Holiday Weekend

Posted on by grahams

Travelled back to NJ this weekend to spend the holiday with family and friends, and it was a surprisingly nice trip, including very little in the department of travel headaches. and I left her office in Cambridge around 2pm on Friday and landed in Hopatcong around 7pm.. We hit a bit of traffic, including the tail end of the friday rush hour on Route 80 in NJ, but other than that it wasn’t too bad. I did get busted for speeding in lousy CT (i hate that state), but one $244 fine later (and no points on my license) means it could be worse… It’s part of the gamble of speeding…. Anyway, we spent alot of time on the boat, swimming, and playing with the dogs… came up from the dirty south, which is good because I don’t get to see my littlest sister much anymore, and now that she’s moving into the dirtier south, that situation will probably only get worse. We also caught War of the Worlds sunday afternoon which was OK, even if it did remind me how dire the theatre situation is around my hometown.

We made it back into Boston in the early evening last night, and the trip was pretty painless… We made it in four hours, and didn’t really hit any traffic… We got back in town and didn’t do much of anything, as I was whiny and tired… Corinna worked on homework and went to the store to get dinner, and at 10:30p we went up on the roof to watch the Boston fireworks, which were great.

Edge of No Control

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Last night’s Meat Beat Manifesto show at the Paradise was fantastic. I honestly didn’t know what to expect from the show since I hadn’t seen them in a very long time (a decade plus?) and the past few albums have been mostly good but not great. But Jack and gang blew the doors of the place and everyone seemed to really be enjoying themselves… They played stuff from their whole backcatalog, but seemed to focus on the more upbeat stuff as opposed to the mellower stuff… It was a pretty intense 2+ hours…

Jon Whitney shot a bunch of video and did an interview with Jack for The Brainwashed Brain video segment “The Eye”, which will probably be up in a few weeks, and his friend Dan shot a whole bunch of stills of the show which came out great.

Retreat

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Land of the Dead was great, although as predicted the Sunday Night Film Club turnout was small (but I don’t really care). As is common in zombie flicks, the (living) characters had retreated to a fortified position, as have I. As the weather has gotten unbearably hot I have retreated to our air-conditioned bedroom. And my love for my Powerbook grows.

I have used command-line mailers for as long as I’ve had internet email. Originally, elm on my Unix UUCP account on Dan’s Domain (hoser@gen.ds.nj.us) through pine then mutt at CSH, I have been a loyal command-line user (although I did have a minor dalliance with Mail-It! while using BeOS). I played around with graphical mailers while convalescing, but had all kinds of trouble dealing with my 500+ mailboxes over IMAP, so I threw in the towel. I finally decided to move my mail archive off of CSH’s servers and onto my laptop, and have been using OSX’s Mail.app as my mailer for a few weeks now. So far, so good, and searching my mail with Spotlight is very, very nice. I tried Thunderbird back with my failed IMAP experiment, and while I fully support the Mozilla project, I think I’ll wait for it to get a bit of polish before I revisit it. Anyway, I had started to feel that the only reason I was sticking with CLI email was geek pride, and that I was just being stubborn. Seeing all the niceties you kids and your GUI mailers have had for god-knows how long now I think I was correct in that assessment.

Land of the Dead

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I have had fairly mixed results when picking horror films as the weekly selection for the Sunday Night Film Club, sometimes the turnout is good, but often it isn’t so good. So I’ve been avoiding picking horror films, but it was just too difficult to skip on Land of the Dead this week, so I threw caution to the wind and chose it anyway. We are seeing it tonight at 7:20pm, and I know , Audra, and myself will enjoy it, even if others don’t.

Around noon yesterday, and called us to ask if we wanted to go swimming at Adam’s parents’ house. After Corinna and I beat down our spontaneity avoidance circuitry, we said yes and asked them to pick us up (which had the combined effect of giving us 20 minutes to get ready as well as being able to drink and not worry about driving). We had a great time, along with the aforementioned people, we were joined by , Eric, Linda, Todd, and Katie O. We ended up swimming and some barbecue came to bear as well, and although we were originally planning on only sticking around until the early evening, we didn’t leave until 10pm.. It was a fantastic way to spend a ridiculously hot day. Unfortunately, this meant we missed the party at my coworker Brian’s house, but so it goes..

I have this project at work, which I had started working on a bit before I broke my leg. This project had a deadline of June 30th. This deadline was fixed, and couldn’t change even though I was out of commission for two months. What makes this worse is that nobody else worked on the project at all while I was gone. And I’m not talking about “no coding was done while I was gone”, I mean nobody worked on it.. I had questions out to program managers, image scientists, etc. when I left to go skiing that fateful weekend, and when I came back to work after convalescing nothing had changed, none of my questions had resolutions. It was pretty frustrating… Fast forward a month and change to today, and things are looking fairly OK, but mostly because I stopped waiting on those who were roadblocking me and just “got it done”. Of course, as soon as these individuals see the software I’m sure they are going to gripe and complain that it doesn’t meet the non-existent requirements. Fortunately for me, I’ve kept my boss in the loop of my frustration and have a nice set of “get me some fucking information” email to cover my ass.

Anyway, I employed the services of Tim, who has just returned to the company full-time after a co-op a year or so ago, to help me with some UI stuff just to get it done. We left friday with one outstanding configuration UI to finish, but it shouldn’t be a problem. In fact, I had one of those eureka moments after I got back from Adam’s last night, and quickly jotted down some notes that should help me thrash out this final bit in short time on Monday (after physical therapy, of course).

Small World

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A few years ago, and I went into Newton to see A Mighty Wind at the Newton cinema. On the way there, I look over and in the car next to me is Matt Kenslea, one of the sales guys from Rovia (where I used to work). We chit-chatted it up a bit at a stop light and then went on our merry way.

Last night, Corinna wanted a few supplies and accessories for her bicycle, so we went to a bike shop, and on the way back we stopped at the Bertucci’s in Newton. We were sitting around waiting for our service, as they were very busy, and I look up and see Matt Kenslea standing there getting a table for his family. I went up and talked to him for a few minutes, we updated each other on where we were working these days, and the usual “haven’t seen you in ages” conversation bits. I know Matt lives in Newton, but I don’t venture into Newton all that often, so it is surprising to have run into him again… I miss (most) everyone from Rovia….

It’s a Dodge Ram

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For quite some time I have been telling people the story of the “Dodge Ram”, but I have been unable to get pictures of it until yesterday. For the uninitiated, for a year or so now I have seen this Dodge Ram van parked on Western Ave. in Brighton. While seemingly an ordinary van in all other respects, this one has one unusual feature: The words “DODGE RAM” spelled out in block mailbox letter stickers on the back door of the van, where the factory plastic lettering would have been. I’m not certain why this individual felt the need to replace the (assumedly missing) Dodge lettering with the stickers, but it has cracked me up every single time I’ve seen it.

Picture of the van
Close-up of the lettering

Apply evenly.

Posted on by grahams

This weekend I had a little party at the family home in Hopatcong… , , Michelle, Sean and Kelly all descended on my parents house for a weekend of hanging out and chilling on the Party Barge Regency Edition. A good time was had by all, and I hope this can become a yearly event, as well as one that can be expanded a bit next year. The challenge is that the Barge can only handle about 13 people, and we need a designated driver, so I am a bit limited on the number of people that I can invite… But maybe I can work out a creative solution for that problem next year.

Made it back from NJ on Sunday in time to see Batman Begins with the Sunday Night Film Club. I really enjoyed the movie, even if parts of it were cheesy, but I think it’s time to space Katie Holmes. Fortunately, I believe she is self-destructing her career with this whole Tom Cruise beard fiasco. Unfortunately, I was really exhausted from the hectic weekend and long drive on Sunday and bailed on the post-movie festivities with the film club. I wisely asked Audra to pinch-hit as the host knowing that I might not make it back from NJ in time, so it wasn’t a dick move that I bailed on them.

My leg is slowly getting stronger… I can go longer without my cane, and I even treaded water with a lifejacket on this weekend. It’s pretty much sore all the time, but it is mostly muscle soreness that will (hopefully) go away once I get my strength built back up. I have another month before I have to visit the doctor again… I hit up the dentist yesterday, and even though I have been flossing regularly since before the new year, he still found two cavities.. One was above a crown, so I will have to ask if there is any special treatment that I should be giving that area, as it’s kinda hard to get to. The other is a tiny little cavity-let that he said hasn’t actually developed into a cavity yet, so I will get some PM on that.

I’m quite excited about the tag support added to LJ… While I don’t think I am going to go into the past to tag up my history of nearly 2,200 entries, I might tag up some of the highlights, and I will certainly tag up future entries. Which reminds me, this saturday will be the 5th anniversary of this journal.