from the desk of stinkpot

you might have noticed that a bunch of links around here no longer point to stinkpot.afraid.org … they point to desk.stinkpot.org.  i’ve finally bought a domain name: stinkpot.org. i finally gave into buying it when the free service [freedns] supplying my domain went down last week.   some idiot(s) decided it would be a good idea to DDOS freedns’ DNS servers to death.  it makes no sense, since those servers weren’t being run for profit; what could the guy controlling the botnet possibly want?

in any case, i picked up a domain so that i would no longer be at the mercy of a domain supplier.  www.stinkpot.org and stinkpot.org now point to my site.

(of course, i still had the problem of setting up a dynamic dns, since my server lives here in our apartment.  and, you guessed it, i still use freedns to do the dynamic dns.  no other free service makes dynamic dns as easy.  so no, i still haven’t really solved my reliability problem.  but, at least i don’t have to give out a long-winded stinkpot.afraid.org:8080 whenever someone asks for my website address.)

…

ok, gotta run – we’re playing hookie today to go camping in rhode island!  we shoulda left much earlier, but we stayed up late last night catching the first showing of snakes on a plane.  (well worth the money.)  it was the first movie i’ve seen in a theatre in a year … and due to the crowd, probably the most entertaining movie i’ve ever watched.

finally found the time to download, cull, and upload the photos from my family’s recent trip to california. it’s gotten bad – i take far too many pictures and spend an inordinate amount of time deleting a majority of them.

in any case, i thought i’d share some of the photos i took and use them to remember things i liked about california:

[above] my ever-amusing sister, stephanie, proving you don’t need to buy something to have fun in a gift shop. steph and i were inseperable for nearly all of last week. she’s 5 years younger than me; consequently, i missed out on seeing a good chunk of her formative high-school years. luckily, something clearly went right during that time (perhaps it was my absence) as she evidently developed a wonderfully off-center sense of humor.

[above] the wedding of my cousin francis and his bride, rashmi. the primary cause of our trip to california, francis’ wedding proved to be spectacular. easily the best wedding i’ve ever been to. it was a mostly traditional indian wedding, with saris and henna and a massive, hirsute hindu priest who looked like the embodiment of some hindu demigod. the ceremony was laced with all sorts of bewildering and yet endearing customs, such as the part where the priest spent five minutes blessing a coconut only to suddenly smash it to the ground, sending husk flying everywhere. i especially liked the sequence where the groom walks away from the alter, acting out the life of a 2000-year-old ascetic who suddenly breaks off his engagement to find krishna. (i hope i got that story right – the translator was working real fast at that point.) the bride’s father is forced to chase after the groom and convince him to marry his daughter.

yet, what ultimately made the wedding wonderful was seeing two people clearly meant for one another get married. in his wedding speech, francis declared that this was “the happiest he had ever been” – he then broke down crying, a recurring motif repeated throughout the day [below]:

it should be qualified, however, that high “emotional quotients” run in the family. francis apparently cried when optimus prime died. mom cries all the time to get out of traffic tickets. heck, i even get verklempt watching inspirational commercials.

perhaps the only downside to california was finding out how much i liked it there. the scenery was beautiful:

[pebble beach]

[muir woods]

[view from my aunt's deck, where i slept one night in my sleeping bag]

so that’s it. good trip. lots more lovingly selected photos here.

oh, and i nearly forgot the obligatory, “i’ve got the cutest cousin in the world shot [below]”

slipped back into boston today.

each day i spent in california was surprisingly delightful. the consistently pleasant weather and the abundance of hiking/biking has really chipped away at my aversion to moving out west. all the time i spent with family has also finally convinced me that it’s fun – not awkward – to live within driving distance of my relatives.

oodles of photos will spill onto the server when i finish unpacking.

gosh, i got no work done last week. i miss having summer vacations.

i’m not superstitious – that’d be bad luck.

a quick post before my pitifully anemic powerbook battery expires …

the wedding was amazing. the ceremony was 3/4 hindi and 1/4 filipino and terribly beautiful. all those saris, the hindu priest, henna tattoos and bhangra – so easy to photograph.

so much work to do though … i should have gotten an earlier plane ticket home.

oh and one last note before i sleep:

for people reading this who use both word press and gallery2, you might want to look into this plugin. it makes embedding gallery photos in wordpress posts a cinch. i installed it the other night and it works as advertised. the wpg2 plugin even lets you embed your gallery within your wordpress blog.

am shipping off to san jose in about 5 hours.

will be gone (and hopefully, internet-removed) for about 1 week.

looking forward to seeing old friends; attending family reunion under mild duress.

i’ve been to california a couple of times now – i don’t know what it is, but i really don’t like the place.  perhaps it’s because people there drive so much.  i’m also distrustful of any state that boasts year-round gorgeous weather.  my inner new-yorker reminds me that nothing in life comes for free.  don’t those californians know that?  i guess they are aware of all those natural disasters …
if i get injured in an earthquake, i’ll be so pissed.

note to self:

changing the password to your DSL account and forgetting to update your modem will probably cause your webserver to go down.  may also result in lost hour of life, as you double-check obscure static-ip settings and port forwarding nonsense.

christina has been taking her first steps towards med school this summer. the hah-vahd post-bac program accepted her and she’s nearly completed with her first general chemistry class.

i’m so proud of her – she’s been kicking the class’ ass.

that having been said, i worry sometimes that she’s in a little too deep. for instance, i went to bed late the other night and found chris fidgeting in her sleep.

“sweetie, what’re you dreaming about?” i asked.

“they came into the room,” she replied with eyes closed.

“who?” it’s always fun asking probing questions when someones deeply asleep.

“them.”

“who’s them?”

“the molecules.” (things were about to get good.)

“what did they do sweetie?”

“they bonded.”

sadly, just when christina’s description of her dream looked most promising, the sleeping girl shut down and refused to answer any more inane questions. nonetheless, it thrills me to no end to see that my girlfriend anthropomorphisizes atoms in her sleep.