Fortunately, I’m not taking a road trip tomorrow.
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When I was out in California a few weeks back Valerie played this Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros track for me after our skyline hike. In the time since, I bought the album *I am not responsible for brain damage resulting from permanent adhesion to your neurons. I was most of the way through a not very good day when I read this piece from my dad. The second half left me crying, but provided some needed perspective. Anyway, it might not matter to you, but it does to me. You can read more of his writings here.
We were playing around with my little GoPro HD camera this weekend. For this video we took one shot every 10 seconds. Unfortunately the battery only lasted three hours or so so the video doesn’t quite reach the summit.  I’m having a difficult patch in my relationship with my car this summer. Some backstory- #1: In the middle of 48 hours this year (way back on May 1st), my driver’s side door handle stopped functioning, quite randomly, as Allison and I were on a trip to home depot for ingredients to build our scale o’ justice. Since then, I’ve either been relying on LZ to open the door for me from the passenger side, or I’ve had to slightly dislocate my left shoulder to reach from the rear door to pop the front door open. Needless to say it is interestingly risky when I’m forced to do this in traffic. #2: On the way back from my mom’s birthday party (July 17th), my muffler and/or every single pipe connected to it exploded. I’ve been deafening myself and neighbors ever since. #3: The day before Foss Fest (July 24th), some jackass broke off my driver’s side mirror in the brief hours I was home, between 1am and 6am. This, my dad helped me epoxy back on. Since I’m trying not to be totally irresponsible (and am road-tripping this weekend), I finally, finally took the car in to get issues #1 and #2 fixed this week. $392 dollars I don’t have later, badda bing, perfectly functioning car! So happy! As I walk over to inspect said beauty in the mechanic’s lot, my bag catches on the epoxied mirror and snap, I break it off again, my own self. The car was totally fixed and in my possession for approximately 30 seconds. Point being, I have more epoxy, and need someone with steady hands. This could be your big chance to accidentally glue yourself to my ride!
I’ll be back in California this weekend, attending a wedding of someone I was close to in high school but haven’t seen in a disturbingly large number of years. After that, I’m going to look around and find a highish looking point and then walk to the top of it. That’s my entire plan*. I’m being told that despite my great idea to fly into San Jose and thereby avoiding San Francisco ‘summer’ altogether, it’s projected to be cold and damp down in the Palo Alto area. But given that that information comes from an unreliable source long since spoiled by California perfection it will probably be utterly gorgeous all weekend. *Ok fine we’re also planning to visit Stanford. And play with miss chloe. And eat as many avocados as humanly possible. I’m not 40 or anything, but this clip pretty much sums up how I feel about my relationship with my least favorite joint. It took 14 months for me to hit 10K flickr views, now another ~21 to reach 100K. My estimate for reaching one million views has shifted from sometime in 2113 to mid 2028. Those two peaks? The first was N&L’s wedding, the second smaller one is Foss Fest. A couple really big events and I’ll end up shaving a decade off that goal.
Via UH, Taza is having some flooding problems. They sell their chocolate at Trader Joe’s, highly recommended both on a taste and ‘support Somerville businesses’ level. Also recommended? Checking out the flooding photos/videos from last weekend. Good thing we were all totally safe and dry up in Gloucester.  I successfully enrolled in the 2010 BAA half-marathon this morning, along with the rest of Team HB, plus special guest star LZ. The race is October 10th, a short twelve weeks from this Sunday. This will be my fourth (?) BAA half, and will meet the latter part of resolution #2. I’m going to need all 12 weeks, as my mileage has alternated between sad and horrific as of late. I last ‘ran’ the day before Nate’s wedding, where approximately two minutes in (just as I was telling KKV of my plan to register for this race) I stepped on the edge of a 5-inch curb and snapped the ever living hell out of the few remaining ligaments in my right ankle. Which would have been fun in and of itself, but for bonus thrills I came just about this close to doing a header into an automobile of the large, fast, oncoming type. What is the proper wedding protocol when a groomsman bites it hours before the rehearsal dinner? I would expect, at the least, some sort of tux discount for the funeral. Point being, the race is twelve weeks from Sunday, and as of today I’m still not really able to walk comfortably. Can this be done? With the psychic help of the bicoastal* runaholics support group, I’m a confident maybe. *Speaking of which, only six months later, the hevelonian tag line is no longer “bicoastal, bimodal, bionic”. Help me think of a better one or we’re gonna get stuck with the bouncing baby crap that’s up there now. **Double speaking of which, Team HardCortex are triathalon-ing it up out in California this weekend. The east-coasters are very psyched for this and are looking forward to hearing of their top ten finish (in the money baby!).
Playing with the new (to me) autostitch app while the critter pateintly waits for me to get going.
I have houseguests coming in from Chicago in a few hours, and have cleaned almost nothing in preparation for their arrival. WELCOME TO MY FILTH. Instead of fixing that situation I’m on here saying I’m excited they’re coming, excited about all the business that’s going to go down this weekend in Rhode Island, excited about the prospects for my boy who is getting married, and happy for the bride who is going to be getting a fairly awesome husband. This is wedding one of four for the summer, so my enthusiasm is high and my spirit still intact. Let’s revisit this assessment of mental well-being in mid-September, a prospective pre-post analysis of my pending psychic destruction. Ok! Time to change the sheets.
If you are a regular visitor to my small group of websites you might have noticed that hevelonian got a small facelift recently, corresponding to the release of wordpress 3.0. The most important change for my current purposes is the width of the photographs we’re now using has increased from 500px to 640px. A primary aesthetic reason for doing this is the influence of The Big Picture – this has really set the standard for photo blogs for me, and while our photos are nowhere near as good as those, the size things are presented definitely makes a difference in how viewers reflexively assign merit to them. So, four days ago I decided to update everything I could (within reason – we have 3300+ posts) to a width of 640. And today, magically, mercifully, flickr announced an upgrade. From now on two different “medium” sizes will be available, the prior 500px and the new wordpress standard 640. This is fantastic news. For one we won’t have to load the larger images and downsize them in browser with the width tag (for horizontal images, anyway). Also, given the changes to the way “blog this” works we may well get the 640 option direct to wordpress from within flickr, which is totally old people proof. So cheers to the new flickr layout and size option! The timing couldn’t have been more perfect.  I’m totally psyched that one of my photos was used by the Urban Land Institute in their March/April issue of their magazine, Urban Land (specifically, way over on page 92). It’s a cropped version of the photo on the right, of the new Sharpiro Cardiovascular Center at BWH (LEED Silver!), taken from the roof of the adjacent parking garage. The article uses it in context of discussing scarcity of space in the Longwood Medical Area. For Brigham, this building added some 440,000 square feet of clinical and administrative (but no research) space to our campus. The ULI piece isn’t really about BWH anyway, they’re more focused on the challenges of forthcoming expansions at MGH and BIDMS. What’s amusing to me is I didn’t even particularly like that photograph, and ended up using this for my photo of the day for November 10th. This second shot is of an iron worker on at the Yawkey Center for Cancer Care at DFCI (275,000 sq ft), opening next year. Much more interesting, dynamic. Anyway, if you have any photographs of Longwood Medical Area, please consider submitting them to my LMA pool on flickr. It only has three members and is a little sad. But who knows, submit away and someday uncredited & uncompensated ‘fame’ and ‘fortune’ could be yours too! My fuzzy one is getting to be an old lady, turning 11 today. Last year I posted a slideshow of her and some of her best links. This year I ask for your help in my world’s cutest husky spam-a-thon. Have a blog? Give her a birthday link. Don’t have a blog? Join her fan club and fave a few of her pics. Nothing would make her happier. Ok actually a ton of stuff would make her happier. Like meat. Or smelling the tree out front. Or belly rubs, snuffing under snow, dead squirrels, waking me up at 5am, etc. Today we took a birthday trip to the park looking for as many of those things as possible. It was grand.
This has pretty much been my life, every night, for weeks now.
Maybe they are summer subletters. Leave me to my hopeful delusions.  A long weekend of hard living north of 49°N, and I’m happy to be tiredly back in Boston. Les Francofolies was going on up in Montreal but we only saw a few snippets of that, more attention will be paid next year. This year, this trip was more to talk with some of my key boys about a man, his plan, their future and some somewhat scary speculation what’s coming down the pike for the rest of us. Per my tendencies, a few photos. All very reminiscent of a similarly excellent weekend back in 2007. Nate & I have been down this road before, but it’s been a while. These are from back in 2004.
 My second 50mm lens broke today (mega-suck), with a whimper, an anti-climatic, non-violent dishonorable death. I’m not willing to blame myself for this one (unlike last time, when it was most certainly my fault). The replacement lens (new as of this March!) always had a lot of give to it, and had recently been making a disturbing grinding noise during certain focusing scenarios. Anyway, the front element just came off in my bag – I picked up the camera and half the lens stayed behind. So I guess I’ll ship it back to Canon and see if they’re feeling generous. Considering the sum total number of dollars I’ve sent them over the years, I’d hope so. But. All this makes me think I need stricter camera care rules. No more putting the camera into my shoulder bag, camera case only. No more carrying that case unclipped, and time to replace the crumpler with something with a little more room. Also, I need to be getting some kind of insurance as I move towards better and better lenses (this, this is next). Here it is, the internet premiere of Echoplanar’s entry into the 2010 48 Hour Film Festival, Boston, our 7th consecutive year. It took less than a month to get this posted after the Kendall screening, which you’ll have to admit is sort of a breakneck pace for us. Try not to get your expectations of awesomeness in check – we didn’t win anything in the audience or best of voting. But still, there’s a lot of fun to be had in the process, and I think it turned out pretty well overall. Thanks to everyone who helped or hung out! |
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and have been abusing it heavily, to such an extent that I’ve been forbidden from singing this particular song in other people’s presence. That shouldn’t stop you though – you’ve not been banned, yet. Listen* learn and sing to the mighty irritation of the ones you love. 
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