Howdy. I will be upgrading aq.org and moving it to new hardware Sunday afternoon and evening. This means that delivery to email addresses hosted there (including mine) and web sites hosted there will be down for that period.

This does NOT affect polyboston.org or mailing lists on lists.aq.org, since those are on a separate machine.

I’m too tired to do justice to the lovely time I’ve been having the past few days, but here’s the capsule version:

On Wednesday, the 26th, drove to Rochester. (Lots of happy fun stuff happened before my trip, too, but I’m hopelessly behind so I’m just going to start fresh.) Gorgeous driving weather. Arrived in time for dinner at plumtreeblossom’s mother’s house (where her brother and niece also live). Had a great time with them. Had an especially great time with Jack, their obsessive-compulsive border collie. I feel guilty encouraging them, but I love excessively enthusiastic jump-all-over-you-and-lick-you dogs.

plumtreeblossom’s mother had generously gotten us a hotel room, so we went there and had a lovely time. It must have been the free wireless that made it so delightful. Yeah, that was it.

On Thursday, I woke up with the birthday girl, and her family came to meet us at a diner for brunch. (Mykonos Café; the food was wonderful.) Then we went back to her mother’s place and had lovely hanging-out time, and then got on the road.

On the way, she returned a happy-birthday phone call from a couple old friends, P. and E., who now live in Southampton (in Western Mass), and we got an impromptu invitation to dinner, which we accepted. They are really delightful people, and their dog is a delightful dog (as affectionate as Jack, but much more calm and disciplined).

We got to plumtreeblossom’s house very late, but I didn’t fall asleep on the road, and neither of us had to work in the morning.

Today (Friday), we had a leisurely morning, had brunch at a diner near her (I loves me some diners), and then ran a couple of errands together — fixing the internet on her phone (which took the folks at the Verizon store all of 15 seconds once we got seen, and now plumtreeblossom knows the magic Just Please Make It Work Again Dammit code) and getting me an eye exam and ordering me some glasses that plumtreeblossom described as “hot”, all emphasized just like that. plumtreeblossom speaks in well-formatted, standards-compliant semantic HTML. (The eye exam was mainly for contacts, but I need a new pair of glasses, too.)

And I had crockpot Kalua pig waiting for me when I got home. And it just occurred to me that I probably also have a lot of mail waiting for me. Should go bring it in, I suppose, but I think instead I’m going to collapse into bed, collapse directly into bed, do not pass GO, do not collect $200. I am debating whether to take my shoes off. Maybe I’ll compromise and take one shoe off.

Had a lovely time with plumtreeblossom at the Aquarium today. The sea lions are so adorable! And the penguins. Then after dinner we went back to the Aquarium to see an IMAX 3D documentary on lions, which was lots of fun. Now plumtreeblossom and I are on the train to my place, both surfing the web on our gadgets — she has a new Blackberry.

First, the morning from hell. For background, I got a new prescription for contacts a few months ago, which turned out to be incorrect, although the sample lenses the eye doctor had given me to try out were correct. So I had an eye appointment scheduled for today to get the prescription fixed.

I’m too tired to do a fully-fleshed-out write-up, so I’ll just tell you about my morning by copying and pasting from mail to cathijosephine. ( Here’s what I wrote. )

So, the three good things: Thanks in large measure to mud_puppy, I went to a fundraiser/rally for Deval Patrick at the Hynes Convention Center on Thursday. Introducing him was Barack Obama, who of course was a really good speaker, but who did a very good job of not stealing Patrick’s thunder. I’d heard Obama’s DNC speech and a couple other sound bites, so I knew what to expect from him, and I got it. But I’d never heard Patrick speak; at most, I’d read short quotes. And wow, he is a kick-ass speaker! Inspiring, entertaining, honest-sounding, impressive. He gives the sound bites, but he also connects them and uses them responsibly. He doesn’t just assert or imply something, he explains why it happens. His speech made me simultaneously really confident in him as a politician and really confident in him as an officeholder, and you don’t get that combination very often. (Even people who are in fact going to be good at both often do only one or the other in their speeches.) So that was amazing. And it was nice to see mud_puppy and a couple co-workers of hers, docorion, and lilbjorn and M. there.

After that, I met cathijosephine at Sarsfield’s, our local Irish pub, for a pint and a half each, which made up in caloric value for not having had dinner. :-) We had a really good time. While I’d seen her a few times recently, this was the first time we’d had a chance to just chat one-on-one since before I went to Hawai‘i, and it felt really good.

And tonight I went over to chienne_folle’s for a night of text-adventure games with her and her husband and a bunch of their friends, which was really, really fun. Makes me want to put some text adventures on my Treo to play on the subway; evidently there’s a lot out there. We played a game called Ad Verbum (if I’m remembering correctly), which was interesting in that it was largely about verbal puzzles. For instance, there’s a room in which all the descriptions use only words that start with S, and you can only use words that start with S in your commands. Atypical, I guess, but lots of fun. I left before they started the second one, because I was starting to get too tired for that kind of brainage, but I had a great time, and seeing queenofhalves there was an unexpected pleasure.

So, all in all, life is good! And soon I will have new contact lenses that don’t give me headaches and with which I can actually read computer screens!

beowabbit sleep now.

For reasons I have not yet sussed out, I seem to have lost a few hours worth of incoming mail. (It’s the sort of thing that happens when the home directory partition on my server is full, but it wasn’t.) So in the unlikely event that you sent me mail between about 2:00am and 9:00am today, I didn’t get it. The problem, whatever it was, resolved itself without my intervention.

I’m going to look through my logs and see if I can suss out what happened, but I won’t have a chance to do that for a couple hours, so I thought I’d give people the heads-up.

[EDIT: OK, I found all the mail (slightly garbled), and there was nothing important.]

I was in this car too, and in fact I did briefly check my mail, but I was too distracted by snuggling with a very yummy person to actually post to LiveJournal. I fail at teh geex0rz. (But I win at life.)

Yesterday in lieu of my regular work day I went to Linux World Expo, along with my boss. It was fun and I certainly learned some interesting stuff, but certainly not something I would have travelled for. Nice to have it in Boston, though. I heard a nifty (and well-attended) talk at the O’Reilly booth by Jesse Vincent on his company’s new (free) web-application development tool, Jifty.

So last night I met chienne_folle for dinner and a movie in Arlington Center. We had dinner at a restaurant called Bangalore. My experience was better than hers; my malai kofta was very good. Her muttar paneer, which she ordered mild, was too spicy for her to eat. Fortunately, the garlic naan had cilantro on it, so I couldn’t eat it and she got all of it. I always forget to ask for no cilantro at Indian restaurants, because not all of them use it.

Then, after a walk because we had a lot of time to kill, we saw Mrs Henderson Presents, which I really really enjoyed. The plot was pretty straightforward and unsurprising (although quite sweet), but it was just charmingly crafted and full of very good lines.

On the way home after the movie, I was listening to a BBC Newshour piece on WBUR on the discovery and translation of a manuscript of the Gospel of Judas. One of the guests made the point that the canonical New Testament gospels leave us wondering what Judas’ motivation was in betraying Jesus, and that the new manuscript might shed some light on that. Then ’BUR went to a station break, and the local announcer started talking about the benefits of underwriting and what was going to be on their flagship call-in talk show On Point the next morning. But I noticed that the background music for the station break was a bit unusual for public radio. It was, well, peppier and more whimsical than one usually expects even the incidental music to be. The sort of thing you might expect on commercial TV, for instance.

And then it struck me. It was the theme song from The Price Is Right.

Whatever ’BUR sound technician chose that music is my new hero!

Good few days. I finished V for Vendetta (the comic), and really enjoyed it, and hope to see the movie soon.

Speaking of movies, I’ll be seeing Mrs Henderson Presents with chienne_folle on Thursday, and am looking forward to it (and to the company). (Too sleepy to make an IMDB link right now. :-)

Went to lots of wonderful social events over the weekend. Among other fun things, got to chat about jazz with chillguru and see eeblet during her whirlwind Right Coast tour. Oh, and got to learn a new board game.

Part of why I’m tired is that last night I got home a bit on the late side to discover that my new phone, a Treo 650, was waiting for me in a box on the porch. So of course I stayed up late getting it working and transferring stuff from the old phone. And today I got calendar synchronization working, so I can again carry around my schedule in my pocket.

Several years ago, when I used to carry a Palm organizer around with me, I was somewhat more organized and less likely to forget stuff I was supposed to do. But then I started carrying more and more other shiny bits of consumer electronics around with me, and stopped carrying anything that was good at calendaring. Now I have a phone that’s good at calendaring, so hopefully I’ll be better about not forgetting to write down stuff I want to do. Wish me luck. Also, wish me more days in the week and more hours in the day, because that’s the real problem with my schedule. And make sure that about three of the extra hours are stuck between 4:00am and 4:01am, so that I will actually wake up well-rested every day.

Speaking of well-rested, it’s time for me to go work on that.

[EDIT: Oh, and yummy dinner with cathijosephine at the Tibetan place by the Diesel. I hadn’t had Tibetan food in way too long!]

(1) I love my new house. Have I mentioned that lately?

(2) I have a new toy. It’s this portable video player/recorder. Basically, it’s sort of like an ipod for video combined with a Tivo you can put in your pocket. (Well, a jacket pocket, or your backpack or large purse; it's bigger than a PDA.) I can hook it to my DVD player or VCR, or to a TV antenna, and record video to it, and then carry my movies around with me. Kind of nifty! It also has memory-card slots, so I can copy the photos from my camera to it without needing access to a computer.

It has two disadvantages: The interface is pretty clunky and not terribly intuitive, and the sound is occasionally crackly for some reason. (I’m hoping the latter might be a bad cable; in any case, it’s not bad enough to bug me very much.) [Edit: Three, actually. Also, it can’t handle files longer than an hour, so it automatically splits a full-length movie into two files.]

So, in addition to reading books on the T, I’m going to be watching movies on the T. Just call me gadget-boy. If you don’t know what to get me for $WINTERHOLIDAY, a pocket protector and horn-rimmed glasses mended with first-aid tape would certainly be appreciated.

I am so tired of losing all my journal customization and having to redo everything, so I’ve switched to another style that I gather is less likely to have this problem. I’ll probably switch back to S2 when it gets reliable again. *Grump*.

However, I just had yummy momos at House of Tibet with docorion, mud_puppy, and mattlistener! Yay!

[Edit: See my reply to corivax in the comments for more about Tibetan cuisine.]