Back, but snowed under.

Figuratively, not literally. (This is Nashville, after all.) I'll try to post a bigger update soon, but the short version is that I successfully made the trek from Nashville to DC to Stanardsville to DC to Boston to DC to Nashville. Now I'm back in town for a few weeks before I have to head to DC again for two weeks of training. (Looking forward to the training, but also to the fact that it's basically a corporately-financed trip to go hang out at home for two weeks.)

Creepy wierdo of the day:

Murfreesboro man tells why he froze 114 cats: "The only thing unusual about him, said neighbor David Whitten, is that Davis often wears boots, a long coat and a hat, 'like a Texas rancher.'" Well, that an the fact that he keeps Fluffy friends in the Frigidaire. Yikes!

A quick update:

Made the trek from Nashville to DC to Stanardsville,VA, and back to DC. I'm heading to Boston in a plane, train, or automobile (still hazy) in a couple of days. I've seen lots of long lost family members, tasted homemade beer, communed with cows, driven on windy mountain roads, gone to various churches, committed to scanning a massive crate of family photos, and gotten a cold. I'll try to post more details later, but hope everyone is having happy holidays!

Cranberries, evergreens, and a reptile ranch

Lately I've been a decorating fiend... I put up some clear lights outside last week. Then, I decided to go out and get a Christmas tree, despite the fact that I'm actually not going to be here for Christmas. I lugged the tree back, dug up my stand and lights, and set the whole thing up in the front hall, where you can see it through my front door.

I don't actually have many genuine Christmas ornaments -- in fact, I'm pretty much limited to a couple of boxes of generic glass balls. So I had to get a bit creative. In some dark recess of my brain, I remembered making Christmas tree garlands out of cranberries and popcorn. It took two grocery runs to find whole cranberries in Nashville, but I was soon stringing up a storm, with only minor needle injuries. It takes a long time to do a whole tree that way, but it's pretty mindless work and I watched a movie while I was working on it.

Turns out that I somewhat underestimated the number of linear feet of cranberries in a bag. (These folks need to investigate this!) Despite creative use of cranberry spice sauce for dinner on Sunday night, I still have two bags left. Anyone have any good cranberry recipes?

After the garlands were on the tree, it still looked a bit empty. So I wandered around my house looking for ideas until I found a book of Route 66 paper cutouts, purchased for their kitsch value a few years ago while on vacation in Arizona. I pulled out the book and started happily punching out pieces and putting tab A into slot B to create models of all sorts of Mother Road ephemera -- fireworks stands, Mexican restaurants, Airstream trailers, and more. I then carefully punched holes in the cutouts and stuck them on the tree. So I now have a kitschy Middle-American tree with cranberries and popcorn. (If you look carefully, you can even find an adult bookstore.)

I also have a wreath on the door, greens on the window sills, and a cat determined to make herself sick eating Pointsettia leaves. Plus I made fudge and prepared dough for sugar and spice cookies. I'm totally down with the whole holiday thing this year.

Bus.... Magic Bus!

From last week's Economist -- an old-school internet mail relay network using Wi-Fi and public transportation:

At “The Future in Review”, a wide-ranging technology conference held in San Diego earlier this year, Allen Hammond of the World Resources Institute, an environmental think-tank, outlined a cunning scheme to provide e-mail access in rural India using buses. Each bus would be equipped with an e-mail server and a high-power Wi-Fi base-station, with a range of a mile or so. This communicates with nearby computers in homes, schools, offices or post offices, delivering and collecting e-mail wirelessly as the bus drives past, so that there are a handful of deliveries and collections each day. The buses connect to the internet when they reach the depot at the end of the line. Given the reach of the bus network, it is estimated that this approach could provide national e-mail coverage for a paltry $15m. E-mail by bus—why not?

A Public Service Announcement...

Brought to you by the fine folks over at the National Latex Novelties Association:

What's an office without a rubber chicken or two? Rubber chicken on the wall, rubber chicken on the floor, rubber chickens are funny and make your spirits soar. We are pretty sure everyone's mood will pick up a little bit when you have some rubber chickens laying around the office. Make Monday Rubber Chicken Day and have everyone carry one around to meetings and stuff... how much fun can your office handle?

-- OfficePlayground.com

The week in review -- the good, the bad, and the really bad.

As you may have guessed, posts are a bit sparse lately because of my periodic end-of-semester academic panic -- not helped by the fact that I spent big two of the last four weekends goofing off with family instead of working. In any case, here's the reader's digest condensed version of what's happened since my last dispatch:

• Flew home. Arrived hours late due to typical holiday delays. Was very calm about this, since I had nowhere in particular to be that night.
• Actually read two novels: Prey and About a Boy. Also read two fascinating articles in Harper's: one about Clear Channel's radio station juggernaut, and another about a possible resurgence of locally-owned companies. Both are worth picking up.
• Had Thanksgiving dinner with grandparents, parents, one cousin, and a whole mess of food. Accidentally spilled candle wax on my mom's best tablecloth. She was not happy.
• Visited the research lab of the biotech company I'm working with for my class. Met with them for several hours. Was amazed by how much AP Bio stuff I actually remembered.
• Bought a wireless router for my parents so that I can finally get online from my laptop at home.
• My parents, brother B, brother B's girlfriend, and brother B's girlfriend's parents went out to dinner together. Meanwhile, I went out to dinner with brother A, brother B's girlfriend's sister, and brother B's girlfriend's sister's cousin. We ate at the local Salvadoran place, followed by some aimless wandering around and a trip to Cosi -- a nifty place where you can toast your own S'Mores on an open flame at your table. I drove the assembled masses nuts by taking hours to figure out why some guy jumped in front of a bus after eating a seagull sandwich.
• Got to play with the fireplace, which still works after being fixed last year. Bought a new chain for my dad's chainsaw, but didn't get around to installing it.
• Went to my mom's church. Talked to a lot of people whose names I probably couldn't remember if you paid me.
• Had very belated birthday cake for me and my brother. Gave my brother a Sony Clie as a birthday/graduation gift. He now wants a memory stick so he can listen to MP3s on it.
• Got up very early Monday morning and caught the subway back to National Airport. Waited in a really long line to get through security. Flight was late anyway. Went to work.
• Got home and started working on my part of the market plan for our company. Interrupted by a call from a friend whose new(to her) computer had a malfunctioning modem. Talked to her for about an hour. Then continued working until my eyes glazed over. Went to bed late.
• Woke up to a call from my brother, who was in a state of shock after being unexpectedly fired from his job. He had no idea this was coming -- his new dishwasher was delivered yesterday. This is totally sucky on so many levels I won't even go into it here. But suffice it to say I think very little of his former company.
• Talked to him until I realized I was going to be late for my weekly Long Boring Meeting Where Nothing Happens. Burned rubber into work and still got there late. As predicted, nothing really happened. Despite earlier plans to avoid work entirely and finish my paper, ended up putting in a good 6 hours. Found out that one of my employees is in the hospital with severe pneumonia. Not a good day.
• Tore out of work as soon as possible and headed to Fido, where I'm currently camped out working on said paper. It's slow going.
• Friend just called, so I believe I will be taking a break to go have a beer across the street. Yay!

Anyway, that's what's new for now. I plan on being more bloggy after the semester ends.

Getting colder...

I'm not always up early in the morning to shoot this sort of thing, but I once again worked all night at the office. That's not good, but at least I got to appreciate a perfect fall morning.

Well, I thought it was perfect. Some people don't agree!)

Domain of the Day

http://www.wewannadoanythingwewannadoanytimewewannadoit.com/

Seen on Monster.com

Wonder if I can get a leave of absence from work -- I just found my meal ticket for a month in Ireland!

IE-Dublin-Father Christmas & Elves
Status: Full Time, Part Time, Temporary/Contract/Project

Unique Entertainment are looking for persons interested in working for them on a part-time basis throughout late November and December 2003.

We require persons to fill the following roles:

• Father Christmas
• Elves

Please send brief CV, including a passport photograph, details of your availability during November and December and the roles you are interested in to...

From the silver lining department:

One advantage of being at work at 3 AM is that you can play your CDs as loud as you want, and no one gets pissy about it. Right now I've got Handel's Messiah going at about 80 decibels.

Ihr Steuergeld an der Arbeit:

Berlin to get trash cans that can talk. Ain't technology grand?

A real Nashville weekend

This weekend was a true Nashville experience. My grandfather and my cousin Laura both showed up in town, and I got to do all that fun touristy stuff that the locals never get around to.

On Saturday, my grandfather went to the Parthenon and the Frist Center. Both were great, but the Frist center has an especially good "Art of Tennessee" exhibit with everything from wood carvings to maps to photos to muskets. It was extremely cool.

Then we went to the airport and picked up Laura. We went home briefly, then headed over to Hatch Show Print. We walked around lower Broad for a bit, and also stopped into Lawrence Record Shop, where we met Mr. Lawrence. This was a very memorable experience -- you can listen right here!

We gave up our coveted $10 parking space and headed back home for a few hours, where we amused ourselves by looking at old photo albums.

That night, we had tickets for the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium. But before the show, we stopped in to Jack's Bar-B-Que. Then a few steps across the alley to the Ryman, where a long line was just beginning to snake through the door. We got to our seats in the balcony just before the show started. One of the first performers was Nanci Griffith, who Laura had seen a few days before in Boston.

The next day we stopped by my office to scan some of the old photos we found, then headed over to Bicentennial Mall, where we explored and played with our cameras until the misty darkness overtook us. (Listen) My grandfather took a detour into the farmer's market, where he purchased a bottle of Dave's Triple XXX Insanity Hot Sauce. The vendor cautioned to only use one drop!

Afterward, we went out to dinner at Basantes (a great Italian restaurant in the lobby of a Day's Inn), and returned home to watch "When Harry Met Sally."

Monday morning, my Grandfather left at the crack of dawn, and Laura and I had breakfast at the Pancake Pantry before her medical school interview at Vanderbilt.

All-in-all, a great weekend. You can view more photos right here.

A bloomin' family reunion, and a lot of malfunctioning stuff!

My grandfather (the one who lives on the farm in Virginia) e-mailed me to say that he was planning to come down and visit me in Nashville. He has been saying he would do this for years, but this time he was serious. So he's arriving this weekend.

Then a few days ago, I got an e-mail from my cousin Laura, who I haven't seen in almost two years. She has been going to school in Boston, but graduated and is now applying to medical schools. It turns out that she has an interview at Vanderbilt on Monday. So she's also coming down -- and naturally I offered up my place.

So all of a sudden I have two out-of-town guests, and it's time to get the house presentable. I've been spending every free moment cleaning, dealing with repairs, etc. Plus, we have a business plan due in several weeks for my class, and our company is getting impatient. Then late last week the massive server that holds our company's electronic archives decided to die in the middle of the night. This has already been good for one all-nighter and countless hours of additional stress. The worst part about the work is that it's a "hurry-up-and-wait" operation, because it takes so long to move around the tons of data we're dealing with.

Yesterday, I spent most of the day (from 6:30 AM until around 4:30 PM) working on the system from home while the plumber and handyman simultaneously abused my house. (After two trips, I believe I now have a working toilet in the guest bathroom!) I also broke down and hired a maid service to clean the place. I feel so bourgeois. But at least the dust bunnies have left the building.

Somewhere in there, I also ran a line directly from the phone network box to my DSL modem, and proved that my DSL problems are not the fault of the ancient phone wiring in my house. The next guess is a bad modem -- they're sending me another one. The phone company is convinced that there couldn't possibly be anything wrong with the line, so we're trying everything else first.

I then went in to work for a meeting around 5:00, and stayed there working until midnight.

This morning dawned with temperatures in the 30s, and I discovered that once again my furnace seemed to be dead. This happened last year. The repair guy said to just cycle the circuit breaker several times. After about five attempts, it finally came on. (It's an outside unit, and apparently moisture can creep into the unit and cause it not to light. A safety device cuts off the gas if there's no flame. Cycling the power resets the safety device and lets it try again. The unit hadn't been used in a few days, and it poured rain yesterday. So hopefully this won't become a regular occurrence.)

And to add to the pile of malfunction and misfortune, the zero key on my cell phone has died. So to anyone with a zero in your number, I won't be calling you. Everyone else, you're good. (Actually I can work around it with speed dial and other tricks, but it's a real pain!) Verizon says I have to take the phone to one of their stores, which are apparently all in the distant suburbs. And they're very vague about what might happen when I get there. I fear that they may ship my phone off to Timbuktu for repair and leave me without phone, which would be bad since I've also been disconnecting my home phone as part of the DSL troubleshooting.

Now I've got to go into work for more pointless meetings and server angst. Plus I've still got to go grocery shopping to do.

I'm ready for another vacation!

Eclipse

I walked in to the neighborhood grocery/health food store to pick up a few veggies for dinner. The checkout counter was abuzz. The moon, it seems, was half gone.

When I arrived outside, I saw this for myself. I drove home, grabbed my digital camera, and headed for the backyard. I subsequently stood outside in the chilly fall weather that suddenly arrived a few days ago and watched the moon drift into the shadow of the earth. (Unfortunately I lack a real telephoto lens, so the photos aren't great.)

While I was waiting, I called my parents. My mom was busy writing a sermon, and I had to convince her to go outside. My dad went outside with no prompting. They stood and watched the eclipse with me. Suddenly the 700 miles between us didn't seem so far.

Just another (birth)day...

And today, with a whimper rather than a bang, I enter the 28th year of my life. It's been a pretty average day so far. Not that I was really expecting all that much out of it. The last birthday I can remember getting really excited about was when I turned 25, because it meant that car rental companies would stop hassling me when I tried to rent a car. (IMHO, just because you're in a demographic group that's statistically inclined toward wrapping cars around telephone poles doesn't mean they should have the right to give you a hard time!)

That may have also been the year that my birthday fell on a Saturday and I went to Boston for the weekend. So I spent my birthday visiting penguins in the Boston Aquarium and doing various other fun things.

But I really just can't get all that excited about it this year. It's too much like just another day.

To be fair, I guess this has been a pretty decent year. The highlights were Italy, New Years (in PA), my brother's graduation in Maine, the 4th of July in DC, and my trip back to Syracuse. Hmm. None of the highlights were in Nashville. That sort of sums up why I want to leave one of these days, I'd say.

the dreaded early morning call

Ring. Wha... Hello? Hi Mom. I was asleep. What? Your network doesn't work? Urk. I don't know. Hang on.... Do you see the lights on the hub? Yeah, that little grey box. Are they on? There's only one? There should be two. Which one has the light? It should be really bright, not just a bit lit up. Well, stop changing your story! You're sure it's Laura's machine that has no light? OK, try plugging that one in to a different number port. Still no light? OK, try unplugging and replugging that wire tightly on the back of the computer. Still nothing? OK. Well, I don't know what to tell you. It could be that the cable is bad or the network card is bad. But neither of those things usually happens all of a sudden on their own. Just as a last ditch effort, have you tried restarting Laura's machine? What do you MEAN it's not turned on? Mom!!! If you're trying to get to a shared folder on her machine, YES, her machine has to be turned on! I'm not laughing at you, but you SO owe me an hour of sleep! [click]

More Engrishes

Bill has posted a new (and perhaps last!) installment of Close, But Not Quite, his homage to mangled English seen in Japan.

You can read more about his adventures in Japan right about here.

Hot stuff

I'm at Bongo, and am drinking a coffee they've named Hair of the Dog. Oddly, the taste is remarkably similar to that of a good cigar.

And I'm still procrastinating on my paper, despite the looming deadline. Last night I cleaned my living room to avoid working on it. When I start house cleaning, that's a good indicator that I really don't want to do something. But I'm about to have a burst of caffeine-induced productivity. I can feel it coming on. Right. Now.

Drat. It didn't happen.

I got those blinkin' sync light blues...

For some reason that eludes me, I've been having major DSL problems for the last week or two. But they're very strange DSL problems. First of all, they seem to be the worst at night. This morning I was able to stay online and connected to my office via VPN for several hours. Yet if I log on at 1:30 AM, as I am wont to do, I can barely keep a connection for two or three minutes without having the modem drop and re-sync.

The only real change I can think of during this time period has to do with the assault on pavement currently being carried out by the good people at Nashville Gas. Part of this involved digging up my front yard and replacing an old-school iron gas pipe with plastic tubing. I'm wondering if perhaps something in the house was improperly grounded to the gas pipe. Now that the pipe is insulated with plastic tubing, perhaps the lack of ground is causing the problem.

My little theory, however, wouldn't explain the curious day/night phenomenon.

This is all quite vexing.

Like all good DSL techies, Mr. Butler was very quick to blame my unfiltered alarm system. But the system has been disconnected from the phone line for several days, and the problem has persisted.

Of course, the phone wiring in this 1920s-vintage house is strung up from the rafters in the dirt cellar, and is quite literally held together by thumbtacks and duct tape. So I suppose at some level it's amazing the thing worked at all. I should probably take the time to crawl around down there and run new wiring, but I have a paper to write this weekend. So maybe I'll just borrow a cup of wireless Internet from everyone's favorite funkadelic neighborhood coffee joint.

In unrelated news...

I saw The Runaway Jury with a friend earlier tonight. A great suspense story, and I got to revel in a bit of New Orleans nostalgia to boot. (Shady dealings are just better when you negotiate them over Beignets at Cafe du Monde.)

I also discovered that Bonhoeffer, which I just missed the last time I was in DC, is playing for the next few days at the Belcourt. I have been fascinated by the German theologian and Nazi resister ever since I read Denise Giardina's haunting historical novel Saints and Villains. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to convince my friend to go see it with me, but I'm going to try to make it over there before the show closes.