Wednesday, November 19 – Becky and I went in to Boston to see ***Les Mis|http://www.lesmis.com/*** at the ***Colonial Theatre|http://www.broadwayinboston.com/html/theatres/colonial/index.html***. I am pretty new to the show – I just started listening to the London cast recording a few weeks before the show. Becky has been a fan of it for a while, though. She has read the original Victor Hugo novel and has listened to the London and Broadway cast recordings. The show was great! The stage effects were incredible, the singing and acting were great, and the story was fabulous. We had dinner at ***Maggiano’s Little Italy|http://www.maggianos.com/locations/detail.asp?sid=001%2E025%2E0139*** before the show – also very good! The service was fast and the food was delicious, and we had no trouble getting a seat right away before the show.

Friday-Saturday November 21-22 – We drove up to Townsend to hang out with the Lowes. Friday night we watched “Elf” in Nashua… a surprisingly good and entertaining movie. Saturday morning we went out to breakfast at ***Parker’s Maple Barn|http://www.parkersmaplebarn.com/index.html*** …. deeeelicious. This time I did not get the stuffed french toast, as seen on the ***breakfast menu|http://www.parkersmaplebarn.com/breakfast.html***, but I did have a nice omlette. After breakfast we visited the craft fair at the Congregational church, then in the afternoon we hung out at the Lowe house and got a little fresh air at a park in Ashby. The day was chronicled in photos with my new Canon Powershot A70 ***here|http://gallery.prwdot.org/townsend_ashby***

Today we’ve been hanging out at home and doing holiday type preparations… this week is the start of warehouse work at ***CBD|http://www.christianbook.com/*** – all employees who don’t already work in the distribution center or the call center have to spend about 8 hours a week helping out in those areas in order to handle the extra Christmas season rush. I usually end up doing checking, which is where you verify that boxes are stuffed with the correct items before they are shipped. It can be entertaining at times, because you get to see the interesting stuff people buy. 🙂

Tuesday we’ll be up in Townsend for ***Corey’s|http://corey.prwdot.org/*** birthday, then Thursday we’ll be in Southie for Thanksgiving. The holiday season is starting to, well… snowball. 🙂

I had a nightmare Thursday night. I was dreaming that Becky and I were on some sort of a college trip to a city like San Francisco. We were staying in a house down near the water. There was lots of stuff related to the trip and who we were travling with and the things we did, but I don’t remember that stuff. Here’s what I do remember. One night, we were walking down the hill outside of our house, towards the water. At one point I looked up towards the sky, and at that moment I heard a loud sound, like an enormous explosion or a huge clap of thunder. At the same time, I saw a streak of light and flames stab through the clouds and plunge into the ocean. I didn’t believe it at first, and I thought I must be dreaming. So I ran over to Becky and asked her if she had seen it too. She said she had! So at that point, I was really scared. I ran back to the hill, and I heard a peculiar sound like the boiling of water. To my shock, the ocean in front of us started to bubble and boil! The boiling kept increasing and moving ever closer towards the shore. I could see that it was going to crest over the shore some time soon, and that we would all be doomed. So I yelled to Becky “Let’s get out of here!” We both started running up the hill, away from the boiling ocean. It was at that point that I woke up.

Phew.

Becky and I took a trip down to Boston last night to see ***They Might Be Giants|http://www.tmbg.com/***. They were doing a free performance and autograph session at Borders/Downtown Crossing, in Boston. It was a pretty fun event, as most TMBG events are. This one was a bit nicer, in a way, because instead of playing in a smoky, dark, drunkard-filled bar, they were performing in a nice, clean, sober, smoke-free bookstore. Definitely a lot more enjoyable. The musical set they did was only 30 minutes long, but it was still a good time. They did some old favorites, such as “Particle Man” and “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”, but also did some newer songs, from last year’s album “NO!”, and from “Mink Car”. A good time was had by all. I didn’t get anything autographed, but I did ***take some photos|http://gallery.prwdot.org/tmbg_borders***.

Speaking of which, if you check out those photos, you’ll notice that the picture quality is not quite up to par with my usual photos. That is because I was taking the photos with the camera built in to my ***Sanyo SCP-8100|http://www.sanyo.com/wireless/handsets/scp-8100.htm*** phone. And why was I using that? Well, sadly, after Becky and I arrived back in Boston from our trip to San Francisco, I had the misfortune of misplacing my camera bag somewhere in Logan Airport. Despite my best attempts at contacting the State Police (I actually went in and they let me look through all of their lost and found items, and then I filed a police report), Logan Express, the bus company that runs Logan Express, and American Airlines (both in Boston and San Francisco), and of course searching throughout our apartment and our cars, I have been unable to locate the camera bag. So, my trusty Nikon Coolpix 775 is lost.

Now, while I am disappointed at the loss of my camera, there are a few rays of sunshine to be felt. First, this has motivated me to get off my duff and finally sign up for a renter’s insurance policy. Not only does this protect the contents of our house, but it also protects items we are carrying with us while traveling. When I do get a replacement camera, it can be placed in its own separate insurance schedule so that if it is destroyed, stolen, or lost, it can be replaced at full purchase price with no deductible. By the way, if you or anyone you know is renting an apartment, house, or otherwise, I’d highly recommend getting such an insurance policy. It is a very inexpensive way to gain a great deal of security.

Second, I had already been planning on purchasing a new camera before this all happened. I have some money saved up, and hopefully by the end of this month, I will be making a purchase. My top candidate at this point is the ***Sony DSC-V1|http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_DisplayProductInformation-Start;?ProductSKU=DSCV1KITIS&Dept=dcc&CategoryName=dcc_DIDigitalCameras_CybershotProDigitalCameras***. While many people complain about Sony’s use of a proprietary memory format (MemoryStick), they are simply overlooking the fact that Sony makes excellent cameras. The DSC-V1 comes as “Highly Recommended” — the top rating at ***Digital Photography Review|http://www.dpreview.com/***. It’s got a compact design, a nice 4x Carl Zeiss zoom lens, 5 megapixels, Night Vision capability, holograph autofocus, manual exposure, aperture, and shutter controls, and lots more. ***MacMall|http://www.macmall.com/*** has the camera for $100 less than retail, so that’s probably where I’ll go.

Of big cats and operating systems – since we returned from San Francisco, we have been running Mac OS X 10.3 on both of our Macintosh systems. The experience has been good for the most part – overall, speed has increased, programs are more responsive and do less of the dreaded “beachball of death,” and the underlying BSD subsystem has been updated to be in sync with FreeBSD 5. At the moment, there is a bit of a quirk, which revolves specifically around the Sawtooth G4. When you are running Panther on a Sawtooth G4, nVidia GeForce video cards do not seem to be recognized properly, and various problems can result from their use. These problems range from black or grey screens at system boot, to strange video artifacts when dragging or scrolling windows. Our Sawtooth system has the latter problem, with its GeForce4 MX video card. There are a few possible workarounds. One is to simply revert back to the stock card that came with the system. Another is to take your system down to 256 megs of RAM or less. I opted for the second choice, and it’s actually working fine. Having such low RAM does bring a performance penalty, but it’s somewhat balanced out by the improvements in speed from having a fully functioning video card. Apple has already released Mac OS X 10.3.1, with a few urgent bug fixes, but as yet, they have not provided a real fix for this issue. I have submitted various bug reports, and they have acknowledged to me that it is a known bug, and that engineers are working on it. So I guess the game at this point is just to wait.

Also on the Mac OS X front, ***Ars Technica|http://www.arstechnica.com/*** has released their full and exhaustive ***review of Mac OS X Panther|http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/003/panther/macosx-10.3-1.html***. If you are curious about what the upgrade really entails, take a read.

Becky’s going to be away for a few days at the ***New England Museum Association|http://www.nemanet.org/*** annual conference, so I’ll be all by my self in Beverly up until Friday evening… don’t worry, though, I’ll find things to do to keep myself busy. 🙂