You know you’ve been living in a place for awhile…

Posted on by grahams

…when the number of times you run into people you know begins to skyrocket. The past few weeks, Corinna and I have either separately or together run into people we know either through work or the film club… This past weekend we were at Six Flags New England, which is 80-ish miles away from Boston, and we ran into two film club members who were there on a date. The odds of that are pretty crazy, especially given how packed the park was. I normally reserve trips to amusement parks for mildly overcast or even rainy days, but the season was winding down and we had to use the discount tickets Corinna got from Harvard, so we pulled the trigger and went on a Saturday. The park was so packed. The shortest wait was for the Scrambler, but pretty much everything else was a 45-60 minute wait or more. It’s really an unpleasant experience waiting on line that long. One of the best parts of the trip, though, was waiting on line for Superman for 60 minutes, getting in the first car due to the kindness of strangers (who wanted to ride with their friends), and after our ride, the ride broke and we were stuck waiting for maintenance to get out of the coaster.. They blamed it on the temperature change, and had it going in about 15 minutes, but I was so glad that it waited to act up until AFTER our ride. If not for those strangers, we would have been waiting to go and probably nervous about flying off into the river or something

Rewinding a little, last Friday a bunch of us got together down at Fanueil Hall for ‘s birthday. Drinks and food were to be had, but Corinna and I couldn’t stay out all that late due to our Saturday plans. It was great seeing everyone, as always, and we even had a special guest! As of September 1st, I was able to count the number of times I had seen since he moved to Boston on one finger. And that one time was for 5 minutes. But with the Welcome Back party as well as Matt’s birthday extravaganza, that number has increased by leaps and bounds! Rumors are that he will be at Girard’s Wii party next month as well!

Sunday was delicious brunch at ‘s abode, which was awesome. After the brunch wound down, I headed over to the Kendall for my own little double-feature. I caught American Hardcore which was a documentary covering the hardcore punk scene of the early-mid 80s. It was a bit frenetic, which can be expected given the subject matter, but it was great. After that, I met up with the film club to see The Last King of Scotland, which I really wanted to be much better than it was. When I left the theater I was pretty strongly against the flick, but after I settled down a bit I realized that it wasn’t terrible, but it just could have been so much better.

OMG beautiful weekend FTW

Posted on by grahams

What an awesome weekend in every respect! Friday night had some friends over to watch the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica as well as the Webisodes (worst. name. ever.) , , and Audra all came over for snacks, pizza, and drinks. The webisodes were OK, but definitely not up to par. The premiere was good, although it could have been tightened up, as some of the plot points were a little weak. But it definitely set up for an AWESOME season, imho.

Saturday morning, Chuck arrived from NJ for a weekend visit. We parked his car over at Alewife and headed out to Kelly’s Roast Beef for lunch. We did all kinds of things this weekend, including heading out to the MFA, Summer Shack, flew (and not crashing) my helicopter, saw “The Departed” (was amazingly awesome), and a bunch of other stuff. He left yesterday afternoon and got home safely without any trouble. Totally awesome.

Corinna and I watched Four Brothers last night, which was a steaming pile of crap. I expected an enjoyably trashy flick, but it was just terrible. There were about 3 minutes where I actually enjoyed watching it.

Dapper

Posted on by grahams

I used Dapper to create something which the world has needed for quite some time.. An RSS feed for The Digital Bits. Dapper seems like a really cool tool, although it took me a little while to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing with it.. I’m really curious, though, to see if it continues to work over the next few weeks… I’ve used a few scrapers before trying to get a feed for the Bits before, but they always break eventually (or right away).

I don’t think I’m really exploiting the power of Dapper, yet, though. It seems it is more intended for scraping sites for crazier “mash-ups”, but for now this is all I needed.

Props to Jordan!

Posted on by grahams

Indeed, the organizers of Yahoo Hack Day said participants weren’t even supposed to decide before they arrived what their hack project was going to be.

That clearly didn’t happen. A number of Hack Day participants used the opportunity to strut their existing Web sites (“flipmeat,” in the lexicon of the current Web 2.0 business bubble) in front of potential Yahoo acquirers.

[…]

Then, in the middle of things, a programmer named Jordan Sissel stepped on stage. For his hack, Mr. Sissel said, he figured out how to store large files — pictures, MP3s, even whole computer programs — on Yahoo’s Del.icio.us Web site.

Read the full article.

I am a Genius

Posted on by grahams

This may be considered a spoiler, but really I’m dissecting something that happens in the first 10 seconds of last night’s episode of Lost, and it has nothing to do with the overall plot of the episode, so read it at your discretion.

I was watching Lost last night, and at the beginning a new character pulls out a CD and puts it in the CD player. I saw the cover artwork and identified it as Talking Heads “Speaking in Tongues”, but when the CD started playing, it was Petula Clark. A look over at Lostpedia, however, confirms that other people agree with me..

I also noticed that it was a DualDisc, which is a pretty recent technology, and the Heads’ catalog was recently released on DualDisc. Someone over at the ‘pedia, however, said it was a recent Son Volt disc, and I defer to their geekiness. Regardless, both slip-ups seem too egregious, and must have been intentional… What they mean, however, I don’t know.

Even if the terrorists don’t win, we still fuck it up

Posted on by grahams

Last weekend and I headed down to NJ… I was going to Wired NextFest to give a little support to , who was there representing Ensemble Robot. Corinna planned on heading into Manhattan with me so she could visit the NYPL as well as her college roommate and family. Friday night we drove down after work, me driving the whole way, Corinna watching 5 episodes of BSG as part of her massive catch-up effort. I made her watch the 4 hour miniseries the previous weekend, and in 8 days she made it through all of Season 1 and 2. We are going to have some people over this Friday to watch the terribly-named Webisodes as well as the Season 3 premiere. She’s an fracking junkie now.

Saturday, we parked in Hoboken and took the PATH up to 33rd. We grabbed a slice of mediocre pizza (Presto) and split up. I headed over to the Javits Center.. To be honest, NextFest was kind of a bummer.. There were some interesting things, but it really didn’t grab me… After seeing Gib’s panel discussion, I headed over to meet up with Corinna over at Sara & Dave’s place. They live down near Battery Park, so I took the opportunity to head over to the World Trade Center for the first time since 2001. It was really tough for me; I bounced back and forth between sadness and anger. I can’t believe it’s still a fucking hole in the ground. WTC7 has been completely rebuilt, but the crater looks like it hasn’t changed in ages.. I moped my way over to Sara & Dave’s, which gave me time to bounce back, and we hung out with those guys all night, eating some Indian food from Baluchi’s and catching up. We made it back to Hopatcong around 11am, and I passed out pretty quickly.

Sunday we hung out a bit for hitting the road.. Corinna plowed through another 5 episodes… She skipped out on the film club, but I headed over to Harvard Square to catch The Science of Sleep. It was enjoyable, but not great… I think Gael Garcia Bernal is overrated, and kind of annoys me, to be honest..