OK, this is seriously geeky, but I love it:

Exhibit A: Distance of stars from us, in light-years, and other information.

Exhibit B: definition of Light Cone.

Exhibit C:Your Personal Light Cone RSS feed.

"From the moment of my birth, light (that I could have influenced) has been expanding around the Earth and light (which could influence me, from an increasing distance of origin) reaching it -- this ever-growing sphere of potential causality is my light cone." My light cone has 61 stars in it. The next star to be reached is Beta Leonis, 4 months from now.

Hat-tip to james_nicoll.

I was supposed to return home Sunday afternoon, but high windsclosed Frankfurt airport (and roads and main train terminal), so Air Canada put some 200+ of us up in downtown Frankfurt. In a very posh hotel, which fed us two meals (late dinner, surprisingly tasty; early breakfast, full buffet, again more tasty than I expected) and gave us comfortable beds to sleep in, though not for long enough at all.

My Monday began at 4:38 local time, with a wake up call from Air Canada. For a 7am departure from said hotel, for a 9am re-scheduled flight which took off at 10am, getting me to YYZ at 12:30 Eastern Time (8.5h flight. Less said the better. (Wait: I will say: sleeping on plane foiled by 2-year-old who enjoyed screaming at random intervals FTL)).

After waiting forever for my baggage (with the same 200ish people, who I had spent the ENTIRE LAST DAY WITH) I finally was able to drive home and shower and change clothes. Oh, that felt good.

I set my alarm for a 1-hour nap so I could go pick up Rover this afternoon (they are open from 4-7pm). Woke up; turned off alarm; laid down again just for a moment and five hours later, was roused from an awful dream that I had slept through the afternoon. Er.

I can't find much of my consciousness. I'm sure it will return, as will an appetite, eventually. I will eat something light now anyway, then go back to sleep, I hope. And pick up Rover at 8 when the boarding place opens. Sorry Rover! (not that she will have any idea. But I do.)

Ugh. Ton of bricks on head.

But, I will say, glad to be in my own house (that place I live, as melted_snowball puts it). He doesn't come home until Wednesday afternoon, as he's doing work with former students in Bratislava.

I have photos of the trip, and I have the end of a travelogue to write up. Berlin was neat, though I don't have many spare words right now.

I find myself quite looking forward to coming home today. I've had an amazing time in Berlin. I could happily visit again, going to more museums or seeing more amazing architecture or... being here in a season without winter sludge, perhaps.

The city leaves me with contradictions and questions. How much and in what ways does it matter what happened here 70 years ago? And 20 years ago? What kinds of things are happening today? I probably will do some reading on Berlin after I get home. I wonder how much of my positive feeling about the city are from the amazing new architecture and from missing New York City.

[sorry about the extra return characters in these posts; they don't appear on the ipod, even editing the entry, so I can't fix it until i'm at a computer. Anyway! Moving onward!]

Tuesday 17:47- I'm on the ICE train back to Göttingen from Kassel, which won't give me enough time to finish this entry. It took me an hour to make the trip in the other direction, with 4 stops in 50 km. This way will be 17 minutes. Zoom! [goobermunch, does that answer your question about 1.5 lightspeed? ;]

[back at the hotel] I'm fairly damp; it rained all day. I saw a wonderful science tool museum with clockworks from the 17th century, astrolabes, telephones from the turn of the last century, and suchlike, started as a collection by a local baron/scientist. My favorite exhibit was an ornate "astronomical clock" with faces for all seven planets, each with hands for where on the compass the planet would rise and set.

Kassel is regionally known as the site of a 5-yearly modern arts festival, which sounded like its permanent exhibits would have been neat to see, alas they were too far, or closed, or I failed to find them. I did a lot of wandering streets and photographing old buildings though.
I think I spent too much time wandering before I finally got on the tram for Wilhelmshöhe, a large park featuring two castles and a giant statue of Hercules. The closer larger castle, an ornate half-circle shape on top of a hill, containing a decent art museum, closed just as I got there.

It was icy and foggy; I barely could make out the other two sights through the fog.

The park felt like a fairy tale- train tracks through snow in a forest, castles through the mist on a hill... Inviting lights turning into will-of-the-whisps and turning off as soon as I approached... I did have fun overall, despite bad timing.

In the evening we went to a party thrown by a student in dan's host's group who just got a job in eastern Germany. So his advisor brought him lots of east-german techno.

I wish I had any conversational German; it felt weird being monolingual around so many multilingual people. German cultural note #n of many: my slice of chicken and broccoli pizza had a heavy cream sauce instead of cheese. It was tasty, but it reminded me of last night's dinner.

Lufthansa pilots are/were on strike. Hopefully the flight backlogs will be cleared up by my first return leg Sunday (Berlin to Frankfurt).

Wednesday 15:45- I'm in a coffee shop in Goslar, home of Rammelsburg mines, a museum and UNESCO heritage site. And a very spooky museum it was- underground, dripping water, nobody else around, spotlighted rusty equipment amidst the shadows. Perhaps creepiest- water dripping in a few exhibit cases. I took a huge number of photos. There were headphones with an English audio guide, which sounded like it had been written by fine arts students imitating German grammar. And yet, I have no reason to think it was poor translation. I couldn't figure out how to make a recording of any of it, but I was laughing out loud a few times. One notable clip was from the perspective of a piece of basalt. "I have been crushed and folded by the inexorable forces of millennia..."

But! There was an exhibit on a Christo project, called "Package on a Hunt", which involved an ore hopper wrapped in fabric and pushed around by Christo and Jean-Claude outside the mine in 1988.

There was another piece of art, near the entry, with ghostly miner outfits suspended from the (far above) ceiling by chains. I was not so fond.

The interpretive history exhibit feels like it can be summed up: "1000 years ago, they found copper here. Ore trading made this a powerful city for many hundred years, but it was to valuable to barons and princes so it was also invaded frequently, destroying each settlement in turn. Now we have a creepy museum instead."

English guided tours were only by advance arrangement, so I didn't do the "ride in an ore hopper" tour or the "wear a helmet and walk around the mine for an hour." Just as well, as I did find lots to see in Goslar (including tons of very old German houses, as Goslar wasn't bombed during the war at all.) I caught a bus that got me back to the train station, and a bit of food, then on the regional train to Hannover in ok time.

I'm feeling fairly worn out, and considered just going back to the hotel, but I think I can have ~45 minutes in what my guide book says is an excellent modern art museum.

18:23- well that was exciting. I just had the equivalent of a visitor to... Well, somewhere 100km from some big city...
Bleh, metaphor fail. Anyway, I had a rapid walking tour of Hannover. Museum didn't work out for me; it was too far and routing was confoosing. But I did find the essential sights to walk past, including Liebniz's house (ugh, too ornate) and nearby, a church that was turned into a WW2 monument in its bombed out condition, including a bell connected with Hiroshima. The opera house and old city hall are beautiful, as is... (I'm not yet sure which building it is, but it looked like a glass confection with cubes piled in odd not-quite-stable-looking arrangements. I'm sure I'll figure it out tomorrow.)

I hopped on a medium-fast train, which is to say 200kph, getting me back to the hotel before dan. Can I just say, if I could get to Toronto in 35 minutes by train, I would be such a happy boy? Of course, also, the fast trains are a huge money sink; I believe from The Economist they have been deemed "a mistake", but I'd like to see how it plays out over the next decades. I wonder if, like building more roads, they mostly invite more travel and more frequent trains?...

23:00- dinner with dan's host and colleagues; i'm quite socialed out. Good folks, just too much talking for me.

Thursday, 11:00- this evening we're off to Berlin. Today is a quiet day, I think. I considered another trip to Hannover, but I'd rather rest up. It's rainy again.

15:53- hah. Rest? I spent most of the day wandering Göttingen, once the rain stopped.
I found the farmer's market (on Tuesday I was looking in the wrong part of Marktstraße) and had cheese and pastry. There was a Catholic church with optical illusions on the columns, a not-so-exciting modern exhibit in Old Town Hall, and the outside of a number of places including the house where Gauß worked, Bismark's house and a tower somehow related to him (?) but it's for rent? *shrug* And a babbling brook. I probably should have rested more, but I guess there is the 2+ hr train to Berlin this evening.

Overall I'm having a good time; I have seen a lot that made me smile. It's too bad more tourist things are closed, but that's what I get for visiting in the off season. I wish my ipod came with wireless so I could sometimes figure out where the heck I am or what it is I'm looking at. Maybe I should have rented a gps or something. Or if the wikitravel app wasn't so bad- it caches pages, but only for a short while, so all my Germany info went "poof" before the trip started. And finally, there is the DeutcheBahn app- which is immensely useful if I have wifi, and utterly useless without. For such a well-designed app, it was a rude discovery I didn't have a copy of the tour items I had thought I stored.

Frankfurt, 14:30 Monday-
My impression of Frankfurt from the train: more farms and graffiti, fewer billboards than I expected. No billboards, in fact. The train was two minutes late. I thought my watch was wrong.

 15:28- changed trains. The regional intercity train routes through a surprising number of tunnels cut through hills.  My ears keep popping. Ow. 

I could use a nap. 

We're not on the faster 'ICE' train; I'll take that when I go to Hanover tomorrow or Wednesday. And on Thursday to Berlin. I think we're going about 175kph, not 250-275...

16:30-
Göttingen, hotel Gebhards. Why are German showers designed to spray the room with water so easily? It's not like the room is supposed to be hosed clean. Oh well, it is this time.
Dan just got off the phone with his host at the university, who is taking us to dinner. I'm momentarily confused what evening it is. Whee!

18:39- fun walk through the town, getting just a little sunlight before sundown. Twisty turny streets galore. I suppose I should have a real map.

Tomorrow if I'm up for it, I'll buy a Länder-ticket for unlimited provincial travel and go up to Hannover, and Goslar.

Göttingen, 9:50 Tuesday morning.
Last night at dinner with dan's hosts B and V, they came up with the sights I *had* to see. I'm not sure what I will get to today.

Breakfast buffet at the hotel was excellent. I'm not too jetlagged at the moment. 10 hours of sleep, plus ou moins. Showered without hosing down the room, even.

11:30- off to Kassel, soon. Having an early lunch in a café. Jetlag makes me hungry!  

After Manhattan, I met up with F/friends [1] and we set off for Peekskill on the train. By that point, my back was still in quite a lot of pain; I took some pain drugs, but not enough. I spent nearly all of the trip lying down, but there were lots of amazing views of the Hudson when I did sit up a bit.

Thence to car, thence to the Catholic retreat center for our Queer Quaker gathering. Oh, the iconography at the Catholic retreat center. It was something. I took photos, but I haven't had time to do anything with them. Other people during the weekend were talking about their various relationships with Catholicism; I can say my reaction was mostly puzzlement. Whatever.

The retreat center was a seven story building on the top of a large hill, so there were great views of the Hudson and surrounding hills. The Appalachian Trail ran nearby, and there was apparently very good sledding. Not that I went outside.

The gathering went well; there were about 100 of us, including a huge number of newcomers who seemed excited about coming to next year's (in North Carolina).

I spent most of the first few days on my back. On the day we arrived, I got acupressure then acupuncture from my friend Amy, who had taught me the very effective headache acupressure points this last June. She has been practicing for 17 years; "by now, I sometimes even feel like I know what I'm doing." I will say it made a fairly big difference, and dramatically. Some of it was sort of like an ice pack, without the cold.

In the first day I also gained +1 in Pain Management skills from other friends [2]. I can be fairly stubborn about asking people for help, but this was a substantial lesson in asking. And feeling so restricted in what I could do for myself. And feeling so frustrated at not knowing how I'd be doing in an hour, or the next morning.

Very early on, lying on a couch, my eyes fell on a wall containing the Serenity Prayer ("Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; The courage to change the things that I can; And the wisdom to know the difference.") I had to chuckle, because that was indeed one thing I needed.

With all the lying-on-hard-floors and moving-mattress-off-squishy-frame and pill-popping as necessary, I did start feeling better, very gradually. I could go on for a while about how great people were; apart from when I've been home sick in bed, I had never needed that much help before. I got all the help I asked for and lots I hadn't specifically asked for.

I had a group activity each day in the center's Chapel, which had amazing stained glass (and a comfortable carpet).

The gathering itself was a combination of work and a joy and occasionally frustrating but felt overall, graceful. I think I learned more about working with people and asking them for their best and trusting in that. I helped where I could.

I missed friends who couldn't make it this time. I missed catching up with people because they were across the room or across the building and I couldn't get up to talk to them.

I didn't sing enough. I didn't play nearly enough. I'll go back.

The train back to Manhattan was wonderful- watching the Hudson and getting to know a long-time attender and talking about life experiences. He is 60; he used to travel the world, and felt at home everywhere. Now, he doesn't feel at home anywhere, and wonders what he should do about that. But he's lived in the same Midwest US town for the last six years, and may move soon for work, which hopefully will help. ...I have felt the opposite experience. I don't think I've ever felt at home "everywhere" when I'm traveling, though really I haven't ever traveled for extended periods of time. And right now I certainly feel settled.

But when we arrived in Grand Central again, I had tremendous wistfulness for not being able to spend any more time there on this trip. Oh well, it will still be there too.

The flight and drive home were uneventful, and much less painful than the other direction. I had drugs, and I had a gel ice pack, which actually was as good as advertised on the box ("stays cold eight hours": I froze it overnight and put it in my luggage, which I checked, and it was still cold at the end of the car trip, eight hours later)

And seeing melted_snowball and roverthedog was about as great as you might guess. :)

[1] that is, friends who are Friends.

[2] The details are probably boring to everyone but me, but: Alternating Ibuprofen and Acetaminophen at two hour intervals; Taking 3 or 4 Ibuprofen at the outset, with food (always with food; it's supposed to do bad stuff to the stomach without food at the same time); how effective an ice-pack can be; and laying on the floor with lower legs on a shelf/chair, parallel to the floor, to remove all leg weight from the spine. These are all probably basic things that I had been told before, but this time, it's internalized, y'know?

Oh! And I learned another acupressure point from Amy! I couldn't turn my head to the right because my neck was sore. She put my thumb against the muscle on the top of my lower right arm, and had me push hard ("as if the thumb was a coathanger hanging off the back of your arm"). To find the point: put your thumb in the crook of your elbow, fingers wrapped around the top of the arm. Note the crook of your thumb and second finger, on the arm. That's more or less the pressure-point; it should be the middle of a muscle. Move the hand so the thumb pushes into that point. She had me turn my head a bit to the right, and if the neck still hurt, move the thumb around a bit and try again. I was dumbfounded that I was able to find it, and find the same point in my left arm, and they both worked! This might have made the difference between being able to safely drive home, and not.

My day has played out like one of those good thing / bad thing stories. I'm in Manhattan! I love this town so much, especially now that I'm not poor.

The hotel check-in guy said he was amazed at the rate I got. And showed me two bills for people who just checked in at three times the rate. Oof. (yay priceline & research).  hotel lobby was full of toy show-dogs. All yapping. There's apparently a dog show in the hotel. Just outside there was a drag queen in fishnets.

 I just (10:30pm) ordered a burger from a diner with no worries they'd be closing.

I was eating this late because I did a dumb thing, which was to go see theatre. The first act of "Hair" totally rocked. The reason this was dumb? My back was in agony, and I left at the intermission. 

So yeah. Lower back isn't pleased with my day in the car and short flight and bus. Apart from that, all is splendid.

My flight was delayed due to traffic pileups at LGA, but I got a standby seat on a different flight. Got to lie down in the hotel room for a bit, and look up 8pm shows. Cabbed to the 1/2-price tckts booth (omg, they're shiny now) and 15 minutes later I was in my *5th row aisle* seat. 

I narrowly missed being molested by the performers... Dionne pulled off his pants stood on two seat-arms, and shook his junk in the face of the front row seat holders. That was in the first 5 minutes. I narrowly missed being kissed by claude. I did get my hair touselled.

So that was most of the high points; I'll save you the ice compress and Tylenol bits. Tomorrow I'm up early and off to the train up the Hudson to the Quaker gathering (sans wifi, I expect). catch you on the flip side!

Hey! dan and I are on Street View in Mahone Bay, NS!

As I said at the time, a sweet birthday present from Google (the van drove past us on my birthday, May 20).

The weekend, it is seized. Seized, ruffled and shaken a bit; but then smoothed down and given a relaxing glass of something on ice.

Saturday was basically spent recovering from Friday night, which saw melted_snowball & I head to Toronto to meet up with amarylliss for dinner and an evening of Karaoke. I have never had so much fun in such a divey bar. d. went beyond the call of duty, driving in both directions. I sang with a mic in front of a crowd of strangers for the first time in... hell, I am not sure. Possibly, ever? I sang You Can Call Me Al from Graceland. Some guys with tattoos and shaved heads sung Metallica; melted_snowball & amarylliss rocked Aqua Barbie Girl.

Saturday evening, d. made us really tasty roast chicken with raspberry vinegar dressing. He can throw together a really good meal in a scary short amount of time. Then, Spanish Catholic Baby Meyer Lemon Pots de Creme. I tell ya, it's a tough life.

Today, we went for a drive and walk with the pooch; I went to the gym; said 'bye to d., who's off to do research with some folks in BC for a few days; and treated myself to a lot of sashimi, staving off the Inner Polar Bear for a bit longer.

Tonight, I watched Crazy People, which isn't a great movie, but it is fun. And I finished scanning my photos- all you folks who said I should do it myself, you were right; it only took three weeks to do 290 or so. I may upload some pics to facebook this week, too.

Wednesday, I pick dan up at Pearson; Thursday I drive to Buffalo to catch a flight to NYC for a Quaker gathering.

...Oh, the weekend's come back for a refill on its calming drink, probably my cue to close up for the night.

Thursday night, d. and I went to see Almodóvar’s latest. I hadn't read many reviews, and none of the ones I read give away the... middle, but I think it's worth the reveal.

If you liked Women on the Verge, you should see this. There is a film-in-a-film which has a delightfully wrong homage - (there's a bed on fire; and barbiturates in the gazpacho; and... you just can't do that. Can you?) or as The New York Times review puts it:

"the director’s pastiche of his early, funny work becomes, in the context of this somber new film, a poignant reflection on aging and loss. To catch a glimpse of “Women” in the mirror of “Embraces” is to see how cinematic images can be both tangible and ghostly."

Much of the film is in flashback to 1992-1994, a full 14 years before the film's "present". [A self-indulgent side-note: I'm struck by how much happens in that 14 years- and it's a bit spooky to overlay the plot over top of my life, to see elements I would just consider "modern" in the 1994 shots and realize no, they were modern 14 years ago. Getting old here, folks.]

Things start with bright and cheerful casual relationships, a writer who changed his name and lost his eyesight, a close assistant and her son; in flashback, Almodóvar tells the back story of the principals, unspooling what might be a murder mystery. It can't be film noir if it's shot in bright primary colors, can it? But noirish it is; and fairly grim for a portion. Until Almodóvar upsets the apple-cart with the first glimpse of Women on the Verge. (In the theatre, dan and I were the only people who were laughing out loud. Which felt pretty damn weird!)

I will be thinking about this film for a while. It digests slowly. There are themes of piecing together ones past; re-editing a badly told story into something beautiful; recovering destroyed photographs from their shreds; reclaiming one's whole identity from pieces that had been buried and considered dead. An Almodóvar trope: self-reinvention and becoming more true to oneself.

Loss. Aging.

And beautiful images of Spain, which I haven't visited, and really would like to.

Got to play with a puppy on the bus this morning, because I ran into nobodyhere and Tawney. I mused to dan this evening, can we get a "Service Puppy in Training" coat for Rover? She could totally pull that off. (Us humans, not so much; it would definitely involve lying. Unless we admitted her training was in cuteness.)

Work was. One efficient meeting, one dodged meeting, good conversations about work and about not-work. In the afternoon, I tried to buckle down with one task that I thought should have been quick, but it wasn't, and I was getting fairly frustrated with myself that it wasn't. I seem to have listened to Lady Gaga - Telephone 31 times over the course of the day. last.fm doesn't lie, eh?

In the evening I watched the tail end of the last David Tennet Doctor Who, had a beer, walked Rover... and I'm feeling more sanguine about my day now.

I ran across a site with some non-intuitive iDevice tips.

http://www.todaysiphone.com/2010/01/vid-iphone-101-%E2%80%94-how-to-set-up-multiple-emails/

If you use gmail, gmail address book, and google calendar, they will all link two-way with your Touch/Phone. I never set up the address book and calendar, so I gave it a go. It works, quite well! Now my non-phone is good for two more things, offline! (I had set up gmail, previously. But I really rely on google calendar.)

All it requires is setting up a new email account with "Microsoft Exchange" (instead of the "gmail" choice) and supplying 'm.google.com' as the server. The link above has a video demo/instructions.

--
I remain a neutral observer on the iPad release. It certainly isn't billed as a do-everything device. Which is ok; maybe that will happen with v.2 or v.3. v1's success will depend on how people react to actually having it in their hands. I was fairly "meh" about the Air until I saw one in person. (And then melted_snowball notes that it isn't really a full laptop replacement either).

I'm unconvinced that it will be a credible business device, unfortunately. Could it be a traveling laptop display extender? It's exactly the same height as my 15" macbook. I've seen displays that work over ethernet; if it's fast enough for full-screen video, it's probably fast enough to handle display extending over wifi. ...so then you have a little monitor you can carry around the room and connect to different machines at once. Hey?

It might be an OK device for creating things. melted_snowball suggests that it's apparently been constructed as a device to buy and consume things created by others. I am not so certain that's a hard limitation; if text input isn't too clunky, and their iWork applications aren't so clunky, and the developer kit makes it possible to DESIGN good creative apps... I'll just say if I had a lot of free time, I would enjoy trying to develop for the platform (casts jealous eyes at the iPhone devs around).

http://www.myheritage.com/collage

No, I think Billy Bob Thorton isn't a likeness. So, gang, who do I look like: Chiang Kai-Shek? Or Tony Danza?

On my walk with Rover, my iPod decided to make me a random playlist. As far as I can tell, it was a shuffle of everything, 5327 songs.

The first four songs were a great combo:

Laurie Anderson - Statue of Liberty: she says, "...It's a good day / To run away / Freedom is a scary thing / Not many people really want it."

The Cure / Open ("I really don't know what I'm doing here / I really think I should've gone to bed tonight but...")

Brian Eno, Music for Airports / Ambient 1/2

O Brother Where Art Thou / Highways and Hedges

And then we got a middle chapter of the book Stumbling on Happiness, where Daniel Gilbert helpfully reminds us that "most people do prefer to have more freedom than less. Even if it makes them less happy."

So, is he agreeing with Laurie Anderson, or disagreeing. I'm not sure. Maybe my electronics want to remind me that free choice isn't always the ticket to happiness.

*shrug*

How was your day? Mine included excellent raw fish at Taka Sushi; and good news from two different parties about job offers. So, not so bad overall.

My day today included:

- a losing battle with pexpect on Solaris. Works from the cli! Fails from Apache! Needs a pseudo-terminal it cannot find for some reason! Whee!
- [solved with an update to pexpect, discovered while writing this journal entry]

- lunch with two friends & a service puppy-in-training. With a tiny little service puppy jacket. Twelve-week-old Golden Retriever! Biggest Paws Evar! She curled up under the table and slept.

- email with melted_snowball, still in India.

- email with an American friend visiting $EUROPEAN_CITY who was just offered a job. (!)

- email with a Canadian friend shortly to leave for Uganda.

- reading the latest from [far-away] friends visiting in Japan, [local friend] newly back from Haiti, and all y'all who are currently staying put.

I'm not sure if today even particularly stands out. It was better than yesterday, and possibly less busy than tomorrow.

[Edits Wednesday 7:12am]

+ got to the gym after work; great workout
- super-chatty guy in the showers, and right next to me changing. Wanted to talk Leafs. Leemielone!

- delayed bus, didn't get home until 9:15
+/- stayed at work late b/c I was being productive.
+ learning lots of Python on the current web-app project.
+/- not done yet, but the end is in sight!

- my ballot for the MA election arrived today. I only requested it in November for an election that's in 4 days!
+/- frustrating customer-service interaction with a photo-scanning service; maybe I'll post about it separately.

+ fun lunch with chezmax at Mel's. And now the waitresses know our names and vice-versa.
+ tasty leftovers for dinner. In fact, the fridge is FULL of leftovers. My work is cut out for me.
+ having people over Sunday or Monday to watch Almodóvar!

+ In the US Navy, Between the Wars: photos for sale on ebay. Some of these are really cute.
+ First-Person Tetris (tip of the hat to epi_lj!)

- dog needs a walk
- ugh, late.
+ Weekend!

Yesterday, I voted in the Massachusetts Special Election for the Senatorial seat vacated by Ted Kennedy's death last year.

(Today's the deadline for write-in ballots! I hope all my MA friends will vote next Tuesday- polls are open 'till 8pm...)

I sent the vote in by fax, using the instructions sent by www.democratsabroad.org. There is a 1-800 fax number, for "Service People and Overseas Americans". Leaving aside the technical incorrectness for me using it, I did, and it went through.

Today I got a confirmation email, which reads:


From: RSS - WHS/FVAP ETS <ets@fvap.ncr.gov>
To: dada.da@gmail.com
Date: Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 11:40 AM
Subject: Confirmation of sent FWAB to Medford Board of Registrars MA

This message is to inform you that the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot (FWAB) you requested be sent to Medford Board of Registrars was successfully sent on 15 January 2010 at 10:57 EST.


Hm, that's quite the set of acronyms. Military? I viewed message source.


Return-Path: <ets@fvap.ncr.gov>
Received: from PTMEXU04BB.ptc.pentagon.mil (ptmexu04bb.ptcmsg.pentagon.mil [130.16.43.188])
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Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:40:45 -0800 (PST)


Yup, military. It's even got a nice long public-key signature to prove it's legit.

Given my general dislike of fax machines, it was comforting to know my vote was received, at least.

A Cohen brothers movie; not quite as dark a comedy as Fargo. Set in Minneapolis, but a Jewish suburb, not small-town. The story is, at face, a retelling of the Old Testament book of Job, the trials of a God-fearing man.

So, yeah, God seems to be testing Larry Gopnik, a nebbishy academic. Wife leaves him; his kids don't respect him; he challenges a student who tries bribing him and appears to be losing tenure as a result of anonymous defamatory letters; his brother has awful medical and legal problems. Through all this, Larry tries doing the Right Thing. To bad effect.

But Larry is the architect of (some of) his trials as much as anyone. He's a serious man, but he's also oblivious to his surroundings, which led to a bit of a psychological "Mr. Magoo" effect.

On the upside, the three rabbis he goes to for help were very funny. And the ending, which I won't spoil, was very well done. Overall, it works, though it feels like a less than stellar success.

I give it a minor recommendation. I might see it again, though I expect a bunch of other Cohen brothers movies I haven't seen will take precedence.

Hm, I should see O Brother again.

Over the last three days I've been going through my boxes of dust-covered tapes. Alannah Miles through When in Rome.

One box of legal resellable tapes: off to the MCC thrift store!

1.45GB of music: purchased from itunes or in a few cases skimmed from youtube or elsewhere. (In passing I will say: that video is a LOT of fun. It took me about an hour to find the right version of the song. And there it is, complete with video. Vicky, where ever you are, thanks for introducing me to it, half our lifetimes ago.)

15 or so mix tapes, prodded, googled, sorted, and reconstituted as playlists or summarily dragged behind the barn and shot. (Warrant! Winger! Aerosmith! Paging 1990, paging 1990; your hair metal must be removed now from the waiting area.)

Two boxes of digested mix tapes, recordings from the radio, and illegal copies: set to go out with the trash.

And 14 irreplaceable tapes: a few bootlegs, a few recordings of the folk music coffee-house I was involved with in Ithaca, and suchlike, are set to be digitized by fuzzpsych who's got the right equipment for that job.

I'm excited to be rid of the clutter [1] and some of the rediscoveries did make me smile (I'm sure I hadn't given a thought to The Hooters or Black 47 in most of a decade.)

I'm amused there were as many rediscoveries; the "good stuff" I hadn't realized I was sitting on, and hadn't previously run across elsewhere.

I'm very pleased to be in a position where I can do a bit of googling and listening on iTunes and youtube and successfully end up with the proper versions of all these songs.

And hey, you can play along with my last.fm page. Or give a shout if you want to come on over for a listen. (We can trade mixes and do homework and read out our angst-ridden poetry... Bring your beanbag chair.)

[1] Next up: my 20-year old stereo and 30-year-old speakers, still functional but utterly useless to me. And the furniture it sits in, which has felt like clutter for the last few years. But that's a post for another day.

Last night I went to see my friends Jason (aka mrwhistlebear) and Karen perform at the Registry Theatre, as Gaedelica (named from a Gaelic book of poetry, Carmina Gadelica). They are both quite talented. One of their pieces was an original arrangement of The Huron Carol, which I hope they record. Great job guys!

They were followed by a Celtic band, Rant Maggie Rant, which I knew nothing about, other than the evening theme was "Celtic" and "Christmas music". If you know me well, you might know this pairing might make me apprehensive. It did, but I'm glad I stuck around. The Registry Theatre was packed to the gills; they were turning people away when I got there (20 minutes before the show). The band was talented, very energetic, and their two lead singers were attractive, too. One sort of looked like a slightly more fey version of Sting. The other singer made me want to start wearing vests- he wore his well- black vest, black dress shirt, purple tie, gray slacks. Porkpie hat.

And home by 10:30.
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This weekend's main project was cleaning my home office floor. I rented a carpet vac, followed the instructions, and hey, the carpet is clean! ...-er, at least. I'm worried about the off-gassing- my last attempt to clean carpet in this house resulted in a severe reaction from dan, and while it didn't smell like anything yesterday, today there was something like new-car smell, so I went over it again with the vac with just water instead of soap. And there was a distressing amount of dirt picked up the second time around, as well. I suppose this is a cost of dog ownership. Yeah. I'm blaming the dog. She's the main reason we still have one room with carpet- it would make her unhappy if we took it out, because she uses it as her towel when she comes in from the rain and snow (after she's already been dried off).
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Also yesterday I made fudge for today's Christmas Desert Potluck at Quaker Meeting. I was, once again, apprehensive (it's been years since I've made fudge), but it got a number of accolades, including people coming around asking who made it, so I'm happy. Meeting was good, too.
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My desk is a disaster area. I haven't gotten back on top of the scattered papers since getting back from two weekends away, and we're reaching critical density. Ack.

At least the house is otherwise clean. Except for the furniture from my office which I moved out to clean the floor. Hm, I guess I should put that back when the floor's dry, or dan will be surprised.
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Dan comes home on Tuesday! Yay!

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I finally upgraded my laptop to Snow Leopard; the "family pack" DVD has been sitting on my desk since dan did his upgrade. It wasn't as painless as I'd hoped, because when I last swapped drives, I apparently used the wrong default partition map (Apple Partition Map instead of GUID) so Snow Leopard said I had to wipe the drive. So I babysat a reformat/recopy/upgrade (in the process discovering that my backup was not, in fact, bootable as I had thought; whoops.)

Apple did an excellent thing with this release, by the way- I was still running 10.4, and the upgrade DVD jumped me up to 10.6. They didn't have to make it this easy, and in Windows and Linux, I would be looking at either a sequential two-step upgrade, or wiping the disk and reinstalling my software and data; both probably a more fault-prone process than whatever Apple had to do to make this upgrade work in one step.

And I like Snow Leopard.

(Although, chatting with dan in iChat, we discovered the graphic for :-P looks like a big smile-and-tongue, which is just wrong. I don't know if it was that way in 10.4, but NOW IT IS WRONG.)

Ahem.