Because I Like Talking

Ah Shit It's Five O'Clock

2008-11-22T04:53:00.002-05:00

Word to the wise: don't use Netflix on the Xbox 360 to start Season 1 of a show that's got 4.5 stars after midnight. Nina spent the night at a friend's house (somebody's birthday, I think) and I decided to see what this Weeds show was all about. Apparently it's about a woman in some super suburban housing development who becomes a pot dealer when her husband dies. And it's fucking hilarious.

And I am not waking up tomorrow.

church_street--

2008-10-30T18:56:00.002-04:00

My normally twenty minute commute took about an hour today, so that was fun. At first it just appeared to be the typical 5:30 slowdown where the bridge traffic merges with Route 9 traffic on to 44/55 East, but after moving about thirty feet in five minutes I got suspicious. Then when I crested the hill and could see that part of 44/55 had been entirely closed, I called Mike and asked him to check the Poughkeepsie Journal's site. Shockingly, it actually had a relevant story. Apparently, that section of 44/55, known as Church Street, is now down one church. Now, I'm no fan of religion, but I think we can all agree that church fires are a bad thing. It was an old one, too: 117 years according to the PoJo. Interesting quote from the Pastor though, "It's just a building." I would have at least expected some sort of lamenting.

The cause of the fire seems to related to some renovations, which I actually see as a good thing, because it eliminates a couple of way-too-easy leaps people could make: one being that it's the day before Halloween and the other being that the church was the voting site for the entire 6th Ward for Poughkeepsie.

Happiest Season Of All

2008-09-29T19:28:00.002-04:00

We have now entered possibly my favorite time of the year to be a sports fan. Football is in full swing, baseball is entering the post-season, and the NHL and NBA are nowhere to be seen. It's everything I love and nothing I don't want. As I type this, in fact, I'm watching the last game of the regular season, in which the Chicago White Sox need a win over the Detroit Tigers to force a one-game playoff with the Minnesota Twins. It's a home game for the Sox, so the stadium is electric.

Moments ago, with the scored tied at two, the White Sox sent a rookie to the plate with the bases loaded. ESPN flashed a stat that he already had 3 grand slams this season, tying him for the all-time MLB record. As I informed Nina of this, the pitcher threw a nice safe first pitch fastball, and the kid nearly swung himself out of his shoes, absolutely crushing it over the right field fence. I would give anything to be at a game when something like that happens some day; even over the TV speakers you can hear how different it is when the entire crowd cheers as one. The only thing that was better -- small concilation, really -- about watching it on TV was being able to see the replay; the batter wasn't even finished swinging and his smile was already threatening to consume his entire head. That kind of play is what I love about baseball this time of the year; the length of the season can take a lot of the intensity out of the games and it's great to see the players wearing their hearts on their sleeves once again.

My Toyota Dealer Rocks

2008-07-29T09:19:00.002-04:00

Just went to schedule my 20k service for the Prius, and I couldn't remember the name for the service department so I went to their website to grab the number. When I clicked on Service, instead of just getting a phone number, I got a web app that let me schedule my appointment. How awesome is that? Now that's one more place where I don't have to talk to a stranger on the phone unless something goes wrong, and I am once again very glad I went with Prestige over Wappingers.

Chipwiches For Everybody!

2008-06-26T22:28:00.002-04:00

Tonight being Thursday, we had a softball game, and it was against one of the less successful teams in the league so we really wanted the win. Dave, who bills himself as our General Manager, is one of the Spectrum (our sponsor) folks that comes to cheer us on, and tonight he announced that he wanted a win so bad he would buy us all Chipwiches if we won. We played the best defense of the year and actually had a few good scoring innings and managed to hang on for a 8-7 win, and Dave stayed true to our word. Eight of us followed him to the nearest gas station and cleared out a very surprised clerk's supply of Chipwiches. It felt like I was back in Little League, only with less snow cones.

Some Fun Baseball Notes

2008-06-12T12:32:00.002-04:00

Last night, Don Ursillo, the play-by-by guy for NESN, made a very nice catch on a ball fouled out of play. Fielded it cleanly in the air and everything. I wish I could have been watching NESN for that. I'm sure Jerry Remy laughed about it for five minutes or until he started choking, whichever came first.

David Ortiz officially became a naturalized American citizen yesterday, which is cool I guess. So congrats, Big Papi, go get yourself a big-ass SUV to celebrate!

Chipper Jones is more than a third of the way through the season and still battingway too far over .400 to be sane. I think it was like .419 as of last night. I know there's a lot of season left, but it's still a remarkable accomplishment to make it as far as he has. It's also great to see a baseball achievement that can't be immediately attributed to steroid use. Swinging harder really doesn't get you much when you're swinging for a high batting average.

Game On!

2008-04-20T13:57:00.001-04:00

Have I used that title before? I feel like I have, but I'm not sure and I'm not gonna bother checking.

So spring has hit Poughkeepsie pretty hard this week, and I'm thrilled. From Thursday through Saturday I had my first softball game (Andrew's work is sponsoring a team), my first golf outing of the season with Andrew, and the Marist College Computer Society's annual Gaming For Hope.

Softball was a lot of fun; it's been so long since I played any form of organized ball, and while we aren't exactly a team of all stars, we've got a reasonable amount of talent and everybody seems to be out to have a good time, which is really all I'm looking for. The best part is we actually managed to win. We took a six-run lead into the top of the seventh (and final) inning, and things got a little tight as our pitcher (who had never pitched a balls-and-strikes game before) had some control issues. The other team ended up down two with a full count, runners on second and third with two outs, and a guy at the plate. That's scary because the co-ed league has this interesting rule that walking a guy is a two-base walk, so that you don't pitch around them to get to the girls. So in other words, one more ball and we would have walked in the two runs to tie it up. Fortunately we got a popup to the pitcher, which he put away handily. Very exciting.

Golf was a lot of fun, although about halfway through I realized I was a bit of a schmuck for not thinking to invite Chris to join us. Fortunately, we've got plenty of chances left to play, and he's not the kind of guy who gets uppity about something like that. At any rate, given that I'm still a total newb at golf and this was my first time swinging the clubs since last fall, I was very happy, as I was no worse (and occasionally better) than my last few rounds last year. I really tried to slow down my backswing this time out and that seemed to help a lot with the slice, although I still had my share of embarrassing ten-yard flub shots. The big upside to the round was that I had I think five shots where the appropriate shot was "nine-iron or pitching wedge" onto the green, and I actually managed to put four of them within twenty feet of the hole. I also putted pretty well; I didn't make any huge putts but I was pretty accurate on my long putts pretty much all day. So the last halves of the holes were pretty good; if I can actually get my long clubs cooperating I think I can put up a birdie or two
this year. :)

Gaming For Hope was also a good time, even if I was dragging a bit for a good portion of it (I basically got back from golf, changed into fresh clothes, and headed over). It was a huge relief to finally not have to be involved in any official capacity OR have any homework I was supposed to be doing, so I could just relax and enjoy myself. I still ended up helping a bit, with things like pizza pickup (somehow my Prius was the highest pizza capacity car available), but not having anything actually be my problem was very nice. I also finally got to play the drums on Rock Band. We played Paranoid, and I chose easy, so it wasn't the most challenging thing in the world but I loved it. Nina also sang with some people for a while and really seemed to enjoy herself, so that was great to watch. I still contend that I would buy it in a heartbeat if I actually had two other people who would be over playing it once or twice a week, but I'm not sure I can actually justify the purchase. It was still great fun to try it out, though. Oh, and Matt had a couple friends from high school there, so we made a team for the Halo 3 tourney and, as expected got absolutely destroyed by a group of 14-16 year-olds. We were up against tough odds; none of us have played much lately, the game type and rule set was exactly not what we like to play, and kids that age can afford to play five hours a day. The nice thing was the whole adventure took about five minutes so there wasn't exactly a lot of emotional investment in it. Besides, bottom line of the day was everyone had a good time and they raised a new record amount of money for the event, all of which goes to the very worthy Child's Play.

So, yea, it's been a fun last few days. I just hope the nice weather holds for awhile; I know it's gonna cool off a bit before we really approach summer proper, but this weather is just soooo much nicer than the crap we've had to deal with all winter that I would really appreciate just a few more days of it.

Being a Fan

2008-04-15T10:21:00.003-04:00

Just encountered this in a Sport's Guy article, and it really resonated with me, so I'm putting here to make sure I can always find it. It is a quote from Roger Angell of the New Yorker, in "Agincourt and After":

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

The only thing that I will add to it is that the lesson here, that we should not begrudge someone their enjoyment of something they love simply because we do not share the feeling, is something that "real" sports fans should think about the next time they turn up their noses at NASCAR, professional wrestling, or whatever other child's amusement they deem unfit for an adult's entertainment.

Suck It, Time Warner

2008-04-10T14:48:00.002-04:00

I hate Time Warner, and I can't wait for Verizon to get FiOS TV to my house (we're wired, but Verizon doesn't have TV rights here yet), so I consistently lose my shit at the TV when I see the Time Warner ad that mocks the FiOS ads and claims that "Time Warner has been using fiber for decades." It's true, they have been. IN THE DAMN BACKBONE! Everybody has been running fiber backbones for years, but they obviously imply that their service is fiber just like FiOS, even though you can't get TW fiber directly to your houses. It's a blatant attempt to mislead customers who don't understand IT infrastructure (read: almost everyone), and for weeks I've been saying that if Verizon doesn't sue them for it, some sort of consumer protection group should. Well, I just noticed on Engadget that Verizon finally threw down the gauntlet. I can't say I exactly love Verizon as a company, either, but I hope they take Time Warner to the cleaners.

Ah, April Fool's

2008-04-01T09:30:00.002-04:00

Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of April Fool's Day. All the really good jokes will most likely get you fired and arrested nowadays, so it's mostly just morning DJs on the radio making some poor woman at a Chinese place sound like an idiot, which isn't really my idea of a good time, but Google had a pretty good one for GMail today. They introduced a new fake feature called Custom Time where you could essentially forge the sent timestamp. That in itself is a clever joke, mostly because it's so easy that for a second it's like, "Yea, that could work," even though it would be a horrible horrible thing. But the FAQ is priceless. The help page is here, not sure if it will stay around so I'll quote a few choice sections.

Is there a limit to how far back I can send email?
Yes. You'll only be able to send email back until April 1, 2004, the day we launched Gmail. If we were to let you send an email from Gmail before Gmail existed, well, that would be like hanging out with your parents before you were born -- crazy talk.

And one of the beta user testimonials.

"I used to be an honest person; but now I don't have to be. It's just so much easier this way. I've gained a lot of productivity by not having to think about doing the 'right' thing."

I also like that they went overboard enough for it to obviously be a joke by the time you've read the whole page, even if it seems plausible at first. This way everyone gets a laugh and you don't have people feeling like total idiots. A perfect little joke.

New Fridge Found to Operate Much Better Than Broken One

2008-03-13T18:58:00.002-04:00

So in a repeat of the "boy this milk seems a bit warm" incident of a few weeks ago, our fridge decided to shut itself off some time early this morning, only this time it didn't turn itself back on in the afternoon. Props to Ridgefield Maintenance; they had a guy over less than a half hour after we called it in after work, and about ten minutes later a new fridge arrived. We figured it was just gonna be from the fridge pool somewhere, something that had been removed from someone else's unit and repaired, but it looks like this one has never been used. It's not exactly state of the art, but it's got a little more room and a much better layout on the inside, and it still had a sticker on the side. Our old fridge had some pretty heavy mileage on it, so the upgrade is pretty sweet. Really, the only downside is we had to chuck some food that got too warm for too long, but the grand total wasn't too bad. And now we don't have to worry if there will be any more warm milk incidents. All's well that ends well, I guess.

Have They Tried This Already?

2008-03-11T22:48:00.002-04:00

Soda coolers in takeout restaurants: why don't they have motion sensors, or timers, or something with even the tiniest bit of sophistication, that makes them able to decide that their off the clock and at the very least shut off the damn lights, preferably raise the maximum allowed temperature a bit. House thermostats have timers so that they don't bother cooling the house as much when everybody's asleep or at work; you would think the concept would have filtered down a bit. Maybe they tried it and nobody bought them? Maybe the technology wasn't quite there and it didn't work out? I demand answers.

Oh My God Finally

2008-02-25T08:51:00.003-05:00

They're making a new Worms game for the Wii. And it's old-school, too. None of that 3D stuff from the Xbox version, which was interesting but didn't really pan out, and (from the demo footage) none of the awful controls and crippled gameplay of the DS version (how can you make the DS feel awkward?), just a bunch of worms kicking the shit out of each other. It releases March 17th, and just might make me go back on this weekend's pronouncement that I couldn't buy any more games for a while.

...and another thing!

2008-01-30T15:58:00.000-05:00

Just ran the Time and Date settings. One of the presented options was "Keep synchronized with internet servers." I clicked it, and it told me I would need to install the NTP package, then asked if I wanted to. I clicked Yes, and 30 seconds later my clock was set.

That was nice.

Venturing Out of The Wilderness

2008-01-30T14:43:00.000-05:00

This post comes to you from the waiting room at Kingston Prestige Toyota, and it brought to you by Ubuntu. I know it may seem like almost a regression as a Linux user, but today marks Day One of my experiment with moving from Gentoo to Ubuntu, and I'm actually quite excited about it.

I call it a bit of a regression because Gentoo has that "close to the machine" feel, where things only happen when you tell them to and they happen exactly as you told them to happen, whether that's what you meant or not, whereas Ubuntu has a much more "oh hey look at what it just did" feel to it. It's almost like putting the training wheels on. Things happen for me, and I don't know what every single process in ps is, or if that's what my init process looked like last time. Hell, I don't even see the init process; I just get an orange progress bar and then a graphical -- graphical! -- login prompt. And, honestly, I kind of like it. It's almost like some forbidden pleasure. But more on that later. First, the real reason I'm trying this.

It basically comes down to two things: overcoming inertia, and reading the writing on the wall.

The inertia thing is a much bigger deal, especially for somebody like me. Everybody is uneasy with change; for me it's nearly a physical discomfort. So whenever anybody has told me I should check out some distro that wasn't Gentoo, the mere idea of having to figure out a different way to say, "I want eth0 to use dhcp," was enough to make me start shaking my head. Wondering how I would get along without Portage was the stuff of nightmares. I tried to install an rpm once. That was all the evidence I needed to know that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. But Ubuntu doesn't make you use the rpm command, and it doesn't wrap some stupid GUI around it that just presents cyclic dependencies in a configurable font. From what people were telling me, it basically just worked. You say, "I want pidgin," and a few keystrokes, maybe a mouse click or two, and you've got pidgin. It sounded tolerable. I watched it happen once, and it looked okay.

Then I read a Gentoo Weekly Newsletter posting about how the people put in charge of the Gentoo Foundation when the creator stepped aside had managed to let the charter for the 501(c) nonprofit lapse, and didn't get it re-instated for six weeks. I saw the founder offer to run things again and be turned down. IBM made an announcement that we would start officially supporting Lotus Notes 8 on Ubuntu. I know, I know, Notes basically blows, but we have to use the thing either way, and the idea of not having to run VMWare (I mean seriously, I work with Xen for a living) to get my corporate mail is appealing. Ubuntu has some serious momentum right now, while Gentoo is stalling. Note: I'm not saying it's falling apart or the quality has decreased. It's just that the project doesn't have the buzz it used to, and it definitely doesn't have the mainstream uptake that Ubuntu is getting.

Also, while the it's fun being able to say, "I pretty much know everything that goes on with my system, because I told it to happen," it's not that big a deal to me anymore, and at this point I'd honestly prefer to say, "All I know is that everything works." At work I write code; at home I play video games, watch movies, and futz around on the internet. Nowhere in there do I see a good reason to be a top-notch Linux sysadmin. At this point, I just want to use the thing.

Finally, if I'm ever going to convince Nina that using Linux might not be so bad, I'm going to need to try a different approach from Gentoo and Ion3.

So how's it going so far? Pretty good. It hasn't been this paradigm-shifting, quasi-religious, epiphany or anything, but it's been nice. Lots of little things that make me smile. Most of them are probably more an effect of running a well-configured Gnome environment than Ubuntu itself, but all I know is it works. (Tada!) For example, there's a little thing in the top corner that looks like it should relate to wireless. It does. In fact, when I turned on the computer in the waiting room here, I clicked on it, selected "PRESTIGE SERVICE" from the list, and starting using the internet. And if I understand correctly, that AP just got added to my list of "if I don't have a LAN connection and I can see this, I'll use it" stuff. So handy. Hibernate is another one. I was going over the backup checklist with Sean and when I mentioned the hibernate scripts, he interrupted and said, "You won't need those." I of course asked how I would hibernate, and he clicked this little green man in the top right corner of his workspace. A series of buttons appeared, one of which was labeled "Hibernate." In case you haven't figured out the theme, it just works.

One complaint. I did the LiveCD install without plugging into the wired network, rebooted, and plugged in my LAN connection. Nothing happened. A little diagnostic work and some frustration didn't get me much, so I left the LAN plugged in and rebooted. Tada, I'm on the internet, but stupid my LAN card is eth1, my wireless is eth0. Which is dumb. But it was fixed easily enough; I just found the udev rule file for persisting network card names and swapped the two cards, rebooted again, and it's been great ever since. So it was resolved quickly and I even got to get my hands a tad bit dirty; all good.

I think is what happened is the T60 put the nic to deep sleep because it wasn't plugged in, and so it failed to autodetect as even being present. There is a known problem on boot, where the nic will often go into deep sleep before the appropriate module is initialized, and so the EEPROM checksum fails and linux doesn't even think the card exists. I think a similar problem bit me on this one, so I'm willing to let it go. That kind of silliness is not something I expect such a hands-off install to be able to handle. Besides, I didn't have to tell it a single thing about the actual hardware. It detected and configured everything else correctly on the first try, even the oh-so-unfriendly Intel 3945 wireless chipset.

Another little thing was what happened when I thought I might have mercurial installed but wasn't sure. I ran 'hg' on the command line, which will dump a little help output if mercurial is there. I got this:

jay@hrunting:~$ hg
The program 'hg' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install mercurial
You will have to enable component called 'universe'
bash: hg: command not found

I thought that was a nice touch.

So bottom line? Too soon to tell, but I think I'm going to be pretty happy with it. And I would highly recommend it if you've thought about running Linux but don't want to have to figure out your wireless chipset or write your own xorg.conf. It is by far the fastest 0-60 I've ever had with a Linux install, Gentoo or otherwise.

Falling and Crawling

2008-01-16T18:44:00.001-05:00

Nina has started class again, which means three nights a week I'm alone in the house for a few hours. I've decided today to get the Terminal Velocity achievement in Portal. The in-game achievement list says "fall 30,000 feet" but I have no concept of how far that is. So I've been falling for about ten minutes now, the Xbox has actually activated its screensaver, and I'm playing some Nethack. Kicking some ass in Nethack is maybe more accurate, but who knows it could all fall apart ten seconds from now.

Oh, and one of my pet large cats just ate a Chameleon corpse and turned into a hobbit. Well for now it's a hobbit; I kind of hope it keeps changing, just for entertainment. Imagine the look on some random enemies face when my pet snail turns into a fire giant or something. If it stays a hobbit I'll just name it Sam I guess.

More on portal later, since it deserves it's own post. For the time being it will suffice to say that the game is awesome. Now back to my games.

Tada!

2007-12-31T11:59:00.000-05:00

I'd say about half of my readers have already heard about this, but some may not have (never got ahold of Jeff while I was in Vernon), and others haven't actually seen it, so a quick entry is warranted. Besides, if anything I've done lately is important enough to record this would be the one.

Nina and I are finally engaged! I managed to take her by surprise, which I was rather proud of, since it was a well-known fact that it was going to happen "at some point." It wasn't an exceedingly romantic proposal, because then she would have seen it coming too soon, but I think she liked it.

Oh, and here's the ring. I designed it myself at Sarah Byrnes Goldsmith; everyone there was incredible, and Sarah did a great job putting the ring together. We're thinking July 2009 for the date, but obviously nothing is set in stone yet.

Snowned!

2007-12-16T12:06:00.000-05:00

So far we've had two winter storms of appreciable size here in Poughkeepsietown. The first one hit basically the entire northeastern United States, so I doubt it's news to anyone that reads this, but I enjoyed that one. That's pretty much the best kind of storm, the one that drops nearly a foot of snow in a day and moves on. No horrific sheets of ice on the road, no frozen rain putting holes in your face, just a crap-ton of snow. Added bonus, the complex has private snow removal crews, and they do a very nice job. We of course have to clean our cars off, but pretty much everything else is taken care of.

Last night's storm was significantly crappier. There was maybe an inch or two of snow and then a bunch of freezing rain, which turned into that gross grainy snow that is almost strong enough to support your weight but instead just makes walking brutally awkward. And it makes a crappy snowball. On the upshot, it showed me how good my car is at defrosting itself. I just turned it on, activated front and rear defrosting, and cleared off Nina's car. By the time hers was done, I just went over and brushed off my entire car. Even the side windows were completely melted clean. Good stuff. I also cleaned off Mr. McDonald's car this time, cuz he's really old. It would take him like half an hour just to get the windshield. So that was my good deed for the day.

And now I have to go, because the Patriots' game is coming up.

Heroes: Turns Out It's Good

2007-12-03T20:06:00.000-05:00

Back when Heroes came out, we (the sci-fi crowd) were all pretty interested, so we excitedly queued up for the first Sci-Fi Night after the first episode aired. We all wanted to like it, but unfortunately, the first episode wasn't very good. The attempt to cram something like twelve character expositions, beginnings of backstories, the first hint at a bad guy, and way too many hints towards the "we are all connected" storyline didn't work out so well. It just came across too heavy-handed. Afterwards, I started hearing that it was pretty good, but my natural inclination to stick to my snap judgments kept me from giving it another chance.

Then Nina threw it on the Netflix queue, just for the hell of it (I love Netflix). We started at the second episode, which is easily ten times better than the first one, right now we've got discs three and four en route, and the show just keeps getting better and better. Besides the fact that almost all the people in the show are either superheroes or supervillains, the pacing is absolutely perfect. They make you wait for the awesome, but they don't make you wait too long. It is, after all, a comic book show when it comes right down to it, and comic books are all about the awesome. The characters have to come to terms with their abilities, but we don't need montages to see them develop.

I know most of you have probably already seen the show, but if you haven't checked it out, I highly recommend it.

Little VMWare USB Tip

2007-12-03T10:25:00.000-05:00

Don't know how many of you will find this relevant, but I seem to have finally figured out the easiest way to get USB passthrough working with VMWare. With some devices, like my Logitech Harmony remote, this is easy, as linux doesn't know what the hell to do with the thing. Once you plug it in, you just go to VMWare's menu and choose VM->Removable Devices->USB Devices->. Tada.

The problem occurs with things Linux does know how to use, like USB mass storage devices, aka keydrives. Linux can grab and attach these as SCSI disks, which makes grabbing them with VMWare more difficult. You can go through the usual steps, and your VM will see a plug event, but it never actually gets the device. My solution is to do the attach, wait for the plug event to fire, then, unplug and replug the keydrive. Now the device will actually show up in your VM. I think it's something about how VMWare does the attach; so that the drive is "claimed" already when you replug it, and Linux lets VMWare take it.

Now the warning: for all I know this won't work for anyone, or keep working as the Linux kernel and/or VMWare are updated, but if you are having trouble getting USB passthrough to work, this could work for you.

This Shouldn't Work

2007-11-27T14:21:00.000-05:00

You know how people will describe things using words like "awesome" or "breathtaking" just to make you go see what they're talking about, and then you see it and think, "Well, that was okay, I guess," but you never really see the breathtaking part? Seadragon is what they wish they were describing.

Super High Critical Priority

2007-11-13T15:16:00.000-05:00

Apparently, Xbox Live is turning five years old this month. To celebrate, they are releasing Carcassonne (an Xbox Live Arcade game), for free for a short period of time. Josh, if I don't see a response in the comments from you buy then I'm calling you about this. Because it's awesome.

This was brought to my attention by John via Mike, and the first google hit is this story on it.

Dear Worcesterites

2007-11-08T14:55:00.001-05:00

Amusing for me, a bit of a bummer for my WPI-graduate readers. Recently, WPI's football team was beating the mighty Susquehanna squad 7-0 with one second to go in the game, when Susquehanna snapped the ball, scored a touchdown, went for two, and won 8-7. Granted, this is better than Marist's plan of attack lately, which typically does not allow for blown leads because we are never leading, but still a bit of a stinger.

Credit to TMQ for finding this.

This Is Good

2007-10-30T13:54:00.000-04:00

Not much to say other than that the FCC may have actually done something right for once. On a related note, Chris's building is getting the inside, per-unit, work done for FiOS today. Mine, by my almost entirely made up estimates, will be done in a week or so. Apparently, the TV access will not be available immediately, but is coming. Internet will be available immediately, although I will probably wait until I get just get both at once to switch, since Time Warner's internet is acceptable, if not particularly impressive.

Amen, Brother

2007-10-25T12:00:00.000-04:00

Great quote from Joel:

Software development takes immense intellectual effort. Even the best programmers can rarely sustain that level of effort for more than a few hours a day. Beyond that, they need to rest their brains a bit, which is why they always seem to be surfing the Internet or playing games when you barge in on them.

I'm with him on that one. Not that we don't use that as a bad excuse a little more than we should...

Here's the article that is from.