Five hours of rain in 50-degree weather later, I’m done. Dinner at Terramia, dessert from Modern Pastry, late evening party with our friends. It doesn’t get any better.
Can’t sleep. Must blog. Graduate tomorrow.
Two years ago I was junking a promising career in IT consulting to put myself heinously in debt chasing an MBA. I was afraid I’d be losing my career momentum and my geek cred.
Today the jury is still out on the former, but I think I’ve answered the latter with a definitive yawp. Plus, thanks in part to this blog (which turns one year old, as a blog, next Tuesday), I have also regained my voice. Granted, I’m not writing poetry any more, but honestly some changes are for the better. 🙂 I think it’s been worth it.
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Silk officially rocks
Happy anniversary, M&D
Happy anniversary to my parents, who (as of yesterday) have been married for 31 years. As I continue in my own path through marriage, I realize just how impressive and difficult a feat this is.
(PS—yes, I’m a day late in blogging this (thanks to Esta for the prod), but I did make dinner for them last night.)
For those who are interested in KM…
Jim McGee is on fire today. What’s more impressive, and to his substantial credit as an instructor, is that a lot of it is the words of his students, esp. Courtney Mohr.
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Bit of a nasty Boston day
Oh well. The day started out ok, weather-wise, but quickly started misting, then raining, then blowing. Our first stop was to be the Boston Tea Party ship; had we checked ahead, we would have learned that a fire in the ticket booth closed the ship down some time ago.
We were luckier at the Museum of Fine Arts. I had never seen much of the museum’s exhibits of furniture, musical instruments, or china; now that I’m going to be a homeowner the furniture, especially, is fascinating. And lunch was good at Vox Populi. Now I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that the weather clears up for tomorrow.
Gray day
A good day for museums here. I’m taking my parents around Boston—my dad’s never been up to see us since we got here. Should be fun.
And suddenly your readers are no longer anonymous
Radio users used to be hidden behind the informative name “frontier.userland.com/xmlAggregator” in my referer logs. No longer! Now I know who’s reading this site! And some of them are darned interesting, like Nicholas Riley, whose blog is subtitled “thoughts from a computer science graduate student, medical student, and Cocoa programmer (this week).”
This alleviates an information asymmetry that’s existed since the beginning of writing…
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Mac OS X 10.1.5 is out
Apple released Mac OS X 10.1.5 yesterday; I left the install running last night while we went for drinks with our friend Niall and his parents, who are over from Ireland. I think the fact that I let the install run unattended says a lot about how much better Apple’s update process has gotten.
The update seems to have fixed a longstanding problem I had with connecting to my iDisk from home; apparently the “added support for connecting to iDisk using default DNS settings of AirPort” did the trick. This is really good. I used to have to dial up directly or go to the network at school to be able to connect to my iDisk. Now I can connect and publish software updates with no problem.
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The people in my neighborhood
Shout out to Mark Pilgrim for building a web service that visualizes relationships between web sites (via Google) quickly and succinctly. Going down my “neighborhood” list, I see a lot of familiar faces and quite a few I don’t recognize.
Question mark: has Google’s API obviated the need for data mining? It used to be that you needed very expensive algorithms and extensive data sets to predict these kinds of relationships (a la Amazon’s recommendation engine). Google has the data set now and has exposed the algorithm via “related sites.” Of course, the catch is your site has to be visible to Google to be able to play.
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Quicktime 6 Beta is out
After a long delay, the first public beta of Quicktime 6 is available for Mac and Windows. This version bakes in MPEG-4 support (the format based on Quicktime’s own standard) as will as JPEG 2000 and some other interesting sounding things like “skip protection.”
All of which I will test as soon as I finish downloading the damn thing; the installer is about 9 MB, and I’m sure that installing will download other components as well. Boy, am I going to be glad when we get broadband again.
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Goin’ house crazy
Busy day in Boston. Had to pick up my cap and gown this morning, and this afternooon all kinds of stuff broke loose on the house front, from scheduling movers here and in the state where our other belongings are living to finding time for the secondary inspectors to come out and look at the property.
You know, when I imagined what I would be doing the week before graduation, I pictured a lot of sleeping on the sofa and general goofing off. Heh. No rest for the wicked, I suppose.
Ah, the festa season starts…
Since I was in Seattle last summer, I missed most of the festas here in the North End. Today, though, the parade for the Madonna di Anzano passed right under our window. Marching bands are good for many reasons; one of them is reminding you that it’s almost 2:30 and you haven’t left the apartment yet, despite the fact that it’s a beautiful day. See you later.
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Site maintenance
No, I haven’t fixed the problem with text drifting off in IE/Windows (though I have some clues now and that might be next). I’ve been busy adding a new <link> tag to the site so that Radio and other aggregators can autodiscover my RSS feed. Now Dave has made life easier by writing an XML Coffee Mug macro for Manila so that I can take the hand-jammed code out of my template again. Thanks, Dave!
The joys of 56K
I’m currently blogging from SeaTac over a paid wireless connection—it’s been a week for blogging in new places. For those of you who frequent the North Satellite Terminal, there is an electrical outlet on the right hand side of the sports bar as you face the bartender, by the row of booths in the back. But tonight you’ll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers to use it. I’m charging my cell phone and once I finish my blogging and surfing, I’ll be watching Akira before my plane boards. Life is good.
Life is not quite as good at home. Lisa is trying to watch our new Harry Potter DVD, but her Win 95 laptop (yes, 95. She works for a company that, for a number of reasons, has never upgraded past that nostalgic number) does not have DVD player software. I was able to find the right places for her to go by looking at VersionTracker, but it looks like she will have to download DirectX (11 MB), then the DVD software (9 MB), all over her 56K modem.
God, I’m looking forward to having broadband when we get moved into the new place.