviser, and a number of other things. In my current situation, it will allow me to trade on a large margin account.
So far, I've waded through the chapters on equities, debt (bonds), and options. It's not very exciting stuff to write here on my blog, so I really haven't been posting lately.
For those of you keeping track, I've completed 38.5% of the chapters in my study material, taken 24 of 104 quizzes (I'm repeating each of the 52 section quizzes a week after I take them the first time), and I have 10 chapter exams to go. After all that, there are a handful of practice exams, ranging widely in difficulty, that I will also take. My overall average score at the moment is 94.5%, and the Series 7 exam requires a mere 70% to pass.
I have until the end of the month to do this. No problem!
It would be nice if the weather held up, though.
Here I am, living in the Big Apple.
I spent most of last week involved in some aspect of moving here, thankfully with my dad's help. He flew up and stayed for nearly a week, assisting me with packing, driving, and everything else. The time constraints ended up being so tight that there's no way I could have done it without him in the end. Hooray for my dad!
The movers, on the other hand, were absolutely awful. They were slow, rude, and almost didn't take my patio furniture from Pittsburgh. It was only after I complained to their dispatcher that they (spent 15 minutes arguing with the dispatcher and) decided to disassemble the patio table for storage in the truck and then move the chairs in the truck's cab.
When the movers arrived here, a day late, they extorted unnecessary money (about $300) from me before they would even start moving my stuff from the truck. As it was Saturday, their dispatcher was out of the office, so I had no immediate recourse. Tomorrow, I will start the complaint process with a call to the moving company and move up the regulatory chain to the Better Business Bureau and even the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Apparently, "hostage freight" is a felony, and the FMCSA has authority over that sort of thing.
Enough bad news! Today, I sort of started my new "job". The enrollment process involves a number of forms, a cashier's check, a notarized document, and a fingerprint card, which I spent an hour or two getting settled while walking swiftly up and down countless blocks of Broadway in lower Manhattan. Can you believe I had to visit five banks before I found a notary? In Manhattan's financial district!
Now that the forms are complete and on their way to the company's main office in Phoenix, I get to spend the next four weeks studying for the Series 7 exam. Exciting.
If any of you feel like visiting any time in the next four weeks, I'm sure my study materials and I will appreciate the company!
I had a friend in high school, Blake, who always said you can fix anything with duct tape. I never doubted that claim, having solved numerous problems with it and knowing the single thing that probably kept Apollo 13 from turning into a spectacular meteor shower was that very same adhesive of the gods. Never start a big job without duct tape.
Tonight, I had my own fantastic experience with duct tape.
Last night, when I pulled the condensation tank out of the air conditioner in my bedroom to empty it, I broke the sensor that determines whether the tank is full. If the tank is full, the air conditioner stops working so it doesn't overflow, and in breaking the sensor, I set it permanently in that mode.
The sensor is actually a metal lever that's connected to a sort of plastic button, and I somehow bent that lever. For the next 15 minutes, I tried furiously to bend the lever back into its original shape, using my other air conditioner's lever as a guideline, but I didn't have any luck with that. I tried so hard, I even got blood all over the condensation tank.
Eventually, I went to sleep with no air conditioning but with my ceiling fan switched to high. It was warm and humid, but at least the air was circulating.
Tonight, I had another go at solving the lever problem. With a little creative engineering and about three square inches of duct tape, I was able to force the lever into a position where it's always pressing the plastic button! That's right, the air conditioner will now always think the tank is less than full, even if it's overflowing. I'll just have to remember to empty it frequently. No problem.
Once again, duct tape to the rescue.
Cell phone camera picture of the Empire State Building at dusk, from the top of the GE Building at Rockefeller CenterYesterday, I returned from a four-day visit to New York City, where I spent some time at the company for which I may be working, toured some museums with my dad, ate wonderful food, and watched the amazing Macy's Independence Day fireworks show.
Before I make a final decision about moving to the New York City area, I just have a few loose ends to tie up. But, if everything goes well, which it should, I'll be on my way in under three weeks.
Now, I just have to figure out where I'm going to live. For the first six months, I'm going to try to live inexpensively somewhere outside of Manhattan and make my daily commute to the financial district on the extensive rail network around the city.
There are so many choices for places to live, and they all have their peculiar commute times, prices, noise activity, and so forth. I'm finding it incredibly difficult to narrow them down. I imagine I'll be back in New York soon enough, spending a couple days looking at possible places to live. It's exciting, but it is truly a pain to organize this whole endeavor.
If any of you have suggestions that may help, I'd be glad to hear them!
I listed a printer for sale on craigslist about a week ago. It's nothing special, and it's been through graduate school twice now, so I'm offering it for pretty cheap. Its only two particularly good features are almost brand new toner and quick printing.
One person responded to the listing, just yesterday, and he was supposed to show up here at 6:00, 27 minutes ago. As you know, I value punctuality, and I'm not very patient.
I paced the length of my living room, dining room, and kitchen until about 6:12, when I decided to come upstairs and read the news. Now 28 minutes on, the guy hasn't called me or turned up at my door. He made a point to ask my phone number, so why doesn't he use it? Maybe that's just people these days.
Until this guy shows up or I get tired of waiting for him, I have to pay attention to the door, which is difficult to hear from my computer in the first place. Alas.
The Constant Gardener movie posterThe Constant Gardener is a movie that highlights the impact of the greed of Big Pharmaceuticals in desperate regions like Africa. It was in my Netflix queue mostly because it was classified as a "thriller", but it turned out to be not a thriller at all but a cry for attention. And a very good one, at that.
In the movie, a particular pharmaceutical company bundles experimental drugs into a treatment for tuberculosis, so if the African villagers want treatment for TB, they essentially sign away their lives into this drug test. The testing ends up killing loads of people, and the main character's wife, Tessa, begins a secret crusade against this horrible exploitation. She and her friends end up dead, presumably at the hands of the drug company.
Tessa tried to keep her dealings secret from her husband because she thought that would keep him safe, but after she died, he started digging into her files and contacts, and he, too, became entwined in the underground movement against the TB treatment. At the end of the movie, Tessa's noble efforts, combined with those of everyone else, only led to their deaths. They were noticed, but if the story were to continue, I'm certain they would have put only an insignificant dent into the plans of the drug giant.
The cynical part of me can imagine this sort of thing happening all the time, and when you add this to the terrible things that have gone on Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and practically everywhere else in sub-Saharan Africa recently, it's no wonder everything is a mess over there. And, it's not stopping any time soon.
What can we do about it? There's no end to the support we can give the good organizations, like the World Health Organization, Amnesty International, and Médecins Sans Frontières. At least check out their web sites. If something terrible is happening on the other side of the world, that doesn't mean it's not happening.
Cool weather and coffee at midnight... it makes me want to be in grad school again!
It feels wonderful to have a break from the heat. I'm sure all of you suffering through the 100-degree afternoons in Texas can appreciate that. You should come to Pittsburgh for a visit! But, hurry — there is only about a month remaining during which I can be your host. After that, I will be in Manhattan or Boston or D.C. or London or Geneva or... somewhere!
Today's customized Weather Underground forecast. Click for full PDFThe Weather Underground, a weather service possibly named after the leftist movement of the early 1970s, is one of my preferred web sites for obtaining weather information and forecasts. They have all kinds of weather-related services available, including marine and aviation weather and even weather blogs.
Today, I stumbled upon their Daily Forecast Flyer feature, which allows anyone to create a single-page flyer with the current local weather, regional and world weather, and the forecast. It seems like a really neat tool to use in a business, like a travel agency or a hotel, where customers may plan their activities based on weather forecasts. It also makes a pretty fun toy, as you can see in the flyer I linked at the top of this entry.
Go pretend you own a hotel in some exotic land and check it out!
Oh, and if you're going to be in the Boston area on June 15th (Father's Day weekend), you should definitely check out Beer Advocate's Night of the Lagers (beer list), which aims to "destroy the popular misconception that all lagers are yellow, fizzy, and boring."
Do you ever associate music with a particular time in your life? Perhaps you associate it with a specific event?
Sometimes, when I listen to music, I associate a song with an imaginary situation because it seems so very fitting.
Right now, I'm listening to the song Going, Going, Gone by Stars. It's on their album called Nightsongs.
Picture a quiet winter night in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Cars are parked along the street, and the sidewalks are covered with freshly fallen snow. The air is soft and quiet, clean houses line the view, and a single living room is lit by an antique lamp. Inside that living room is a woman in her mid-twenties, looking through a photo album of her mother's. Her mother passed away last week, and she has been spending every night since then mourning, imagining the life her mother lived and wishing for things that never had the chance to happen. She regrets the times she put her mother off for an engagement with friends or a late night at the office. But, what is there to do now but think about what could have been?
Watching her through the window, this song should be playing. "You're twenty-three, but how can that be? You're still hooked on cellophane, killing time with gin and lime. Each second numbs the pain," the song says, aptly channeling the poor girl's feelings. "I'm scared, but I'm OK," it continues.
Going, Going, Gone seems like such a perfect song for this situation.
Do you ever imagine situations for which a song would be appropriate?
And, then, the song quips, "All I see again is me everywhere."
Two years ago today, I wrote my first blog entry here. It was pretty terrible, but it was a rant about terrible service at a restaurant, so I guess the shoe fits.
Since then, this blog has matured. It has attracted many visitors and has been host to a number of intellectually stimulating conversations spanning the realms of food, travel, education, computers, and myriad other topics.
There have even been 746 hits to a useful tip I wrote that allows people to install iTunes, among other things, on Windows Vista. In fact, if you search for vbscript vista on the Microsoft Live Search utility, that particular blog entry comes first in the list.
Recently, I haven't been writing much because I don't have much to write. In the past week, I considered mentioning a ban on high-altitude football, Venezuela's latest slide toward communism, daredevil skiing, and soft drinks that damage DNA, but that would just be meta-news, and I don't really have strong opinions on any of those things. The daredevil skiing, though, sounds like a really fun way to break one's neck.
Thank you for your continuing visits and comments. I hope to have something with more depth to write soon.
Yesterday, I wrote an entry about my master's degree commencement ceremony and the extended weekend I spent with my family.
Last night, my sister did me the favor of uploading most of them to her personal web gallery. You can find them all in a special album there.
I don't normally post photos of myself here because that's a little weird, but I'm very proud to be able to call Carnegie Mellon University my alma mater, and the following eight images, probably the very best of the whole lot, show that pride precisely. Oh, and the second one shows Bill Cosby giving his keynote address!
Because Carnegie Mellon University only has one commencement per year, in May, I was not able to traditionally graduate when I finished my master's degree last December. I received the diploma in March, and that was all well and good, but this past Sunday's official commencement really made me proud to be a graduate of Carnegie Mellon.
My parents, sister, and aunt and uncle from Massachusetts turned up last Thursday to spend a long weekend here, graze through some of Pittsburgh's best restaurants, chat and drink wine, visit The Andy Warhol Museum, and attend my rainy-then-warm-and-sunny commencement. Yesterday, their flights all departed within about 20 minutes of each other.
The commencement was incredible, with bagpipes, formalities, and even Bill Cosby walking a Scottish Terrier up to the stage, where he would later receive an honorary doctorate and give a humorous but inspiring keynote address. We took a number of pictures after the ceremony, many of which are quite good. I'll post them here after my mom downloads them from her camera and sends them to me.
Excepting a problem my mom experienced with Continental Airlines food on her flight to Pittsburgh, we all enjoyed the diverse food we ate over the weekend. Following is a list of the restaurants where we dined, hopefully in roughly chronological order.
