November 2008 « quasify

Grubsgiving

Thanksgiving, clearly the foodie-est of all the holidays. A brief look at recent food triumphs and failures around the quasi-verse.

Also (& most exciting) our first guest Deconstructing Dinner! This is Death to Mushrooms, with what one assumes is a custom soundtrack.

The dog seems to have survived her seven hours in the American Airlines gulag well. There’s no visible physical and minor psychological damage (we’ll be able to work through that in counseling). We got in late last night and (your bed vs my bed issues aside) have been getting along pretty well, sorting out our respective positions with regards to the new living situation. I say I’m the boss, she says someone who claims to be the boss should be able to shut off the damn heat. I’m also re-remembering why I like the forced mobility of having a puppy all over again. Today we walked a prospective running route down through Golden Gate Park, past a buffalo pen that eventually will provide material for a better cross-over post tagged both as charasmatic megafauna and urban wildlife. We also found a pretty cheap nine hole public golf course on the other side of the buffalo (key phrase with ambiguous interpretation: Alcohol must be purchased on premises). Then on to Ocean Beach where we ran into a two hundred person mob of what must have been a yappy dog meetup (none taller than six inches allowed?). My peoples are not so organized yet. All in all a good day #1. Tomorrow, The Presidio!

Gobble!

As is custom, an annual moment of gratitude. I’m thankful for my family – specifically my parents who with characteristic kindness were (without comment) willing to wake and take me to the airport at 4:30am. I’m thankful for my various sisters & their assorted hangers on. I’m uber-thankful to see the fuzzy one after a too-long break, thankful for getting to see both NYC & DC during the holiday. I’m thankful to have been able to see so many CNY & EP friends over the break (& Z!) and am immensely thankful to finally get my girl out to California (& to VC for rescuing both of us from SFO).

I’m also thankful for Team HB for a fun and motivating realsgiving race at the Gobble Gobble Gobble this morning, thankful the city of Somerville has fairly modest hills, thankful for the grandma rocking the double stroller who passed me on the homestretch. I have to say though – grandma, if I see you (or your ilk) at the Bay to Breakers, you’re going down.

Hagioestasticism

So you’re thinking about purchasing the new hot newness, the Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization? Most likely so since you’re itching to get SJH’s definitive treatment on hagiography (inferior background can be found here). Purchase through the handy link on the left and quasify will rake in 0.2% of your $17000 purchase price allowing us to retire on a boat somewhere photogenic and shark-infested. All purchasers are of course welcome to visit anytime, rum, coconuts and scuba gear will be supplied.

Fakesgiving Meat Lust

I love my dad’s shot here, and the possibilities suggested by the two relevant tags. Note: if this plate had had marshmallows or raisin bread on it, it would have already be devoured.

Northeast Corridor

A long, interesting, difficult day. Up stupid early at 3:30, went down to our sub-branch of the FDA to present some work stuff, then over to the really quite stunning Union Station to meet up with Z before heading back to Boston on the Acela Express. It’s a great way to travel, infinitely more comfortable than being shoehorned into an airplane with the added benefit (one hopes) of having a lesser chance of accidentally cratering in an unsuspecting neighborhood. I don’t think it’s as scenic the Pacific Surfliner but fun nonetheless. The parts of Baltimore and Philadelphia you can see from the Acela are really impoverished, blighted looking places – they make the brief swing through Wilmington, Delaware look like Dubai by comparison. Things got really interesting (or annoying, obnoxious, and surreal) after Providence when we ran into several extended periods of sitting around waiting for the Amtrak guys to restring some wires that were “ripped down”. My speculative journalism credentials let me definitively say that either too tall trucks were wreacking havoc or (green!) meth-heads were out looking for recyclables. Two plus hours later, having swapped the gorgeous Acela for the creakity Northeast Regional cattle cars, finally getting back in Boston was enough to make all still awake happy.

Somehow things just seem more right like this.

The stupid long transit day went something like this: bus (MUNI 38), bus (43), train (N-Judah), bus (29), bus (29, reverse direction), bus (28 to Daly City), train (BART to airport), train (AirTrain), airplane (SFO-JFK), bus (NYAS), walk from Grand Central to upper midtown, various escalators, chutes/ladders & firemen poles, walk back to Port Authority, long-haul bus (Peter Pan to South Station) and (finally) a car for the last ten miles to Burlington. It’s good to be here, good to be back with her, good to be stationary. I am not driving to Montreal tonight.

Pre-NYC

In yet another thing in a long series of mundanity that only matters to me, I managed to fix the busted DSLR tonight (perfect timing for my little trip to NYC* tomorrow). I was playing with the body with the lens off tonight, and could see that one of the bits of the shutter was sticking about 3/4 of the way down (which made perfect sense given how odd looking the exposures have been. I set the camera to a 30″ exposure, reached in and gently flicked the edge and it popped right up. Took a bunch of test shots, all seems to be well. The downside of which being it weakens my already underpowered case for a Canon 5D Mark II*.

In other photo-wise news, I’m looking forward to seeing CNHB’s shots from her gig at the SRI Charter Member’s meeting tonight (in conjunction with the GreenBuild Conference). I notice the GreenBuild guys are having a 5K race tomorrow to conclude their program – don’t they realize any optional burning of calories for fun, sport or celebration of life is not environmentally sound? My reductio ad absurdum-dar says let’s do the math showing that exercise by it’s very nature is not and cannot be a green activity. There’s a lotta fuel going into making those calories you’re burning up there racers. At least they’ve wisely opted not to loop over the Longfellow as any sudden motion or stiff breeze may well cause that to collapse into the Charles*.

(*not green)

Evilmorsel is dead, long live evilmorsel!

If you’re here looking for information on BVPDG there’s not really information here on that anymore (other than a couple of old open screen posts). Your best bet for current information regarding the new series of meetings is on their meetup page. Apparently there’s a meeting tonight.

I’ve missed you most of all, Crazy Eyes.

What’s Old is New

Dragging up more good stuff as I work my way through the EP archives. From 2005, this is The Occasion. They’ve long since broken up and moved on to new projects.

WMBR 2008

In my sleep-addle-ness time-zone-delayed existence I completely missed the WMBR fundraiser this year. It’s still possible to pledge through the 19th (next Wednesday), and they’re pretty close to their goal so might as well push them over the edge. There’s a bunch of crap to pick from but I like this BOC shirt from twink the best. May we all bleed Down With 8 rainbows!

Also, we’re playing around with a bit of an echoplanar redesign/repurposing. Check back or grab that feed.

B-A-B-Y spells BABY

It’s come to my attention that I screwed up the track order, album art and mix name for Baby Baby Baby. Apologies!

Ill-iteration

I was amused anyway. To prepare for a successful poster presentation, it’s best practice to conserve starting letters if at all possible. Artificial Auto-Associative Annealing Algorithms Adiabatically Approximate Asynchronous Attractors Along Arbitrary Algebraic Axestime, indeed.

*And yeah, alliteration. But this is ill dawg.

Some bling for the Gobble Gobble Gobble

It’s no San Antonio Rock ‘n’ Roll* half-marathon, but the Somerville Road Runners are putting on their 12th annual Thanksgiving Day road race in two plus weeks. The finish line (and post-race debriefing) is at The Burren, exactly what one needs prior to an extended weekend of extended family extended togetherness. It looks like the course goes up from Davis Square and turns at Broadway and Medford, just skirting Winter Hill. Close enough for promotional purposes at any rate. Oh, and yeah – I got new kicks, from Zappos. Rock on.

*Not to be pedantic, but I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking this should spelled be Rock ‘n Roll, Rock n’ Roll or even be concatenated to RockNRoll – anything other than the overly grammatically aware double single apostrophied abomination Rock ‘n’ Roll.

I want to work where a wolf would be welcome.

Excerpts from the excerpt (e²) of Mark Rowlands’ new book, The Philosopher and The Wolf, from the The Telegraph.

On our runs together, I realised something both humbling and profound: I was in the presence of a creature that was, in most important respects, unquestionably, demonstrably, irredeemably and categorically superior to me. This was a watershed moment in my life. I can’t ever remember feeling this way in the presence of a human being. But now I realised that I wanted to be less like me and more like Brenin.

Continue reading I want to work where a wolf would be welcome.

Intersections!

Totally psyched. We’ve finally finished porting the rest of CNHB’s photos over to the hevelonian reboot and in the process have been exploring the enhanced options of our tagging system. Why does this matter? As of right now we’re rocking 1226 posts & 662 different tags, meaning if you’re interested in becoming the world’s foremost expert in a topic we specialize in (say, the Boston Marathon), you’d have to deal with an obscenely large number of posts on that topic, sorted by recency. So it can be helpful to use more complicated tagging calls to drill down to what you’re specifically interested in.

To get photos from one person, we’re use categories. Here are my mother’s, father’s, etc.

We can look at tags just within a person’s shots. For instance, CNHB’s shots of maija.

We can require two tags to present. For example, both SMHB and Maija.

How about two tags (like above) but from a specific person? Say, CNHB’s shots of SMHB in the rain?

Point being, this can quickly get pretty random (Maija in the snow at sunset in Allston?). Fun tymes.

Laser Pointer Thursday!

If the flickr devs can have their Kitten Tuesday then I can similarly appeal to the basest kitten-lust instinct of the interducts and have us some Laser Pointer Thursdays…

More LPT in the new Chloe set. And the rest of the OPP.

The scene from Grant Park

I had a long-ago rowing coach who said celebrations of any win had to stop at twenty-four hours. After that, our (obvious) greatness was not to be mentioned again. We’re getting close to the end of that window, when the euphoria stops and the hard work of governance starts. But until tonight, here’s something from KKV. She (who never ceased to amuse me by adopting the surrogate middle name Hussein some months ago) was down at Grant Park last night. Be forewarned – there is a non-trivial amount of whooping and a will.i.am overdub (but thankfully no holograms).