Author: Owen

Arnold Arboretum

Char and I took a walk in Arnold Arboretum today to celebrate 60 degree weather. Boy it was nice. We live right next to the park, so in literally five minutes we can get away from our apartment and enjoy the peace and quiet of an underused government property.

I love parks, because most people ignore them. When I was at Madison I’d go to Blue Mounds State Park, and invariably I’d be just about the only one there. There were gaggles of kids at the pool, but venture just a minute down the path and it would just be wind and trees and birds. See my old photos for pictures of the place.

Arnold Arboretum has a few more people in it, all walking their dogs or their kids, but mostly it’s empty. It’s not the large forest that blue mounds was, the trees are far apart and you can always hear the traffic. But compared to the parks I saw in Japan, which charged admission and were manicured to the point of insanity, it’s like a gigantic tropical jungle.

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A map of the park. Hey, is that large mark a bullet hole?

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Arty shot with Char.

The snow was melting quite fast, and made very interesting patterns. The following is a screencap from a short video I took with my camera. The quality is shitty, but you can get the idea. The water flows under the ice and snow, taking little packets of air. These bubbles make cool patterns under the ice as they flow.

click to download movie in quicktime (linux OK)

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Bubbles where the water comes out

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Closeup of water trickling

Breathed is breathed new life

I was just decrying the fact that Bloom County books were out of print, and that one needed to buy them used from amazon. Seeing as every cartoonist of my generation cites Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County as inspiration (just see Sinfest) it was very unfair that you couldn’t get a hold of one of them. No longer true!

Bloom County is being republished online for the low price of ten bucks a year. One week’s worth of strips will be put up every two days. Sweet.

(thanks slashdot)

Truth > Fiction

Today, congressmen will eat Freedom Fries in the House of Representatives’ cafeteria, and all I can do is laugh nervously.

ps: I’m going to be posting the links with which I would normally assault my friends on AIM here instead. The ratio of text to pictures is going to go down, but hey, no more link spamming.

OMG DRAMA!

I’m pretty new to the pathetic self-centered world of the bloggosphere. There are a few classes of blogs. Let’s break out some html.

  • Link-harvesters, people that spend all day looking for links of a certain type. Slashdot was one of the first of these, although it has a little original content (interviews). Fark is another, this has no original content whatsoever.
  • Pundits, who find links, post them, and then provide commentary. See Tom Tomorrow, Instapundit, and others.
  • Original content, where people actually post original work/thoughts/pictures/writings. These range from:
    • E/N Drama, or people that post useless angsty shit, and
    • Good sites (like mine of course) where people post beautiful essays, photos, etc. Try Hunkbutta (a travelogue) or Buffoonery.

99% of blogs are livejournal E/N drama pieces of shit. This makes sense, because it’s very easy to update a site that’s about you. Teenagers are the primary authors of these sites because all their friends will read their site, their parents won’t, they loooove themselves and they have lots of freetime.

Like anything else, a way has been found to use stupid blogs to form cliques. I give you the Nonuglies, a collection of livejournal users who choose who is pretty enough to be included among them. As an ugly nerd who now writes his own blog that is straying dangerously toward E/N crap, I react two ways: 1), that’s sort of sick and mean, and 2) who the fuck cares.

I don’t see this as the end of civilization or really anything new. I refuse to say “kids these days” or whatever. Assholes will be assholes at any age. Just because there’s a new, public medium for assholes to flaunt their assholeness doesn’t mean anything has changed. Put it this way, they can have their space, and I will have mine. The internet is a huge place, and it’s very easy to not even know about sprawling subcommunities until someone clues you in. Like Blogs.

Ah yes, did I mention there’s a link harvesting site that tracks crappy blog drama? There’s a niche for everyone I guess.

Boston stoplights

Stoplights like this don’t really exist in other places. Or if they do, they are strange abberrant intersections. Boston is its own universe of crappy intersections, bad signage (I hate that word), and horrible drivers. Every day I discover a new stupid thing. The nexus of evil is The Fenway, the worst collection of rotaries and one-ways on the planet. But, that’s for another day.

Today, it’s the stoplight from hell. In actuality this light means “don’t turn left,” but that’s not really obvious here.

random acts of pet

When I was living at my parents’ house, there was a white cat from next door that would come over every so often. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, but as we were driving away the other day Char spotted iton the hood of a car. Char demanded to be let out to pet the cat.

the crappy tivo-clones begin

One thing about personal video recording is that no company with enough money to make video recording popular could make one that isn’t crippled in some way. No one will make a box that simply records tv, and lets you watch it any way you want. No, they will make you watch the ads, or refuse to allow you to share your recordings, or anything like that.

Today, AOL announced their entry into the pvr world. “Mystro TV” doesn’t do any video recording itself, it relies on an on-demand hub at your cable company. It lets you pause tv, but while it is paused it will show you more ads. Oh great.

Read what the nytimes has to say.
Continue reading “the crappy tivo-clones begin”

MEOW!!!!

Last night, Char and I were getting ready for bed as usual. Char left the room to get something, and noticed Sigmund in the hallway. Our silent little critter has been getting more brave, and it’s more common to see him around the apartment at night. When you come across him, he usually freezes in place with an incredibly guilty expression on his face. Once you make a move he’ll run off.

So Char found Sigmund standing at one end of the hallway, and she called out to him: “Hello Sigmund!” I was lying in bed, and from down the hallway I heard the plaintive reply: “meww?” Parents probably get choked up over their baby’s first word’s, and although I wasn’t especially surprised what he sounded like, the fact that any noise aside from a purr came out of his mouth filled me with parternal joy.

Here’s hoping he doesn’t start yowling into the night.

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This is an unrelated cute kitty picture

A program note: I’ve reduced the number of image sizes, because four is frankly too many. The three new sizes should be enough for everyone.

Glasses

Look back to august and july of last year, and you’ll see complaints about vision. Well today begins another chapter in that tale; I got glasses. They’re pretty hip. The prescription is relatively weak, but it makes all the difference for me. I can read street signs at night again, yay!

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I think I look stupid in this shot, but char is irresistably cute

Finally!

The replacement ram for my tivo machine finally arrived. When I first put that machine together, it crashed and crashed and I could not install the operating system. Now with this ram I can put it together again and see if the problem has been solved.

I have this sick feeling in my stomach that, in fact, the problem has not been solved and this fucking thing is still going to crash. Please pledge your support by replying to this and wishing me luck!
Continue reading “Finally!”