Reunion friends met

estaminet, greenehouse, and me

I could probably continue to go blow by blow through the reunion weekend, but I thought focusing on some highlights would be more memorable and appropriate. And, as always, the highlights of any reunion are the people. I’ll save the music folk for another post, as this one will be lengthy enough without them.

The first night’s conversation with Scott and Susan Barker was an early highlight. I don’t think that, ten years ago, I knew Scott would be back at the University teaching, but I certainly knew he was destined for great things. The fact that Susan thought he was a good guy is definitely proof of that. —Friday night was the Barkers’ tenth wedding anniversary as well, they told us over a plate of Big Jim’s Barbecue. I asked them whether the tenth was traditionally the Pork anniversary. I don’t think they appreciated my joke…

We spent some time talking with Dan Herzfeld and his beautiful fiancee, who clearly outclasses all of us and with whom Dan is appropriately smitten. We saw Dan after Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball lecture, during which he handicapped the presidential race. He’s a powerful speaker, but at the end I had to agree with the guy on the Lawn who said, “The bottom line according to Sabato is that it will be a close race, unless it’s a blow-out.”

Saturday afternoon I bumped into Doug Acton and his wife and new baby. Doug has been busy in the military-industrial complex, primarily on the IT side. He was one of two physics classmates I ran into over the weekend; the other, Patrick Manigault, had finished his Ph.D. only to decide it was time to do a career change. He’s now in consulting. (Sound familiar?) At the same reception I ran into Carrie Smith, who was a year ahead of us and also went to the same high school (and middle school) as I. She and her husband appear to be doing well.

On Sunday we breakfasted with Greg Greene and Esta, who drove up from Richmond. The morning was a little comical, as we started out planning to go to Duner’s for brunch only to learn from the helpful lady at our B&B that it no longer did brunch. We then tried the Biltmore and other Corner restaurants, only to find they didn’t open until 11. This left us with the Virginian, about which Bernie Fallon (who was unable to attend the reunion due to work) always said, “Who eats there? You never see anyone go in or leave. Parents don’t eat there, faculty don’t eat there… who eats there?” Well, Bernie, apparently the answer is: people who want Sunday brunch before 11 am.

Afterwards we stopped at the Brown College (née Monroe Hill) reunion brunch, where we saw Marc and Diane Leipzig and their little baby. We also said hello to Carl Trindle, who is still in residence at Monroe Hill (he jokingly calls it his “sinecure”—certainly given his contributions and continued work it’s much more significant than that).

Carl Geisler told me that he thought later reunions, when everyone’s kids were grown and life was more certain, were better. I disagree. The best reunions are ones where the years melt away and you’re speaking with the same people you studied, ate, drank, laughed, and lived with. By any standard this counts.

Day one evening: Friends and momentous occasions

Written at 2:12 pm Pacific time on Saturday, June 5: After a brief nap on Friday, we made our way to an informal barbecue dinner for my class. Since the rain was still coming down in sheets, we had to navigate our way to the Aquatic and Fitness Center, where we eventually found ourselves and met up with Don Webb, fellow Glee Club alum Scott Barker and his wife Susan, Lara Dalch, Steve Eslami, and a bunch of other folks. After eating and catching up on old times for a while, Don, Lisa and I drove back over to downtown where we found our way to the Court Square Tavern.

Don and I had joked for years about the tavern that we would make it our home away from home. We had passed many good nights there—with Scott Norris and John McLaughlin after their return from their post graduation trip to Europe; with John Navarrete and others watching Nav try his first hefeweisen and blurt, “It tastes like sweat socks!”; and with other Glee Club friends, including Jon Vick, who would always start the evening with a Newcastle Brown Ale.

We found a seat in the small booth on the upper level beneath the specials chalkboard (where Nav had sat). In Vick’s honor, we started with Newcastle and proceeded to some serious reminiscing. And we continued to reminisce into the wee hours of the morning.

Day one: High moderne to 18th century revival

Written at 5:54 am Pacific time on Saturday, June 5: We landed at Dulles a few minutes before 7 am yesterday morning. After pausing for a Starbucks fix in the terminal, we started looking around for the mobile lounges. —A moment here. I don’t think I appreciated the quintessential weirdness of Dulles while I was flying from it as a consultant, but man. Those mobile lounges. The big ol’ flying wing. You just know Eero Saarinen was hanging out with Austin Powers in the shagadelic sixties when he designed the place. On the plus side, riding in those lounges you get an unparalleled view of the airport’s real activity, which as Lisa put it appears to consist of very large slow moving machines trying to run into each other.

We got out of Dulles and navigated reasonably successfully back out into the suburbs. We wanted a proper breakfast and decided to head back to old haunts, so we made for McLean and got full breakfasts at La Madeleine, the local chain farmhouse-French restaurant. Then we realized we hadn’t packed for a weekend of rain, so we napped half an hour in the car to wait for Nordstrom’s to open so Lisa could go in and buy some more rain-appropriate shoes. Ah, the joys of travel.

We eventually made it to Charlottesville and checked in to the Inn at Court Square, which if anything actually excels its appearance on its website. Our room is furnished with antiques and looks out onto a park, and was gorgeous even in totally pouring rain. (Oh yes. So much for beautiful pictures of the Grounds.) We grabbed a late lunch at Michael’s Bistro and killed time until the first event, the class dinner, at which we met up with a few old friends. More on that in a moment.

Made it in

I was worried about adjusting to the Charlottesville weather. After all, Charlottesville is in a mid-Atlantic state where temperatures and humidity typically run high, and every summer I’ve experienced since 2001 has been in temperate, dry Seattle.

The adjustment isn’t as hard as I feared, as it’s raining here, and likely will all weekend. Sigh. Bang goes my hope of getting really excellent pictures of Grounds.

Avoiding search engine confusion with charset

Following up on an old thread, the reason that MSN Search thought my pages were in Chinese and other languages rather than English was a problem with the charset specified for my pages. My site used to specify its charset as Macintosh: <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=macintosh”>. Unfortunately, MSN’s search crawler doesn’t understand this charset. So as an experiment I tried changing the charset to UTF-8 on my front page, while leaving the deep pages untouched. Now an MSN search on my name no longer brings up garbage characters.

That’s the good news. The bad is that re-rendering my whole site to fix the charset on all the deep pages will be a royal pain.

Coolpix and iPhoto

Quick follow-up to yesterday’s post about my first experiences with my Nikon CoolPix 2200. Some of the image questions I had—the small resolution (800×600 vs. 1280×1024) in particular, and some of the extra image artifacts on street signs—were caused when I upstreamed my photos to the web from iPhoto. The native resolution of the images was much higher. However, I still saw light balance problems on some photos (to fix, I’ll need to pay more attention to light levels and exposure settings when I shoot) and moiré effects on the shot of the clock tower. Apparently there’s not much I can do about that given the camera’s resolution; I’ll just need to be aware of it.

I forgot to mention one bennie of this camera: it’s really small, light, and portable. Almost as light as my cell phone, a little bulkier in a pants pocket but really not too bad.

Nikon Coolpix 2200: first impressions

inscription on paulist center and chapel by boston common

Following up on the thread about the camera purchase, here are my notes about my first pictures from the Nikon Coolpix 2200. The sample I’m using is the album I took in Boston on Saturday, May 29.

First point: The built-in memory in the camera is good for about 36 or 37 photos using the default settings. After a few rounds of importing and deleting photos (interestingly, iPhoto can’t erase imported photos from the camera’s built in memory as it can from removable media), I bit the bullet and picked up a 128MB SecureDigital card. The capacity looks like about 225 or so images—adequate for a weekend’s shooting. At some point I may consider this handy little iPod accessory to provide additional storage. Battery life is OK—the camera is still going after about 100 photos on the first set of AAs.

I wonder now whether I had the settings correct for these photos. None of the photos in the album is larger than 800 x 600, but the camera is supposed to support up to 1600 x 1200. This could also be an artefact of iPhoto—I’m not near my PowerBook, so I don’t have a way to check the original image sizes.

In general—and again this may be an artefact of the process for sending the photos up to the photo album—the images don’t appear to be very sharp. Some blurring and color fringing around diagonal sharp edges is visible, for instance in this picture of the North End after the removal of the elevated Central Artery (look at the two street signs), or this close-up of the tower of Park Street Church. Some images also appear a little dark even though they’re taken in broad daylight, for instance in this shot a lot of detail in the buildings to the left is not visible.

The stronger point, I think, is that the camera isn’t going to make me a better photographer by itself. Hopefully I’m learning a few things by looking critically at my results and will improve by taking more time with each photo and considering issues of lighting, etc. Maybe even a short course—who knows? I just know it will be a long time before I’m in the league of some of the better photobloggers out there.

Incidentally, the cryptic fragment of text in the image above is from an inscription above the door of the Paulist Chapel on Park Street across from Boston Common. The full inscription, if not the full facade, can be seen at the Paulist Center Community Boston web site.

Boycotting Virginia?

Hooblogger Dave Tepper writes, “Overlawyered.com provides the most cogent analysis I’ve seen yet of Virginia’s latest anti-gay law. Simply a vile, disgusting law all around. I’m still encouraging people, including a gay friend of mine who’s considering going to grad school at U.Va., to boycott the state.”

While it isn’t exactly a surprise that Virginia isn’t progressive on this issue, the specific implications of Virginia’s holding as null and void civil unions and “partnership contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage” are pretty alarming. I guess, living in blue states for the last four years, I had forgotten how the “mainstream” feels about issues like this.

Issues like basic human decency. And good models of marriage. My home state, lest we forget, was also home to a particularly keen model of marital bliss.

And, of course, to my 10th college reunion this weekend. I’ll be interested to take the pulse of other alums on this one. My feeling is that many of my friends will hold my position, but some of Greg’s friends from the Jefferson Society will try to play the usual gay-bashing cards.

What’s for dinner

I missed my customary “bachelor chow” post the last few days. Normally when Lisa is out I end up cooking stuff that she would never eat if she were there; this time was no exception, although she was only out two days.

Last weekend as we cooked with Charlie and Carie we grilled vegetables, including fennel, and I was reminded of how little I do with vegetables these days. I resolved to address that. So Monday I spent working on my first ever ratatouille.

I learned to eat this stuff in Norfolk in a little pub whose name I’ve forgotten; the beer was always varied and good (I had my first Harpoon IPA there) and the cuisine was mid-90s American bistro. I think ratatouille was the side dish for every other entrée, and I loved the stuff: the eggplant’s slight bitterness countered by the sharp edge of the tomato, the overall mouth feel full without being heavy; perfect vegetarian comfort food, in fact.

My version was pretty good, and tasted good cold (a mark that I had the recipe pretty close). I had bought ingredients without looking at a recipe, so ended up with a yellow squash instead of the customary bell peppers, and with no basil. I had the right mouthfeel, though, and by swapping these ingredients around I think I could arrive at a pretty good recipe—and a surprisingly easy one. I ate the ratatouille with a ribeye that I coated with coarse-ground black pepper and seared in a cast iron skillet until just past rare.

Yesterday was a working day, so I couldn’t linger as long in the kitchen. I opted for a single ingredient dinner of broccoli rapini with garlic and cheese. I trimmed the tough stems from the rapini, blanched it in salted water, drained it, dunked it in cold water to stop it from cooking, and drained it again. Then I sliced garlic thin and cooked it in olive oil over moderately high heat, stirred the drained rapini in, and tossed it until it was heated through. I grated fresh pecorino over the rapini and ate it with a bratwurst that, to save time, I had just boiled. Good, simple, and Atkins-friendly.

Dead voice on vinyl 7″

I was thinking the other day about Elliott Smith again, how I really miss his music, and it got me to thinking. Sometime last year before he apparently killed himself, Elliott put a new 7 inch (45, for those not hip to the terminology) out on Suicide Squeeze, a label here in Seattle. I heard the song on KEXP one night and thought, Man, that sounds bleak. Anyway, in all the subsequent tragedy I forgot about the song.

Until last week, when it occurred to me to look for it. The album he was working on hasn’t been released, and the single isn’t available digitally. But it is available on vinyl still. So I ordered a copy of “Pretty (Ugly Before)” b/w “A Distorted Reality Is Now a Necessity to Be Free” from Suicide Squeeze. It arrived today and I put it on. It’s like a valentine from Elliott. Some songs, like “No Name No. 5,” that he recorded years before the incident sound a lot more suicidal and dangerous to my ears today than this last of his recordings. This one sounds energetic, but it sounds angry. And somehow that makes me feel better. Elliott didn’t go quietly. He went fighting.

Dog-friendly workplace

I think Seattle is more pet friendly than a lot of cities, and Microsoft carries that to the next level. This is, I think, the only place I’ve worked where I could bring two dogs in to my office, close the door, and get some serious work done and have no one raise an eyebrow.