CBD doesn’t give Columbus Day as a paid holiday, but I used one vacation day so that I could have a nice three day weekend on MV. Becky and I met up with Jenn and Mom and Dad Lowe this weekend on Martha’s Vineyard. We did a bit of housework, lots of reading, talking, movie and TV watching, eating, and relaxing. The weather was cool but nice, and there were no summer crowds to deal with.
Picture-taking was fairly subdued this time around, but there is still a gallery to check out if you like.
This guy is the luckiest Apple Store employee. His whole store, I suppose, is lucky, but he is the one with the photos to prove it.
We’ve been watching tonight’s Presidential “town hall” style debate. Frankly, all of these debates just make me sick and don’t really make me want to vote for any of the candidates. Politics in general just sickens me, but at the moment that’s not my point.
Right now, the question I’d like to ask the candidates is, “What exactly are you going to do to stop the forces of Blue Laser? Will you ensure that the Cheat Commandos have sufficient supplies of Cheat Commandos…O’s?
Earlier today, Jay Allen, creator of the MT-Blacklist plugin, posted on his blog that Six Apart had just pulled in an additional $10 million of venture capital funding. He wondered in his blog entry, “Geez, what they’re going to spend that money on?”.
A little while later, Mena Trott posted on Mena’s Corner that Jay would be moving back to California from Hungary and joining Six Apart as a product manager.
Hmm, I suppose that explains where at least some of that new venture capital could be going. 😉 Methinks Jay knew just a tad more than he was letting on in his post… if not, then it’s certainly an amazing coincidence!
Anyway, congrats Jay! Your plugin is great, and though I’ll probably never upgrade past Movable Type 2.661, I do appreciate all of the work you have done. The MT-Blacklist plugin helps protect all of the blogs here at prwdot.org from comment spammers, and Jay’s genius will surely come in handy at Six Apart.
Update: Jay just got around to posting about it.
Since I’ve been promoting my movies to a slightly wider audience recently, I thought I’d make an index page for them. I’ve also put a link to “Peter’s Movies” in our left nav bar. Hopefully this will make it easier to keep track of future short movie productions – if any. I don’t see movie-making taking up too much of my time, though, unless I receive a real video camera and a more powerful computer. At the moment, it’s fairly excruciating to do even a five-minute movie on my 450 MHz PowerMac G4, and my individual video clips are limited to about three minutes in length, since I’m just using my digital camera’s freebie “movie” function.
… is apparently the way to get the call telling you that you’ve just won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Congratulations to Betsy’s husband Frank Wilczek, as well as David J. Gross and H. David Politzer, who shared in the prize.
A while back I had mentioned the case of Dunkin Domination here in Beverly – eight dunkin donuts within 2.5 square miles of land.
This weekend, Becky and I had the occasion to drive around the Route 60 rotary in Revere for the first time in a while. We discovered that there were now two Dunkin Donuts on the rotary, immediately across the street from each other, as shown by “DD1″ and DD2” in this diagram:
ppp|
Dueling Dunkin Donuts|ppp
So, whether you’re entering the rotary or leaving the rotary, there’s a DD to satisfy your cravings. And there’s probably another one down the road if you missed one of those. And another one in case you get lost. And another one in case you take the wrong exit. And another… and another…
I had another exhausting but fun day today as I trekked around Boston. Becky was once again working, so I drove her in and parked for free! Whee!
My picture-taking today was driven by colleges. I’ve spent plenty of time taking pics in the center of Boston, but haven’t branched out as much to the outlying areas. So today I made the rounds to Boston University, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
ppp| |ppp
I took some photos of the schools, as well as some of the surrounding areas. The day was exceedingly clear, which made it very nice to walk around and take in the sights. Unfortunately, the lack of any kind of light diffusion due to clouds made for not the greatest photography conditions. So I’ve got the best of the bunch online, though I would have liked to take more.
If you’re viewing our website, you might notice that it has been, well, beheaded. Our photo on the left has been chopped off. This is my fault, and it is an accidental side-effect of the website redesign that Becky and I are working on right now. I usually make separate copies of our site code to work on so that we can see the new design without messing up the old design. Well, I accidentally edited one of the files for our old design instead of the corresponding file for the new design, and saved the file before I realized what I had done. I could easily have my host restore the old version of our page from a backup, but I’d rather just get the redesign done soon. At which point we won’t be needing that photo anymore. I hope you’re all okay with that for the next few days. 🙂
Keep your eyes peeled for our new look, coming soon to a web browser near you!
This weekend, amidst all of the travel and adventure, there were a few mundane tasks to be done. Certainly the most mundane of all was buying toilet paper. We had a coupon to get two 12-roll packs of Angel Soft bathroom tissue from Walgreen’s for just $5! That’s just $0.21 per roll! Quite a bargain, and not one we could pass up.
So we went into Walgreens with the coupon, only to discover that the particular brand of toilet paper was sold out! Oh no! What to do? Since it was the last day of the coupon’s validity, we decided to get a rain check. This would enable us to come back in when the product was in stock, and receive it for the same sale price. At the cash register, however, I had an interesting encounter with a teen-aged cashier:
Cashier: Rain check?
Me: Yes, please.
Cashier: Ok. Starts filling out a slip of paperwork. How old are you?
Me: Huh?
Cashier: Only old people get rain checks!
Me: I’m 25, that’s not old!
What is so wrong with wanting to save money? Are all consumers our age expected to buy the most expensive, heavily marketed products at full retail price? Why, I tell you, kids these days, with their hair and their clothes and their hippity-hop music…