UltraNurdage

Category: Life

  • The Last 10 Y

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    If I had to summarize my last decade in the cheesiest way possible, it would be with the phrase “growing together”: I met Andrle just a bit over 10 years ago. All of my major life events since then have been our major life events: engagement, marriage, birth of a child, new jobs, many moves……

  • Trick-or-treat?

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    After moving to The Couve and finding ourselves living in an apartment complex that seems full of kids, we were expecting to finally get a lot of trick-or-treaters. Sadly, we were mistaken! Now the only way to manage our disappointment is by eating all of this candy.

  • Uncle Trouble

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    My dad’s older brother, Michael Ward, died on Wednesday. While my dad told me the news yesterday morning, I don’t think it entirely hit me until I saw his obituary, though I had partially processed the idea that the man we knew was largely gone after his massive stroke almost six years ago. Uncle Mike…

  • Ex Astris, Scientia

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    “From the stars, knowledge.” This happens to be the Latin motto of Starfleet Academy, but it’s a phrase that’s stuck in my head as reflection of where I think our future as a species lies. Few people embodied that spirit better than Dr. Sally Ride, who died yesterday at the age of 61 from pancreatic…

  • Stranded in Westborough

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    On Friday, Andrle and I took a Zipcar out to Worcester to see a friend’s band, Wilderun, open for Turisas at Paganfest 2012 at the Palladium. It was a fun show, and others agreed. I’ve had some exposure to metal and folk metal, although more with some of their origins in prog rock’s folk experiments,…

  • Reality Distorted

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    I had just gotten home from work on Wednesday night, when I read this tweet from my friend and fellow Apple fan Andrew. It was certainly a surprise, to the point where I initially doubted it (or perhaps hoped it wasn’t true), but the stream of traffic from my tech-oriented Twitter feed made it fairly…

  • Engage!

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    Set course for Marriage Prime, Love Factor 6: I asked Andrle H. Pence to marry me, and she said yes! Woohoo! This all went down the Wednesday before last (July 7th, or 7-7-2010… seven might be her favorite number…) while we were visiting a friend’s cabin in northern Minnesota. Now, below the cut, some (goofy)…

  • Going Home

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    Last weekend I attended my five-year reunion at Swarthmore College. I graduated in 2005, and it was my first time back on campus since I attended the 2006 graduation to see off friends from that year. I think I had somehow forgotten how beautiful the campus is (being a national arboretum will do that). Campus…

  • PAX East 2010

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    Best. PAX. Evar. PAX East was my third Penny Arcade eXpo, and in many ways my best… but as others have addressed, also an unfortunate reminder of how hard it is to manage a convention hall full of geeks, nerds, dweebs, and all the rest. The whining has been handled by others, and I have…

  • RIP Bike

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    If you follow me on Twitter or are a friend on Facebook, you probably already heard that my bike got stolen. A brief memorial to my thorughly well-used 2005 Trek 7500 FX ::cue sappy music::… It was a solid bike, and it served me well, in spite of occasional abuses such as forgetting to oil…