so few updates
May 5th, 2006 by Lawrence David
ah, so much has been conspiring lately against me getting some notes down into my blog.
- broken laptop – at least my powerbook still happened to be under warranty and apple paid for my hard drive repair. in fact, by patronizing a local computer repair-man, instead of the official apple store, i was even able to get a newer, faster drive for a fraction of the usual cost.
- broken bike – i decided that going to an engineering school and being a bike rider automatically made me a bike mechanic. so, when christina’s bike needed semi-extensive repairs, i took it upon myself to correct what initially appeared to be almost cosmetic problems. i mean, how long could it take to replace two wheel axles and make applying the rear break a little easier? answer: about 10 hours. my general ignorance about things like ball bearings was confronted with a bike so antiquated that even the seasoned bike mechanic next door got a bit confused. needless to say, my evening time lost that battle.
- dead internet connection – good god verizon is terrible. let’s see, our apartment internet connection goes down at nights, on weekends, and whenever it rains. insanely frustrating. i whole-heartedly look forward to dropping them like a dead cat when we move to somerville.
- work – i’ve finally figured out what kind of research i’ll be doing for at least the next couple of weeks, and consequently have lost a good excuse for dawdling. i’m really excited: i think my advisor and i have assembled a reasonable strategy for creating a big-shake up in the way people use genetic sequences to infer evolution. i’m also doing a good job of ignoring the overwhelming odds of failure for anything this ambitious.
- general life offline from the internet – christina and i are doing our best to give boston a chance. we make good use of our local tennis courts. and, we will admit that boston’s music scene is fantastic. two nights ago, we got to see aqualung at the somerville theater:
the concert was fantastic – they’re terrific musicians. it was incredible how smoothly they could spontaneously segue mid-song from whatever they were playing into old simon and garfunkel tunes or a wilco song. very talented people. perhaps the only downside to the concert was that it was sit-down; even that had some advantages though, as it gave me the opportunity to bring along my black and bulky camera. since i didn’t want to be a complete jerk staring at a bright lcd throughout the dark concert, most of the photos didn’t come out right: i left a couple of the less-bad ones here.
