Author: Owen

Ooooo scary

Char and I were coming home on the T yesterday on the redline going southbound. The train had just passed the Charles/MGH stop and was at Park Street. A voice came on the loudspeaker and said “the next stop will be Charles/MGH.” This of course makes no sense, since we just came from there.

The stop after Park is Downtown Crossing, and that’s where we were going to transfer to the Orange Line to get home. There’s an underground concourse that connects Park Street and Downtown Crossing, so we decided to get off the train and walk underground to the station.

Unfortunately, there were a bunch of police and fire officials at the underground concourse, and they told us we should walk to Downtown above ground. I asked if the station was closed too, or just the concourse. The policeman said yeah, the station’s still open.

At this point I was thinking a water main had busted and flooded the tunnel. The concourse might be flooded, making underground travel to Downtown impossible (or at least very wet).

When we got to Downtown (now above ground), there were more fire trucks, and more police cars. We tried to go into the station from one entrance, and the firefighter there said to use the other entrance. We used the other entrance, and _finally_ someone told us that, in fact, the whole station was closed after all. It’s amazing how poor the communication between these guys was over a mere 500 feet.

We ended up walking to Chinatown and taking the train from there.

Today I found this in the paper:

qdoba update!

Well thank goodness my site is the highest rated result for “boston qdoba” on google. I got an email today from an alert reader who found my site and says:

we seem to be in the same boat because I,too, am searching for a qdoba competitor and anna’s just doesn’t cut it! A few days ago I was in the Copley mall and low and behold, there is a qdoba actually coming to the mall! Word has it that there are three of them coming to boston soon…just thought you might be interested….hope you enjoy it!

This is great news, and I will no longer have to pine for burritos I can’t have. I never mentioned this, but when Char visited me for Thanksgiving she actually brought a Qdoba burrito on the plane from wisconsin so that I could have one in Massachusetts. It was totally unexpected, and even nuked it was delicious. She’s a great gal.

Structured Procrastination

This article seems to describe some of my behavior pretty well:

… the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

As in, I wrote Bloggo as a way of avoiding doing a project for work. The work did get done, late, but I also had this other great accomplishment.

The author, John Perry, points out a flaw of this philosophy:

At this point you may be asking, “How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?” Admittedly, there is a potential problem here.

Perry’s solution of making sure that the “most important” tasks are the ones that are the least dependant on deadlines is somewhat of a cop-out.

My solution is to constantly rearrange the list of tasks, so the thing I was avoiding doing yesterday becomes the thing I do to ignore something new. For instance, I avoid paying the bills until a week or two before they are due, but as the deadlines get close, I decide to do the bills as a way of avoiding doing the dishes. Logically, the bills are more important because they involve money and theoretical large men breaking your legs. Instead, I think of the bills as an easy task involving a pen and paper, rather than getting my hands wet and soapy and aggrivating my eczema. This process of justifying reordering the list is crucial to convincing yourself that you’re putting things off, but once you cross that hurdle you’re on your way to lazy productivity!

Thanks Jordi Mallach

Now if I were an Artist…

Here’s a bit of high-concept art. Everyone who talks about cameraphones emphasizes the spontaneous nature of the photography, the every-dayness of the pictures. Now if I were an artist, I’d get a cast of thousands, the most expensive lighting setup — you know, something like the photos of Gregory Crewdson… and then I’d shoot it with my shitty 352×288 cameraphone. Spending thousands of dollars to determine the arrangement of 100,000 pixels? Art, baby.

I am being spammed by five-year-olds

Spam filters have gotten good enough that the only thing that gets through is total nonsense and awful spelling:

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rpm crashes / won’t respond

RPM is a little like windows — it’s chaotic, and if it’s disturbed everything blows up and there’s nothing you can do. But, if you find that rpm suddenly stops working and none of the commands work, try doing:

rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*

and it might just work again. As always, you should have backups.