from the desk of stinkpot

i’m really hungry. it’s amazing – the students and faculty i work with don’t seem to eat at all. without anyone’s lead to follow, i constantly find myself forgetting to eat lunch. luckily, christina has taken a shine to cooking since we’ve moved to boston, which means that i usually enjoy a solid dinner. unfortunately, she’s at a business function tonight, which means that i’ve got 20 minutes until my frozen foods finish cooking in our toaster oven.

torture. my stomach has got to be digesting itself.

to steer my mind away from food, i’ve been thinking about an article i read the other day in the nytimes – “hope, saved on a laptop.” it’s this absolutely heartbreaking story about the mother of a girl killed in the world trade center attack, who finds her daughter’s laptop years later. on it, she finds a list of 100 things that her daughter had resolved to do sometime in her life. although the mother tragically never sees her daughter pass through adulthood, she’s still finds some joy by knowing what her daughter intended to do.

i’ve had trouble getting this story out of my head. so melancholy and yet somehow hopeful.

so i’ve decided to write down some of the things that i’d like to do in my lifetime. i don’t think i can muster 100 right now – but i’ll get started anyway. i’ll try and only write down things that i think i can pull off – nothing too pie-in-the-sky. here goes, in no particular order:

1. become fluent in another language.
2. learn to whistle.
3. write a decent poem.
4. skydive.
5. make some real contribution to science.
6. see machu picchu.
7. see china.
8. see the northern lights.
9. climb a mountain.
10. become a father.
11. become a grandfather.
12. learn to play the guitar.
13. stop being easily distracted.
14. build a bicycle from scratch – even the wheels.
15. become a decent carpenter.
16. learn c.
17. learn to dance.
18. become good at linear algebra.
19. go surfing.
20. learn how to blow a bubble with bubblegum.
21. get the courage to do the scary things on this list.
22. become a decent cook.
23. backpack for at least 2 weeks in a foreign country.
24. live in a small town.
25. raft the grand canyon.
26. go sailing.
27. learn to drive stick.

that’s it for now – i’m out of things to do and my pre-cooked chicken nuggets are finished reheating.

this whole house buying thing has been a real drag lately. that, coupled with my general sloth, has totally stifled my regular updates to this blog.

i’m gonna make up for it though, beginning with this joke:

what do you call a tiny psychic who escapes from prison?

a small medium at large!

argh, dsl (and therefore the webserver) was down for the past 6 days. can’t wait to ditch verizon when we move …

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.

christina and i finally saw matt pond, pa in concert last night. we’re both fans – we were thrilled to buy t-shirts (with beavers on them!) and get them signed.

matt pond opened for cake … the two bands were playing mit’s spring concert.

it was the first concert that i’ve had the presence of mind to bring earplugs to. consequently, we got to stand in the second row, directly behind the left loudspeaker. such a liberating feeling to not have to prioritize between standing 5 feet from the stage or suffering long-term auditory damage.

the two of us look forward to tuesday – we’ve got tickets to see aqualung in the somerville theater. i’m really pleasantly surprised at how much good music makes its way through boston. and unlike back home in new york, boston-area shows are rather affordable; tickets around here never seem to be upwards of $15. makes concert going real hard to resist.

my powerbook has been awfully pokey lately.

at first, i thought it might have something to do with my limited available hard drive space (~ 5 gigs free … my mp3 library is getting out of hand).

i tried deleting unneccesary files and running optimization utilities like onyx.

this evening, i decided to try and repair permissions using disk utility.

i open the program, to be greeted with:

This drive has reported a fatal hardware error to Disk Utility.
If the drive has not failed completely, back up as much data as you can and then replace it with a working drive.

honestly, i was a bit happy to see a message like this; i’m glad that my hard drive has the courtesy to let me know that its on its last legs.

of course, i’m mostly terrified – i’ve been scrambling to back up gigabytes of code, music, photos, and documents for the past couple of hours.

come on hard drive, hold together just a little bit longer …

i got a kick out of this clever solution to evacuating people from skyscraper fires. i particularly like how these elevators are collapsible, allowing for several of them to be used simultaneously.

poor christina committed one of dating’s cardinal sins tonight: she let her boyfriend cut her hair.

i wore her down with a couple of reasons:

1. i’ve been cutting my own hair for years (albeit the easiest haircut in the book – the crew cut)
2. salons are expensive
3. although i might make a couple of missteps in the beginning, the payoff – a lifetime of free haircuts – will be worth it.
4. hair-styling runs in my blood. my grandmother’s beauty school put my dad and all his sisters through college.

needless to say, christina didn’t much care for most of these reasons, especially the first half of reason 3. nonetheless, we’re heading down to see friends in new york city tomorrow and she needed a haircut before then. i was the last resort.

emboldened, i convinced her that i could do a “forward-angled bob”, the jennifer aniston-type cut that christina had always fancied. i found the following diagram online; it looked pretty straightforward:

forty-five minutes later, in spite of the fact that i had never given a girl a proper haircut before, a forward-angled bob sat on christina’s head.

in her words, “huh. that actually looks ok.” if that’s not a ringing endorsement, i don’t know what is.

so if this whole phd thing doesn’t work out, looks like hair stylist can go on my list of alternate things to do with my life (joining garbage man, rock star, and tabloid photographer).

i watched goodnight and goodluck for the first time tonight. i knew a little bit about murrow going into the movie, having heard a program on npr about the man. nevertheless, i was still blown away by the movie and ed murrow’s eloquence, integrity, and sense of justice. the man is my hero.

i was most impressed by his tirade against television – all the more remarkable considering murrow made an indelible stamp on televised journalism. murrow challenged:

“Just once in a while, let us exalt the importance of ideas and information. Let us dream to the extent of saying that on a given Sunday night, the time normally occupied by Ed Sullivan is given over to a clinical survey on the state of American education…Would the corporate image of their respective sponsors be damaged? Would the stockholders rise up in their wrath and complain? Would anything happen other than a few million people would have received a little illumination on subjects that may well determine the future of this country and therefore the future of the corporations? To those who say people wouldn’t look, they wouldn’t be interested, they’re too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply-there is, in one reporter’s opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost. Otherwise, it is merely lights and wires in a box. Goodnight, and goodluck.”

i couldn’t agree with murrow more. in fact, this reminded me of my 15 minutes of literary fame, which dates back to high school. [the only reader response i've had accepted by the nytimes.]

goodnight, goodluck, and good-god i wish i could write like ed murrow.

apologies for server being inaccessible. verizon dsl blows like a vacuum.

alas, no other ISP is nearly as affordable …