Category: Life. Don’t talk to me about life.

I’m a bike rider. I have 2 wonderful bikes – my Haluzak recumbent, and a Giant mountain / trail bike. I’m not one of those rabid riders who feel they must have top of the line equipment, lycra everything, and be emblazoned with screaming corporate colors like a mobile billboard. I ride because I enjoy it.
Today I rode into Somerville, as I am wont to do, to do some work at the Diesel Cafe, a wireless enabled coffee shop in Davis Square. This was my longest ride this summer, and not only did I break my record for a single days ride, it was also my first time riding in the city proper. Read on for some interesting observations.

Continue reading “Bicycling, weather, and traffic” →

As reported on Yahoo News, via Reuters:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Rodney Dangerfield, the goggle-eyed comic famed for his self-deprecating one-liners and signature phrase “I can’t get no respect,” died on Tuesday at age 82, his spokesman said.

A lot of folks didn’t like his style, but as a fan of the 80’s goofy movies, things like Caddyshack and Back to School were wonderful and really let Rodney shine. He’ll be missed.

So. this is interesting. Throw a big party, give everyone laptops, and make sure you have people who like to publish interesting things on a realtime basis. Is this what it’ll be like when ubiquitous computing becomes commonplace?

Folks are running around with various webcams, phone cams, and other goodies, here’s a couple interesting bits…
PJ Morr’s photoblog
Chris DiBona doing eeeevil things to some of the schwag
And the festivities continue.

“We’re so bleeding edge, when the Red Cross comes around asking? I have to pass. I ain’t got nothing for ’em.” – Greg Hughes (greghughes.net)

Made it! This is my first time in Lake Tahoe (in this case, I’m in South Tahoe, for those who know the area). What a fascinating place.
I do admit that going from Tampa, FL (Hot. Humid. Flat), to the Sierra Nevadas (Cool. Dry. Mountainy) was a bit drastic. Someone probably should have mentioned ot me that Lake Tahoe is at 6100ft, (and my hotel room is on the 11th floor, so I’m up around 6300ft). Nothing like running up the escalator and having to stop and gasp for 2 minutes before continuing.
On the important front, all my gear got here in one piece, it’s all set up and running. Gnomedex will go on as planned! Minor twitches that are the norm for any event, but the show shall go on!
One interesting tidbit. Lake Tahoe straddles the Nevada / California border. Since Nevada allows casinos, and california does not, all the casinos are -right- against the border (as in, crossing a street in town has a sign “Welcome to California”. 🙂
I’ll try and keep things up to date here, but the wireless for the event hasn’t gotten set up yet (and what’s with Harrah’s not having broadband access? It’s a mighty nice hotel, but no net access? Sheesh!

What fun! The hotel lost power last night around 7pm. This wouldn’t be so bad except that the backup generators they said they had could only run emergency lighting. Not, say, the plumbing or the kitchens. Apparently a huge chunk of Tampa is without power – we’re guessing that a station got damaged badly. THe power came on at 2:30am for about 30 seconds, flickered, and went out. Probably Something Bad [tm] happened at that point, and the poor guys in the power company are rebuilding things from scratch.
The hotel stuck it out until noon today (I just went to bed early) and then they gave up the ghost and kicked everyone out. (It wasn’t much more pleasant than that, really). Through some fantastic help from Cat, we got the Fedex shipping arranged for my equipment, and I wrangled a room at a nearby place.
Arrived here, got the room, and lo! Power! Air conditioning! Running water! FOOD! Internet connectivity! (Yes, ranked that one last, it was getting that desperate). This is a ‘Chase Suites’ which is… shall we say, a step up from the Doubletree. This is a full studio apartment. Complete with kitchen. Really. Dishwasher, stove, over/under refridgerator, and microwave. Paradise!
Net connection is established, so I’m good there, now I’m gonna go scrounge some food.

Well, now I’m seeing a hurricane kicking along at full speed. Jeanne is down to a Cat 2 hurricane, but that doesn’t make it any less impressive. I’m probably less than 50 miles from the eye now, it’ll past to the northeast of me, but the ‘turn’ all the meteorologists were hoping for didn’t happen, and it looks like the eye-wall will pass pretty close to me. The picture is from the tropical section of Weather Underground which has always been my favorite weather site. The X is where I am.
I’m really tired of “on the spot” interviews and pictures on TV (right now the TV has a big colorful graphic “JEANNE’S FURY!!!!”. Dude, it’s a storm. Don’t anthropomorphize it. It doesn’t like that. They keep replaying this interview with some idjit newscaster who got blown over last night. He was on the shoreline where a category 3 hurricane was coming ashore, and he got blown backwards about 40′ by the wind. I suppose no one mentioned to him that it’s pretty hard to stand upright in 120mph winds.
I woke up to the sound of whistling wind outside my room – this room looks onto the courtyard where there’s a swimming pool and other hangout spaces. They took all the lounge chairs (metal frames and plastic seating spacestuff) and just tossed them into the pool. That actually makes sense – they won’t fly around and smash into the rooms.
Power and internet is working (yay!) and I think I’m going to make my way down to the restaurant and get some breakfast. I saw some families coming in last night with blankets and supplies and stuff to take shelter for the day.
I don’t think we’ll sell many registrations today 🙂

The eye of the storm is about 110 miles east, south-east of me, on the other side of the state. THe eye is just making landfall, just north of West Palm Beach.
Here it’s just ‘windy’. I just went out on top of the parking garage to check things out – we’re not seeing any rain at all, but the clouds are _SCREAMING_ overhead. Not very windy as far as hurricanes go – at least here. Winds are around 20-25mph, gusting up to 40 or so. CNN just said that Tampa is expecting 2.7″ of rain, as opposed to Orlando (about 100 miles north east of me) which is expecting 7 1/2″.
Things may change in the next hour or two, but we’ll see – it’s supposed to turn north just as it hits land, but if it doens’t, it’s gonna get uglier here 🙂
The coolest part was standing on the roof, chatting on the phone with arora, listening to wind whistle on the phjone – looking up through the -really- thin layer of clouds that was screaming south, and seeing stars and the moon shining through. Neat.
There’s a lot of chatter on the news about the surfers, who are having a field day.

Apparently large chunks of the folks who were at my 40th birthday party have come down with a cold. I know of a dozen or so at least. Headcold, sinus drip, the whole shebang. Whee I tell you, whee.
Sorry everyone, but thanks for the party!

I’m totally exhausted, but I have to just say I have an amazing group of friends and SO’s and just cool folks around me. For those not in the know, today was the culmination of Cat’s scheming and planning that resulted in a surprise birthday party for me on the Schooner Fame out of Salem. Although I had a few hints along the way, I had no reason to suspect the beauty of the boat, the 40 or so folks who showed up to yell SURPRISE!, and the lovely get together at homeport afterwards. There was food, a cake, family and friends all around.
Special thanks to Rosa for being wonderful company and apparent distractor leading up to the event, and of course to Cat for planning and executing a great party. Thanks to everyone involved for making it a very special day. Ya’ll are great.
There’ll be plenty more on this later, but for now I’m just too pooped.

Well it seems to be the season for fairs, so in a show of comraderie with my sister, (and, okay, because it was a beautiful Sunday up in Maine), Zach and I went to the Acton Fair today.

Continue reading “The County Fair” →

This evening Cat, Zach and I went to friday night services at a temple in Sudbury. This is the first time I’ve done shabbat in probably 25 years. We’re looking at this temple for Zach to go to Hebrew school, and this was sort of their ‘welcoming’ evening.
For those who don’t know, one of the parts of shabbat services is when the rabbi asks if anyone is sitting shiva or would like to say kaddish. There’s a pause where members can call out names of those they are mourning for. I paused a moment, and called out “Robert Shevett”. My father, who died over 2 years ago, but for whom i never got around to saying kaddish.
I made my way through the prayer, but it was hard. I had forgotten most of it, but I managed the bows in the right places though I was basically crying the whole time. I think I’ll take the time to learn the prayer again by heart, and then do shabbat at least once more for him.

Wow, okay, this is going to be a quick snapshot of what’s going on right now, just to keep folks in the loop. Sorry for nothing particularly deep and poignant lately, but as you’ll see, things are busy…
On the Business front, I have 4 events locked in for the next 3 months, with the first one in Tampa in mid-September. Then off to Reno, NV for Gnomedex, a coolio blogger convention I’ll be doing reg services for (“If you blog, please try Gnomedex”).
Back to the east coast for a quick break, then off to New Jersey for Ubercon IV – a truly wonderful convention – I heartily recommend folks to put it in their list of regularly attended events. Great gaming, great folks, lotta fun.
After that, to Boston for only a week, then off to Baltimore for a big private event there. Yikes! After that, all I have to do is prep for Arisia, which is in January in Boston. (BTW, I’m actually -running- Arisia’s registration this year, not just being a vendor. It’s an order of magnitude more work, and I’m psyched, but if anyone wants to help out, I’m not going to refuse 🙂
Then it’s in to next year, and more events, but I’m too pooped to go on about them now.
In the middle of all this, I have a 1 week contracting gig in town this week, which’ll be nice for the wallet, but pretty wearing on me.
AND ON TOP OF THAT, we’re probably listing the house for sale this week (so Cat and I have been going -nuts- getting the house ready. It’s sort of weird – the house is slowly ‘not being our house’ anymore as we clean and move things out and the like. I guess this is a good thing, but it’s sad as well.
And of course, somewhere along there as well, we’ll hopefully be moving into a new place.
Not to mention that Cat and others are planning Something [tm] for my birthday, and I dont’ have an inkling what. So in the midst of all this chaos, there should be a lot of fun.
I just have to say… AIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

I saw this posted over at BKO, and hadn’t seen it in my little corner of the web, so thought I’d pass it on…
“In a far cry from the high-minded ideals of humanity and tolerance embodied by the Olympics, the organizers of the Athens games have warned spectators that they could be barred for taking a surreptitious sip of Pepsi or an illicit bite from a Burger King Whopper.
Strict regulations published by Athens 2004 last week dictate that spectators may be refused admission to events if they are carrying food or drinks made by companies that did not see fit to sponsor the games. ”
One of the interesting bits of this is the -security guards- have been told to polics this situation.
Full article from the Halifax Herald is here.