For whatever reason the computer in my living room has decided to make sure that anything relating to wireless connections to it no longer works. The problem with this is that the living room PC is completely dependent upon wireless connectivity for most interactions with it. To send mouse and keyboard signals from the couch it uses a Logitech wireless system. The Internet is beamed to it through 802.11. Despite being so dependent upon these wireless tools I decided it was the most powerful computer in my home since it was set-up to show movies and download lots of MP3s as a latecomer on the computer network.

The problems started when I dropped the Logitech wireless mouse on the floor about a week ago and I guess the mouse failed the drop test. From then on I couldn't use the wireless mouse. The computer outputs to the television but I found a nice little workaround a long time ago which is that I can use Remote Desktop to connect to it. That was going fine until today when remote desktop mysteriously stopped working as I was doing some editing of pictures on the living room PC.

Now I had a real challenge. The problem is that the PC isn't on the network and is not accessible via a mouse and keyboard. So how do I fix it. I tried the Microsoft reboot salute a couple of times but it still didn't find the network. Then I rebooted the router and the DSL modem for good measure. I finally resorted to using a mouse that I had gotten at a trade show designed for portable use with laptops that had a cable of about 2 feet that kept trying to retract. This was quite fun to use in conjunction with a 42" television about a foot away from me that kept giving me useful prompts like "Repair this" and then would tell me "The system was unable to repair this because". I still haven't fixed this problem and I suspect that it has something to do with trying to use my laptop in the middle of the night and installing Microsoft SP2 because that is the only thing that I did differently last night than most nights. The laptop was giving similar annoying wireless networking errors.

So I came-up with a solution at least to try to do the fix. I lay on the floor of the living room on the rug. I took the mouse from my bedroom that is nice and old-fashioned and has a cord but connects to a USB port. I connected it to the living room PC to give me some more room. I then searched for the problem on the laptop by sitting on the couch. There was a mention of the problem on a site called PCHell that after installing SP2 on WindowsXP machines that they had a bug that causes them to show the error message that I was seeing "This connection has limited or no connectivity. You might not be able to access the Internet or some network resources. "

The solution was to install a driver from Microsoft at this page. Now this would have been easy enough if I had a working mouse, keyboard, and network connection but what appeared to be my only option was to use the dreaded floppy disk. Of course, the laptop didn't have the floppy disk installed. It only had the CD-ROM drive available. Since this was useless I went back into the bedroom to seek a floppy disk. I don't need a floppy disk very often so at first I couldn't find one. I finally found one that Sarah had been using to move files around in the floppy drive of the computer in the living room. Now this seemed like a big win for me. So I rushed back into the bedroom only to find that I had the mouse attached to the living room computer. So I moved the mouse and made a floppy disk with the patch on it and went back to the living room. Then when I went to find the file on the floppy disk the computer in the living room decided that it didn't have an A: drive and wouldn't recognize the floppy disk.

Now this is a fairly awful situation since I now needed to go to plan b to get the patch onto the computer in the living room. So I looked at what it could recognize and found that it knew that it had a CD-ROM drive, so I considered burning a CD-ROM to place the patch onto it, and that it recognized the Smart Card reader for my camera memory. So I connected the camera memory to the laptop and saved the file onto the smart card. Unfortunately the USB mouse from the living room, the keyboard, and the card reader all wanted a USB slot but there were only two available so I went keyboardless and copied the file to the desktop. I ran the executable, rebooted and voila the livingroom computer was back on the network.

Then I went over to the laptop and noticed that while I was fixing the living room computer it had the same error message. I had downloaded the patch directly to the card reader so I moved the card reader and the card with the patch in it back over to the laptop and installed the patch there. I then moved the mouse back to the bedroom computer, hooked-up the keyboard again on the living room computer and tested my access to the living room computer from the bedroom now that I had a mouse once more.

It seems like life isn't that much simpler since they got rid of the wires. I am wondering what I gained other than a headache and an aptitude for plugging in and unplugging wires?

The other day as I was walking through the parking lot at Stop and Shop to bring home the bacon for breakfast I noticed a man in a japanese car who appeared to be working feverishly at removing the radio. He was an african american man and I looked at him and he looked right at me when he noticed I was looking into the car. I thought about a bunch of things at the time. The first was that I could use my digital camera to photograph him and share the photograph with the police in case the radio was reported stolen in that car. At least they would have a way to locate the criminal from an eye-witness photographer. Then I got to thinking that I might be racially profiling the man in the car and he could just be rifling through his glove compartment looking for coupons. I also considered the possibility that if I were to take his photo and he was not too happy with it that I could find myself brained and out another digital camera as I walked home on Alton Place.

I finally thought that the means of production that disconnects the supply and demand for meat products like the bacon that I was carrying was likely to be a bigger crime. So given all of these thoughts rushing through my brain I decided to walk on by and returned home to burn the bacon to a crisp while trying to do too many things at once.

A few days back our neighbors came to our door asking whether we had signed for a package. They were in a panic because someone had signed for their airplane tickets but they had not arrived. They were looking for a thin package. We told them that we hadn't seen it nor had we signed for it. The woman was very frustrated because the place they had ordered the tickets from not only required them to purchase a new set of tickets but to also purchase them at a last minute price. We didn't think it was right and told them so.

Lately I have been cursing as I reported two of my NetFlix movies missing because they didn't arrive assuming that NetFlix was collapsing in their service and couldn't figure out how to deliver the movies. Now I have an open mailbox because I lost the key a long time ago so when any mail is delivered it is available to the world in the entranceway to our building.

Stephanie had given me her mail key while she was away last month when Sarah and I were taking care of Leelin. This mail key had caused some incident with her boyfriend because apparently I, an ex-boyfriend, have a mail key, and he does not. Furthermore I never used the mail key to take her mail in when she was away and left her mail to build-up.

So I figure I had a lot of bad karma building-up just waiting to burst and yesterday I put it over the top. When I returned home from work yesterday a set of shelves that Sarah had bought from Crate and Barrel arrived. They were sitting in the entranceway in six boxes. Rather than bringing them inside I rifled through the mail that I could find looking for missing NetFlix movies. Not finding any of them I reported that the movie The Office Season II was lost in the mail. I rushed back downstairs past the boxes at 5:50 to bike to my Java class.

After the Java class I went to Corrib to eat dinner with Sarah who was waiting there. She was sitting with Dick and Matt and the first question they asked me was whether I had seen the shelves that were delivered. I told them that I had seen them. Then Sarah told me that the shelves had been stolen by someone. She knows this because she also had walked past them on the way upstairs because she had gotten a call on her cell phone. When she went back downstairs excitedly to acquire the shelving they were gone. So we had been robbed of the shelves before we had even received them.

Whenever I have been robbed I think of terrible things to do to the criminals who did it. One idea I had was to give the criminals a bomb in a box that they could steal and then blow them up. I also considered putting a web camera in the entranceway and baiting them with attractive packages and then have the police arrest them. I also thought it would be good to give them the sentence of needing to fight in Iraq. Then I thought it wouldn't be such a great idea to train criminals to use modern weapons. Finally I just resigned to making a sign to put on the door to warn everyone that there had been mail stolen recently. Today I'll try to get the mailbox fixed, I'll start locking my door, and I'll warn people to be more careful with their mail.

I'll also try to be more active the next time that I see someone who looks like they are breaking into a car to steal a radio. On the bright side I learned that Jeremy's sister managed to get her stroller back from the front-door theives who stole it from her entranceway. Those theives had placed the stroller onto craigslist the next day and it was recovered from them. So another thing to do today is to hunt for shelving from Crate and Barrel on craigslist.

View more pictures


It was a dark and stormy night and we were outside getting drenched at Gillette stadium. Coach Bellicheck said that there aren't too many weeks with conditions like this in a 16 week season.

Sarah and I had been shopping at Whole Foods and got hamburger meat for a change. The whole time at whole foods Sarah was trying to talk Lynne out of going on a last minute date called by her friend who is a non-committal boyfriend in order to show him that he should plan more in advance to treat her better.

Our tailgating was successful despite not having a lighter tool to light the Coleman stove. I have come to define success that the meat is successfully cooked and we had alcohol to drink. We struggled with a container of wet matches to get the stove lit and had to do it twice because the wind blew it out but once it was lit everything was well.

My dad and I sat up in the rafters under the lights. We knew we were under the lights because they collect rain and pour it down on you. I didn't mind the water much because I had brought full expedition gear covering my body in goretex from head to toe. The only things that didn't work right were my gloves and socks. I have yet to find a pair of gloves that works well in the rain. The really waterproof ones make your hands sweat which leaves them more wet than if they weren't waterproof and the other gloves just fill with water like a sponge. I thought I had a good plan circulating a pair of glove liners and two pairs of gloves but they all got wet anyways.

The game in the mud was a lot of fun to watch. The Patriots totally dominated the Ravens to the point where it looked like the Ravens couldn't wait to go home to dry Baltimore as they were getting repeatedly sacked on down after down. The TV timeouts didn't help the flow of the game which ended-up feeling long.

Back at the car I ate about a pound of Hattie's Rice Crispy treats as Sarah drove us all home. I still have some good Cambozola in the fridge as a leftover from the game.

In other unrelated news Jeremy has officially left for four months to go on an adventure to Australia. Cloey the cat moved to his sister's apartment down the street.

When I went to work today I bumped into Ivana. She just came back from Peru where she was chewing on Coco leaves while trekking Machu-Pichu. I think that will be our next destination. I also got word from Chris that it could be worth going to Atlanta soon to meet with a friend of his involved in the media licensing project.

Robert decided that he will try to promote street musicians by lining them up with local independent movie houses to play a couple of songs live before each movie. It could work. I tried to think through how to make a bar where people could also watch movies on nice sceens in their own mini home theatre. Initially I thought it could turn bars into a new movie distribution channel for indie films.

View more pictures


On Saturday night we celebrated Sarah's birthday again by going out to dinner in the North End with Lisa, Dave, and Lynne. The original plan had been more grandiose including a gathering of many people including Sarah's friends from college, Stephanie and James, Hattie, Kate and Matt, Snow White, and the Seven Dwarves. But because it was Thanksgiving weekend the dwarves were visiting their families wherever they were and we were able to have an intimate dinner together.

Notice: I was warned in an voicemail message to specifically not mention an interesting fact so instead of that fact I am replacing it with pure fiction.

At dinner I learned about some good news from Lisa and Dave. They were playing on the subway when a man took notice of them and mentioned to Lisa that the music Dave was playing was very good. He then went on to tell them that he works for Geffen records, which has just opened an office in Boston, and that he is actually David Geffen's son. He further asked that Dave and Lisa visit his office some time soon. He was so interested in the music that when he got a cell phone call he told the caller that he had to go because he was “listening to a guitarist”. Thus continues Lisa and Dave's meteoric rise to the top of the modern folk charts.

Lisa and Dave are also going to be playing at a gay wedding. This doesn't mean they legalized gay marriages yet. I hope they don't get arrested. It may be a good opportunity to write a protest song.

We also had some discussions about sex and our parents or relatives. Lynne was wondering what the sex was like the night that she was conceived. She also marvelled at how every person began with at least one orgasm (male) and potentially two. Lisa then told the story of one of her friends from college who was totally disgusted by a certain sexual act. We all assumed it was something odd and depraved but it was actually just plain oral sex.

Lynne also has been on the dating scene and has noticed that she has gone on dates with people who she went on dates with last year who don't even recognize that they went on a first date before. She also just got an inquiry for her opening for a roommate renter for her condo from someone who responded to her match.com profile that she had declined to go on a date with before. That should be an interesting situation.

I finally got to give Sarah her top secret gift. It is a miniature framed diarama representing the imagery of one of Sarah's favorite songs - Isis. Lisa connected me with her friend Lisa Bastoni, a musician who opened for Arlo Guthrie this year. Lisa Bastoni makes diorama's of music. We had a meeting last Wednesday to exchange the cash for the one of a kind commissioned item. I also had it wrapped at Paper Source in Coolidge Corner in Elvis wrapping paper and a blue polkadotted ribbon.

After dinner Lynne drank coffee with us at Mike's pastries and then had to go home to sleep. Dave and Lisa were off to get plastered at Dave's tenth reunion at a bar. Sarah and I had plenty of energy from the coffee so we walked over to the Improv Asylum for a show. On the way we passed a window that had Yankees suck t-shirts but they also had a France sucks shirt available.

The improv show was very funny. Highlights included a format they did with someone from the audience who had recentlu gone through a break-up. The woman selected was with her family, a family of blond haired hippy nerdy types. When asked what attracted her to her boyfriend she said that it was because he was avant-garde. That was clarified that he wore clothing from thrift stores, listened to Indy music, and had long unkempt hair. She broke up with him and said he smelled, was lazy, and was too hairy.

Another great sketch was an office that remained serious then periodically broke into childish outbursts that fit into to context. The new management consultant was trying to hide beyond the boss and then was whining that he wanted to “familiarize himself with the fiscal '03 financial statements.”

After the first show the Improv Asylum has a midnight show which is basically an audience participatory drinking game. I tried to drink enough to get drunk but it was too tricky to buy beer while watching the show.

View more pictures


Sarah turned 29 yesterday. To begin the celebration we stayed in bed for most of the morning. I then worked with her to make a superb pair of breakfast bagels including bacon, eggs overeasy, and extra-sharp cheddar cheese. We eventually managed to get ourselves into the swing of the day so we went together to the gym to work-out. My stomach has been feeling lots of pain from going to the gym lately. I think it has something to do with my plan to do sit-ups on an incline. I did about twenty of them on Wednesday and now I worry that I created a hernia. But if not I may end-up with a much more attractive stomach and continue my quest to become a Chippendales dancer.

I dragged Sarah to the FAT (Friday After Thanksgiving) chain reaction at MIT. It is hard to describe so I won't bother. Look at the MIT Museum site. The funny thing was that with thirty odd contraptions lined-up as soon as it was time to set them off the orchestrator asked each creator to describe what their link would do. The typical link description was delivered by an eight year old boy and sounded something like this. "My link is called escape from Martha's Vineyard because we are from Martha's Vineyard. Here a marble rolls down the run and hits a pulley that releases a train by hitting a magnet. Then this ball gets jerked off and that turns on the blower to blow-up the turkey balloon and makes the bell ring. The ringing bell makes the random generator push uh balls down the stairs through the uh, lego people, and then the bunny is free and walks to get the carrot to make the lever go down to make the next link go." Multiply that times 30. It was fun to watch the kids describe the creations.

We bolted early in order to make it out to the Carvey home for a dinner of leftover Thanksgiving foods. We had another serving of creamed onions. Sarah's sister Christina popped by. She had braved the mall crowds in order to purchase a J Jill gift certificate for Sarah. Her mother had purchased some useful gifts for her including a Burt's bees desitin based product that neither Sarah nor her mother could determine the purpose of. The general consensus was that it was for diaper rash. She also got Crest White Strips 7 Day. Those should be quite a bit of fun.

We drove to Chelmsford for the Bedford High School 10th reunion. It is interesting to be an outsider at someone else's tenth reunion. I have been to two of them now. It was interesting to watch Sarah tell her classmates about her current life. The major highlights are that we live together in Brookline, she is a child developmental therapy, her parents moved to Sweeney Ridge from their prior road, and her little brothers and sister all went to MIT. With that behind her she was able to drink heartily, celebrate her birthday, and dance to the music played by some twelve year olds who were trying to guess what ancient people who grew-up in the late eighties and early nineties listened to as music in highschool. I got one compliment from a woman named Cindy who has a child but no husband. She told Sarah when she saw me she was wondering who the cute guy was that she didn't recognize and whether she recalled if I had gone to high school with them. We all danced together on a tiny dance floor to end the evening. Many of the Bedfordians were going off to Lowell for the rest of the evening but Sarah and I elected to drive home and stop at Burger King for some chicken sandwiches, french fries, and onion rings.

One thing that did disconcert me was that the Bedford 20 year reunion was happening only about fifty feet from the 10th reunion. As I first passed through them I thought to myself that Sarah's class hadn't held-up very well with the times. Then I thought that I was in between the 10th and 20th reunion and I had a good three year head-start on the people at the 10th reunion but was rapidly running towards the 20th reunion. If that wasn't enough all the reunion talk had prompted Sarah's mother to talk about her 40th reunion and that 18 people from their class were already dead. Time is breathing down my neck some days especially when it appears through other people's lives unravelled in front of me.

View more pictures

I started off today trying to figure out what I was thankful for. The majority of the thankfulness that I have lies in health, family, and friends. I have these three things in ample form. My family is doing well together with no issues or squabbles. I am in good shape and don't feel that I need a doctor in any time soon. Things are well with Sarah and I now am on improving terms with Stephanie and Nadia. It would be nice if friends like Falkoff would come to Boston more often but that is just a simple thing. I am also thankful to have my spirits high. They are soemtimes lower than average but lately I have been feeling like I can create and build and be successful at it. I think that was triggered by that sales guffaw last friday.

Today we awoke and drove out to Bedford for Sarah's family thanksgiving lunch. I say lunch because the Carveys eat at about 2PM normally while the Housmans normally eat at about 6PM. This leaves ample time for two Thanksgiving experiences. The Carvey family was having some minor turmoils. Sarah's sister Christina was unhappy that her mother and her were both making creamed onions and that the meal would need to be early at about one o'clock. I am not sure if it was explained that the meal was moved for Sarah and me but it likely annoyed Christina that she would need to eat too early because we needed to leave early. So Christina and Nick boycotted Thanksgiving because it was starting at 1PM instead of the advertised and regular 2PM and because of the challenges with potential duplicate creamed onions. I had never had creamed onions before and although I was unable to sample two different dishes of it I am happy to report that I like them very much. I may have sweet dreams of creamy and cheesy onions tonight.

Sarah and I drove to Newton first to pick-up my car. During the ride we had a nice animated discussion about whether or not people who are slowly losing their minds or mildly insane needed to take psychiatric medication. The discussion was triggered because her grandmother believes that the Rhode Island mafia is out to steal her jewelry and using strange rays to put pain into her leg. My argument was that all drugs like SSRIs or anti-psychotics have side effects. Some are health related and others are just that people feel like crap, tired, and not themselves. Sarah thinks that regardless people should be on the drugs. We aren't exactly in a world free of people who are or could use mental health drugs. I used Jeremy as an example of someone who is pretty tired all the time and not terribly motivated to do much. We ran out of time before we could finish what could have been a six hour discussion.

As we pulled into the driveway at the Carveys WBCN had just started playing their Thanksgiving traditional noon-time Alices Restaurant. Sarah and I were in separate cars in order to facilitate separating if necessary due to Thanksgiving commitments and she was talking on her phone. So I listened to about ten minutes of the song with the radio blasting before she knocked for me to go in with her. The song was reaching a crucial point where Arlo is on the bench with the father rapers but I got out in the name of boyfriendly-familial duty and promptly upon going inside commandeered a boom-box radio from her father's study and tuned the radio near WBCN only to find that Alices Restaurant was still on the radio a few minutes back giving me a complete experience while munching on snacks and chopping into the Camenbert cheese.

We stopped downstairs to get a demo of the top-secret Puma project. That is Sarah's dad's project to build an assisted leg spring. In the basement were Sarah's dad, her brother Matthew, and Matthew's friend Ben. Ben was in the military because when I mentioned that the military should buy the Puma device he let me know that it takes six years for the military to buy anything. Whenever he referred to getting a new item he called the people who got them "we". He said that the military still uses cotton shirts in Iraq just like the ones in Vietnam instead of the new polypro shirts they sell at EMS because it will take them another six years to change the policy. He said it takes 6 years to change the socks they wear. Because of that he thought that it would be a long time before the US military would adopt Puma for soldiers.

We went upstairs to watch Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkahban. It was a cute movie although it was a bit confusing exactly what happened in the end. It wasn't as confusing as the scene at the end of Once Upon a Time in America when Max walks behind a garbage truck and disappears. I noticed during the Harry Potter that at the crucial scene when Harry is being freed from an unknown force from some hooded evil wraith-like things that what frees him is a deer's head that appears and then a bright light appears over the head of the deer. I thought it looked familiar and then realized that it was very similar symbols to the jaegermeister logo.

Sidenote:I went to the german jaegermeister web site but two deers started yelling at me in German and I needed to shut the window down quickly. It was very scary. The US site is much less scary.


I got a call from Newton while I was in Bedford from my dad. He wanted to warn me that Matthew, my cousin, was very excited to see Tuffy again. This held two problems. The first is that Tuffy died about three months ago. The second was that nobody wanted to tell Matthew about this and because death is a difficult topic they were going to leave it until later. So I was to stick with the party line about Tuffy. Tuffy isn't here because Karen is eating Thanksgiving dinner at someone else's house. Normally I would push hard to expose him to death sooner than later but other things were revealed to me that made me happy to stick to the party line. So if Matthew asks you about Tuffy... he is alive and well until further notice.

Bedford was a nice dinner and everyone was having a good time with the food. I started eating before everyone is served because I was raised to eat quickly before Falkoff got my food. But other than that minor incident all went well at the Carveys. I ate a half portion of dinner and a piece of apple pie for dessert to save room for dinner number two. I thought about eating the pumpkin pie but held off.

In Newton we arrived to find the dogs barking at us from inside the back of the Volvo station wagon. They were imprisoned there for the Thanksgiving feast. Everyone but Dave had arrived in Newton and were still cutting and cooking the food. Since we have two vegetarians in our family, Matthew and Lisa, they were working hard to make the classic Thanksgiving tofurky feast and green beans in garlic while my dad was pulling the turkey soaked stuffing out after having carved the 13 pounder.

After eating we all wanted to go watch Tenacious D which was a present from Lisa to dad on his birthday. It is a series of Jack Black sketches and songs from HBO. At first we were going to watch it upstairs but I couldn't get the audio to work fast enough and people were happier in the living room. Sarah had voiced her suspicion that Jack Black may not be suitable for a ten year old child but we figured it couldn't be that bad. As soon as the first sketch came on we found out within ten seconds how bad it could be. The first song was something like "fucker, fucking, you fuck it all, yeah, we rock". So everyone started trying to drown it out with noise of talking because the remote control for the volume didn't work. Matthew was rushed out of the living room and his father Paul and him went to play games a few rooms over while we played the video for another fifteen minutes or so. They could still hear the video and Matthew started to complain about all the curse words he was hearing so we figured it was time to stop.

For a while we told some stories in the foyer. Lisa was telling a story from grandma Louise about one day she came home from the train and was amazed to hear a conversation that went something like this.

Person a: "Hey Motherfucka!"
Person b: "Motherfucka"
Person a: "Fuckin a motherfucka"
Person b: "Fuck yeah motherfucka"
Person a: "Right motherfuckah.."

She also mentioned that grandma had told the following joke to her once. A family has a baby and the baby is born and says "Mother" as soon as it's born. The mother says. "I told you the baby is smart. It even knows half a word."

When that conversation got old we started talking about giant evil bunnies. That led to a little conversation on Donnie Darko and Harvey, two very different movies with six foot imaginary rabbits. They would make a good double feature.

We broke for dessert and once again we had apple pie and pumpkin pie. This time I opted for the pumpkin pie. Mom noticed that I had gotten a haircut. Dave asked if I got it from the Irish woman I had written about before so I told her that I got it at Great Cuts. Judy said that she finally could no longer cut Matthews hair himself because he had recently asked her to make it thinner and since this wasn't something she knew how to do she would pass the guilt on to the barbers at Great Cuts in Harvard Square. Lisa had called to ask if a local hair establishment was open and was told to come on over and that they would be expecting her only to arrive at an all african american hair stylist shop. She had gotten the haircut but both her and the proprieter hadn't expected what they discovered. My dad piped in that he has gotten his hair cut at Frank's barbershop in Belmont for the past 29 years.

Then we got to talking about dentists with good and bad experiences. Lisa had had an awful time with getting the mouth guard that is supposed to stop her from grinding her teeth at night. They first sent notice for her to pick it up by calling my mother and then they kept telling her to pick it up so she asked them to send it to her and then finally when my mother went in for an appointment they asked my mother why Lisa hadn't picked it up. They finally sent her two mouth guards instead of one and charged her for both. $700 total. It was one of the few things I have seen my sister has blown-up and been utterly angry with. Judy had gotten charged $1500 by Sprint because they changed her plan from ten cents a minute to two dollars a minute for International calls. Judy also had trouble with her dentist because he was a snob. He would say things like "What do you think about the MCAS?" and then follow-up with "I don't have to worry about it because my children go to private schools." She finally got some revenge upon him when he asked whether she celebrates chanukah or christmas. Her answer was that she is an Athiest so she didn't celebrate either.

You could tell that Matthew was ready to go because he started playing with the light switch dimming the light on and off about six times. It was like the dimmer before a play is about to start. He told Paul in no uncertain terms that he wanted to leave as soon as possible. So Judy's family left and then Lisa and Dave left to go to their second Thanksgiving desert with Dave's father and mother.

Dave's father is a psychiatrist and prescribes drugs to people who are a little crazy. Sarah and I watched Tenacious D with my parents and then went back home to Brookline.

I awoke this morning with Ami still in the apartment. We had talked about cooking breakfast with an elaborate plan to make eggs and have fresh bagels. So we ventured out into the world and stopped into Brueggers to get the frest bagels. We then proceeded to try to undercut the Brueggers highway robbery price on Lox by going down the street to Trader Joe's. Unfortunately for us Trader Joes isn't open until 9 am in the morning so we had to stand in front of the store waiting for it to open. It reminded me of when mothers used to wait in the morning when Cabbage Patch dolls would come into the toy stores so that they could rush the aisles to make sure their dearest could have a Cabbage Patch doll for Christmas. Instead of an overpriced semi-unique doll Ami and I just wanted lox and tomatoes.

So we successfully procured the food after the long wait but it was a warm morning and the time always passes quickly with Ami as we pass stories back and forth about things. We had an animated discussion about bringing bialis to Brookline. I had gotten Ami's interest in the Frozen Man festival mainly because we were talking about how everyone could stay warm in a giant igloo that we could all build together. He thought that Ilana could get behind such an idea because she loves winter even though she hates to get cold. Maybe I can get some of those San Francisco russians to make the pilgrimmage to Boston in order to help establish the first event. Malchik was mentioning that the russians at Burning Man were going to make a hot tub for late at night. Wouldn't it make more sense to make one in Boston?

I was glad to hear from Sasha Malchik with his comment on my post about Sasha Vladimirov's role in Burning Man. I generally am somewhat uninformed and sadly to be used as an accurate news source on events that I didn't attend is probably not a great idea.

So the day picked-up it's pace as I finished breakfast with Ami. We had gotten to talking for too long and I was trying to help my father's office asisstant to figure out how to stop my car alarm from going off at the office because I had asked my dad to bring the car in so that I could get to Burlington and back later in the day. So I was late leaving for the VMS meeting.

The VMS meeting was interesting and informative. I learned a new vocabulary word. Basically to remember how big companies act around small companies the general mode of operating is to show sudden high interest then stall. This can also be referred to as giving you the SHITS. It also seems to be generally how most men react to women.

They also went over a venture that includes a jacket that provides self-defense for women by shocking potential attackers with 80,000 volts. I volunteered for the mentoring team. I love a challenge although I don't know much about the self-defense industry.

I also went to the VMS lunch presentation which was a very interesting event. The presenter there had made a new kind of fiber optic cable that is hollow in the center and has a mirror on the inside instead of the normal silica center. The application of this is that they can transmit almost any wavelength since there is no material to absorb the light passing through the fiber. This happens to be useful with infrared light that is produced by lasers for surgery and with a fiber optic guide they can do minimally invasive surgeries. It looks like they are going to be very successful. Before the presentation I was chatting with folks around me and I felt that I could easily explain what ChannelWave does and why it is important with both the commerce product connected to distributors and the PRM product connecting to VARs. I was sitting across from a man who was employee number three at the Boston Beer company so we chatted about the beer market.

I had to rush out of the event to get to my meeting with Aaron Abend. It was in Burlington and I picked-up the car that my dad had dropped off. I had biked into MIT. I didn't have the directions so I kept trying silly things like using my Blackberry to link to the directions that Aaron had sent in an email and reading a map book in traffic to determine whether Burlington was North or South on 93. It is North. Why I don't know or remember this yet is beyond me.

Meeting with Aaron was a fun experience. We chatted a lot about old war stories as CRM entrepreneurs. He had known some people like Keith Barnette, a very agressive ex-IBM sales rep who started a sales outsourcing company called AIMM. He also was a former New England Patriot. Aaron has built over the past two years a product to help people to organize their email. The product is called ViaPoint and solves some problems I have always had with Outlook. The first problem is that I often need to retrieve email from someone from a certain company and Outlook doesn't sort that way. With the ViaPoint tool you get all of your emails and contacts related to a company automatically applied into virtual folders that you can look at and the time to pull them up is instant instead of reading through tons of emails to find the right person, file, or phone number. It makes the unstructured email much more easy to use as a business tool. I also liked that it was possible to see things within a company like people who were on a cc: list for an email sent to you. For example - One email appeared under ChannelWave that was actually because Irene Howard, a ChannelWave employee had also been cc'd:. I'd recommend people download it and send their comments back to Aaron and his partners. They have worked quite hard to build a useful product and just launched it last month.

The objective of the meeting was to see how they might add a person like me to their team since they are looking to really drive adoption of the software and build the market around it. I thought it would be a welcome relief from the deep marketing of enterprise software with eight month sales cycles but you find different problems in every market. We did get plenty of chuckles just talking about the past.

I drove back to MIT to drop the car off for my dad so that he could get home and then I biked home. Because I had cooked eggs with Ami in the morning I had a Sudden Interest in cooking so I decided to make meatloaf. Jeremy actually did most of the work to make the meatloaf while I did the shopping to get the ingredients and focused my energy on cooking the bacon to put on top of it and making the mashed potatoes. The best feature of the meal was that we put a lot of garlic, onions, and fresh grated parmesan cheese. Yum.

We ate while watching the epic movie "An American Tale". Actually that is a cartoon about mice. We really were watching a movie called "Once Upon a Time in America". It is on 2 DVDs where the first one is 120 minutes and the second one is 104 minutes. It is about jewish mafia folks in the thirties. I am liking it although we have only just gotten to the intermission at about 150 minutes into the movie. Almost every movie with Deniro in it is very good though!

One highlight includes a beautiful girl who a young Robert D. child falls in love with who flashes him a glimpse of her naked backside while he is peeping at her from a hole in a bathroom wall. The settings are really great like a prohibition pub all styled in Art Deco with radiators that server alcoholic drinks. A young girl who is quite loose and chubby and eventually runs the brothel tells the boys that she will have sex with him if they bring her a charlotte rousse. I am not sure what it is but it looks like a Strawberry shortcake with a cherry on top. What is interesting is that the Charlotte Rouse isn't an unfamiliar word to me because my grandmother Louise who lived in the lower east side during that same time frame used to work in her father's candy shop as a young girl. Her job was to put the cherry on top of the charlotte rousse. I could see her being the slightly wild young girl with hopes and dreams of moving out of the New York jewish quarter. So the movie had some added significance. It clearly is near the Grand Street apartment where my father grew-up and I lived in when I worked at NYU.

We stopped the movie at intermission so that I could get my review from Sharon for my Improv class. I had been assigned the 11PM slot because I was unable to respond during the email flurry for sign-ups as I was driving to Burlington and reading a map. One less task and I might have pulled it off. I biked over and almost hit a stream of drunk young women as they were streaming out of a party bus into a bar in Central square. One of the friends told me not to hit the tiara clad girl I nearly rammed with my bike because it was her 21st birthday. I thought about making a special stop for the party bus full of 21 year old attractive women but decided instead to continue on to my review.

The review was fun. I had a nice good long chat with Sharon. I don't get the electronic copy until later but I will have it soon enough. A real improv report card!

So I have shown sudden high interest in cooking, improv, vms, jewish foods from the 30s, viapoint, party busses full of 21 year old women, blogging, and Sarah. Now with so much going on it is time to stall.

View more pictures...

I don't consider myself especially Patriotic. I definitely am an athiest. Tonight I have proven how anti-social I can be. I lost the rest of my crew who all either wanted to watch the second half of the Patriots game at home, needed sleep, or didn't like football in the first place.

This left me alone with the locals at the Corrib pub. I don't know them but I recognize them from when I watched a big Sox game here a few months back. There is the guy with the glasses who serves me beer from Breuggers and the man who was doing his laundry last time. The woman who knew everyone from the bar is still here. She keeps trying to convince “Mr. Nelson” to come sit up at the bar. She broke into singing the national anthem before the game because her friend was too busy drinking to hear it on the television. She broke into a beautiful rendition of God Bless America as Sarah and Ami were walking out the door.

I like it here. There is a little community dynamic going on that I can watch from my seat. Luckily the Pats are doing well which helps the mood here at Corrib. Things are already decorated in an elaborate fall Thanksgiving display. I have to wonder what happened on the Corrib Pub group trip to Foxwoods advertised the last time I was here. I should ask about it but I prefer to wait and see if it appears in people's conversations. I keep expecting things to evolve into a Spider Robinson novel like the Callahan chronicles with aliens everywhere coming to town with their puns and problems and throwing glasses into the fireplace.

People are all chatting about what they are doing for Thanksgiving. They all appear to be mildly lonesome. They may have given-up on most of the human race except for the people here in this bar. They are divorcees and single aging men. Where else are they supposed to go.

The reason why I am here is simple. I'd rather pay for beer during the game than pay the cable company. The only thing I want to watch on television is football and with eight away games it just isn't worth the money.

The bartenders name is Dave. He has a hunched back and wears a white oxford over a black T-shirt. He has a goatee beard that is black on the sides with a grey stripe down the middle. Some man named Wayne walked into the bar to introduce his floppy eared grey bunny rabbit named Lilly to the woman who sang God Bless America. Lilly the bunny is being held and cuddled by a firty five year old single woman. The man next to her asks “is that for supper”. The woman says to the bunny “you are the cutest thing in this bar - no offense.”

We take some pictures and then Wayne talks to the woman holding the bunny to let the bunny walk on the floor. “I like her a. Because she is a non-male, and b. Doesn't bitch complain. you used to own a rabbit. She is mine now. Do you have papers. Do you want a kiss” “She likes kisses” “Are you coming over for breakfast? You have never seen a face that cute.” “She knows who is the boss!” “I'm the boss”.

Mike walks in and he gets called over to the bar with the bar where the bunny is. Mike can't believe there is a bunny in the bar.

Lilly is being brought over to Dawn. Dawn is an older woman who has a red jacket on with a pin in the shape of a martini on her jacket. She doesn't relate well to the bunny and is talking about god being a woman and looking over her.

“I had her on ebay and they offered me ten grand and that was for Thanksgiving.”

“You can visit. Send a post card now and then. I'll read it to her. I think he is delusional he thinks she is his.”

The Pats have the ball on the 24 and it is second and six with 2:45 to go. I got excited and yelled out “put the nail into the coffin” as the tv faded into a commercial because the Chiefs called a timeout to stop the clock.

You wouldn't notice it if you weren't looking but glasses and empty bottles disappear from the counter tops. Dave the bartender holds them up in the air and inspects them before tossing them into the dish area or the garbage. He holds them up to the light to make sure they are empty first and then moves them over to their end.

“A wabbit. A wabbit.”
“Do I watch cartoons. I watch cartoons every day of my life.”
“I know what you mean.”
“It's duck season. It's wabbit season. It's duck season. It's wabbit season”

We sack the KC qb to make it fourth down and the Pats win again. God bless america.

In a completely unexpected move the java professor actually attacked his accuser. While the reasons for baiting his most vocal critic are unknown but here is what happened.

As the professor went over some advanced material the critic noticed the material wasn't in the handout so he asked the professor “is this going to be on the final exam?”

The professor was talking about the topics he wasn't covering in this course and that the gui applets would be covered in the advanced course. Then he turned to his critic and said “you would probably fail that course. You will probably fail this course and need to take it again.”

Later in the class the professor finished with a fortune cookie program that selected random quotes from a text file. The last quote was “now is the time to make new friends.”

In java class tonight again.

The revolt appears to be driven from a small contingency. You can tell who they are because after the professor prompts the class for a question about what he just went over in the java.io package they ask questions like “is it customary to not have a TA in a MET course.?” And “will the final be the same structure as the mid-term?”

I found myself nodding off as the professor first did a sweeping high level review of the first half of the class that contained no new information. The main information that perked-up my ears was that one time and location for the make-up exam required promptness at 6pm because the room is taken over by a sorority. So that launched me into a wonderful fantasy of a sorority full of beautiful young women surrounding me as I polish off a perfect exam and am then surrounded by them as they go through a strange and sexual initiation ritual that requires only one man where I was selected out of convenience and eagerness to participate.

Then I awoke to find the lecture stopping for a break after having gone over filtering a list of files from a directory. Now he is showing how you need three streams to read data sometimes. Don't cross the streams. Althougk I now have a Starbucks frappuchino from the drink machine downstairs I still am lost and far away.

Now I am thinking back to lunch and the phantom Catholic school girl. I walked past her as I was running down to meet someone for a top secret birthday present project. This woman was standing alone on the third floor of One Kendall in front of the Abcam office and was dressed in knee high stockings, a plaid mini-skirt, and a white shirt open at the top. She was talking on her cell phone and I nearly fell over as I passed her trying to figure out how to move both towards my destination and still spin and stare at her. I rushed back to the third floor after running my errand hoping she would still be there. But she wasn't and when I went to lunch with Robert I kept looking everywhere in Kendall for her. Maybe I imagined her?

As I was showering while prepping to go to my Java class after working out I realized that one major barrier I will have in becoming a Chippendale's dancer is that I would need to shave my chest. But I would like a job like that at some point.

I was poking around on eVite to try to figure out how to invite a bunch of friends to Sarah's birthday party this weekend and to figure out if VMS would be better off using it than having to go through the constant back and forth that we normally do to co-ordinate mentor meetings and deal with RSVPs. It seems like something that should have been automated and free by now to have a co-ordinator bot deal with all people's idiosyncrasies until a meeting time has been established. But anyways...

We are planning on going out to the North End for dinner, then an improv show, then go out dancing. While I was on the site I noticed that eVite has added a bunch of new social networking features that surprised me but I think they are pretty cool. The first thing I noticed was that there were a bunch of people's pictures under the heading "People to See". I didn't know who they were but after taking a closer look and updating my information quickly I found that it shows me all the people who were on guest lists for events that I was invited to.

I found old high school friends through a superbowl party in San Francisco that I never went to, improv people from a get together at Sally's house, old frat brothers who I used to wrestle with that were on bachelor party and wedding invitations, and people I met once at a friend's going away party. I am not really that often invited to these sorts of events so I only have about 358 people on my list but I could imagine someone who was a little more active would have thousands of people that they could dig-up through this thing.

It has a big wow factor to see all these people suddenly in front of me given that I hadn't thought that they had been left behind or the data had been trash compacted a long time ago. But I can go and find a woman I met at a party that I had a great time with three years ago that I wanted to know. It is a little scary but also represents continued evolution of how we will use and continue to use technology to network and build communities.

I had been thinking a lot about communities because Ami came over last night. He was talking about how the Russian community in San Francisco is very active with great events being held almost every night that they can't help but go to. Ami and Ilana are busy as bees humming around from one party, rave, burning man, or parade to the next. He went to some web sites of friends in the community who had posted their pictures for months with Ami and Ilana appearing in and out of pictures. Their pictures of Burning Man from last year and this year were especially interesting. It looks like a really amazing event and is an experiment in temporary community. Sasha Vladimirov this year created a new god and mantra with giant ears that was finally a god that listens rather than talks to you and I could see him at Burning Man with his big brown furry ears on. I also realized how much preparation work people put into Burning Man and how tricky it will be for Robert and I to pull off even a mild pilot of an East Coast Burning Man through Frozen Man 2005. But we will try anyways because that is what we do.

So I realized while I was talking to Ami how anti-social I really am and how I have chosen to live excludes communities. I think my general phobias and neuroses about being in crowded rooms with strangers keeps me from being in a community. I am a bit of a loner who doesn't even feel really comfortable using IM or the telephone. It may also be that I prefer to be alone and to have peace from being alone with a small number of people who are the same every day. I am not sure what it is but I don't plan much on this front. I surf my way into my social relationships and when I go to invite "all my friends in Boston" to something the list can be counted on one hand. There are 235 people on that evite list? Maybe I do know more people?

Jorey and I had been talking about social networking while we were going over entrepreneurial ideas. He is now an unemployed entrepreneur and is doing some work for a friend of his who created a social networking product that goes on top of a content management system that allows people to find experts in the system. He sold a copy to Cisco. It could be promising.

I posted a link on halfbakery about antisocial networking. Someone who viewed it found a link to someone who has done an incredible job making a funny spoof site of friendster called nemister. I can't recommend it or the overall world of the author enough. It is simply hilarious. He has also created his own fake country and a number of other things.

On Sunday I got another invitation through the social networking ether. An entrepreneur who knew Ron Schmelzer with the following message...

"I believe we may have spoken somewhere along the way. I met Ron Schmelzer when he was starting Channelwave. In any case, I have started a new company and we just launched our first product. I may be looking for a marketing person to join our team and I saw you on linked in. We are linked through Lee Leavitt but noticed you were open to direct contact. If you are interested in exploring let me know."

If it proves to be something of real value to both me and him it will be the first time that I have found real value from Linked-in to find a connection that matters to me in business. I have followed-up. More to come.

I also found this amusing at the bottom of the evite site: "Users of alcohol-endorsed Evite designs must be of legal drinking age." Apparently using acohol-endorsed designs by minors is illegal. It makes sense but it looks funny when you really see it.

I got fed-up with Verizon billing me $40 per month every month for DSL and sending me offers for faster service at $29.95 per month every month so I send them an email a week back asking them whether I could be switched to the lower cost faster DSL and why they didn't just do this for me automatically. But they were nice and allowed me to do the whole transaction via email. They even sent a wireless router that Jeremy recommends doing nothing with since the doubling in download speed and tripling in upload speed shouldn't have anything to do with the modem. Then I was wondering how I would know if they sped-up the connection or not or if I needed to install the new router or just ignore it. Jeremy recommended testing my connection speed at DSL Reports.com. So I tested it and it was slow as before. It's a fun little test and for a geeky person has a bit of humor in it when it tells you about the DSL speed so that if you have a slow speed near old modem speeds the definition of that speed is "Ugghh".

Here was my exchange with Verizon...

"Before we change your account to reflect a new price, we must explain something to you. Right now your account is on a plan, which includes an additional 150 hours of Dial Up service every month. If your account is changed over, you will loose the Dial Up service that you currently have on your account.

Receiving a price change will also have an impact on your DSL speed. Should you choose the Annual Commitment plan (for $29.95 per month), your new DSL speed would be 1.5Mbps/384Kbps (rather than your current 768Kbps/128Kbps). "

I have never used one minute of dial-up and wouldn't because it comes in at ugghh speed. So if you were an early adopter of DSL through Verizon I'd recommend asking them for a new and better plan.

I had a real frustrating day yesterday at work. The problem was that I had been working with a sales rep and a partner to sell a deal for about a month. When the deal finally came close to closing and the customer was ready to buy our management decided not to do it. It was a little more complex than that with the VP of Sales and the sales rep not having communicated effectively whether the rep had the OK to go after it or not. But this left me feeling completely responsible for wasting a lot of people's time and looking very unprofessional. It also really burned my entrepreneurial approach to selling because this was to be a new way of selling and it clearly was caught in all the red tape that tends to tie innovation in knots.

But it has a silver lining or two. The first one is that I have rarely if ever been in a situation where it was my company that pulled the rug out from under a deal. Usually it is a customer who does that to us while we are working diligently to cater to their every need. It was a bit vindicating to be on the other side of the transaction. But there isn't much more demotivating to sell something and have people pull back the sale.

So last night I was thinking hard about my life and what to do next. I started thinking that it is time to really spend more time on my new ventures. Having met with Jorey I got the vote of confidence that I was a good "Mogul". This is either a big pile of snow that causes you to tear your ACL or a person who goes very deep into subjects and can really build something around. So I am going to go after one venture right now because I am doing enough writing these days to make me feel like it would be an interesting place to put some energy. That one is the hypercrit project. I'll do what it takes to bring it forwards. In the middle of the night last night I was thinking that it could be quite successful and make lots of money if done in a commercially smart manner. So I will give it a try. If it fails... at least I was working towards building something.

I went to bed quite cross last night because of the whole sales deal thing. That led me to get into a fight with Sarah about some things that are causing trouble in our relationship. I am not sure how well I expressed what I thought but I think it was good to communicate even when the communication isn't all positive. It's healthy although a little uncomfortable to have your girlfriend swimming in a pool of her own tears on your belly every once in a while. I think the key thing that made her cry was that I told her that I feel sometimes when she is acting very bitchy about something irrelevant like traffic or clutter that I am afraid she will make me miserable in the long term over these sorts of things.

Then when I woke-up and was getting ready for the day the pug dog puked on the bed. I put the down pillow in the washing machine. I figured that if the pillow got ruined that wouldn't be a big deal. Well... actually I learned instead that the problem isn't ruining the down pillow.

I went out with Leelin and walked him to do his business. On my way in the delivery man was delivering a DSL modem for my new upgraded service. He was excited to see me as I entered because it happened to be me who the package was for. To him this implied that I had ESP so he was inquiring what I would recommend as lottery numbers for the evening. When I got back into the apartment I put the DSL modem on top of the washing machine.

So the risk of putting a down pillow in the washing machine isn't that the down pillow will get ruined. The risk is breaking the washing machine and anything on top of it. As I started to do some work I heard what sounded like a thousand marching feet or an airplane engine approaching the apartment and the floor started to shake. When I got up to investigate the situation the washing machine was bouncing up and down on the floor and shaking more and more with each cycle. I ventured near it and opened the lid to turn it off. The problem was that the down pillow absorbed so much water that it created a huge imbalanced centrifuge when the washer started to spin down. I am not sure what exactly stopped the washing machine. I think it has some tilt-guard but it may have just broken. I won't know for a few days. My advice for anyone whose dog has puked on their down pillow in the morning is to avoid putting the pillow in the washing machine.

While I was fixing the washing machine situation I found the pug dog eating the cat's poop. The cat seems interested in baiting the dog to chase her out of boredom. He is very cute even when he is sick.

Lately I have noticed a trend around Boston for organizations to turn kids games into adult sporting activities. The first that I heard of something like this was when I was reading Sports Illustrated before the summer Olympics and learned that tag was being lobbied for as an Olympic sport. When I went to the gym on Monday they were advertising a dodgeball tournament with 5 on 5 teams. For a social commentary on dodgeball please refer to South Park: Season 2: Disc 1, 1998. The South Park team goes to play in the big tournament. Lots of limbs are lost and Kenny is killed by a dodgeball. The Terence and Phillip only episode at the beginning of the disc is terrible. Skip it.

On Tuesday I noticed a sign at Bukowski's promoting a competitive four-square league. Four square is the game where you rise through the ranks to become the master in the commanding square and create rules that make it impossible to depose you. It is great training for becoming a dictator and teaches all children that power corrupts such that whoever is in power will change the rules to suit their own need for continued power and to favor them socially, culturally, and economically. This is the basic idea behind concepts like redistricting in Texas when the Republicans are in power so that the Democrats can't gain power by splitting the votes across districts in an unfavorable way. We also learned this useful tidbit through George Orwell's Animal Farm.

Based on this limited understanding of the world and fearing right wing conservatives who want to shove their religion down my liberal secular humanist atheist throat I didn't vote for Bush and will move to Canada, New Zealand or some other safe place if I see signs that say things like "All animals are created equal... but some animals are created more equal than others." or "Four legs good. Two legs better."

Anyways. I do have some fond memories of being a child and playing newcomb, volleyball when you catch the ball, tetherball, and kickball. My favorite game was a game we played in Newton called "Kill the kid with the ball". Basically whoever had the ball had to run away from everyone else until someone caught them and knocked them around until the ball came loose. Once the ball was loose another kid would grab the ball and everyone would chase them. It was the closest I ever got to being a rock star. Maybe I'll create a league soon "Kill the adult with the ball". Or maybe they could just go with "Kill the adult with the oil".

I went to dinner with Jorey tonight. He relayed an interesting story of corporate madness. One of his friends went to work at Kimberly Clark. They have a strict set of HR policies that defines the entitlements of each worker based upon their seniority and contribution level within the organization. The entitlement system covers things like whether you have an office, a cubicle, the size of the cubicle, and whether you are at a window or not. Apparently his friend was given a cubicle by a window but did not have proper credentials to permit him to have the priveledge of a window seat. The solution to this that the HR department created was to cover the window so that he couldn't see outside through it.

So finally the robots at Yahoo! decided to give me the option that they should have given me on day#1, to send me to a real person. I got this email back to my last request to talk to a person. What was most impressive was that it was still from Gwen, who recieved my last email so maybe she isn't a robot.


Hello,
Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.
Please call us at: 408-349-5151 (option 5)

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Regards,
Gwen
Yahoo! Customer Care
For assistance with all Yahoo! services please visit:
http://help.yahoo.com/

So I called the number listed on the email. The phone number passed me to an option tree even after I entered the option 5 and I entered 3 which specified "other". A woman answered the phone named Destiny.

"Hello this is Destiny"

I wanted to make sure that I got her name correct since Destiny is a bit of an odd name so I asked her to repeat it. She was asking why I was calling about Wallet and I informed her that I was having trouble paying Yahoo! and I just wanted them to take my credit card so that I could pay for LaunchCast Plus service and make the advertisements go away. She then asked if I could provide some personal information to verify that it was really me.

She needed to verify the following information:
What is the alternative email that you have on file?
What is your zip code?
What's your pet's name?

I figured that this might be my former puppy named Bijoux but apparently it wasn't correct. So she asked me the final confirming question "What is your birth date?". I knew that one so I was in! The she said:

"OK. We can now continue. At this moment I don't think I can help you. I need to transfer you to technical support person. It may take a few minutes before they appear. "

After about 45 seconds Destiny returns and informs me: "Apparently I can help you without connecting you to customer service. Is the information that you are entering the exact same information as your billing address?"

I then explained that this couldn't be the problem since I am entering the right information that works on lots of other sites. She put me on hold again and talked to the technical support people. Then she told me to close all of the browsers on my computer. Then she instructed me to go to my computer's control panel and to delete all of my cookies and all of my temporary Internet files. I did both but the temporary Internet files were taking more than five minutes to delete so we chatted a bit about how her father had this problem and it took fifteen minutes to delete the temporary files. I had a call coming in on the other line so I took her offer to leave the call and resolve it later.

After the call was done the hourglass had changed into a pointer again so I went to Yahoo! to enter my credit card. This time I went straight to Wallet since I didn't trust the Launch tools. On the first try it worked. I am now listening to Bob Dylan commercial free.

So I am sending the following email back to the Yahoo! folks.

"Destiny, Gwen, David, Caitlin, and Sydney

Thanks for your help. I spoke with Destiny today and she walked me through a process to delete my cache and it finally worked for me to add my credit card. I consider this case closed.

Have a great day.

- Dan Housman"

Good news. I got an 89 on my Java mid-term. This was great because many people actually got less than a 50 and failed. The professor is amidst a secret underground revolt from a class full of adult ed students. They filed the following complaint email and sent it to the whole class this evening even though the professor offered to allow anyone in the class to take a second test where he would take the better of the two scores. I might even take it. I could get a 90 or better!


I know this doesn't apply to everyone in the class so I don't expect everyone to go ahead with this request.

As many of you know more than half of the class failed the mid-term and I know that many of us are frustrated with Rom.

I spoke with my advisor Julia Goldberg today and she said the only way that we can get anything accomplished is if we email Dr. Zlateva.

Dr. Zlateva is the head of the department and is going to deal with our situation only if enough people write to her and complain about the situation.

Her email address is zlateva@bu.edu
I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't see half the students complaining outside of class on Monday.

Hopefully we can get this situation straightened out.

I am sitting after Improv practice in front of the East Coast Grill and behind me a homeless person is talking to the alternative looking woman leaning on the other side of the pillar I am sitting against. He wants to know what they serve at the East Coast grill so the alternative girl who is likely just taking in a cigarette in between drinks answers him that they probably serve take-out and beer. The homeless guy tells her that he always knows where ever they serve beer with a twangy smile. Then he tells the girl that he can never figure out when to shave his heard. She tells him to shave it just before the Red Sox season starts and not again until after the season ends. He seems to feel he is wearing out his welcome so he turns to go.

I took a ride to the Improv class today. I met Melissa coincidentally as she was leaving the T and she was going to meet Hillary at Carberrys. Hillary drives her to the class from there. What is funny about this is that Carberrys is about a five minute walk from the ImprovBoston headquarters and the nearest parking space isn't any closer.

But I am always happy to have company and observe people so I got a coffee and a chocolate croissant and pulled a third chair up to a table for two. Hillary was debating what to do with her credit card. Apparently her spending on her wedding far.exceeds her cashflow so she feels like she is swimming in credit card debt. The solution to this according to her friend who is a credit debt counselor is to take her credit card and place it into a tupperware container filled with water and the place it into the freezer.

While I was waiting a tall man with dreadlocks walked over to talk to me. He was wearing a shirt that said EMC Cambridge and ranting about how his boss is also his best friend and they were out drinking and his boss wasn't handling being both very well. He thought that it would be better for him to leave his friend-boss at Bukowskis and go spend the time with his attractive Irish girlfriend. Apparently he had been having trouble lately because he grew a beard but he couldn't explain what it was. As a fellow bearded man I wanted to understand the problem.

He then asked where I was from and when I told him I was from Brookline he told me that to speak honestly that I looked like an angry Jew. Then he told me that you need support from the IBM corporation to commit genocide on 20 million jews or to enslave 6 million people.

As he began to tell me about the problem that the whole country has bought into a system that if you have a certain skin color you are right or wrong and chastizing me that I should know at least two muslims well as an American I got the cal from Sarah that she had arrived. When I got up to go he told me that I should be more responsible in who I vote for. I told him I didn't vote for Bush and walked away.

Sarah and I argued about my need for her to reduce her late night traffic rage. I disapproved highly of her statement while in traffic to get out of the parking lot at Foxboro “someone better be dead!” When I got to the door with Leelin Waichi was out front. She thought it was great that I have a girlfriend who is so understanding about my relationships with my ex-girlfriends. I rolled my eyes but it was dark so she couldn't see.

View more pictures...

The Patriots game on Sunday was quite a treat. The main benefit of an 8:30 game is that no matter how incompetent a tailgating crew you have the game is so late that you have time to recover frm your failures. Many of our tailgating and Pats home game watching crew believe that this was our most successful tailgating experience yet.

Among the major highlights was that we tailgated with Alan and this time he had time to prepare his own food and drink. He brought some hamburgers that had been mixed with onions and tasted great. He also brought an ample supply of beer as did I. Plus we also brought lots of wine for Sarah and Hattie. We arrived at the parking lot a good 2 and a half hours early and the grill was up and running in less than ten minutes. Hattie even brought banana bread and rice krispy treats.

The only real challenge that we had as a group is that one of us had a newborn baby about three weeks ago and she had brought her breast pump. She had never tested how it would work without being directly powered. So when we put batteries into it she had expected it to run. Unfortunately the batteries did nothing and she had no working breast pump. Team tailgate had plenty of people with basic mechanical sense so we had a team of people all trying to fix a breast pump in the dark while hammered on beer, wine, and full on hamburgers, sausages, chips, and gaucamole.

As usual at home the Pats delivered a devastating loss to the Bills. Troy Brown even intercepted Drew Bledsoe making it the first time he had caught a pass by Bledsoe since Bledsoe left that Pats for the Bills.

I recieved a new response from the folks at Yahoo! today. This time it was signed "Gwen". This robot believes that the problem is that I had not cleared my cache. Although I repeatedly told them that I used multiple computers to try to submit my credit card they still believe I am some bumpkin who can't figure out how to use a browser. The message below is the one that I received from "Gwen" although I cut out the instructions for clearing your cache on browsers other than IE5.

People have told me that it is odd that I would continue to persist to attempt to pay Yahoo! while being consistently responded to by what appears to be an automated system that has little capacity or interest in resolving what is likely a real bug in their database or credit card processing system. The reason why I am continuing is not what most people would say - "It's the principle". No I am continuing because I see it as a fun sport. I am enjoying watching them flail and they are providing ample challenge to me to do something that should be simple but has proven extremely difficult.

Hello,
Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.
It is necessary at times to clear your browser's cache. The "cache" is the memory your browser uses to store content of the web pages that you visit. Storing that content lets your browser load those same pages more quickly the next time you visit them.
Error messages such as "Document Contains No Data" can be caused by the length of time it takes for your machine to reach our server, or your browser may be caching an older version of that page. Try clicking reload/refresh on your browser window and/or deleting your cache.
When you need to clear your cache, follow the instructions below for your browser and version.

How to delete your cache in Explorer:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 and higher:
1. Click on "Tools" in the menu bar at the top of your browser.
2. Select Internet Options.
3. Under the "Temporary Internet Files" box, click on the Delete Files button.
4. Click OK.
5. Click on the "Settings.." button.
6. Under the section "Check for newer versions of stored pages" select "Every visit to the page." 7. Click OK.
8. Click OK.
9. Refresh/Reload your browser.

Other:
If you are running a browser other than those listed above, and would like more information on how to clear your browser's cache, please refer to your browser's help file.
Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.
Regards,
Gwen
Yahoo! Customer Care For assistance with all Yahoo! services please visit: http://help.yahoo.com/

So I tried there cache clearing technique and then closed all my browsers. For a moment I actually thought that it might make sense given the nature of things being stuck and cacheing is a good way to get things stuck. But when I returned to the page it still did not operate properly.

I replied with this message back to Gwen.

Dear Gwen,

Thank you for your email. It is good to see there are so many people at Yahoo! working on this problem. I have already recieved emails now from your colleagues David, Caitlin, and Sydney. Unfortunately none of their emails have been able to resolve the problem.

On your suggestion I deleted my cache and set my browser to refresh on each request. The browser is IE6. Unfortunately the problem on the credit card payment form continues to persist where it refreshes and does not continue when I select the "continue" button even though it does not raise any errors. Because of this I still cannot pay Yahoo! the $29 for upgrading to LaunchCast Plus or pay for any Yahoo! services as this is the central area in Yahoo! for managing payments.

Perhaps my inquiry should or could be escalated to someone who could talk to me on the phone. They could reach me on my cell phone at 617-216-9921 at any time EST from 8am to 11PM or send me an email to schedule a time to have a call to walk through this problem.

Thank you again Gwen for trying to help.

- Dan

I spent some of today poking around looking at whether it would be possible to become more involved in bioinformatics. I figure that I know a lot of biology and a bunch about software so why not look at bioinformatics. I also was interested because I know that BU has a program in a convenient location.

One site was saying that it is the new rocket science field. The due date for trying to enroll for next fall in 2005 is to apply by December 15th. That could be too soon to apply but maybe it isn't? Part of why I looked at the program was because I looked at hotjobs and I saw a pretty cool looking job at MGH as a program manager but they were looking for ten years of experience or a PHD.

I am not sure I am ready for six years of education but it isn't a bad thing to do if nothing else is blowing me away as super interesting to spend my time on.

View more pictures...

Sarah's friend Dave Berry, not Dave Barry, was having a wine and cheese party in Brookline about two blocks from my apartment. We went there with a bottle of wine in hand at about 7:30 and were the first people to arrive. I was immediately excited because the woman, Dave Berry's girlfriend Susan lives in the 50 Longwood complex that has an outdoor swimming pool that I have been dying to swim in for years.So at the wine and cheese every time I interacted with Susan I was talking to her boyfriend Dave about making pornography.

The reason for this is that Jeremy just returned from a trip to New York to visit Diamonds International. Jeremy generally doesn't do anything for them and instead spends his time at home watching DVDs at an alarming rate. When he arrived at the New York office his boss finally realized that Jeremy is actually still on the payroll. The initial plan was to start paying him for only the one hour per week he often works. Because of this Jeremy now is making half of the salary he was making before. The only job that I could think of that Jeremy had shown interest in other than as a DVD critic was to become a producer of high definition pornography. He ad even advertised on craig's list and gotten a decent response from potential actresses.So here I was at a wine and cheese party surrounded mostly by strangers and every time I bump into Susan, my one chance at summer bliss in Brookline at a local pool, I am talking about the making of porn movies.

Luckily I had a pre-planned exit for going to dinner with Sarah's sister and brother-in-law who were at the Cheesecake Factory waiting out a seventy minute pager to eat dinner with us. So I got into a long conversation with a Brazilian man named Fabio who was very interested in clinical trials and was from Brazil with the knowledge that I could soon escape to dinner. But Sarah kept coming back to me with five minute delays that I would have liked to time on an egg timer.We finally left the party when Sarah received a call from her angry sister that her sister's buzzer at the Cheesecake factory had gone off. So we rushed out of the party and walked back to my condo. On the way I called Jeremy to make sure that the dog hadn't eaten the cat and that the cat hadn't eaten the dog. He informed me that both the dog and cat were safe but that the dog had pooped on the floor. When I asked him why he hadn't picked up the dog poop he said that he was waiting for it to harden.

So I ran quickly upstairs and said hello to a pug dog who was very happy to see me. I then grabbed some paper towels and picked-up some moist new pug-poo and tossed it into the garbage and then rushed back to the car where Sarah was waiting for me out front.On the way to the Atrium mall Sarah called her sister who said she was annoyed that we were late and then got cut off. When we arrived at the Cheesecake factory we couldn't find her sister or her sister's husband. When we called them they told her they had waited too long and had gone home. So we drove back to Brookline and Sarah took him for a walk as she pondered the long term feud this would cause in her family. I think once this terd of a family squabble cools off it will be like a hardened pug dog poo that can easily be disposed of. As for Fabio, he had two Brazilian women hanging on his arms. I don't worry much about him.

View more pictures...


When snow has just fallen like it has today you can walk in the woods of Dover and find plenty of undisturbed snow. We took Leelin with us for a walk. I love to be the first person to kick and play in fresh snow. It is exciting to defile the virgin white beneath me.

At the end of the walk I lay in an open area after diving as far from tracks as I could jump. Leelin liked that I was low to the ground and at his level. He probably also wanted to get even with me for throwing snowballs at him as we walked, a couple of them actually hit him. So Leelin ran all around and on top of me as I lay letting the snow melt into my blue jeans. Sarah wanted to get a better look to film the event so she sat on top of me.

When we got up we decided it was time to return home. After twenty minutes while we were walking back to the car Sarah's phone rang. When I checked my phone it was missing. I decided it had to have fallen out of its holster at the top of the hill. So we trudged back with the tired pug dog wandering listlessly behind our heels. Finally in the center of my snow angel was a wet icy Blackberry phone showing the orange cingular logo on the front.

Ami is going to be a physics professor soon. We were chatting and apparently he needs to make physics more appealing to inner city kids so we were thinking that it could be great to have a physics text book for gangsters.

It could cover important topics like the physics of a drive-by shooting specifically handling corrections required to deal with the momentum of the moving car. Other subjects would include the physics of jumping onto moving subway trains to avoid the police, the force required to propel yourself over prison walls, battery power required to play a boom box at a specified volume for a prolonged period, the electricity and magnetism of hot wiring a car, and planning spray paint quantities to make large scale graffiti art or to mark a territory with scribbles.

So I got another email from Yahoo! support. This time it was from a robot named Sydney who gave me the helpful comment to try again and let them know what happens if it doesn't work. I wonder if they calculated that if someone needs to report the same problem over three times they eventually give up and stop trying to complain by going to a different service. I can just imagine the meeting.

VP Service: "We are getting too many customer support calls and emails are flooding us because our service doesn't work and we can't process credit cards when people try to pay us!"
VP of Technology: "We can't figure out how to process credit cards but we can buy some software from Kana to create robots that automatically respond to inquiries and complaints and also we can get this company Inquira to trick them into entering requests that search a database of useless information. That way if they try too often to contact your department they will get frustrated and give-up!"
VP Service: "Awesome solution. My department has a budget to hire SatMetrix to send emails to measure customer satisfaction too just to make sure they are annoyed and not continuing to try to tell us that our service doesn't work."
VP of Technology: "Great, now let's go out and yell Yahoo! a lot and solve the rest of the worlds problems"

So here was