Arrived

I made it to Lakewood, New Jersey about 3:15 this afternoon. The rest of the drive was uneventful, excluding all 359 miles of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which need a little work.

I have napped, had my face and hands licked by our excited dogs, and am drinking a Harpoon while I keep my eyes on various cooking things that are starting to smell good.

I talked before about some of the road toys that got me through the trip, but clearly the most important one was my Passat, which just came 3000 miles in four days and didn’t really break a sweat.

Now, dinner. Something not involving hamburgers, French fries, coffee, or carbonation added to soda syrup. (Carbonation in beer, on the other hand, is definitely in order.)

Open All Night

Bruce Springsteen
Nebraska
Columbia, 1982

Well, I had the carburetor, baby, cleaned and checked
with her line blown out she’s hummin’ like a turbojet
Propped her up in the backyard on concrete blocks
for a new clutch plate and a new set of shocks
Took her down to the carwash, check the plugs and points
Well, I’m goin’ out tonight. I’m gonna rock that joint

Early north Jersey industrial skyline
I’m a all-set cobra jet creepin’ through the nighttime
Gotta find a gas station, gotta find a payphone
this turnpike sure is spooky at night when you’re all alone
Gotta hit the gas, baby. I’m running late,
this New Jersey in the mornin’ like a lunar landscape

Now, the boss don’t dig me, so he put me on the nightshift
It’s an all night run to get back to where my baby lives
In the wee wee hours your mind gets hazy
radio relay towers, won’t you lead me to my baby?
Underneath the overpass, trooper hits his party light switch
Goodnight good luck one two power shift

I met Wanda when she was employed
behind the counter at route 60 Bob’s Big Boy
Fried Chicken on the front seat, she’s sittin’ in my lap
We’re wipin’ our fingers on a Texaco roadmap
I remember Wanda up on scrap metal hill
with them big brown eyes that make your heart stand still

Well, at five a.m., oil pressure’s sinkin’ fast
I make a pit stop, wipe the windshield, check the gas
Gotta call my baby on the telephone
Let her know that her daddy’s comin’ on home
Sit tight, little mama, I’m comin’ ’round
I got three more hours, but I’m coverin’ ground

Your eyes get itchy in the wee wee hours
sun’s just a red ball risin’ over them refinery towers
Radio’s jammed up with gospel stations
lost souls callin’ long distance salvation
Hey, mister deejay, woncha hear my last prayer
hey, ho, rock’n’roll, deliver me from nowhere

I could stay and go on to fame and fortune

Cleveland.com: American Idol holding auditions here Wednesday. Apparently about three-quarters of the people staying in this particular Best Western are waiting for the auditions tomorrow at Cleveland Browns stadium. Sure beats karaoke.

One more day’s driving and I get to see Lisa and the dogs again. Today I go from Cleveland through Pennsylvania on 80 and then across New Jersey to her family’s place in Lakewood. With any luck, there won’t be a repeat of yesterday’s traffic snarl around Chicago. Then again, it’s already raining, so who knows.

Neologism of the day: gootllysac

I do have to give a big thumbs down to the loop around Chicago. The first 1600 miles of this trip were like some kind of platonic ideal of driving, where people stayed on the right unless they were passing, roads were well maintained, and you got plenty of room from your fellow drivers. Fast forward to the approach to Chicago, where I encountered my first stay-in-the-left-lane-for-six-days drivers, my first come-up-after-everyone-else-has-merged-from-the-closing-left-lane-into-the-right-lane-and-cut-in-front-of-me driver, and my first signs of the impending jaw surgery I’ll need from the rough ride.

Wah, wah, wah. I know. And yet I think it says something that I didn’t have to dust off my invective until today. For example, a little phrase I’ve taken to short-cutting as “Gootllysac,” lest “Get out of the left lane, you selfish ass-clown” be too long or harsh to pronounce. Try it, you’ll like it.

(For more left-lane angst and uses of the word ass, check out this classic post from 2002, now with working link).

Still going

Nothing outlasts…the cross-country drive. I have this funny feeling that I will be too tired, for a very long time, to post any blow-by-blow details of this trip. Suffice it to say that 2350 miles after leaving the Seattle burbs, I’m sitting in another cheap hotel with free internet, this one outside the Cleveland airport. (All together: Cleveland rocks!)

Odd factoid: not every room in these Best Westerns actually has high-speed Internet, despite it being advertised as “free” on the sign outside. I had to change rooms tonight to get the high speed connection.

Oh, and one minor correction to Dave’s post from a few days ago: the final destination of this trip is Boston—but the map on the first day’s post shows my interim destination, my in-law’s place on the Jersey Shore, rather than Delaware (a reasonable guess given the highly imprecise map).

Hallucinating

I did get a chance to try out the iTalk (which I mistakenly called the iMic a few posts back) yesterday. It worked, mostly. I held the mic too close the first time and got lots of unlistenable too-loud audio. The second time was OK but I was incoherent. The third time? It didn’t record at all for some reason.

Which was too bad, as I was actually babbling something that would have classified as “seeing vapor trails.” (Technically the following could be considered a “spoiler.”) My babbling involved an elaborate reading of “Kill Bill” as an inverse Odyssey with the Bride as Penelope having to fight her way home to Odysseus, who is waiting for her with her child. Along the way she has many picturesque fights, including one with a cyclops. Finally the couple is reunited. And then Penelope kills Odysseus. (OK, so Ulysses it ain’t.)

Things that spoil roadtrip photos

infrastructure and mile marker, minnesota

  1. Auto-exposure cameras that can’t be easily tweaked to capture the subtle play of the setting sun’s rays on a mountainside.
  2. Poor aim.
  3. Bugs on the windshield.
  4. Attempting to take photos at 6:30 in the morning through the windshield while driving. (Don’t worry, I made sure no one else was on the road, on either side of the median.)

Rough cut of the photo album for the first two days is up; notes as I get a chance.

Quick update: In the Twin Cities

Since I wasn’t able to dial up from the hotel in Livingston, Montana last night, I thought I’d post a quick update before I try to find a bite to eat. I’m currently sitting in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the Best Western has free DSL. <flavorflav>Yeah boooy.</flavorflav>

For those of you playing along at home, I’ve come over 1600 miles in two days. Just two more to go… Hopefully I can post more later.

Getting ready

I’ve never driven across country before, and certainly never done it by myself. So I’ve spent a lot of time getting ready. I got the car checked out on Wednesday. Most of it is packed full to the gills, and I’m not sure my framed photos from my office (for instance) are going to make it intact across the country. But I start driving tomorrow either way.

Here’s the route, or as near as I can get it in all the different online map programs that I’ve messed with. Tomorrow’s goal is Livingston, Montana. I’m hoping to get as far as St. Paul on Day 2, but we’ll see.

My companions? My digital camera; Roadfood; more Triptiks and maps and AAA guides than I can possibly use; ten years worth of mix tapes; my iPod (newly loaded with the free audiobook version of the 9-11 Commission Executive Summary and a not-free audiobook version of the Benjamin Franklin biography, plus about 8.5 GB of other stuff); and a Griffin iMic voice recorder that I’ll probably start using somewhere in North Dakota, which is when I imagine I’ll start seeing vapor trails and really talking to myself in earnest.

Maybe some audioblogging will come out of this. Who knows? All I know is that from this perspective the open road isn’t seeming too simple.

Untold story: How I sold my house at my ten year reunion

Untold story #1 from the last two months: how we sold our house at my ten year reunion at the University of Virginia, 3000 miles away from home. While we were at the Court Square Tavern.

We had left Kirkland on a red-eye Thursday night, bound for Charlottesville knowing that our agent was going to be showing the house while we were gone and trying to forget about our house being on the market and just enjoy the reunion. After we met Don Webb and our other friends at dinner, relaxing and enjoying became a lot easier. I already wrote about our trip to Court Square Tavern that night. What I didn’t write was what happened after we got there.

After we had been there for about half an hour, Lisa’s phone rang. She excused herself to stand over by the door where she could hear better, and Don and I continued to catch up. Then Lisa came back to the table with an odd look on her face. “What’s up?” I asked.

“James [Raysbrook, our realtor] says someone wants to buy the house. But we have to sign the offer and fax it back by 9 pm Pacific time.”

I looked at the clock. It was currently 10:40 Eastern time. An hour and 20 minutes wasn’t going to be enough time to find a Kinkos, call James with the fax number, and fax the documents back and forth.

Then inspiration struck. Lisa asked the bartender whether James could send us a fax on the Court Square’s machine. Twenty minutes later we had the offer in our hands and were paying scant attention to our beers as we pored over the details with James on the cell. Twenty more minutes later and I beckoned to the bartender again.

“You’re probably wondering what we’re up to. Well, we’ve just signed the papers to sell our house in Seattle and need to borrow your machine one more time to fax them back, if that’s ok.”

The guy was very clearly amused as hell, and I could see him cataloging the story to retell tomorrow. But he never cracked a smile. He said, “Of course,” and led me back up the stairs to the business office, where we faxed the papers back.

Smooth as silk. I’ve decided: from now on, I sell all my houses at the Court Square Tavern.

Fire and faith and forgiveness

On Tuesday, Denbigh Presbyterian Church in Newport News, Virginia suffered its second arson attack of the summer. The responsible party torched an education wing, including burning decorations and banners made for Vacation Bible School.

And this was the second break-in and fire this summer at the church. On June 14, someone broke into the church office, set fire to the copying machine, and damaged items in the pastor’s study, including pictures of past ministers.

The Newport News police have arrested a 15-year-old male and charged him with the crime. (This article in the Daily Press, registration required, says he’s been charged with burglary, arson, destruction of property and petty larceny, and that he’s being questioned about the June incident.)

It’s hard for me to write about this dispassionately. I grew up in that church. I was baptized there and confirmed there. I sang in the choir. I went to Vacation Bible School there and Sunday School. Frankly, I find it really hard to forgive this one. I believe in forgiveness, but it’s hard to practice it when I’m so mad. I don’t understand what would drive someone to do this. Break in and look for food, sure. Break in just to break things?

I’ve never met the Reverend Deborah Dail, the current pastor of the church, but I am awed by her ability to forgive even this repeated attack.

As I find out more about what’s happened, including opportunities to help, I’ll post more.

Hitting the road

Unveiling time: I’m moving back to Boston. Starting Saturday, I’ll be doing a cross-country drive from the Seattle suburbs to the Boston suburbs (with a several day layover with my inlaws in New Jersey).

This has been in the works for a while, but for various reasons I didn’t think the time was appropriate to break the news. Now I’m packing up from my temporary digs; I got the car checked out; and I have my Triptik and my copy of Roadfood. I’m ready to go.

Returning to Boston is a little bit of a dream come true for Lisa and me, because it’s much closer to both our parents and my extended family, and because quite frankly we love the town. Plus we like Dunkin Donuts and heavy snow.

Finally, I have to point out the irony that I’m moving back to Boston just as Dave Winer has finished his stint at Harvard and is looking for a new gig elsewhere, since Dave moved to Boston just a few months after I left. I’m not stalking you, Dave, honest. I’m actually stalking David Weinberger. (Joke, folks. Laugh.)

Dinner at Bill’s

Jeff Maurone, rising fourth-year at Villanova, posts a nice, respectful summary of his intern reception at Bill Gates’ house. Very cool, Jeff.

It makes me wish Microsoft had been more visibly supportive of blogging culture when I interned there in the summer of 2001. I had the “intern BBQ at Bill’s” experience, and remember it fondly, but didn’t write anything at the time and so can’t remember any fun details. Except the “donut” of people wanting to talk to the world’s richest man. That definitely happened in 2001 as well.

Triangulating the conventions

Today I spent the evening reading the convention blog portals: ConventionBloggers.com, Politics @ Technorati, and Politics @ Feedster. Yep, there are three of them and they all launched this week.

To be fair, we’ve seen this before. Every participant in BloggerCon (including myself) was part of an aggregated RSS feed published by Feedster. And both TechEd and PDC, the Microsoft conferences for IT Pros and Developers, respectively, have had their own aggregated blog sites. The roots reach further back, to 24 Hours of Democracy, which in 1996 predated (most) blogs and any concept of XML content syndication, and to the late lamented my.netscape.com which pioneered RSS feeds in portal sites (O’Reilly’s Meerkat and the various iterations of UserLand’s Frontier-based aggregator, from Radio to Manila, must also get the nod in this context). The roots reach forward, too, to the blog portal on Microsoft.com, which I helped launch a few weeks ago and which aggregates blog content from people across the company, on a myriad of blogging platforms, and lets people slice and dice the content via keyword searches and content scoping.

But this week, with three sites launching independently that aggregated content about the same event, special-purpose aggregation sites could be said to reach critical mass. If triangulation in the blogosphere is the art of reading three or more sources who write about the same event from differing viewpoints to arrive at the truth, what do we call this? Hyper-triangulation?

Sometimes (with no disrespect to my colleagues at Microsoft, or our friends at Technorati and Feedster, and certainly no disrespect to the Bloggfatha) it seems that there is an evolution of programmer cred. First everyone had to write their own weblog software; next, everyone had to write their own aggregator client; now everyone has to write their own scalable aggregator portal.

But all snidery aside; the reason everyone writes an aggregator portal is the same reason that everyone wrote a weblog client: because it’s massively useful and in the best interests of everyone. Reading the convention blogs, one gets a feel of life on the FleetCenter floor that network TV may never again deliver. Because it’s too boring for live TV? Perhaps, but reading the blogs, one finds the pockets of excitement because everyone is talking about them: Barack Obama’s speech, Ted Kennedy’s damn-near-valedictory panegyric to the Massachusetts roots of the American Revolution, Ron Reagan’s apolitical call to revive stem cell research, and the pulpit pounding furor of the Reverend David Alston (former Vietnam boatmate of John Kerry). Plus photos and discussion of the Free Speech Zone.

And what does the Washington Post see fit to give column space to? The TV production values of the convention and Ben Affleck.