Category: LiveJournal

Well, I survived. My best estimate is that 700-800 people were there at the event’s peak, which was far more than I expected. I suspect that the SWIL equivalents at nearby academic institutions helped mobilize everyone. There was a preponderance of geeky t-shirts, not just ones from XKCD. I was weird in that I was…

In about an hour, I’ll be at some coordinates in North Cambridge that were specified in this web comic. If you don’t hear from me, assume it was all a trap and that I’ve been eaten by raptors.

put out a call on the Boston [FUN] list that there was a ticket for tonight’s Suzanne Vega concert at the Somerville Theater. I was ‘s last-minute replacement; I also got to chat briefly with Amy (Why am I blanking on your LJ? Stupid brain.), , and before and after the show. It was good;…

A motorcycle officer passes you in the left lane while you are in the right lane; his lights are blinking, but there is no siren. He pulls into the intersection you are approaching, and stops traffic (your light was already red, anyway). What do you do? I signaled my braking and stopped at the red…

To get into the building where you get your Harvard ID, you need a Harvard ID. Yelling “share the road” at a car looks like “asshole” (same vowels) if said car’s windows are closed. I can go on a blind date. I like the new Dr. Who. There is such a thing as Dalek porn.…

So, I was having a discussion about verb tenses with a friend who is a copyeditor at a newspaper. The subject turned to us complaining about “pleaded” – the newspaperese past tense of “to plead”. Both of our NESIs say that it should be “pled”, by analogy with “to lead”/”led”. That got us talking about…

Thanks to ‘s reaction to my regular “Churchylizing” away message for Sunday mornings, the following t-shirt idea popped into my head. However, I’m not sure on the proper way to art it up, since I haven’t taken chemistry in 7 years. First, we have a quotation from John 1 “In the beginning was the Word”;…

Random thought of the day: Today’s gospel was Luke 13:10-17, the story of Jesus healing a woman in the temple on the Sabbath. I was reminded that, sometime shortly after learning this story in Sunday School, my sister and I started saying on Sundays that we couldn’t do our chores because it was the day…

So, my flight from Minneapolis back to Boston happened to have a group of at least 50 Japanese students. While waiting for my checked baggage, I noticed something: the typical American traveler uses what I would call a roller bag (a few, like me, use duffels or rolling duffels), whereas all of these students had…

I think I saw 2001 the movie first, certainly didn’t understand it, then I read all four books in high school at some point. I don’t think I was even aware that there was a second movie until Netflix recommended it to me last year some time (yes, it only just now made it to…