Whateverhappenedto...

Yesterday, the subject of the deceased Acrophobia again came up. Here's the best explanation of its fate I could find:

Bezerk got bought by won.net, they got bought by uproar.com, and uproar got bought by Vivendi/Universal. Now, Vivendi is getting rid of all the stuff that's really fun but isn't as profitable as they with it could be.

Someone really needs to find a way to bring it back. Chris thinks Yahoo! should just write an Acro clone, or that Richard should. This clone looks promising, but I have yet to try it out.

On a related note, I was trying to think of things to do tonight, and I remembered Esports Arena. Even though they weren't open when I was last here, they're already bankrupt. It was a really interesting idea, but for some reason public gaming just doesn't seem to catch on here.

Dam, that was a good trip

In San Diego, after surviving Vegas. Also went to the Hoover Dam, where many puns were made. Highlights include the lounging by the pool at the Tropicana, playing the $3 blackjack tables with a fun dealer at Boardwalk at 3 a.m. on a Sunday, an audience member asking Lance Burton to kill his wife, the cool (and patriotic!) fountains at the Bellagio, the incredible brunch at the MGM, the refreshingly decent music at the Hard Rock....and some other things that are better off staying in Vegas.

More random stuff

Finished reading the cool Wired spaces issue...including this interesting take by Rem Koolhaas on the Libeskind design, which I kind of like.

Instead of the two towers - the sublime - the city will live with five towers, wounded by a single scything movement of the architect, surrounding two black holes. New York will be marked by a massive representation of hurt that projects only the overbearing self-pity of the powerful. Instead of the confident beginning of the next chapter, it captures the stumped fundamentalism of the superpower. Call it closure.

(Meta note: I typed this in instead of copying and pasting. It felt good. When I saw Billy Collins give a reading, he pointed out that copying a poem out longhand was one good way of making it your own.)

Unrelatedly, I found an easy way to make a hand puppet. Take a sealed envelope (particularly one featuring this week's unappealing Chase bank credit card offer) and tear one side off. Remove contents. Insert hand. Voila. Hours of fun.

Blues, Blogs

Had dinner with Mike, who has started a blog. Most recently he talked about the types of blogs. I think mine is still a little schizophrenic.

One thing I did want to do was link to this story in Wired which had a chart showing a bunch of blue logos in color space, including the last three places I've spent my time: Yale, NEC, and IBM. Unfortunately, the graphic isn't online. Damn you, Wired! I wonder if I'm destined to only go places with blue logos.

Another weekend, another beer belly

Hmm, where did the weekend go? Bar-hopping in Cambridge on Friday, including yet another conversation about jdate (if only i were jewish!). Bought Travel Scrabble and played on the T with M....I highly recommend it! You can stop mid game and store everything quite handily since the pieces snap into place.

Also ran into the catalog of guttural moans in comics, which reminded me that I thought a catalog of male and female bathroom signs (given the funky ones you find in Europe) would be fun. I Googled around for one, to no avail...though I did find this comparison of male and female bathroom graffiti. I didn't even know women's bathrooms had graffiti! Mysterious.

Neat

Richard got the stats working for my page, and it turns out that my WWW paper has been downloaded over 1800 times since appearing in Search Day. Pretty cool, if I do say so myself. Update: Susanne just pointed out that it was mentioned in Wired, which is probably the likely culprit for some of this more recent traffic. Wow.

Also, in all the excitement, I forgot to mention that I'd read Stover at Yale. I sort of wish I'd read it a long time ago. It's always weird/depressing to see that people were grappling with same issues a century ago.

Home sweet home

Back, finally, after lots of travelling. And this blog is back, too. The MT import was surprisingly easy! However, I've lost my look and feel. :-( Maybe I'll take my time and come up with something snazzy.

Anyway, Dublin was great. I saw the Book of Kells and the Guinness storehouse (where I think I finally learned the barley+hops+yeast+water = beer formula) and went on the literary pub crawl and met some fun folks from the University of Minnesota, Morris who said that the musical pub crawl had been better. Maybe next time. Also met some interesting people at the hostel, Isaacs. The night before, went partying in Cork. Hopefully, Naomi made it through the day at work okay! The night before that, finally found a club in Budapest! The trick is to ask for a "disco." We ended up Bank, which is near Oktagon, and the music was pretty good, although I got American Life stuck in my head. On Saturday, snuck off for a bit to go to the Gellert bathhouse/spa and climb the mountain to the Citadel and see the Buda castle and Mathias church and whatnot. Didn't get to go to the Statue Park where they have old Communist statues or to Heroes Square. Had a too-expensive dinner where we were overcharged for water. Friday had a good dinner at Cyrano in Pest but then just went back to the hotel bar. Night before that had a cruise on the Danube and the night before that went to the Jazz Garden with a few people. Managed to deliver my presentation without any major disasters. Met lots of cool folks.

Hmm, I'm sure there's a lot I'm leaving out, but since I didn't bring a camera, it's probably all I'll remember. I'm exhausted!

Phew

Music's over. Realized I should say more about my trip. Working backwards...bowling with some people from Bristol and the guy from Columbia last night...had a great dinner yesterday in Pest with violins and pasta and plum strussel. Was warned by a local that credit card number theft is rampant. It was raining a lot...During the day, went to a workshop on Community Informatics and met some interesting new people and met Seb in person...Before that, went running in search of the castle and it was farther than I thought....Ooo, Tim Berners-Lee's talking. Back in a bit.

Hmm

In Budapest, at the WWW conference, listening to Princess. Sufficiently weird to justify writing a blog entry despite the headache it'll create while switching servers. Not only is this a weird venue for this music, the music itself is a fairly painful montage of cliched classical music, backed by pounding bass and a phantom electronic symphony... In other news Budapest is great, I'm learning a lot. This weekend, went to Blarney castle and lots of pubs. Europe has one hell of an allergy season.

Old dog

yesterday, made enchiladas! wes showed me how to cut onions. and today jordi showed me how to throw and catch and baseball. now, if i can just figure out how to throw a frisbee and hit a golf ball and play football and...god, what was i doing with my childhood?

The sun!

Sat in the sun at the Christian Science Plaza on Saturday (designed by I.M. Pei, who in my Googling I discovered also designed the Hancock tower and the MFA extension and the Media Lab and studied at MIT and Harvard and was a professor at Harvard, and so, in other words, left his mark here).

Bought Rolling Stone on a whim, the 35th anniversary issue about American Icons. Marilyn Manson rips apart reality television, John Updike praises Andy Warhol, corporate logos are explained.

Crap, I'm using capital letters again! we'll put a stop to that.

got my first sunburn of the summer today while watching the red sox blow a 4-0 lead against the twins. so sad.

considering running a half marathon in virginia, one of the country's 25 best. i'm not sure i could actually pull it off, but it would be fun to try. there is an amusing disparity between this training schedule and this one. the boston half-marathon covers a lot of ground i already run, which sounds a little boring, though last year they got to run around the field at fenway.

the play erik was in got a good review, wish i'd gotten down to see it.

A long weekend

all sorts of stuff happened this weekend. among them, a decision to forego capitalization. i finished reading the long walk, somehow fitting given this week's marathon and reality television and horrible tragedy. supposedly there is a japanese movie adaptation of it, but i haven't been able to find anything about it. speaking of movies, i saw a mighty wind, which was quite funny. stood in the rain at earthfest and got free samples of stuff and saw an incredible performance by sheryl crow. also went to a driving range for the veryfirsttime. and ate lots of good meals.

More about men, women, careers

With uncanny timing (given my recently revisiting the Maurren Dowd fiasco), I heard this story on NPR explaining:

Putting off marriage and babies until later in life significantly increases women's wages: It's an increasingly common dilemma for working women who want to have children: Do they have babies early on or wait until they can provide a better income for their family? Well, analysis by researchers at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank says that waiting has its benefits. Income dips less than one percent for women 28 and older after childbirth; it falls 4 percent for those women who have babies before then. While many women today are choosing to put off having a family until they're established in careers, the reality is they only have a 50 percent chance of getting pregnant when they’re 40.


Also, the press release says:

Studies have shown that men who have been married earn more than men who've never been married, a phenomenon known as the "male marriage wage premium." St. Louis Fed researcher Abbigail J. Chiodo and economist Michael T. Owyang first described the relationship between marriage and men's wages a year ago. They describe how, in contrast, marriage has little or no effect on women's wages, after taking into account individual characteristics such as education and experience. Indirect forces, however, such as children and household responsibilities do tend to affect a woman's lifetime earnings.


Here's the actual study.

I'm not particularly obssessed with this topic, just attuned to coincidence.

Bosses around

My old boss Jeff Pulver was recently featured in BusinessWeek, which is kind of neat. I was also a bit surprised to run into a picture of Steve Lawrence, who I worked with this summer, at the web site for the book I'm auding (I'm getting tired of deciding between listening and reading for audio books) (apparently this is a real word - "the process of hearing, recognizing, and interpreting spoken language" - but that won't stop me from co-opting it), Linked. (The book is very heavy on the intellectual history/storytelling. I was really excited to read Six Degrees, which looked more sciencey, but had to return it to the library before I had a chance to read it.)

J. Crew

I've never actually paged through an entire J. Crew catalog before, but I did today. And you know what's weird? Everybody is white. I know that J. Crew is often used as a shorthard for a cetain sort of stereotype, but I really expected to see a few token people of color. As much as I'm hoping the affirmative action at Michigan isn't upheld, I still find this a little offensively unprogressive.

Women, Men, and Maureen Dowd

The subject of Ms. Dowd's columns almost a year ago about career-driven women came up again tonight. (We also discussed how her columns are generally pointless and a waste of space and wondered how she ever managed to swing her job.) Luckily, some digging with Google turns up still-working links to the articles, even though the Times search engine tries to get you to pay for them. (At some point, a site was also charging for access to an article of mine available for free on the Herald site. Weird.)

In any case, the first article was "The Baby Bust" and the second was "Y? DNA! Q.E.D.". There are plenty of careful dissections of these articles findable on Google, so I won't bother writing my own. I offer them only because they seem to be great conversation pieces.

Bits N Pieces

The Media Lab had an open house today, and since IBM is a sponsor, I got to drop by and see some cool stuff. It was my third time there - the first time I met Brian, and the second I saw a talk by John Maeda. This time, I managed to talk to Cameron at long last, which inspired me to start being better about actually writing in my blog. Of course, I don't have that much to say at the moment. I went out in search of green beer last night and failed. Maybe next time. I also have this fun passage I ran across:

Box joined Microsoft early last year to help develop its .Net Web services architecture and has a reputation as a lively speaker. At the 2001 TechEd show in Barcelona he led a discussion on SOAP while sitting in a bathtub.

On Monday, to show that solidarity exists at least among developers, he coaxed an IBM software engineer on stage and made him pose for a picture while he kissed him on the cheek.

Boston

I've been spending too much time waching reality TV and not enough time enjoying Boston. But I did walk home today, and enjoyed the view of Boston with the Charles frozen over and covered in snow. It's a little trippy. You'd want to run out there, except you'd fall through the ice and freeze. It's also a bit sad and desolate. I almost want to break down and get a camera to capture it.

Speaking of Boston, I ran across a site for Boston blogs (though there are others), including one about the people who keep trying to run me over on Boylston. I'm glad I don't have to drive around here.