Owen’s Photolog

Here were are, stopped in the left turn lane of a stop light at a big intersection (McGrath and Broadway) when a BMW sloowly runs the light opposite us, doesn’t turn, and comes slowly towards us, and towards (I honk), and towards, until I realize they’re not going to stop at all and I try to get the fuck out of the way. They continue on McGrath headed south on the wrong side of the road. We did suffer a glancing blow, but just minor damage and everyone all right. Reported plate number to police. WTF!

Update:
The extent of the damage, although this really overstates the case since many of those scratches were pre-existing.

Small chunk of plastic missing -- all in all, could have been a lot worse

I recently went to a DJ show at Good Life, and since these shows usually last longer than the T runs and I also hate cabs, I decided to bike both ways (about 5.5 miles each way). It had been flurrying all day, but there wasn’t enough snow or ice on the roads to make me worried about wiping out.

One factor I hadn’t considered, however, was road salt:

My bike, caked with salt and grime

Closeup of salt and grime

I’ve wiped as much of it off as I can, but it’s too cold to wash the bike (it would probably just freeze). My hope is that the chain isn’t ruined and my components aren’t all going to rust. Ah well, the show was fun.

You want to watch the post season, but you can’t stand the awful, brain-dead commentary. What do you do? Well, if you use linux, you can spend 7 innings out of nine trying to get jack audio to work — which, when it finally does work, does the job well:

For those who aren’t familiar with JACK, it’s a “professional”-quality audio library that’s designed for low-latency audio routing and mixing. It’s great if you want to easily pipe audio from one application to another. In this case, I want to take the baseball AM radio broadcast, feed it into my laptop, delay it 7 seconds, and then output it.

So, you can see in the “Connections” window (using the program qjackctl) that the system input is tied to a program called jack-rack, and then jack-rack is fed back to the system output. Jack-rack is a program that supports many interesting audio plugins, like echos, flanges, pitch changes… and delays. Here, I have a seven second delay turned on.

And that’s it. All the difficulty with JACK is getting it to work without stuttering or skipping, which required that I install a “realtime”-quality kernel, edit files in /etc/security, and tweak all sorts of stupid options. As I say, it took me 7 innings of Game 6.

But now it’s working, and I can enjoy game 7 with good commentary from the very beginning!

(It occurs to me I should have gotten this working sooner in the season, but I had forgotten just how bad the national announcers were)

edit: Ah yes, why the delay at all? Because the HD feed is delayed by 7 seconds compared to the radio broadcast. I probably should have mentioned that.

Travelling from Braintree, MA to North Truro with Mike MacHenry.

Total distance: 108.23
Time moving: 7:44:57
Time elapsed (includes train ride from Davis to Braintree): 12:30
Average speed: 14.0
Max speed: 31.0

Details to follow, including video clips from the ride.

Char and I went to see Ben Folds at the opening of the Boston Pops season. It was fun, except for the part where some guy in the second balcony started punching some other guy in the face.

I’m not making this up!

Some guy whose post I found on technorati:

so i’m sitting here in the center on second balcony and to the left of me on the same level in the middle of the sound someone screams and everyone looks over there and it looked like someone was about to fall over the edge or something. then i kept watching and the guy goes up a couple rows and looks like hes talking to this other guy and then all of a sudden punches him. and then proceeds to keep punching him. the people around there try to restrain him and stuff, but it was really intense. and people were kind of screaming, so it even stopped the music for a couple minutes as they got it under control. but seriously who fights at a freaking boston pops concert. anyway.

That’s pretty much the way I remember it, although I missed the part where someone was about to fall off the balcony. I heard a woman’s voice cry out, and I couldn’t figure out where it came from. I thought maybe someone had too much to drink. And then I saw a commotion way over on the left side, and sure enough some guy just starts punching someone else in the face.

In the movies, when things like that happen, there is always the horrified “oh!” of gentle-men and -women in the audience. Funny enough, it actually happens in real life too! People were still mumbling to each other after the orchestra started up again.

Other than that, the concert was excellent. The hall sounded beautiful, and Ben Folds rocked the house. It was quite a meeting of two very different audiences — the regular Pops crowd, and a lot of Ben Folds fans. (Note: the altercation appeared to be between regular-pops-crowd-types, not rowdy young ben-folds-types.)

A night to remember!

Update: the em-ess-em picks up on the story

Update with picture!

This looks like it’s getting a decent amount of play, so you can probably take it from here and search google news for more info.

Char and I have been trying to find Granny Smith apples for a couple weeks now, and no store we’ve been to has them. We’ve looked in Shaw’s, Whole Foods, and even Market Basket, to no avail. Where did they all go? Are they out of season or something?

As a spoiled westerner I’m not used to growing seasons actually mattering, so this has been a weird experience. The stores have plenty of other varieties of apple, but I much prefer the tart Granny Smith. My current theory is that there is one boat that brings all the imported apples to the north east. Sometime last month it sank off the coast of South America, leaving us without green apples for the forseeable future.

edit: success! Harvest Coop had Granny Smiths, although many were bruised. I think it was the leftovers from the last successful shipment before the boat sank.

This jewel was uttered by a guy sitting near me at the midnight showing of Snakes on a Plane at AMC Loews Boston Common Theater yesterday. Fifteen minutes before showtime, he was on the phone trying to convince a friend to come to the theater. It’s a shame his friend didn’t show.

That little couplet serves as the perfect review of Snakes on a Plane. It is also a no-contest rebuttal to any criticism of the movie. Do the first fifteen minutes of the movie exist only to get everyone on Pacific Air Flight 121 as fast as possible? Yes, but even that was a little long for some in the audience. Are some of the characters shallow, and are some of the actors really bad? Of course! Do the effects pale in comparison to Pirates of the Caribbean? Damn straight!

It is a little cheesy, a little scary, and quite a bit funny, all in the right proportions. Most importantly, it does not take itself too seriously. “Snakes” is a good B-movie, something I feel like I haven’t seen in a while. When was the last time you saw a really bad police interrogation scene?

Should you see Snakes on a Plane? Yes, but if you weren’t in Theater 16 on Thursday night you’ve already missed the greatest showing there will ever be of this movie. I invited my friend Mike to the show, and he brought a printout of the Snakes on a Plane Participation Script. Well before showtime, he helped the audience learn the key lines: anytime the asian bad guy finishes a sentence, yell “…in bed!”; anytime a sentence ends in “snakes,” yell “motherfucking snakes!”; anytime Samuel L Jackson yells at someone, add “...bitch!” for emphasis; etc. It was a little like a Rocky Horror Screening, except that nobody had seen the movie yet. So when the entire theater found out that adding “in bed” actually works for damn near everything the asian guy says, it was hilarity topped with the joy of discovery.

I wouldn’t trust any reviewer who wasn’t in a theater with the electric atmosphere and audience participation I experienced last night. The story of SoaP’s development and production has been one of collaboration between the filmmakers, the fans, and especially Sam himself. For this movie to work that collaboration must extend to the screenings as well. Putting the burden of the entertainment on the film itself is a dereliction of duty by the audience. So print out the wiki, bring some rubber snakes, and do your part!

Am I ready for opening day?

With 33 Red Sox blogs, you bet I am.

look! photos!

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Char in Kendall Square

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Fanueil Hall on a warm day

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Char at a restaurant

Char and I went to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. They have this awesome chinese house there that was brought over plank by plank from a rural part of China, but they didn’t allow photos there. Bastards.

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Char at Peabody Essex Museum. Lots of Char in this update!

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On the train

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Look, someone who’s not Char. Peter being helped putting on a tie.

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Him name Hopkin Green Frog

Crazy video of the night the red sox won the world series, shot by the guy who does all of those crazy bicycle videos.