I took to the streets to check out Kenmore on the big night out. The Sox finally won the World Series. We swept the Cardinals in a final shutout game. It wasn't that hard now was it? As I walked down Beacon I could finally get a good look at the bite out of the moon that the eclipse has taken.

I could smell the rotten egg scent of crowd control or stink bombs as I walked down Boylston after the Landmark center. I ran into Julie from Improv. I was congratulating her for having successfully been being accepted into an Improv troupe called the Tribe. Some Sox fans took it as time to do some high fives and wildly congratulated both of us.

I tried walking towards the park and a woman told me not to go in that direction because there were angry cops marching towards them. The streets had some mobs forming in circles around women on their boyfriends' shoulders. Men all around them were yelling, “show your tits” until they took off their tops to flash the crowd. Each mob contains plenty of video cameras, digital cameras, and cell phones all pointing to the center where the woman sits. I would feel pity for them but they chose to be in a mob full of angry Red Sox fans and seemed to be asking for the attention as they mounted their boyfriends’ shoulders.

Down in front of the Landmark Center a mob of people were jumping up and down near the cops. Some of the cops were wearing black gas masks. A car got stuck in the mob and motorcycle cops surrounded it and beeped through the mob to let the car get back to Beacon Street.

Most, if not all, of the mob are college students. I doubt many of them are even from Boston. Some band of people jumped up and down yelling Yankees suck. By accident I stumbled into a field where some people were lighting off firecrackers. The loud banging under my feet startled me so I jumped back towards the pavement.

Plenty of folks were out having a genuinely good time celebrating a long awaited victory. About eight helicopters were circling overhead to both monitor a potential riot and to report on it for the news. Some fans were urinating on bushes.

I walked towards Kenmore. When I got there a man was climbing the traffic light. He hung around on it for a minute above a crowd that frantically chanted, “let's go Red Sox”. Below him some people had lit fire to pieces of wood and were waving them in the air. The man hanging from the traffic light fell down into the crowd from what looked like about 20 feet. The crowd may have caught him or he could have fallen and injured himself directly on the pavement. Suddenly the crowd surged backwards in fear of the police charging. I ran back with the crowd. Some people were yelling, “fuck the police”.

As I inched back towards the square the police fired something into the crowd and the air filled with a yellow gas at the corner. I retreated down Beacon as people yelled in unison “Let's go Red Sox”. When I turned around I heard loud booms to see more billowing teargas fill Kenmore Square. People kept filtering back towards Kenmore despite the exploding sounds, warnings from people fleeing, and a couple of people who got too close to the tear gas and had to wear their sweatshirts over their faces. The gassed victims were just waiting for the pain to stop.

One kid biked past me on the way to the front line and yelled “Sox win the world series and no parents.” That's what this crowd is; Lots of kids without their parents to watch them who are looking to destroy something in celebration.

I got tired of running away from police across the bridge. Although it gave a real feel of a riot or war it also was just a cheap thrill ride students were having at the expense of the police. It looked like the cops mobilized forwards to push the crowd back across the bridge over the pike with the horse cavalry showing power. I wonder if the horses get gas masks. So I walked back home on Brookline Avenue and crawled into bed. The moon overhead was in full and bright white above me as I returned.

The Red Sox have won a World Series after 86 years. There should finally be some peace in Boston tomorrow.

I was biking back from lunch with Stephanie and was mesmerized by the fall weather and foliage to stop at a bench and enjoy the atmosphere. So I'm lying using my helmet as a pillow with my head in the bucket underneath a slightly balding weeping willow tree.

Lunch with Stephanie was interesting. We hadn't had time alone to sit and talk in about a year. She had been looking forwards to it and wore eye make-up that her colleagues noticed when she arrived at work this morning. She brought my birthday present wrapped in a wrapping paper with smiley-faced cupcakes on it. Taped to the wrapping paper were two fortune cookie fortunes that she had saved among the many years we dated. They were from the Chinese restaurant near Washington Square that has a logo made from a fish head pressed in paint with a body from corn. The logo is on the fortunes.

Fortune number one: “a routine trip turns into an enchanting escapade”.
Fortune number two: “you are unique and find it difficult to live within conventional guidelines.”

The present inside was a calendar made on ophoto out of pictures of Leelin, her pug dog. It starts in November of 2004 and ends in October 2005. I loaned Stephanie my new portable disk drive at her office in the Museum with all of our old digital pictures so that she could copy them back to her laptop. As I was leaving the Museum of Science three buses were lined-up full of children chanting "Bye Bye Birdie" in honor of the Red Sox Cardinals series. It was a little unnerving to see kids drawn into a negative chant. It made me think of how easy it is to create hate in children for things far away that they don't understand. But what are you going to expect from a bus driver who wants to keep his kids excited about baseball?

Jeremy was chatting away with his many online female acquaintances this morning as I left this morning. His computer sounded like a musical instrument with all of the 'whling's. He had learned that we will have a full lunar eclipse tonight at about the same time as the end of the Red Sox game. It gives all of the superstitious people a chance to compare this game to a movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Tomb Raider where the hero needs to line-up amulets to bring a clue into alignment at just the right moment in the astrological cycle.

Last night I didn't have improv class but I walked over anyways because I had forgotten. Since I didn't have a car or bike I walked across the Harvard bridge. I had my camera with me so I took some good shots of Boston at night with the reflections in the water and the moon blaring like the sun through the high exposure.

We were all meeting at Abe and Louie’s which was a terrible plan for watching the game because it meant a long sit down dinner. I pushed to do drinks at Unos before to catch some of the game. At Unos we were approached by the Jaeggermeister girls who were promoting by giving out lays and t-shirts. They recommended a blend including a honey liqueur mixed with Jaeggermeister called BerenJaegger. We passed on it.

Matt and Jeff were perfectly happy to spend the cash at Abe’s to get their now 35 dollar steak dishes. That is because Matt got dumped or at least got called into a break in his four year relationship with a nagging girlfriend Helen. Jeff was happy because he won $800 playing online poker earlier in the day.

Kate was shocked at the prices but went along and told the whole story of her coming out as a debutant when she was 19 back in North Carolina. At one point we were discussing racism and segregation and Matt mentioned that while people from Boston think it is integrated and liberal anyone from outside sees the city as very segregated into white communities and black ones that don't mix.

After dinner we watched the end of the game. Pedro pitched a great game holding a shut-out through seven and if Foulke hadn't given up a one run shot to Walker we would have had a shut out through 9. People weren't too excited about the win because there was less drama in it. The black guy sitting next to me kept hitting on every girl in our group as they came over one by one from the dinner table. He was a nice guy so we had a chuckle about it together.

On the drive back Kate was marveling about how great it must be for Sarah to have known what she wanted to do and to be doing it. Kate had wanted to be an actress back when she was coming out as a debutante. Her parents quashed that dream and she hasn’t been as excited about other things like she once was about becoming an actress. Now she is in publishing and she can't find the right job here in Boston. She wants to be a compositor which she thinks she will like better than her current job because her favorite part of her job is that she gets to use Quark and do layout. Her least favorite job is having long deadlines on things like cover art and after working 30 days to finalize a cover of a textbook to have her boss tell her that the brown colored covers never sell so she needed to go with another cover. Magazine jobs are mostly in New York. If she left she would probably have to break-up with her boyfriend because he wouldn't likely move given that his family owns a house in Gloucester that he goes to every weekend. We joked about making our own magazine but couldn’t find a segment that hasn’t already been covered or a new angle to the magazine business.

When we got home Sarah was acting insane. She told me to fire the cleaning people because she found white powder on her toiletry bag. Then she stubbed her toe on a trunk in the bedroom and started ranting about moving the trunk out. I used one of her tools and put her in a time out. Finally when she calmed down and was in bed she knew she would regret having a temper tantrum from being tired and recommended that she might act-up less if I threatened her with ultimatums like “I will leave you if you act like this.”

I was reading Maxim magazine on the flight out to Vegas last week. Among the articles in this month's magazine was a listing of the greatest rock-n-roll deaths. Among them I was surprised to see Elliot Smith had died last year. While I was never a great fan of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon I did take a strong liking to Miss Misery from Elliott Smith. It is too bad that he is dead. It sounded like he comitted suicide or had a drug OD. He was up there with Leonard Cohen for intelligent somber music and at 34 he still had lots of time left to make great music that I was looking forwards to listening to.

He has a web site dedicated to him. Maybe I'll buy his last album while I am out at the mall today having lunch with Stephanie or at least I could figure out how to collect more of his music.

How cool is a brain stored in a petri dish that can fly a fighter jet. Now there is one.

Someone in the university of Florida has done this experiment in an attempt to better understand how neural networks operate. Personally I think he is secretly doing military research on miniature autonomous drone planes the size of insects that need a better control mechanism. Watch-out for these rat brains in a petri dish everywhere. They will become helpful in the future for doing household tasks like controlling Roomba robots.

As I was walking back to my room last night to go to bed I thought about how the new electric toothbrush is very similar in form and function to a vibrator. I told Sarah this when I returned to the bed and we had a chuckle about strap-on electric toothbrushes and other similar bad ideas for about half an hour. As she realized it was getting late and that she wasn't going to get a full night's sleep she said "I could burn the candle on this end with you all night long." I could see she was torn between sleeping and continuing to stay awake chatting.

It's good to have someone to laugh at your jokes. Especially when so few of them are funny.

Coming to you live from the Watertown Registry of Motor Vehicles. An automated voice calls out your turn with messages like “Now serving B211 at window 10”. The registry put red LED boards fed with interesting information like a spotlight story about people collecting 1.4 servings of food and someone is being put on trial by the FTC for selling spyware that doesn't work. It is branded the “Motor Vehicle Network”. It is a part of a happier friendlier registry. I like this new network. Maybe I can get it via satellite at home.

A baby is crying until his grandmother sticks a pacifier in his mouth but he still sounds more like a duck or a wild monkey than a baby. The trivia on the board asks what the capital of some African country is. The answer is Abuja. The music plays - “I can't go on thinking nothing's wrong”. The now serving board is going berserk dinging and ringing now serving announcements in rapid fire every second. Dido is singing “I won't walk. I won't sleep until you are resting here with me.”

Jeremy is here for his third attempt at his driving test. He is nervous for the test. The test is at 9:30 and now that we are waiting he is worried. He says “The strange thing about this place is they don't have a clock. It is like a casino.” He told me on the way over that he was one of the few absentee voters in Florida to pass the IQ test required to be able to vote in that silly state. Apparently the voting return envelope had a location for one stamp in a small rectangle. On weighing the envelope Jeremy decided that it was too heavy so he added an extra stamp for good measure. Apparently a few weeks later people reported a large number of absentee votes bouncing because of insufficient postage.

Although Jeremy has a degree from MIT he doesn't have a driver’s license anywhere in the United States. This isn't because he can't drive. He moved to St. Maarten and let his license lapse.

Seal is singing “you remain my power my pleasure my pain...”

For anyone taking the Mass drivers license test in Watertown I can tell you a bit about the course and how you might avoid the two big areas where you can fail. I've seen them fail The first trick they like to pull is to take you down an old street that crosses some railroad tracks and in front of it is an obstructed dilapidated orange rusted miniature stop sign. If you drive past it without stopping you fail. The next trap is the three point turn. You get asked to do this when on a back road similar to a part of a parking lot after the train tracks. Jeremy didn't know what one was.

The first two times Jeremy failed the test we had the same woman officer. She was pure evil. At least she wasn't a huge fan of Jeremy and his quest to drive again. She complained that the PT Cruiser was a truck and that you need to bring a car with four full seats. She also threatened to give me a speeding ticket for driving 35 in a 30 mile per hour zone.

This time, a year later, Jeremy got a man who seemed more reasonable. We won the race to the back to be the first in line behind the state trooper car so we were up first. The officer started by inspecting the car and didn't find any problems.

Then Jeremy got to question number one. “Please show me your hand signals.” Jeremy showed a correct right and a correct left. Then the officer asked about the third hand signal. Jeremy didn't know what else to signal so he asked what it was. At first the officer said it was stop and then Jeremy squirmed in his seat a bit and he finally he admitted that he didn't know what the third signal was. To my disbelief Jeremy was about to fail his third consecutive Mass drivers test.

When the officer moved into the passenger seat he asked Jeremy why he needed to take the test. Jeremy said that it was because his wallet was stolen while he working out of the country.
Jeremy had a license when he was 16 until he was 26. When Jeremy told the officer that he lived in St. Maarten for the past six years they had found some common ground as they started chatting about living in the islands. The officer expressed that he wished he had a job that let him live anywhere. Then they chatted for a bit on going on shark dives in St. Maarten. The officer had touched a reef shark on his last dive.

Finally, without ever having pulled out of the space the officer told us “Look I have a lot of 16 year old kids who really need to take the test. I'll sign your form and we can pretend I took you out on the road test for fifteen minutes. Go inside and you can get you license.
I could see the look of fear in the eyes of the pimply sixteen year old sitting with his curly haired mother in the car behind us. All the other new drivers looked scared including the over tanned girl with her boyfriend sponsor. This cop had failed the first person without even putting the car into drive.

Once inside the red LEDs run across again:“Please no running screaming playing with chairs or the ATM machine. Thank you.” I was wondering who this is directed at. Are they afraid people will be so happy to get a drivers license that they will start throwing chairs at each other and hump the ATM machine?

If Jeremy can get his drivers license this year than surely the Red Sox can win the World Series. He was charged $100 at the cashier. When he asked why it was so expensive the cashier said “Apparently you have taken this test more than once.”

On the way out the sign reads “Thank you for visiting the registry of motor vehicles”. Thank you registry. Another example of beaurocracy gone good.

On friday last week amidst the preparation for the big organizing day I found my bill from Boston University and noticed that it was a month late. I promptly mailed a check in the full amount to Boston University. On Monday night I opened my mail to find that the accounting department had asessed a ludicrous late fee on me. Although the course costs $1,080 they charged me $150 for being one month late in paying the bill.

At over 10% for less than a month they are operating late fees at criminal levels. The only places I can think of that charge the high of a percentage are the mafia and Blockbuster, both of which ultimately lead to broken knee caps. Even the government only takes about ten percent per year for late taxes.

The remedy to this is to send a written complaint that explains the extenuating circumstances why you were late. Apparently they don't encourage haggling over the amount. It will be a battle and while I may not win I will fight for my money.

During the break in the java class the professor stopped to recount how he had spent his weekend. He hadn't watched baseball because despite living near Comisky park in Chicago and Fenway in Boston he had never lasted more than 4 innings.

Instead he went to worcester to watch Brazilian ballet.

“I never saw anything like it. They were jumping and spinning so fast that I couldn't see them turning. Boy was it loud and I had a headache by the time we left. They had a lot of drums. It was less like a ballet and more like a sporting event.”

This was from the same guy who left me dizzy only minutes before in describing the recursive algorithm used by java to do a quick sort. I was barely keeping pace with the bubble sort. Now we are on to multidimensional arrays. Can you say int[][] arr = new int[2][].

I wonder how long it will be before people are radio blogging. It can't take too long before the audio world really meets the world of self-publishing. What I mean is that the barrier of publishing a magazine used to be printing but now it has been dropped to a baseline of free. At the moment there are still a lot of barriers to being a radio DJ but there are also huge problems with the radio DJs spinning their music online. The first problem is that the selection is pretty bad from the items that I have found. I listen to Microsoft's free radio station because it is easily configured and if you don't like the song you can move to the next one. I like the station Alternative Rock but the music seems to repeat forever and never gets really good. It seems like a start for what I would like out of an online music listening experience.

I would consider making lots of mixes but then I need to tote them everywhere. What I'd like is to be both a consumer of people like me's tastes/mixes as well as a publisher. I'd like to create my own radio station with playlists. I'm sure that the legal issues are a big pain here but they tend to fade once people start to do a behavior that favors someone else making bucks. I wouldn't care if Microsoft or whatever other big evil corporation wanted to place advertisements into the music or if they needed to protect the music in some way to force people to license and purchase it.

I just think that we could do better if everyone had access to the big library and could create their own play-lists that they could share with the world. It could even get cool by putting extra features into people's personal blogs to set the mood for a specific entry or throughout the blog by allowing someone to press play as they listen to the blog. If you are going to enter into someone elses world you may as well be immersed in it. I found one site that had some of it started at radioblogclub.com. They don't seem to have the legal issues tackled and just allow you to broadcast your MP3 collection. It's cool but maybe not the best solution. It would be better if Apple, Microsoft, Google, Clear Channel, Virgin, or some other big boy let me stream from their collection.

Right now I am listening to a song by Radio Bliss. It is a band of someone who works at ChannelWave. I don't think you can get their CD anywhere but from the band members. It would be great to let other people hear it while they read this. It probably won't happen for quite a while but I think radio blogging is coming. It would suddenly go "pop" like Hello and Flikr and suddenly all the bloggers would be scrambling to add radio playlists to set the mood on their blog.

Limerence isn't a word globally recognized so don't be surprised if you don't find it in too many places. I found it while digging through some old piles of text on halfbakery. It is defined basically in a medical dictionary as "The emotional excitement of being in love". Someone did some work to illuminate it on a web site dedicated to their wedding in Limerence defined.

I happen to like this term and the implication that there are some concoctions of chemicals in my brain capable of conjuring-up an excited burning love feeling. I seem to have lost my ability to feel such a thing. I have become more analytical about my relationships and don't feel this feeling. The last time I felt something like it was when I got a new puppy a few years back. I now look forwards to feeling it as a father. Maybe it is something that goes away with age? Maybe I am just a cynic? But I like the term anyways.

I'm going to Doug and Amy's wedding on Friday. All I can think about it is the hassle of getting a tux, messing up Halloween, and having to find a place to stay in New Jersey. From what I can tell of the two of them each have some limerence.

My dad and Barry thought this would be a pretty useful product while we were driving to the Pats game yesterday.

As we have seen in the 2004 baseball playoffs one of the highest paid professions in the world, pitching baseballs, runs the risk of having the star pitcher get frustrated and break his needed hands punching walls, phones, or other items. This happened both to the Yankees Kevin Brown and the Cardinals Julian Tavarez.

Apparently having broken your hand once before while punching a wall is insufficient deterrent. Brown punched a wall with his catching hand this year because he had learned his lesson punching a wall with his pitching hand.

The solution is to fully stock dugouts with plush toys designed to attract pitchers shaped like interesting things like walls, umpires, opposing players, or telephones. They could save millions of dollars for teams and players!

Yesterday was a phenomenal success as a sports day. We went to the Patriots game and finally, after four unsuccessful tries we had a successful grilling experience while tailgating. The new regulator from Coleman worked and although we had to waste twenty minutes picking-up a new can of propane fuel, it was worth it because it grilled. Matt brought his table and drinks. Sarah's friends from work brought desserts. The cheese was tasting great with the fresh baguettes. So I can now rate our tailgating season at 1 success 3 failures. I think that the key is to focus on each week and make sure we are ready on time. The health of the grill is critical and it was good to get the grill back after two weeks of injury. The old style Coleman camping grill that we had borrowed last week from Sarah's dad last week unfortunately suffered from overtinkering. From what I could tell he had oiled the parts and the fuel was leaking out of the newly oiled areas because the seal was no longer good. The only big area of improvement for grilling was that we need one of those lighter sticks that clicks to make a flame. The clicking mechanism on the portable grill doesn't do a good enough job of lighting the propane in the wind.

The Pats won their 21st. All the points were scored in the first half. Sarah went to the bathroom just before the half which was when the Pats scored their only touchdown. It is always good to beat the Jets. Of note in the crowd was an incident where a Pats fan in our section got into a shouting match with a Jet fan and he decided the throw his beer at him from six rows away. Now the population of the end-zone is 99.99% pure Pats fans with only 2 Jets fans. So the guy's drink splashed all over about ten already moist Pats fans who weren't very sympathetic when he was led out of the stadium by the police. In the upper deck my dad saw some interesting action. Apparently a fight that erupted near him led to one guy throwing another guy down the stairs. The blood on the steps was enough to notice when he went to go to the bathroom.

The Sox also won their second World Series game. That was good to see. We watched it back in Brookline on the ghost ridden television but it was nice to curl-up, warm-up, and relax to watch them soundly beat the Cardinals. I don't think it means too much to have won the first two games against the Cardinals. They are 1-6 in away games in the playoffs and 6-0 in home games. Pedro should have his hands full on Tuesday night.

Tuesday is looking like a crazy day. Jeremy needs me to take him to the registry of motor vehicles for his third attempt at taking his drivers license test. I then have a VMS meeting at 10:30 and then a demo to do that I need to prep for today at some time near 2 PM. I think that is what is driving some bad dreams. On Saturday night I dreamed that I was on an airplane that had been taken over by terrorists. The plane was headed for a building and I was sure it would explode and kill me instantly when the impact hit. I was wondering as the plane travelled towards the building whether it would hurt to die and how stupid it was to be to die in this senseless way.

My dad and I went to the game last night at Fenway. It is tough to say why it is better to be there in person vs. watching on television. I guess it is the feeling of being a part of the game vs. just a spectator. My dad and I still have the remnants of Little League cheering in us where we constantly produce chatter for every pitcher and batter. "Come 'on Wake". "Let's go Belly - big at bat", "David - you got it!". At some level we believe they hear these cheers and hit home runs, pitch strikes, and feel good about themselves.

We went extra early walking over to the park from my condo at about 7PM. We marvelled at the potential price of our $190 tickets in Section 13 Box 106 Row MM Seat 3. My dad got them at face value because he splits season tickets with a group of people from MIT and they all got to pick which playoff games to take tickets in. He picked Game 1 and Game 7 of the World Series figuring that this was our year.

The stadium was already full of people an hour before game time. We had to fight through the crowd to get our Hill Top steak tips subs, my Guiness and my dad's Harp. As we walked through the crowd along the walkway on the first base line I overheard two people talking near the handicapped section. One man was glad that the handicapped person's seats were good. The handicapped man was glad that his friend also had good seats although he quipped "For 4 grand you should be able to sit anywhere you want."

We settled into our seats to watch a Steven Tyler do a great rendition of the National Anthem after the Drop Kick Murphy's sang Tessie with the sexy girl who sweeps the bases in a miniskirt danced on stage with them. Five F-16s blazed overhead at the finish of the anthem. The first inning went well. Wakefield was pitching well and the Sox belted three runs in.

At the bottom of the first confusion struck and people in our section were suddenly all uncertain if they were sitting in the right aisle. The problem is that Fenway doesn't clearly mark the rows well enough to determine whether you are in the right row or not. Letters like MM, NN, or KK are written in the concrete steps. It was clear that something was wrong because there was an entire empty row in front of everyone and four people were without seats. My dad and I were sure that the people in KK were sitting in LL so we moved into KK which was a four seat upgrade for us and made space for everyone else. Throughout the game we could hear murmurs from behind us justifying that the people behind us thought they were in the right row. We didn't care where we were as long as we were watching game one of the world series in Fenway park.

The Sox grabbed a big lead scoring seven runs in the first three innings. It looked like a great game for Wakefield to just hold the Cardinals. But Walker was getting a hit every at bat and the Cardinals kept creeping back into it. Wakefield faltered in the fifth and walked the bases loaded. When Arroyo relieved him he made a throwing error to first base and let all three runs score. The game actually was tied at 7. Russell, an eight year old sitting next to us offered us some Cracker Jacks. He is the son of a friend of my dad's from the lab. He kept trying to stay awake near midnight but he was too tired so he faded in and out of sleep as the game progressed. After the game he wanted to take home a sign someone had left on the ground made by an insurance company as a promotion that had a picture of a dead cardinal on it. At one point the Cards had far more runs than hits and the Sox finished the game with 4 errors.

Kelly Clarkson butchered God Bless America. Tessie or the girl who sweeps the bases came out with a mini-Tessie, a little girl who could barely throw the balls into the crowd. The Sox scored two and I thought we had the game won. The Cards scored two to tie it at the top of the eighth. Finally Bellhorn put it away with a two run home run that hit the fence on the right field pole. Foulke closed it out and the Sox had put game one in the bank.

If I need to go next week to Game 7 Halloween I will still have my tux from the wedding and I will go in some costume based on a tuxedo. Sandy, my dad's friend will go as Louis Tiant, her favorite Red Sox player and her Halloween costume throughout her youth.

When the wind blows in the fall the rustle and bustle of the leaves above can grow to a sudden crowd like roar. Then falling down from the tree tops comes a sudden wave of leaves. Walking through them I feel like it is a ticker-tape parade dedicated only to me. It makes me remember birthdays in Watertown when I was younger when my father would rake all the leaves in the yard into a single large pile beneath the four foot drop-off from the garden to the yard. My friends and I would take turns spinning, diving, and falling until the plush and scratchy leaves broke our fall and consumed us.

Yesterday in the afternoon Kim came to help reorganize my apartment. So much of reorganizing is really just throwing old stuff out. What I needed Kim to do was to tell me that it was OK to dispose of things like my large collection of defunct cellular phones and accessories, old bank and stock statements from three years ago, the plastic cases that CDs come in, and to give GoodWill clothing and clocks that I'll never use. We made a ton of progress and created about two hundred pounds of garbage. I even disposed of a lot of old ChannelWave history that I can finally say is never going to be worth anything either for sentimental reasons or for the people who will attempt to write a biography of the great Internet entrepreneurs.

Kim is a nice girl. She surprised me by being Asian. Her last name didn't seem Asian. She is studying accountingand has a boy friend. She had to leave at five because a friend of hers was having a 21st birthday party. I was off to my own little 31st birthday celebration with Sarah after she left.

Sarah and I went to the Elephant Walk. She had never been there before despite having lived in Brookline or at least nearly living in Brookline for many years at Simmons, hanging out at MIT fraternities, and hanging out with me in Coolidge Corner. We didn't make a reservation and although we got there early at 7 PM they were already posting a one hour and a half wait. Luckily Sarah and I are just two people and we both enjoy and normally prefer to sit at the bar to eat. Being a fan of eating at the bar is a powerful and liberating experience. Two nights ago we ate at the bar at the Cheesecake factory by choice so that we could view the highlights of the Red Sox - Yankees ALCS series. They showed the highlights of every Red Sox - Yankees game since the last series including the regular season match-ups.

I find that eating at the bar has so many advantages over eating at a table. The obvious one is that you don't need to wait at a table. You also are closer to the person you are dining with so you can whisper in their ear to report on eavesdropping on someone or just have a quiet conversation. The bar features that bartender, an extra new friend, who is captive and usually quite friendly. Because the bartender is captive they tend to serve you faster and there is less hailing of the waiter or waitress. Usually you can see televisions showing sporting events or in the case of the Elephant Walk, the cooking channel. The bar also features strangers.

In the case of the Elephant Walk last night a very social man sat down next to us and started chatting. He was an MD who was now in business school before starting his internship. We weren't sure if he was gay or not and had to wait until his partner came fifteen minutes into our conversation to find that he was with a woman.

Today is the World Series. The last time the Red Sox were in the World Series was 1986. I was 13 then. Now I am 31. The World Series last time was marked by my birthday as well. Bill Buckner let the famous ball through his legs during my Bar Mitzvah reception. My dad and I are going to the game tonight. It should be awesome. I love watching Wakefield and the knuckleball.

Sarah is off fighting with Chloe because Chloe keeps trying to eat the flowers. We will try to get some views of the leaves before I head out to the game. We'll leave Chloe behind because you can't really walk a cat in the woods unless they are a Tiger or something big like that.

In case people are wondering how to stand out when applying for a quicky job this information is absolutely essential. It is a job poster's eye view of the many applicants for my position.

I finally had to choose which of the BU students who applied for my organizing job I would hire yesterday. The main driver was that my cell phone would no longer accept any more voice mail messages. The candidates were filtered on the following criteria.

1. Did they have a funny sounding voice or odd accent.
2. Did they seem like they might be fun
3. Were they available at good times or days.

I called my first choice, Katherine, who stood out because she said she was available on Friday afternoon. I then eliminated her when I heard her voice mail because it didn't make any sense and I would have to wait for her to call me back. I then moved to my next choice, Pam, who lives on St. Paul Street, making her a neighbor and convenient. But when I called her she wasn't available on Friday and could only work on weekends. I figure that weekends are more likely my play time so I wouldn't like doing lots of organizing during that time. I eliminated someone who seemed viable but left only a phone number but no name since I didn't want to deal with the awkwardness of trying to converse with a nameless person. I also eliminated Sandy because she sounded ditzy on the phone. For a moment it worked in her favor as I fantasized about having a ditzy person helping me in my apartment but that faded as I then imagined my files being organized by font and my clothes organized by color.

Finally I settled on Kimberly. She hadn't been at the top of the list because she had a funny twang to her voice and her last name was the same as a woman I know who lives in Florida that I didn't find particularly attractive. But she answered my call on the first try and she was ready to come over today at 2PM.

Tune in next week to learn. Will Dan's apartment get neat? Will Kimberly accidentally find Jeremy's stash of odd sex toys? Can Batman and Robin escape from certain death tied to the roller coaster tracks!

Today is my 31st birthday. I awoke to find a small pile of happy birthday spam in my inbox. I was greeted by WebShots, "your world of photos" with this nice little greeting playing a midi version of "you say it's your birthday". The Alumni.Net team also wished me a happy birthday.
"The Alumni.NET Team (http://mail.channelwave.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.alumni.net) would like to wish you the very best on your birthday. We hope that the following years bring you greater success and happiness. "

At least one real person who knows me sent me a happy birthday greeting. My mom!

"HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We'll have to find a good time to Celebrate. "

Given all of this lavish attention I am blushing uncontrollably. Who knew so many people loved me.

The blue Viagra is actually an apple green energy drink containing at least a red bull, curacao, and sour mix. It is served at Shadows, a bar in Ceasars palace featuring naked dancing silhouettes. The blue Viagra was recommended to me by the waitress as the most popular of the energy drinks. It tasted as would be expected of an apple green drink, like mouthwash.

I kept hoping the naked figures would stop dancing and make shadow art like the barking dog, the parrot, a giraffe or George Bush. Apparently that isn't included in their mandate as shadow dancers.

Brian, Kari and I had taken to the city to do some exploration before returning back to the MGM to visit Studiio 54 later in the evening. Our tour was fairly lame because everything was closed for one reason or another. The fountains at Bellagio were closed because the winds were too high. The white tiger habitat at the mirage was closed because the tigers were sleeping or chewing on Roy or something like that. TI, the modernized and supposedly now risquee rebranded casino was just dull.

In order to manufacture something of interest we broke into the Ceasars pool area to see what it was all about. I would like our pool in Marshfield to approximate this magnificent pool. The pools are filled with mosaics and are lined with marble. One pool has a central area only available by swimming in the water that made me imagine what it would be like for an archeologist to find the remains of Las Vegas.

They would say something like:
“Las Vegas was a central trading post that allowed certain merchants to rest in lavish hotels enriched by a gambling business that sought to milk money from the merchants. It became a confluence point and rebirth for many cultures including the venetians, the romans, french culture, and a tribute to american capitalism in New York. We don't know why these people went extinct but it may have been that they never could get learn that the odds were always against them.”

We stopped at a piano bar that was starting to play New York, New York and had two cute women as the dueling pianists . So I yelled in “go red sox, yeah!”. The pianists briefly switched to “I love that dirty water” and made the astute observation that the piano part is nearly identical to the theme song for the muppets.

I wonder who robbed who. I would bet that Henson had it first. He was way ahead of his time. The muppets are a work of true genius. Imagine how great television would be today if Jim Henson was alive today.

The music was abruptly and rudely interrupted when a disgruntled Yankees fan dropped a twenty on the bar and asked them to play anything else. The song went back to New York New York. Then the piano girls started taunting the crowd to pay 21 bucks to sing a song about Boston. I led our crew to leave in disgust.

The Red Sox and the Yankees were in a historic game last night. It was all primed for drama with Kurt Shilling coming to pitch with two red blotches on his ankles supposedly from shots to numb and strengthen his ankle enough to pitch. The two extra inning games before had showed Bostons toughness and a seeming impossibility to eliminate them.

This was all great but I was assigned to man a trade show booth while the game was progressing with the objective rapidly becoming to collect business cards from people who wanted a golf club and to listen to a couple of complaints. My complaint was that I couldn't see the two televisions brought into the room to keep everyone from boycotting the event on account of extremely dramatic baseball games.

The game delivered well and I got to see the key and bizarre plays including a homerun from a slumping Mark Bellhorn that was initially called a ground rule double even though the hit clearly bounced off of the stomach of a woman wearing a black cloak in the front row about three feet above the top of the wall. There was also a grounder where A Rod knocked the ball out of the glove of the first baseman as he was tagged that was called interference on the Yankees. The backlash and anger towards the umpires was so bad that riot police came and crouched by the sidelines to keep the peace.

Finally, as the game approached the bottom of the ninth a swell of conference attendees including mostly Sox fans but a few Yankees fans gathered around the television chanting, cheering, and clapping as if they were at the game and in the stadium until they erupted in cheers when the last Yankee batter struck out. This game was a landmark as no team in baseball history has ever forced a seventh game after going down by 3 games.

Tabu was open last night and we passed it on the way to Studio 54. The sign in front of Tabu said “dress code: upscale fashion”. The women outside of it were wearing corsets or what looked like underwear. The guys had standard armani uniforms of whit and brown shirts with long collars, pin stripe pants, the male model hair do, and expensive yellow fashion sun glasses. I would have been entertained all night to just pull up a lawn chair and watch people in line for Tabu.

I imagined how hard it would be for me to get into that club.

Doorman 1: Oh my god do you smell poverty? Look at those shoes, did he get then out of the garbage or do they make him wear those to punish him for a crime.

When we got to Studio 54 there was a line-up and Brian took it as a cue to separate from us and go to sleep. Once in the club Kari realized she was going to need a drink in order to dance and she would need one fast. I tried to order two tequila shots but what came back were two shots of jaegermeister with red bull chasers. We drank those and after dancing for a minute Kari felt too hot with her sweater.

Since we were in the MGM we decided to go up to her room and drop it off. So we went up together. She disapeared into the bathroom to reengineer the strap on her bra. I sat there on the couch waiting and thinking about how great it would be if she came back out in her underwear and jumped on top of me. I had the same naughty nervous feeling in me that I had when I was eight and Suzanna and I stopped at her house together because the snow storm had gotten us cold. I considered grabbing her when she exited the bathroom and throwing her onto the bed pinning her beneath me.

But when she exited the bathroom she was just in a bra without straps under the same shirt she was wearing earlier and the reverberating sound of the toilet flushing synched me back to reality.

We got a bit drunk after that on two rounds of tequila shots back at Studio 54. The oxygen in the casino, the red bull, and the adrenaline of dancing kept me wide awake. I wasn't dancing the way I would like to with Kari. She wouldn't let me get close to her and backed away, ducked, or turned whenever I gave it a drunken try.

Eventually I switched modes from feeling connected and wanting to be connected to feeling disconnected and wanting to feel more disconnected. I barely noticed when Kari left at 3:30 and I continued to dance alone and enjoying being disconnected until the dance floor was nearly empty. The dance floor was like an atom and men and women were electron proton pairs and I was just a neutron vibrating and shaking to my own beat.

I figured there was no need to go right to sleep so I joined a blackjack table. There were some hockey fans and a Canadian yammering about the strike. The Canadian from Toronto also was saying something about the girls from New Brunswick being easy lays. The hockey fans were pissing me off by pushing me to bet fives for the dealer all the time to tip him to get good karma. I don't believe in that crap.

 uckily they left because I wouldn't play their way and my crew were all chinese people who didn't speak much english. I left the table up three hundred bucks. The cards were playing well giving me good hands when the low cards were flowing and signaling to increase my bet to take advantage of the high concentration of face cards.

At the airport I was in sorry shape. I hadn't slept in 24 hours and my shoulder was still killing me from the handspring I had done two nights before and carrying the worlds heaviest laptop in my backpack. I looked around the airport a bit for a vending machine that might have narcotics in it like oxycontin, or morphine but apparently they are either hard to find or a figment of my imagination projected into reality when I start dreaming while awake. I didn't sleep until I got situated on the plane.

When I transferred in Denver I snuck a picture of a guy photographing his garden gnome in front of the window looking out onto the plane..

The blue Viagra is really green. All advertising is false. Go figure.

It wasn't until the cab ride back to the MGM that I learned that Ghost Bar at the Palms has a policy of no dancing and signs in the club that announce it. Ghost bar is a must see place on a warm fall night because they have an outdoor patio on the 54th floor that overlooks all of Vegas. At one block of the balcony they have a clear window below you where you look straight down to the ground floor. It is a terrifying experience for a moment but then you just switch to dancing.

I was dancing with Kari, a 5 foot 10 blond 23 year old who just started working for one of PTCs largest VARs on friday only to find herself at a conference in Vegas on Monday with me dragging her all around Vegas as a companion for the evening. We were having a blast dancing on the window to the ground, tempting fate, and worrying the bouncer assigned to the balcony. So how did I meet Kari?

I landed at 3:00 in Vegas time. The Red Sox had an early game at 5 on the east coast so I met with Brian, a 40 year old father of three, ChannelWave sales manager at the MGM sports book. We had to go to the kick-off reception at 7 which should have been plenty of time if the Sox and Yankees didn't decide to have a second major nailbiter in two nights with a 14 inning game that lasted until almost eight o'clock. I had to leave the game in thirteenth to get to the kickoff dinner.

The sox did win finally. I learned about it from other people while chatting and networking. I still don't know how they won.

So I was at the networking kick-off launch and I scanned the room to see if there were any potential partners in crime. I saw Kari and was immediately certain that she was the most beautiful woman in the room. So I figured I would hatch a plan some way to meet her.

I sat down with Brian because you can't eat the lobster tails without a table and three napkins. We were eating and reviewing my earlier escape from a South African transplant to Canada who was trying to explain that it is impossible for people in this part of the world to understand how difficult and different it is to live where there is a culture where people don't value life. People who don't value their life, their neighbor's life, or a purported enemy life are capable of destroying a civilized country and do it quickly.

I pointed Kari out to Brian as the one person worth meeting in the room. I also pointed out where some key business contacts were.o because Brian had never met any of the people at PTC.

While we were talking near Kari a woman in her forties started chatting with me. I learned from her that her company had brought about eight people and one of them was Kari. So my plan was to infiltrate this little company and meet the one person I wanted to meet.

Already having an introduction into their inner circle I approached Aaron, one of the sales reps by asking him whether he was up for causing trouble. Aaron was a former special forces guy who had served in Mogadishu, Somalia, and a whole host of other places for eight years before deciding that 30 thousand dollars a year to risk your life isn't a good value. He had a medallion in his wallet and an air force wings tattoo to prove he was really special forces. He showed the tatto on his chest once he was plenty drunk.

Eventually I networked to Kari. It was funny to me because I was with Brian and we were talking about all sorts of goofy subjects like his daughter's soccer team and raising kids. Kelly from PTC came over and Aaron and her talked about whether she would go dancing on tables at Coyote Ugly.

So Kari, Brian, Aaron, and me all went together to Coyote Ugly expecting Kelly to folow as soon as she was done setting-up the partner pavillions. On the way we passed a band called “speed kittty” that was a bunch of women singing old rock tunes like “I love rock and roll” and “Sweet child of mine”. I also did a handspring and Kari told the story of a gymnastics tournament she was at that was cancelled because one girl had done a vault, landed hard on her foot and shattered her shinbone that then went through the skin and splattered the other gymnasts with blood. On the bridge to New York New York Aaron tool a picture of us all close together and Kari mentioned that it could be quite incriminating if her boyfriend saw her with two strange men.

Coyote Ugly wasn't that hot of a place. It was filled with about two hundred guys and six women. The woman hired to go on stage had jet black hair and a well engineered boob job. She wore a top the highlighter her breasts and showed her stomach down to her hips. She would recruit women from the audience to dance on stage with her. At one point she got into a fight with a man who was smoking in the front a threaghtened to pour a glass of water on him if he didn't stop blowing smoke at her. Then she sprayed the water at the audience and the bartending waitresses sprayed the audience using the water taps.

Aaron wandered off to recruit women to dance on stage. When I went to look for him he had found a woman from New Jersey that he was working. I took a couple photos of him on his digital camera.

Brian was getting tired so he took off to sleep and I was getting tired of the scene at Coyote Ugly. Kari didn't want to stay out past midnight. So I asked Kari if she wanted to find something more interesting to do. We took off looking for something fun.

Out on the strip we grabbed a cab driver and asked him if the stratosphere roller coaster was still open. It turned out that it was open until one so we rode with him to the Stratosphere. On the way I asked him where good clubs were on a Monday night. The two good ones according to him were the Ghost Bar at The Palms and The Foundation room at Mandalay Bay.

At the stratosphere we went on the big drop ride. It overlooks the strip as you go on a full ten seconds of free fall. The photo of me that they try to sell you made it look like I was about to get punched in the face.

Then we went to the roller coaster but we didn't have tickets. They let us on for free because we attempted to pay at the ride and that was a pain for them. The roller caoster was a slow ricketly ride but the view of Vegas was still great.

I figured that Kari would want to go to sleep since I had already gotten her to go beyond her planned curfew but she must have gotten filled with adrenaline. So we took a cab to the Palms to go to Ghost Bar. On the way we passed a drug bust in progress in the low building part of Vegas.

At Ghost bar the weather was perfect for dancing outside in front of a sub-woofer that kept rarttling. whike we demonstrated how to dance in the sky. Kari was so excited to be having so much fun dancing that she didn't seem to want the evening to end. “This is the best”, “I love this so much”, “This was so woth the cover charge”.

I know that John Gray has covered this subject in great detail but I was glowing because I was doing a good job of keeping her happy. It was a great feeling.

We kept getting stopped by the bouncer for doing silly things like jumping up and down on the window and sticking our heads through gaps in the window to look out into the city. At one point a couple asked us if we were married.

We retired to a set of couches after getting chastised again for standing on the couches and looking over the edge into the Vegas skyline. We looked into the many little homes and pondered what was happening in all of them. Some must had had domestic violence., some children being read a bed time story. Kari said in some there must be people making love. Kari figured our little partnership to wander the city worked well for both of us because I kept creepy guys from hitting on her - strangely I was excluded from this class of guy - and she kept prostitutes from propositioning me.

It was getting past three so we went downstairs and they music had switched from techno to retro with songs like Stairway to Heaven playing to scare the crowd out. We took our cab back to the MGM. When we got to the elevator bank we bumped into Aaron who had a hooker's arm hooked under his arm. He let us know that she was falling down and fell right into him and she staggered off back into the casino floor maze. Aaron was showing the pictures in his camera of all the fun he had had with the woman from New Jersey and her friend. They had done karaoke, gone dancing, kissed. He kept saying that he was a salesman and that meant he was sure he was going to close the deal. We left him behind and as we walked to the elevator bank he stumbled into the two hookers that were sitting in the two pay phone booths to chat with them.

Kari got off the elevator at the 25th floor and I got off at the 26th. It was a good enough ending and as I walked into the eery green glow of my empty MGM room I thought to myself “mission accomplished.”

I awoke at 5 am this morning to scramble to pull together my list of clothes for my trip to Las Vegas for the PTC partner coference. At about 2 am I had watched David Ortiz hit a two run homer in the bottom of the twelth to finally beat the Yankees in a playoff game this year. I never saw the actual ball because I was watching the game while drifting in and out of sleep over the Internet.

Since I freeload television and there is no reception for television in Brookline I am a second class citizen when it comes to watching baseball. Normally I watch on GameDay, which shows where the pitches went and no real people. Luckily Fox buried a camera somewhere between the pitcher and the batter and they provide a free stream of it on the Internet. It comes with the sound of the game and is eerily commercial free. That's because in the commercial breaks you see the catcher taking warmuip pitches and hear the ambient ballpark noise.

I called a taxi to take me to the airport and being at a dead hour of the night it reminded me of the many times I have looked for but couldn't find a cab. I thought of two new applications of GPS. The first would be a tool to find cabs near you that are unoccupied and looking for fares. By reading you GPS the system focuses around you. The taxis have GPS built-in and radio their positions to the dispatcher computers. The phone uses a web request to send the current phone gps and receive a map of cabs in the area including direction of motion. Then boom I get to an empty cab in no time.

Another neat application is inspired by the videogame Taxi Driver. It has great background music by Offspring but that is irrelevant. In the game you can see what people want from your taxi before you pick them up. So why not have a beacon for people to turn on with their phone/pda that announces that they need a taxi and where they are going. That way if they are a good fare they will get picked-up quickly.

I like the idea of people using information technology to become more insect-like, using silent communication tools to inform each other of wants and needs to maximize efficiency and operate in a buzzing hive. The japanese are way ahead of us in this regard. They create inventions like lights to inform other people that you are attracted to them and have made better giant insect movies than we have.

Long live Mothra!

At the halftime show at the Patriots games they have a contest called The Levitra challenge. It involves throwing a football at large phallic inflated targets that get successively further away with each throw. The man sitting next to my father and me had this to say about it.

“When I was a kid and I was watching television and a tampon commercial came on when my mom was in the room I would quickly change the channel before I offended her. Now the halftime show is one big hard-on ad.”

After the Levitra challenge they had a blindfolded man try to locate a giant moving bottle of Pepsi.

Heidi Klum was at the game giving away on thousand dollar gift certificates to Victoria's secret. Amazingly there were four seats called and all of them were women. This is pretty suspicious to me since the crowd is 80% men. My guess is that they orchestrated it by taking a database of the tickets scanned through the womens only lines. Personally that seems likle an unfair contest but they also could have just brought out the women from groups of seats where people won.

The pats did well by winning a record setting 20th game. As Heidi Klume says “go pats!”

It is always such a pain to fill your car with gas when the gas station is busy. The problem is that you need to combine waiting in line for a pump with directing your car in the direction optimal for filling the tank. What ends up happening is that cars face into each other against the grain and then get trapped by people waiting since they need to back out of the gas station. One solution is to have access to the gas tank from either side of the car.

I passed by VideoSmith about five times in the past week without figuring out the change. I even recall seeing a jigsaw puzzle in the window of Mickey Mouse made in a photo-mosaic style and I remarked to Sarah - "I would like to make photo mosaics of my photos". I finally had a Eureka moment while walking in front of VideoSmith that half of the video rental store was no longer for video rentals. It is now populated by puzzles of every kind. In some bizarre arrangement between the Smith family and the owner of Eureka puzzles they are splitting the space in VideoSmith.

I could hardly wait to go inside the puzzle store once I realized what it was. But we needed to eat since it was 4PM and neither of us had eaten lunch. We went to the at the Coolidge Corner clubhouse. I almost ordered a "Drew Bledsoe" because it had chicken and cheese on it but since he is now in Buffalo I thought it wouldn't be good to buy food in his name. Instead I opted for another dish that had guacamole in it but I don't remember the name. Maybe it was a Pedro Martinez?

We split-up to divide and conquer. I went to the puzzle store and Sarah went to Brookline BookSmith. The Smith family is still powerful in Coolidge Corner although their empire has been waning since CyberSmith flopped in Harvard Square above the Border Cafe.

I was walking around playing with all the puzzles when the proprietor started chatting it up with me. I was fond of the metal and wood puzzles where you need to unlock pieces. He told me that there seem to be three types of people. One type likes the jigsaws, the other likes the board games, and the third (people like me) like the puzzles. My favorite puzzle there was a wine bottle puzzle where you could give the puzzle and a wine bottle to someone as a gift and they would need to solve the puzzle to be able to open the wine. They also had one that was for chocolates and another one that looked like a good puzzle for jewelry. Wouldn't that be a great way to propose? Here honey, let me know when you've solved this.

I had a few pieces of Java homework that I still hadn't completed and some lingering internet conundrums that I hadn't solved in the morning relating to making server side includes operate on my web server. So I left the proprietor of the Eureka puzzle store with full confidence that I had plenty of puzzles to solve without having to purchase new ones.

I was completely right. I spent a full two hours on a single piece of java homework for a problem called DebugThis where I just couldn't figure out most of the problems despite trying many different angles. It proved to be a great challenge and felt quite rewarding when I had cracked it. While I was doing that I had to download a new FTP client and learn how server side includes worked giving me the pleasure of having solved two puzzles for the evening. It made me remember what I liked about MIT that most people didn't. I like problems and problem sets. I like them when they are difficult but solvable. Even if I can't figure them out I like that I know that I could with enough time and training. I loved doing chemistry NMR to decypher what a compound looked like, the complex math of quantum physics (which I was never quite good at), and coming-up with a synthesis for a particularly odd molecule. It is an odd thing to love puzzles. There must be plenty of people like me who go right to that part of the store.

So I am just inundated with car trouble. The Direct Tire people charged Sarah 600 bucks to fix a bunch of things not related to the flat tire. They claimed that they had to replace a tie-rod and to do a new alignment. They were certain that this was necessary maintenance caused by general wear and tear.

When I got home I opened a recall notice from Chrysler to inform me that “the power steering pressure hose may contact the transaxle differential cover” which will lead to “an underhood fire.”

Every time I return to the dealership they find a problem with my brakes that costs about 600 bucks.

The big question - should I risk death by fire and tell them that I believe in Smurfs but not the transaxle differential cover or just go in and get hosed with an unnecessary brake job

Wow! Although I haven't gotten my new regulator back from the Coleman corporation I just had one of the best experiences ever calling to complain about a defective product.

I was calling from my desk to the number on their web site in the warrantee area.

"Take the product to an authorized Coleman service center. You can find the nearest authorized Coleman service center by calling 1-800-835-3278 or TDD 316-832-8707."

At first I tried to navigate their phone tree which was a mess since they sent me to some area relating to grills that told me to call some other number to talk to someone. I punched in 1 and they gave me a real breathing person in under five seconds. Now I was mainly calling expecting them to give me some really complex process like driving to a remote location in Springfield where I would need to prove with triplicate documentation and an affidavit from KMart that I had purchased the product and the date of purchase. Because of this I didn't have the grill handy or any of the parts.

I told the woman on the phone my story about the grill and the propane tank expelling. She worked with me to zero in on which grill I had bought by asking me questions like "Is it blue?", "Does it have two grilling surfaces or one?", "Do you put charcoal in it?", etc. until she knew the type of grill. Then she told me "You need a new regulator - we'll send one out to you." She took my name and address and promised it would arrive in 7-10 days. Now what is amazing is that I never had to prove everything with iron clad documentation.

This makes sense because I could have died or been severely burned in a fireball of propane that would likely be traced back to a defective regulator that shouldn't be marketed to people who drink all morning heavily before watching football games.

But hey -- not everyone is out to get me. The Coleman folks are looking out for my safety and I commend them for it. Way to go Cole Men!

My sister called to ask what finally drove me to the decision to put my '87 Volvo out to pasture six years ago. I told her that it was because the entire exhaust system fell out from underneath it and I thought it would cost more money than the car was worth to fix it. She mentioned that her current problem is that there is a problem with the brakes.

Give me a break!

Now I am not someone who is easily swayed by conspiracy theories but I am nearly convinced that there is a conspiracy among the car dealers and repair shops of the world around brakes. Eveyone I know has some problem with their brakes. I think that if you ever come into their locations they either tamper with the brakes to make sure they need some form of repair or they simply tell you that there is something wrong with your brakes. Then when they fix the brakes they don't fix them so that they last very long.

It isn't like you can argue with them or consider not fixing a problem with the brakes. It isn't like I can climb under my car and look at the rusty dirty parts near the wheels and confirm or deny that there is a problem with the brakes. The only things I can use to tell what is going on with the brakes are squeaking noises and red lights on the dashboard, both of which are very easy for a technically minded repair person to install.

Nobody wants to die in a terrible car crash caused because they didn't want to pay the $300 to replace a caliper. I can just imagine the conversation:

Repair man: "Your brakes are totally shot. You need to fix them immediately."
Dan: "Is this a necessary repair?"
Repair man: "You will die a horrible death if your brakes fail."
Dan: "I'll take my chances."
Repair man: "Congratulations -- you are the first person not to fall for the brake scam in months!"
Repair man gives Dan a handshake and Dan dies in a car accident three days later.

Although I have never thought much of a warranty on my television I believe that I could use an iron clad warranty that promised that my brakes wouldn't break.

Jeremy and I watched Capricorn One last night. It was interesting to see that actors never disappear while actresses tend to only last a short period. The main actress, the wife of the captian of the mission, looks vaguely familiar but she is definitely not someone in movies and tv today. Meanwhile, the reporter was Eliot Gould, OJ was the black astronaut, and the prosecutor from Law and Order was the third astronaut.

The movie was quite entertaining for a seventies flick. The only really annoying flaw in it was when the reporter, Caulfield, finally found the base where the astronauts were held to make the fake mars landing and he decides to charter a crop duster to look for them in the desert. This search is based on information the audience has that the plane they tried to escape in crashed in the desert and not information that Caulfield had. But I would still recommend Capricorn One to a friend.

Two nights ago Sarah and I watched Crazy Beautiful. That movie is so bad that we had to fast forward through most of it. I would recommend that they send the entire team that produced that movie to mars or at least to a remote desert location they would need to escape and hopefully be eaten by vultures.

My dreams have been strange and memorable. I dreamed that the one person who was reading my blog was actually Sarah's roommate Lynne's boyfriend. It came out in a creepy way that he was using my blog to learn about Lynne. Later I dreamed that I had gone to the Patriots game and forgot to bring two of the six tickets. One was in Cambridge and the other was in Brookline. I was in Kenmore square even though that doesn't make sense. It was a dream. In the same dream Jeremy had bought a new tv but it was very small and long. The aspect ratio was bizarre. He had bought it so that I could watch sports like the Red Sox playoffs. I was trying to act gracious but was secretly baffled regarding what to do with it.

I am hoping to be so well as to go out into the world again today. It will beat staying home, having weird dreams, watching movies, having people bring me pho, and scrounging around looking for reasonable hot beverages.

Whenever people are sick around me I think to myself about how great it is that I am never sick. This is silly because I do actually get sick as often as everyone else but I tend to have amnesia about it afterwards. Today and yesterday I have had a nasty flu. I don't think it has to do with the Brits not shipping us flu vaccines this year but I am not happy with the virus that has infected me.

Among the symptoms that I have are a strange delusion that the Red Sox should be able to beat the Yankees due to superior pitching that has been shattered two nights in a row by back to back losses in New York.

I spent most of today alternating between sleeping, playing tissue basketball with my waste paper basket, and attempting to do my java homework. Learning java when your head feels like a bowling ball is not recommended.

I did get a response to my organizing ad at BU.

“Dan-

My name is K. de la M. and I am a graduate student at Boston University. I found your job posting, “Organizing an Apartment” on the BU website and am hoping you are still looking for help. Please let me know, either way, if the position is still available.

Looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks.

K de la M.
“

I felt one emotion when I received this reply - fear. I may actually have someone who is organized snooping through my piles of mess. Sarah was noticing how cluttered things were and went on a mini-neatening spree this evening that was driving me nuts because I am sick but had to justify the existence of items deep within my closet like a decorative bowl I bought as a gift for my mother three years ago and the “libra” make your own mosaic kit that Yuval gave me as a present in 1999. Then she lit some candles using the logic that if the candles are never burned down to nothing then they can never be thrown away.

Back to tissue basketball.

Having been through a near fatal propane tank expulsion on Sunday at the Patriots game everyone around me is now more conscious of fire safety. Jeremy sent me this email

"Hey i just noticed we dont have a single smoke detector in the apartment, we really need 4 simple 9-volt stick up ones to be safe, if you are at home depot anytime soon or a hardware store pick some up."

So I figured I'd grabe four of these: First Alert FG888D 9V Smoke Detector.

That reminds me why I don't have any smoke detectors in the apartment. We used to have one of them and I can remember how and why it was expelled from Eden. It was about midnight on a fall night in Brookline when the smoke detector started to chirp every two minutes. It had been chirping once an hour which was easy enough to ignore but at once every five minutes something had to be done. I believe it was trying to inform us that the battery was beginning to run low. Being a good and handy repair person I took the detector down from the ceiling and took a 9 volt battery out of the drawer and prepared to repair the detector.

To my surprise removing the battery had the unexpected result of causing it to beep continuously with what can only be described as a the sound you would put into a sonic weapon that you would use to cause an eardrum to bleed. The smoke detector had some type of anti-tampering device in it to keep evil arson minded individuals from removing the batteries from the device. So I rushed to place the 9 volt battery into the smoke detector believing that placing a charged battery into the device would end the evil piercing sound that was rapidly turning my entire body to jelly and most likely causing my neighbors upstairs and below to deploy their rope ladders to climb down out of the burning deathtrap of a Brookline condominium.

Placing the new battery into the device had no effect whatsoever. It continued to beep. I have the most annoying neighbor in the world who hates me for a variety of reasons but I began to think how this fiasco with the midnight smoke detector alarm would drive her nuts so I took the battery out again figuring it would run out of power sooner or later. But after a minute it still didn't run out of power. So I tried smashing it with my boots on to crush the mechanism into submission.

Stephanie, who was with me that evening, was also freaking out about the loud noise and the neighbors and she finally told me that the only thing we could do would be to take it outside and put it into a place where nobody would hear it until it stopped making the noise. I volunteered her for this task since I was more of a hunter trying to kill the thing and she could be more agricultural in burying it. Stephanie took the remains of the tattered smoke alarm and brought them outside.

When she returned she told me what she had done with it. She hadn't found any good enclosed place to put it until she came across the blue mailbox on the corner. Since it had an enclosed area she slid it into the slot and closed the door on it making a bizarre present or prank for the postman to find. It apparently wasn't any quieter in the mailbox as it acted like an amplifying drum to inform the whole neighborhood that there was something beeping inside of it.

I still imagine the police in bomb control outfits wandering the streets of Brookline trying to figure out what sort of explosive device was left in the mailbox and tracing the broken smoke detector back to me using fingerprints and boot footprint analysis.

Now I need to trust the US Postal service to not be too revenge minded when they deliver the 4 new smoke detectors that I just ordered to my Brookline apartment.

As I did a great deal of surfing this afternoon clicking from blog to blog and site to site I am happily refreshed to be walking outside to get my lunch in the real world. Sometimes when I am online I feel like a character I have seen many times in sci-fi and horror movies who is telepathic but can't block out the voices of either the living or the dead and hears a jumbled crowdlike noise all around him as he is unable to avoid the thoughts that hit him in rapid fire. Outside it is quiet, cool with a gentle rain and a slight breeze. The safety of breaking the link to the bustling agora of the web leaves me wondering what I was doing submerging myself in the soup of the lives of strangers.

Posting the advertisement for help organizing my apartment didn't quite work they way that I thought it would. I went to login after proving that I had a pulse and could navigate the Indiana Jones style challenge of getting a password and username. So I went to the BU site and I went to where I got stuck yesterday. I entered my shiny new password and BUID and then got this message.

"We are sorry, but you are not eligible for this Student Employment service. Please visit the Student Employment Frequently Asked Questions page for eligibility requirements and more information."

This page luckily took me to a page that allowed me to post a job as an employer without having a BUID. This makes sense since there is no reason why I should have a BUID in order to employ a BU student but I hadn't counted on people who require you to encrypt and decrypt your own password in your head to come up with a policy that made it easy to post a job for $10 an hour. The form is
here
in case anyone is looking for it.

I would have cut and pasted the job posting that I put into the form but it is one of those forms that gives you no reciept and gives a funky error message when you hit the back button. My reproduction of the job listing is something like this:

"Looking for someone with strong organizational skills to help reduce the clutter in my apartment. Tasks to include filing financial documents and managing closets, bureaus, drawers, and cabinets.

$10.00/hour
Minimum 4 hours/month
Maximum 8 hours/month
"

But it's posted so now it's just a waiting game to see who responds.

The cleaning people came today while I was out. The problem with the cleaning people is that they don't speak any english and they are set-up to clean and not organize. I had originally thought they could organize my life but instead they make little piles out of my messy life once every two weeks. I had hatched a new plan to keep my life organized a few months ago which was to hire an undergraduate from Boston University to organize all of the clutter in my apartment at a reasonable rate. I got the idea from two places. The first was Philip who hired an undergraduate beauty school student as his asistant in Toronto to organize his life. She used to go out on errands to buy him beer, would fill out his expense reports for him, and most importantly acted as the topless waitress at poker night. The other person inspiring this idea was my family friends the Kriegers who on Passover held a Seder and had hired a BU student by posting the job on the BU Quickie Job board. While Passover was in the spring of last year it takes me a long time to get into gear. Besides that I had never had a way of posting to the quickie job board.

Now that I am a student at BU taking Java, which is off tonight because it is Columbus day, I have extra access to the resources of Boston University. So I went to do my research and found the quicky job board. Upon trying to click through to the job board I learned that to post a job I would need a BU login. I had actually inquired about getting a BU login a week before when I was desparately looking to post announcements for Swedishnurse.com but all I had received was an email 24 hours after I inquired about how to get an account that read:

"To set up an ACS account (e-mail, BU login and kerberos password), you must complete this online application:
Start
Once you have completed this online application, your account will not be active until you present your ID to our office in person. For security reasons, we cannot verify your ID via phone or e-mail. The lab at 111 Cummington St where you may show your ID is open 24 hours from 10am on Sundays thru 9pm Fridays. "

I hadn't read this very carefully and had to hunt through my email to find this message for about half an hour to find the link to set-up an account. At first it seemed quite easy to create an account like dhousman@bu.edu which would be a great alternative email to have. But the third screen into the process presented me with an inquiry that also caused a twenty minute set-back. The requirements for the password at BU are very specific and hard to meet with any password a human being might be able to creatively build based on their own common list of memorable dates phrases and pet names. These are the requirements for making a BU password:

- Must be at least 10 characters long but no more than 15
- Must contain at least 2 lowercase and at least 2 UPPERCASE (CAPITAL) letters
- Must contain at least 1 number or punctuation character
- Cannot be a single English or foreign word or name found in our word list
- Cannot contain part of a course name, your status, BU ID number, personal name, or BU login name

All other passwords that I currently maintain failed these requirements. So I needed to create a new password. I looked around at things in my office like headphones, CDs, books, a thesaurus, and finally created a password that I am not supposed to tell anyone, not because I am worried you will break into my BU account but because it was a major investment on my part to find the creativity to beat the password rules.

So I entered the password and was taken to the next challenge. Apparently being a BU student and creating in uncrackable password are not enough requirements to login to post jobs on the quicky board. I also needed to present myself in person at an elusive location. The text on the site reads:

"You can now start using your BU login name and Kerberos password for Web authentication, e.g., in the Link, immediately after you show your BU ID. Your ACS account will be available within 24 hours after you show your BU ID.

You must now present your BU ID at the following location:
Charles River CampusThe Input/Output Services Window(Open continuously from 10am Sunday to 9pm Friday, and 7am-9pm Saturday)
Located in the Central PC Lab (Basement)
The Office of Information Technology
111 Cummington Street

Medical Campus
The Learning Resource Center
Located on the 12th floor in the Medical Library
715 Albany Street, L12"


This information did not come with a map or GPS system to figure out where either of these two locations is. From the