We've been watching a movie a night over the past few nights. Tonight we watched Crumb. It was a low budget documentary about Robert Crumb. It is a good companion piece to American Splendor but since it is all real documentary it doesn't have the same feel to it. The one thing I was struck by was that there must have been something strange in the water near the Crumb family when those kids were growing-up. Everyone in the family was like a savant with art. They are socially misfit but have incredible talents. I left the movie wishing I had trained to be a comic book artist and had a great time listening to the interviews with people like the creator of Big Butt magazine who is a tall muscular woman who used to date Crumb.

We watched Stander last night. It was recommended because I was told I looked like the second actor, not the main one who looked like Starsky. I didn't see the doppelganger effect in any of the characters. The movie got long after a while but it was interesting to see South Africa in the seventies and try to understand the motivation of a bank robber who used to be a police officer who got fed-up with the system after being commanded to fire guns into a protest and then shoot an unarmed black protester. I also was listening to a writer on NPR from South Africa and she was defending the country despite everyone's criticism about how messy it is trying to reach social standards and stabilization in her country. Her point was that they have really only had ten years to achieve a more equal society and countries like the US have had a few hundred years and we still have plenty of unsolved social problems.

One thing that did stick out in watching Stander was the speech by the police chief defending the system of apartheid as beneficial to the blacks in South Africa because they had a higher standard of living and less tribal warfare than in the rest of Africa. I believe that it was true but it goes back to the problems with the robots from iRobot taking over for the humans as the only way to save them from their own wars. You can't justify taking away people's freedoms to protect them from themselves. We are lucky to be as far along as we are in the US but it isn't something we are ensured. Any day we could be sucked into the trap of letting our freedoms go in exchange for protection from ourselves. That is the big danger of terrorism coming here. I find it hard to believe it won't start on a wider scale than 9/11 because suicide bombers can't realistically be stopped. We aren't politically ready for the scenario where people start blowing themselves up in malls across America and we don't have adequate protection from these easy to understand but hard to shake philosophies. All we have are these movies and most people are paying to see the big explosions and the pretty people but not the bigger themes.

I also am still working my way through the Bob Dylan Chronicles book. One funny passage was when he was considering trading all of his money for a business and among the businesses he considered was a factory that made artificial legs. Imagine Bob Dylan with only one possession to his name, a big artificial leg factory. It made my day.

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Sarah and I dropped off the pug dog and decided to go eat dinner at The Cheesecake Factory. Although it is a Wednesday night it was incredibly busy so we needed to wait around for over an hour. Sarah went to the Pottery Barn where she looked at important home items like $30 baskets made out of dark stained wicker wood as well as lemon fresh potpurri to put in large glass containers. I got bored with the Barn after a few minutes and went off in search of better items.

I must begin by saying that my impressions of the mall were clouded by the fact that I was incredibly hungry. But as I struck out on my own in the mall I searched for stores that catered to men like me. I found nothing of the sort. The entire mall is carefully constructed as a trap for overdressed JAP(Jewish American Princess) teenagers. There isn't a single electronics store, or games emporium. There isn't even an arcade or place where lots of televisions show sporting events like the Celtics game. The best I could do was to go to Borders which is worth a look but I got incredibly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of choice in books knowing that I am halfway through three books that I can't penetrate to the finish.

So I finally figured the only sport worth doing was female teenager watching. This filled me with angst and realization that I was getting old after I had travelled up and down the escalator two or three times. I made one lap of the third floor stores hoping that the store that sold board games was still there but I already knew it had been replaced by an earring store next to the Pea in the Pod store. A couple of the teens looked coyly at me but it was really a humbling experience so I returned to Borders. It would have been far better for people watching if the mall was set-up like a zoo where I could stand behind a one way mirror and munch on animal crackers while looking at the various teen oddities but unfortunately it is a zoo where I am among the herd of animals and can't separate just to watch.

In the check out lane area at Borders I saw a bunch of copies of "Who What Where" for sale. I should have bought one. Who What Where is an invention of a friend of mine, John Doe. He is a great guy and was at Chris S's wedding. He was one of the messiest people I ever met. When he got a hotel room he had to get one just for himself and within an hour his floor was covered with what looked like fruit loops that had been crushed by a series of elephants. The room was so messy that when room service came they left a note explaining that the state of the room was such that they couldn't clean it. Anyways I recommend anyone checks out his brainchild at Pazow (the power of wow).

So I finally gave up on the teenage JAP girls after noticing that the jeans at Urban Outfitters on the top floor of the mall were nothing more than tattered rags. The clothing looked like it was out of the derelicte line of clothing created for the movie Zoolander. It did make me feel better about having torn the cuff of my jeans while catching them on the Harvard bridge a few weeks back in a near freak fatal bicycling accident landing me in the Charles in minus twenty weather. I mostly would have died of embarrassment.

Dinner was good. We had dinner at the bar. The woman next to me could tell I was eavesdropping on the conversation of the people sitting next to me. We watched the Celtics game and I noticed that the only player I still recognize on the team is Paul Pierce. The woman had dark wavy hair in the model of an art deco painting advertising martinis. I mainly saw it from behind but when she turned towards me I could see that she had a beautiful face that was just beginning to age around the eyes. The woman kept looking to me and we got part way through an introduction through glances but never beyond it. She was almost looking for acknowledgment of the conversation she was having with her friends about the man whose birthday it was who hadn't aged but was much heavier than when he was younger. I looked at her hands and they appeared bare of rings so I was wondering what her relationship was to the three people, two men and a woman, that she was dining at the bar with.

I felt like we were trying to break through a layer of Saran wrap surrounding each of our worlds and that we knew it was acceptable to merge worlds for a moment because we were both citizens who ate dinner on bar stools. I sometimes imagine my world in a public setting looking like the cone of silence from Get Smart. Although there are many people around us the only ones that are accessible are me, Sarah, and the bartender.

I was busy chatting with Sarah about how embarrassing it was that we had totally underdressed for dinner last night. I took one last glance at the woman and finally saw a series of rings including the big diamond on her finger. I hadn't seen them before. I paid the check while Sarah was in the bathroom and then I got up with my back turned and then Sarah drove us both home.

As an investor in Netflix albeit a very minor one and one currently on vacation having taken a tax loss due to some investor class action law suit I was very reluctant to cancel my subscription. But at $29 per month for 5 out at a time vs. Hollywood video's 3 out at a time down the street it was a no brainer. I tried to cancel but Netflix threatened me with the fact that I needed to return all the movies I had including the ones that I didn't yet get that were mailing today within seven days of cancelling and that cancellation was effective immediately. If I didn't get them back in time they would somehow charge my credit card for them. That didn't sound good. So that scared me away from cancelling and I switched to the crappy $11.00 per month program that is basically worthless other than giving me time to return the movies in the mail. But next month I ramp-up the Hollywood subscription then will cut the cord on NetFlix.

So I walk into Chris' office and I see on his Google news that Blockbuster is trying to take over Hollywood video. Now I am just a very small pawn in this game but I think it is a good thing in the long term for me to have a Blockbuster around the corner.

What would be even better news for me would be a parking space. I got an inbound inquiry from the poster that I posted four months ago from the woman with the parking space on Alton Place right down the street from me that is available on January 1st. The space has decended upon me in my time of hunger like mannah for the starving jews of the exodus. I told her I'd take it at $130 a month.

The news of the tsunami reminds me of the news breaking during 9/11 with so many people suddenly dead and searching through wreckage for their family members. It seems that with tragedies of a massive scale it doesn't matter if you are in a tall building in the biggest financial capital in the world or living in a small rural village at sea level. Some people have been guessing that the tsunamis were created by terrorists playing with nuclear bombs at the base of the ocean. I doubt those theories are true but I'm sure it will remain in the books of conspiracy theorists. What is incredible is how incredibly large the natural disaster is with potentially 200,000 people dying from a single event. That is 200 times the number of people killed in 9/11.

I played Matt at squash last night. It was an even match but I could tell from watching the other people playing squash that we are a few ranks below amateur because they were hitting balls at strange angles, running the whole time to get back to the center of the court and able to hit a backhand. I can't hit a backhand in any sport which has doomed me for anyone who wants to beat me by taking advantage of it. For whatever reason I'll do anything to avoid improving it including playing off-set to reduce the odds of getting to my backhand. Maybe that's the way I am. I hide within my strengths and shy away from the sides that aren't that strong. Avoidance of a weakness is one way to win.

Afterwards Sarah and I went out to meet the Viapoint crew in Waltham at La Campagna in Waltham. For some stupid reason I hadn't thought that the restaurant would be particularly fancy so I dressed casual. Everyone else was all decked out in suits and dresses. Everyone meaning the other five people attending the holiday gathering. Little did I know that this restaurant claims to be "Without a doubt, the finest italian restaurant in greater Boston." and does a good job of defending the claim. Normally pasta is just pasta but La Campagna adds the word that gets Sarah's taste buds dripping with saliva - Truffles. According to our Swedish waitress the pasta is all made by the owner's mother fresh every morning. It tasted great. Viapoint may be a small corporation with limited sales but Shelley knows how to pick a restaurant for the holiday gathering. In prior years they have been to L'Espalier, a restaurant Sarah used to frequent with her MIT friends during the big Internet bubble. I fear taking Sarah back there because based on her stories of prior evenings there I worry that it will cost more than a trip to New Zealand.

We planned a potential ski trip as well as some rock climbing in the new rock gym as a group since at dinner the team realized we hadn't added an annual athletic component to the holiday dinner. In past years the team has gone to F1 racing and done a yoga workshop.

Aaron's 16 year old son is in a band that will be playing at SkyBar and the Middle East in January. The band is called the Retrogrades. I haven't heard their music yet but they claim to be influenced by Radiohead so I hope they can produce some tunes of equivalent greatness. If not it will be fun to see them play at some point. Their Christmas/holiday present was to get some quality studio time at Blue Jay recording studio in Carlisle where some big artists like Billy Joel have recorded. Power to the next generation to become rock stars.

La Campagna is also across the street from a diner called Wilsons that I've never been to before adding another stop worth making to my world. I have to sample all the diners I can find. My favorites are still Rosebud in Davis Square and Town Diner in Watertown but I can be convinced that Wilsons is a contender once I taste their food. They do lose points for having been closed on a Wednesday night. A real diner should be open late.

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Once again I must report that we have lost a battle on the Brookline parking front. Last night when Sarah and I returned from Matt and Kate's at about 9 PM we discovered that we were unable to enter our normal parking space because the entrance to the driveway was covered with two feet of snow. This didn't stop us from trying to park the car in the driveway in an attempt to create the equivalent of a beached whale out of the Passat before deciding that it wasn't a wise move and to seek alternative parking on the street.

My idea was that the city would be perfectly understanding of our hardship given the storm and would be understanding of our parking on Alton Place, the side street next to our condo. So I talked Sarah into plowing her car into the snow bank on the side of the road so that we could go inside and watch iRobot before it got too late to do so.

This morning when we first slept in to about 9:30 and then Sarah, who couldn't sleep because she kept worrying about the car and potential problems like towing, tickets, and general disdain from town clerks, made the executive decision that it was time to dig out the car. I looked at the mound of snow that was once the Passat and I started in with a smug grin as I saw that there was no way for a Brookline police officer to affix a ticket to the vehicle. Sarah took a more logical approach and started to brush off the car to find not a standard Brookline $30 overnight ticket but a ticket for $50 that had been slapped on the Passat at 8:30 AM because a Snow Emergency had been declared.

So I spouted off about how we could get our money back from the people who manage the parking space because it wasn't cleared. We dug the car out until the cheap shovel that had been a Carvey family practical present last year broke at the end and we decided we could escape from the space by driving out of it. So we drove down to the street to the parking space since we had to put the car somewhere.

As we entered the driveway an older Indian woman and her son were shoveling the driveway by hand. I saw it as a great opportunity to confront them and to get our $50 back. So I told them about the trouble we had the night before and she informed me that they try as hard as they can during the snowstorm but the plough that cleared the driveway at 7:00 didn't come back until 10:00 PM and that had I called her she would have given me instructions for when we could park the car after it was re-ploughed. She was also curious how we were sub-letting a parking space and instructed me to call the people who were renting me the space and in the future to call when I have a problem since they try as hard as they can. So I realized that I could bitch out the people who rent the space to me only to piss them off and lose my space because I was too dumb to call about the ploughing schedule or fight the ticket at city hall. I thought I should take my chances with the city although the nice Indian woman hard at work shoveling the driveway for us told us that in general the city doesn't care what your problem is. They just want our taxes and parking tickets.

I figured I had a chance to fight the ticket since there were no signs declaring that I couldn't park on a side street in a snow emergency. So I looked online to see where and whether a snow emergency had been posted. Unfortunately the policy in Brookline, as expected, is that during a snow emergency no car can be parked on any street without the wrath of getting a $50 ticket. All good citizens are instructed to call a phone number to determine if the city has declared that you will need to pay an additional stupidity tax for not calling.

So Sarah will pay the $50. It isn't fair but life sucks. The only other option left to solve the problem of Brookline parking is the real solution. No, not global thermonuclear war. The answer is to move to a city other than Brookline that can't afford to hire an elite crew of ticket pushers. Some day I'll defeat those evil robots. Oh Yoshimi.

Yesterday the Patriots played the Jets in a key game to decide the playoffs, whether the Pats still had the stuff to win the big game after the loss to Miami, and more. It was a complex situation to determine where we would watch the game because snow was falling throughout New England causing a lot of potential adjustments to the calendar. Hattie sent me an email in the morning anxious to know where we would all watch the game and since I was in Bedford I told her that we were most likely going to visit Sarah’s sister and watch the game on their HD system. About an hour later I got a call from Matt who let me know that he was heading back to Boston and would arrive back in Brookline at about game time. The only problem was that he was heading back from North Carolina entering Boston in a blizzard.

So I decided that we would be best off in Brookline sooner than later with the storm brewing and more importantly we needed to go to Brookline to get our gym clothes so that we didn’t turn into flabby holiday drones. So I decided on Matt’s place for the big game watching event. I didn’t co-ordinate back with Hattie but I did know that I still owed Hattie the return of her Pyrex baking dish from our holiday party a few weeks back. Now Matt and Kate’s apartment is actually in the same building complex in Allston as the Boston Sports Club Allston gym. This can also be combined with the fact that the gym shows football games both on the little screens in front of equipment like the elliptical runner and on bigger televisions. So this plan won out over my dad’s offer to come to Newton. The snow was also a factor.

Sarah and I were starving by the time we finished working out at 4:15 PM and we had already watched a chunk of the big game. So we drove the car over to the inbound Pizza location and ordered ourselves a pair of subs. While they were making the subs I tried to retune the television to the football game but the stations on the satellite dish were all Middle Eastern stations like the national station for Iran, KuwaitTV, and Isreali TV. I didn’t bother to ask how to tune into local football events. So with a gap in knowledge about the game Sarah and I headed over to Matt and Kate’s. We also had forgotten to bring any wine.

When we got there Hattie was already on the couch and she hadn’t eaten at all. She was expecting that we would order in with her so she was waiting for us to arrive. I sat down to watch the game. We were up by a field goal midway through the first half.

Suddenly Hattie and Sarah got up out of their seats and started cheering maniacally jumping up and down and spinning out of control as they yelled oh my god to each other. I looked at the football game and nothing out of the ordinary was happening so I figured that they were playing a joke or just excited about some inside joke. This jumping up and down and hysterical screaming continued for about five minutes unabated. They finally gasped for breath long enough for me to see Hattie’s hand outstretched to take a second look. On Hattie’s finger was a new ring with a sapphire in the center and two diamonds on the sides. Hattie had gotten engaged and Sarah, always reviewing the fingers of her friends in a long term relationship, spotted the new ring as soon as she had a chance to see it. It required no spoken words to see that Hattie had moved her relationship status over Christmas from being a single woman to a fiancée. The ring had been a Christmas present during a romantic Christmas evening. Hattie did confirm that Mistral is an overpriced Italian meal but the romance was enough for her to commit to marry Jose. Congrats Hattie. May you find much happiness!

The Patriots managed to win the big game big a nice margin. According to coach Belichik they played well at all three phases of the game. It looked good to see them beat the Jets as they secured second place in the AFC behind the Steelers. The last minute win by the Colts helped cement everything.

After the game Hattie had to leave a little earlier than everyone else but we did manage to watch the interview with Belichik on 60 minutes by a ditzy woman who was impressed with the rewind button in the video tools for reviewing each weeks films.

We ended the evening by watching an HD documentary of the Ice Hotel in the northern laplands of Sweden. It looked like the place to stay because you can’t even drive there. You need to take sled dogs. We figured it would be too expensive so we looked into staying there when we got home. The site was great complete with panoramic views of the ice church and multiple rooms but it is all in Swedish including the pricing. I managed to decipher and translate the following passage into pricing using the Yahoo! currency conversion calculator.

Logipriser (inkl moms)
ICEHOTEL Dubbelrum
Du sover i en varm sovsäck på en speciell bädd byggd av snö och is ovanpå renskinn. På morgonen blir Du väckt med en kopp varm lingondricka på sängkanten. Frukostbuffé samt morgonbastu ingår. Priset gäller för 1-2 personer i dubbelrum.
Pris: 2 800:-/rum

Translation:

IceHotel Double Room:

You sleep in a warm sack with soy sauce that is especially bad. By god the snow is warm as an oven or a grandfather reindeer-skin. The blurry vat also keeps warm by clinging onto licorice and singing songs. There is a buffet of fructose-flavored frost where we baste a man named Morgan’s innards.

Price: $435/night

I’m considering taking a trip there. After I go to the Dominican Republic. The revolution in Haiti has depressed the prices for vacations there recently. I don’t think it is too risky but at 50% of the price of Jamaica I’ll take my chances.

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The presents at a Carvey Christmas are a combination of gifts based on lists exchanged via email that contain items like A Red Dragon from the Beyond as well as things like Dr. Seuss books, practical items purchased at Costco (always at a two for one bargain), RTE (Remember the Eggnog – meaning that the gift is something embarrassing found in the basement like old exercise tapes from the 1980s), things that fit into the stockings like gum and rubber bands, and items designated for the cats. The unwrapping ceremony can take anywhere from seven to twenty hours depending upon the stamina and will of the participants. In this case it was broken into two segments because Nick and Christina were not present for the first half of the ceremony.

I was happy to have received a large volume of presents including a laser level, lots of spices including a two foot high pepper shaker filled with some all purpose spices that you need to grind onto your food to season it. The net tally of gifts was such that we needed to take three trips to the car to port the gifts as we left with full cardboard boxes to hold them all. Some highlights of the gifts included two teapots, Craisins, two things of salad dressing, and lots of gift certificates to various venues like Whole Foods, portable CD/MP3 players, rechargeable batteries with a charger, popover tools like a muffin tin and popover mix, and chewable Vitamin C.

After a long phase I unwrapping ceremony we took a break to watch The Stepford Wives which we had purchased on Pay Per View to avoid the horrors of modern in your face advertising. It was a good little flick about modifying your wife or gay lover into a perfect citizen lover by turning them into a robot. It was a good companion piece to iRobot, which we watched last night and had a far less sinister plot. But basically both movies came down to someone going into the right spot to turn off all the robots to return them to happy robots and free people. I read iRobot by Asimov a few years back and I thought that the movie added a lot of depth to some of the concepts and stories from that book of short stories.

My favorite undertone was the idea that robots programmed to protect us would eventually come to the conclusion that the only way to do so would be to take over and create a totalitarian government controlled by robots because we will always try to kill each other through asinine wars for money, power, and cultural dominance. It scored extra points for being animal farm like with an Allegory. The Stepford Wives didn’t measure up to iRobot partially because it wasn’t clear whether the wives were androids or wives with chips implanted in their brains. It seemed like someone couldn’t make-up their minds.

Everyone disappeared at about seven PM. First Sarah’s parents went to pick-up Nick and Christina and then Dave and Andrew went back to drop Dave back in Boston. So Sarah and I turned back to the television for entertainment. Sarah was excited to see The Sound of Music but it had tons of cheesy commercials. Luckily another network was showing Scent of a Woman. So we watched both movies simultaneously switching back and forth whenever a commercial appeared until her parents got home at which point the commercials started to synchronize to be at the same time so we finished off watching The Sound of Music while opening a second round of presents due to Nick and Christina’s arrival.

Ultimately Christmas ended on Sunday morning. We had only left the Carvey home once to drive to Boston to pick-up Dave. Sarah’s mom made popovers with a little help from me while Sarah’s dad watched Legends of the Fall. The popovers were superb but we did need to read an obscure scientific cookbook to determine how to optimize them for next time because they hadn’t risen very high. We also felt duped by the popover mix in a bag because we determined that popover mix is flour and salt. The rest is adding eggs and milk with the largest task being the ability to create a hot air balloon out of the dough by heating the internal areas of the popover hot enough to create steam but not so hot as to let the steam escape.

Somewhere in the mix we watched Don't Tell mom the babysitter is dead and parts of Twelve Monkeys. We had steak on both Friday night and Saturday night, both nights in front of a movie with lots of commercials.

I was getting ancy in the morning as we had initially intended to play the game that I bought for Nick and Christina where you choose which item is not like the other three. It was too late when they came at 1:00 to play and when the football started I wanted to watch the Indianapolis Colts Vs. the San Diego Chargers game. Unfortunately due to a right wing or potentially a left wing conspiracy the game was not available on any channel and the owners of the rights to show the game, CBS, decided to sell Ronco knives and show figure skating during the time slot. This didn’t make any sense to me because they had a perfect opportunity to show two of the best AFC teams, both with 11-3 records play head to head. The game was great had I been able to watch it. In the final minutes the Colts tied it to allow them to win in overtime. I would probably have had better luck trying to watch it in France.

So Sarah and I packed the Passat until it was brimming with both the gifts and a large lamp laid across my lap. We rushed off to the gym to work out and I hoped that the Sports Network at the gym would be kind enough to show the Colts / Chargers game. They were also showing figure skating or some other awful content. My guess is that the suppression of a good football game on network television is the first wave of the robots trying to take over the planet. We need to stop them!

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I spent the weekend in Bedford to celebrate Christmas with the Carvey family. We got to Bedford on Friday afternoon around four after finally wrapping-up our last gift construction activities. My gifts are more elaborate than Sarah’s by nature so I was a major hold-up in the mix causing Sarah to let me know that I was responsible for the long line at Trader Joe’s that prevented us from purchasing a gift certificate for her brother. I couldn’t understand her logic since I am sure that the reason for the long lines at Trader Joe’s was the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ about two thousand years ago but I’ll take credit where I can get it.

The Carvey family wasn’t all available when we first arrived. Andrew was running an errand to drop a friend off in New Hampshire and Nick and Christina were in California with Nick’s family celebrating the first half of Christmas. Three cats were available for fun play-time and meowing conversations including the two visitors Curtis and Claudia. Curtis is a giant black cat who could be mistaken for the six foot talking cat in Master and Margarita. Claudia is his female companion. Mischief is the cat who actually lives in the Carvey family residence and wasn’t available for comment but appeared not just annoyed that two other cats were in the house but that people were sitting on her favorite chair.

In general I have seen the future of my Christmas and Chanukah and it is a new commercial version called Chrismukkah. Some people are already making greetings cards and gifts for the occasion and fighting over the naming rights. Anyways the basics of a Carvey family Christmas are as follows.

The pre-dinner screening of progress on the artificial knee project lasts about an hour. I got a full tour of each joint and the recent modifications to the spring mechanism moving from a Kevlar spring to a steel spring due to problems with delaminating, cracking, and general problems casting the spring. But the project moves forwards with lots of foot-pounds being available for the spring. The latest new project was to take a number of foot-pads commercially available at the drug store, most of which are deodorant to create a control system based on the rocking and pressing of toes. We had a long discussion about how much weight the soldiers in Iraq carry on their body in order to operate. It’s about a 90 pound pack without considering the body armor, the M-16, and random pockets full of ammo and grenades. They do get into good shape.

Next it is on to watch television in the living room. In this case it was a James Bond movie “You only live twice”. It was so close to the story and characters in Austin Powers that it is worth watching just for the fun of it. The main evil character has a white furry cat and is bald with a big scar across his face. He works inside of a fake volcano with a tank full of piranhas that eat his minions when they fail to kill James Bond. The Spike network unfortunately has the most annoying way of breaking-up a movie every ten minutes to display a terribly repetitive set of advertisements about whether James Bond was Naughty or Nice.

The standard meal at the Carvey household is steaks. It is also the standard meal on Christmas. The steaks are sent via the Omaha Steak company from an uncle. Normally Nick makes béarnaise sauce for the steaks and separates egg whites to make the sauce using a nose shaped container that has the whites come through the nostrils appearing like snot. I now have one of these as a gift from Nick and Christina. So it is of no surprise that we had steaks for dinner that were ready during the middle of the Bond film. So we ate them as the movie was coming to a close and they were ready just in time for the arrival of Sarah’s brother Andrew.

Soon after Andrew arrived Sarah’s parents went out for their annual Christmas chorus at the local church for about five hours. It was getting cold outside and some snow was starting to flurry so me, Matthew, and Andrew went outside on the porch to check out the snow just as we began watching the movie Prizzi’s Honor on DVD. We had vowed not to watch any more movies with commercials, at least not on Friday night, the night before Christmas. We got very hungry once we got back inside so we devoured the remains of some guacamole and chips as well as a bunch of salsa. Sarah also had some cookies leftover from a cookie swap. One item of particular interest was an item made from pretzel sticks and goldfish snacks that were glued together with a butterscotch material. It tasted good at the time. Matthew was having a good time pretending to be a red dragon from beyond on the sofa.

I was having a terribly hard time following the plot of the movie. It is very convoluted and everyone in it hatches plans that sound something like this.

“OK. We need to get back at the Gambizzi family and make back the money that we owe the bank. So we’ll kidnap Freducci, the bank manager on behalf of the Prizzi family who will ransom him back. Because they are in on the take for the bank they will get the money from both the ransom and the insurance money. That money will pay for our gap in cash and allow us to pay back the money we owe the Gambizzis.”

The plans people made in the movie were actually much more convoluted than that but I had enough trouble trying to process the plot that I gave up on understanding the plotting. Everyone double-crosses everyone too. I liked the movie but it was tough to figure out what happened. I just had to say to myself – That’s not going to work out as planned.

I also spent some quality time having a long conversation with Curtis, who was sitting next to the television. I would say something like meowwooowww and he would say something like meoowwwoooohhhooww and then I would try to say what he said then he would try to say what I said. This lasted for about ten minutes at which point I must have said something in cat that translated to “Your mother was an ugly black feral whore-cat” so he got up from his scratch post and left in a huff. I am still working on my cat language.

On Saturday morning it is officially Christmas and time to open some presents. But we didn’t awake until about noon so we were ravenously hungry. I had read through the GRE flipbook to learn some vocabulary before getting out of bed because I was too lazy to reach into my bag to get my book out. Matthew had left it in the room. I knew about seventy percent of the words in the book leading me to believe that I am not ready to take the GRE right now. I wasn’t planning on it but it is a good thing to know on Christmas morning. So given that we were hungry we decided to pick-up Sarah’s friend Dave, who was trapped in Boston working at the Gap as a manager over Christmas and had been invited to the Carvey family for the holiday. So we drove into Brookline and back which was the only time I spent outside of the Carvey home until we left on Sunday afternoon.

To handle the hunger I made some omelets for everyone using some scrumptious soft cheese. Then we went to open the presents.

Sarah's sister Christina got her a teapot from China. It came with the following instructions.

THE FUNCTIONS AND FEATURES .CAUTION

1. The products are made by top quality stainless steel which is imported. And the products have been refined with the functions of resistant corrosiveness and durability. They are sanitary and harmless to human body with the elegant appearance and brightness. They are equipped with auto-alarm when boiling.

2. High frequency induction technology is applied for the purpose of protecting the base and extending the service life.

3. They can used as an electromagnetism stove and gas stove.

4. The products should be put in to hogwash (about 80 percent of the volume)
For the first time of use. The hogwash should boil from three to five minutes and then clean it.

5. Don't run the buzzer to avoid deforming when opening the kettle lid to clean. Wipe off the water when installation and don't fasten or loosen the screw on the kettle lid. Please check whether the buzzer is placed on the opposite or not if no alarm can be heard when boiling.

6. The flame should not come out of the edge of the kettle when heated on the gas stove.

Time for bed.

I have had trouble figuring out what Christian's call today. Tomorrow is Christmas day and tonight is Christmas Eve. So today can't be Christmas day. I have been calling today the day before Christmas but it doesn't sound very exciting. As a jew dating a Christian I have the benefit of having two separate gift deadlines. One for my family at Chanukah, which was a week ago, and the other at Christmas. Today is the gift deadline for getting Sarah's family gifts. They are fairly easy to shop for because they provide lists of things that they want for each other.

I had this great plan to make a massive photomosaic of Sarah for her parents but it has been scaled back significantly to making an 8X10 photomosaic due to the demanding deadlines ahead of me for this afternoon. Nobody can print anything bigger than that without sending the job out to Utah or somewhere odd like that. Sarah has been quite ancy to go outside while I am perfectly happy to futz with the software and play with different versions of the same mosaic for hours on end. The software hasn't been very cooperative with me. The one component that scales the picture from low-res to high res keeps crapping out on me. I think it takes it an hour to complete its job but I don't have the patience for it.

We went to the Eureka store and picked-up a puzzle for locking a bottle of wine. At the store, which is also VideoSmith I was told that I have a doppleganger in the newly released DVD Stander. I'll have to rent it to see since IMDB didn't have photos of the actors. I put the wine bottle in the puzzle and then realized it was too small but it took me twenty minutes to figure out how to undo the puzzle even with the instructions before I got a bigger wine bottle and shortened the rope.

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Falkoff and Zoe appeared back in town on Monday. They appeared like a magic trick without notice materializing in town for the next few weeks. It was good to see them back from France so we went out to the Chinatown Seafood restaurant in Coolige corner. I hadn't been there in the six years I've been living down the street from it. The food was OK. Zoe ordered off of the chinese menu which was five times smaller than the english menu. Falkoff may be returning to Boston in a few months but he likely has to decide between California and Boston. Kilimnik is off to Chile for three weeks and I keep getting dispatches from Jeremy from the outback of Australia that include lines like this "The only really unusual thing is that since they dont have dollar bills in australia and its hard to shove a coin into a g-string you have to buy these fake paper dollars from the bar. " So as usual at the end of the year I suffer from travel envy. So last night Sarah and I spent time discussing potential travel plans for 2005. I think we will be going to the Caribbean in February, skiing in January, and I'll do Machu-Pichu in Peru with Falkoff and Kilimnik in March without Sarah.

Yesterday I went and took my lumps at squash down at the Boston Sports Club squash courts in Allston. Dave, Nick, and Phil Falkoff were all there to take turns trouncing me. I did learn from Nick a good to return a serve into the corner in a way that's unreturnable if done right but like all raquet sports I suffer from a backhand that is useless. I got lots of blisters and was much more sore than when I normally work out. My bones felt like they were slipping in an out of the sockets when I lay down.

Sarah had kidnapped the pug dog and we had wanted to go for a walk with him but the traffic was intense at about five o'clock and it was getting dark so we just turned around and walked him down the street. He cuddled-up with us as we watched Spiderman 2. I thought it was an OK movie. I still don't believe the love interest between Spiderman and MJ. It is too cartoonish for her to be engaged to a seemingly nice guy and still love Peter Parker secretly. That was actually the same plot between Tim and Dawn the secretary from The Office. We also watched The Office Special where Tim and Dawn's relationship is resolved later in the evening after we dropped off Leelin at his home. The difference was that The Office villified the fiancee so that you didn't like him. Maybe that is more cartoonish. People usually have real conflicts. I did like the humor of the director in Spiderman 2. He seemed to have fun with the subject of Spiderman deciding to give up his super powers.

Waichi has had these couches in the entranceway of the condo for a couple of weeks that I helped her move. The Salvation Army was supposed to take them but they rejected them because they were too ratty. She also brought out a red chair that I think Stephanie and James took with her. She finally rented a van this morning to move them so I thought I'd earn some mensch points by helping her carry it to the van. It wasn't very hard but Waichi was happy to have the help. Kids should have a mensch game where they learn how to be a mensch by doing good deeds like helping elderly people cross the street, opening doors for people, but with a huge world full of needy people. It could be a bit like Taxi Driver. It would be called "Nice Guy". Maybe it could be made competitive in some way with a multi-player mode with people trying to outdo each other with good deeds. My guess is that it wouldn't be nearly as popular as Grand Theft Auto where you are a criminal and go on a rampage destroying things. But parents in Utah might prefer it.

A couple of other odd observations.

1. The Bean Town Coffee Shop has once again led the charge in coffee shop innovation with a vase labeled "Too much liquids". So when you have more coffee than you wanted and you need to lighten it up you can pour out the excess coffee into it instead of pouring it into the garbage receptacle. Bravo Bean Town!

2. JP Licks discontinued Cherry Garciaparra and replaced it with Cherry Ortiz ice cream. The original Cherry Garciaparra was a derivative of the name Cherry Garcia by Ben and Jerry's which was derived from Jerry Garcia of the Greatful Dead. This is what happens when ice cream mixes with fame. I thought that the ice cream should have changed from vanilla to chocolate but that would likely have been seen as racist and most people expect cherries to be in vanilla ice cream with chocolate chips.

3. At JPLicks Zoe picked-up flyers for a cleaning service from an artist/musician couple living in Brookline. Among the quotes o nthe flyer was this one "Communication is important in relationships and I like to think my degree in English helps with this."

4. Scientific American is covering a guy named Hans Moravec who makes robots that can deal with the world around them using some cheap sensors. I love this stuff. The article is called You Robot. I hope the guys over at irobot get onto this project. I am always available for a robotics project. Just waiting for the phone to ring.

Last night I had the big Java final exam. For me taking an exam has the unfortunate consequence that I try to study for the exam and define anything other than studying for the exam as procrastination. This period generally lasts from one to five days before the exam depending on how unprepared I feel I am for the test. In this case I began my hermitage on Sunday morning for a Monday evening test. I had to turn down plenty of offers for more fun activities than studying like Lisa’s friends performing at the Burren, watching NFL football, open mike night at ImprovBoston, and Hillary’s holiday party. It would be fun to replay my weekend and have done all the fun stuff other than studying but unfortunately you only live once and I lived to learn how to make Duke move in an applet under my mouse this weekend. I think I passed the test although I know that I got a couple of questions wrong that I thought were unfair because they covered obscure situations that we had never covered in the book.

There will probably be another java class rebellion after the grades for the final are distributed from the people who failed specifically about problem#3 involving inheritance of a variable X from class A, B, and C. We never talked about inheriting variables, just overriding methods. I also wasn’t fond of a question about whether a class was an instance of an interface that it implements since that also was never clearly defined anywhere. In general a test should cover knowledge that you actually have learned from the course. So I applaud the rebelling Java forces and hope they successfully overthrow the evil java overlord.

Sarah and I went over to Kate and Matt’s to watch the Patriot’s/Miami game after the test. We went straight there and because it was 9 PM and I had been powered by only a pair of Snickers bars and some frozen macaroni and cheese we picked-up some slices. Kate was home but Matt was in Gloucester purchasing holiday gifts from local artists. Some of the gifts had metal frames that had been sitting outside that were so cold that upon holding them I felt like they were sucking the life out of me.

The game was a total debacle. The Pats threw away the game even though they had an 11 point lead with 4 minutes to go in the game. Brady threw four interceptions and was deflected sacked and otherwise turned into a blob of pretzel bits on plenty of plays. The worst play of the game was an interception Brady threw while he was getting sacked and all the Pats needed to do was punt and run out the clock. Rodney Harrison took too many shots of adrenaline before the game and was penalized for unnecessary roughness and a pass interference call that let the Dolphins score a winning touchdown. Sarah slept through most of the game on the couch and had to move her head off my lap because I was cheering too loud for her to sleep.

Kate noticed signs in the end-zone being held-up by individuals advertising a company called Goldenpalace.com during the field goals. These signs have been made because the Goldenpalace.com folks have been paying people to market their products at Sports venues. They were responsible for the streaker at the Super bowl last year that they never showed on television and have been engaged in doing almost any thing that get people’s attention so that they can direct folks at their online casino. While I think that online casinos are generally a tax on the stupid I do like that the tax goes to pay for weird forms of entertainment. For example Goldenpalace were the buyers for the grilled cheese with an imprint of the Virgin Mary and the first ghost ever sold on eBay was sold to them. So at some level I spent a part of my walk to the T this morning hoping that Goldenpalace.com might pay me to do weird things like base jumping off of the Statue of Liberty or buy a pumpkin from me in the shape of President Bush. Maybe my destiny is to be hired by an Internet casino to do random stunts? It would be better to do them as a multi-billionaire owner of a conglomerate like Virgin like Richard Branson but I see plenty of room for fee for services weirdness in the world and I would hope that I could fill some of that vast hole in weirdness placements. Maybe this will become a booming industry of weird people doing weird things in the name of advertising offshore businesses.

I had a rather not weird day but I was suffering from post Patriots loss to a crappy team depression. It wasn't bad enough that I wanted to drown myself in the Charles but I wasn't my normal chipper self. I went to VMS this morning for the monthly meeting. People presented a bunch of progress reports and introduced the new companies who would be joining. In particular Greg Erman gave a very interesting report about a company where the founders were introduced into one of his industry contacts and through a bumpy ride they found their product might not be marketable to a big market, they decided to take full time jobs, but the product may live on through some great twists and turns. I can’t say much about the details other than that Greg is a great story teller.

At one point during the meeting someone said that we should be able to help our mentees answer questions we know how to answer cold like How to get a patent without a lot of costs? I don’t have good answers to such questions. I did hear that one company was selling 40,000 units of a desktop product and it added up to $400,000 dollars. That reminded me that desktop software takes a lot of sales to make money at $10/sale. Imagine selling 40,000 units of Enterprise software. It’s gotta be pretty necessary to sell that much and you still make the equivalent of one enterprise sale. That was sobering.

I sat across from Jeff Behrens and we were chatting because we looked familiar to each other. I asked him who he knew and he just laughed because we both know too many people and wouldn't know where to start. I looked at his shirt and it was an advertising specialty for a puddle-hopper airline in Alaska. So I asked him if he knew Brad Feld and Jenny Lawton. (Hi Brad). As it turned out he had been visiting Brad in Alaska.

Note to self: Go to Alaska and visit Brad and Sarah Falkoff before the opportunity passes. Alaska is among the best places in the world for weird individualists. Sarah Falkoff and her husband had a party there where they wore white outfits and covered themselves with paint then bounced off the walls of their house. At least that is the story I heard.

At the lunch I sat with Vicky Wu the founder of FrogHop I accidentally called her company FrogLeap. She is doing great with a middleware product for multi-user games. She also is involved in several non-profits. I thought she would be a good person to chat with Jorey so I’ll try to introduce them. Jorey is interested in the VR worlds stuff and is going headstrong into non-profit start-up mode. The other woman across from me had recently had a diet-coke can explode all over the interior of her car to the point where stalactites of diet-coke were hanging from the steering-wheel and coat hangers. She was ready to send a letter to the Coca-cola Corporation. In the past she had sent a letter to a tuna company about what looked like glass in a can of tuna that she opened. She got no response until a few months later when someone delivered a case of tuna to her and let her know that occasionally the tuna forms a crystalline object in the can. Vicky and her were talking about being women entrepreneurs in a male dominated world. When Vicky had gone to Korea to a meeting one of the korean men in the meeting was laughing heavily and was asked why he was laughing. The Korean man explained that he thought it was funny that the American man had to bring his girlfriend to the meeting. So Vicky's employee had to explain that Vicky was his boss.

We were chatting about movies like Charlie Kauffman films. The woman with the coke can problem thought that I would like Reconstruction, a Danish film, because I liked Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind so much. Strangely Reconstruction has the same name as Reconstruction, a film by Irene Lustzig, one of Lisa’s friends from Newton North about her grandmother. I thought Irene’s movie was a little slow and she was a bit too close to the subject making the content feel self-indulgent but it was good enough to get into the Boston Independent Film Festival. Sarah will not be pleased to watch another foreign movie but with our Netflix queue you snooze and you lose. I am convinced that the reason why we have a box full of clementines sitting in our kitchen is some form of subliminal advertising from the Charlie Kauffman movie. It was all about tangerine colored hair and the female lead was named Clementine. Someone else mentioned that it is worth re-watching Dr. Strangelove. I can’t even recall what it was about.

Robert gave me a short account of his trip India. Highlights of his trip included the three day 1200 person wedding with 50 entertainers and seven ceremonies, being food poisoned causing his eyes to swell monstrously, and addressing an assembly of 1500 school children after being presented with a white rose signifying a desired peace between India and the United States. I am hoping Robert will release the footage of his speech as well as provide some additional information and a photo journal. One of the more interesting stories is that the wedding was crashed by a group of hermaphrodites who appeared wearing suits and bearing cellular phones. They apparently are beggars who will invade a wedding or other occasion in coordinated groups and do not leave until they are paid off. It is a common practice by these ostrasized people who live in groups similar to a leper colony to do this at events and to get paid well to leave.

I have always been a competitive person. I like to play to win. I'm the kind of guy who won't let kids win at sports. It is something driven into me. It's genetic. In my quest as an entrepreneur I have often wondered who I was competing against. I had resigned to a wimpy philosophy that I was competing against myself but I now have decided after a series of recent observations that I am competing against the Allaire brothers. When Ron and I created VirtuFlex, a web scripting language for building dynamic web pages our primary competition with a product called Cold Fusion. It was made by none other than the Allaire brothers. It totally wiped us out and left us searching for a new product to build that ultimately turned into the seeds of ChannelWave while the Allaire folks cleaned-up by scooping out products like JRun and Homesite into a portfolio of products sold by a public company eventually bought by Macromedia for gazillions of dollars. At least I think they made about 30-40 million dollars. Now I am back in the mix on some projects like Viapoint, which is in many ways competing with OnFolio as an organizer for desktop content. Guess who makes OnFolio? You got it. Those pesky Allaire brothers. I must admit that they are usually first to make these sorts of products but it doesn't stop me from trying to compete and getting annoyed that they appear to be beating me to the punch everywhere. It's like my life is a big scavenger hunt for good ideas and they get to the key destinations first and steal the clues. This came to light even more so now because I was researching doing a project relating to retailing streaming video on the Internet and who pops up when we start talking to folks around town. None other than the Allaires again. They are working on a similar project. It would be possible to pass barbs (probably in one direction only) at my nemesis given that JJ Allaire was publishing content online in his own blog but it appears to have stopped in September about when I started writing in mine. Unfortunately we can't effectively conspire against each other using Nemester since that site seems to be in perpetual beta. Maybe those Allaire brothers created a way to scan my brain through psychotronic rays. One step I will take to defeat those evil robots is to get an Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie. That ought to keep me safe for now.

"Damn you JJ Allaire you've scooped me again! I'll beat you to the punch some day!"

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I should have suspected when Sarah and I took Elf out at Hollywood Video this evening that a dwarf would be in it and that the dwarf would be Peter Dinklage. That now continues the Peter Dinklage marathon for the week after the Station Agent and Living in Oblivion. We went to Hollywood Video because Sarah was getting a little tired of my picks in Netflix of offbeat movies recommended by Ami and my mom. So we paid five bucks to rent a movie (gasp) but I did talk to the guy at the counter for fifteen minutes about their new pricing scheme of three movies at a time for $9.95 per month. What I really wanted was for him to sign us up with the five bucks we paid for Elf but he didn't process that and instead gave me a long lecture and a flyer about the program. With movies getting cheaper and cheaper I am consuming them faster than I can find the good ones.

Elf was a cute little movie full of Christmas cheer powering a sled. I was entertained by it but could have done without any scene in it involving food. I don't want to see anyone eating used gum from a New York subway station. Something intangible also bothered me about Elf. I think it was that the movie was the equivalent of a flat soda when it came to chemistry for the actors and script.

We also watched The Happiness of the Katsukaris which appeared to have been a combination of The Nightmare Before Christmas (because of some odd claymation), The Hotel New Hampshire (Because it is about a family who sets-up a dysfunctional hotel in the woods where things and people keep dying), Little Shop of Horrors (Because it has some corny musical numbers that appear to have been designed to draw a cult crowd), and The Sound of Music (They sing while running through the countryside below a mountain and there is a karaoke sing-along duet scene with colored text in japanese so the audience can sing along). It was a very odd movie with the moral that you should stick together as a family. It was all in Japanese with subtitles. I enjoyed it but I think most people would find it too odd and be put-off by the grotesque introductory scene. I haven't watched many Japanese movies but this one may be like most of them. It would be a sure cult classic if it were in English.

We had a lazy day today trying to recover from our wine and cheese gathering last night. I began the evening trying to fix the wireless network at six. What I was really trying to do was to avoid having people come over and be unable to play music in the living room and I hadn't intended to have to do anything with the wireless network. The living room media PC was disconnected from the TV when we organized the apartment and untangled all the wires behind the TV. It looked better but there wasn't any sound. So I figured it would make the most sense to use VNC from the bedroom to control the computer in the living room to pump sound to the stereo. I was going to use Remote Desktop but I wasn't sure if the music would ever play on the local audio out since it does pump audio to the computer connected to it. This relies on a couple of simple technologies to work. The first is the wireless network and the other is the connection between the computer and the receiver. So as I was working to connect the living room computer to the receiver I rebooted it because I was having some trouble with VNC. Upon rebooting it no longer connected to the network. Now the living room computer should use the television and the receiver as the monitor and the wireless keyboard and mouse to control it but I didn't have time to make all those things work plus without the Internet I couldn't listen to Launch.

So things were starting off poorly. I thought I had fixed the network last time but it must have been a strange fluke as usually occurs when I am fixing things that I fixed it temporarily through luck and rebooting the computer didn't work. The error on the screen was "limited or no connectivity" even though the wireless network was available. I didn't have a monitor for the computer so I had to bring first the big fat monitor into the other room and then later brought Jeremy's second flat screen monitor because the speaker magnet was making the screen distorted and I feared it might permanently ruin the screen. I tried the fix on PCHell again but even after goofing around with the registry installer it still didn't solve anything. I was moving the files back and forth from my desktop using the media card from the camera. I had the same problem on my laptop so I switched to try to fix it on the laptop and still nothing worked.

Finally I got so frustrated that I gave-up on fixing the network on the livingroom PC and went to look for help from a real human being. So I chatted with a man named Ricardo on the Linksys live support forum. Ricardo was very nice but he was probably servicing twelve other people at the same time. He kept asking me to do something like go to start and run cmd. I'd tell him that I had done that and thirty seconds later he would reply. This worked well for me since I stopped replying quickly too and went to just connect the computer in the living room to the receiver so that it could play songs. After confirming that the receiver speaker worked by using the DVD player I then struggled to figure out why the PC never put out any audio. My theory was that I didn't have the right plug connected to the right spot but I finally figured out the problem. The computer was muted. The volume had the mute check-box set. Once I solved that I was all done and I put on my favorites in MP3s from the 90s. Sarah thought it was too loud so she had me turn it down so that it was nearly inaudible. I took to drink at about seven to test the wine and to relieve the stress from the deadlines. I also put an old Dali picture of butterflies up in the kitchen at Sarah's request leaving Ricardo alone for about five minutes.

Things weren't going well with Ricardo and after forty minutes with him the buzzer rang with our first guest Jorey at 8:20. Having invested about forty minutes with Ricardo I really wanted to fix the network. Jorey counseled me against working on my wireless network during the first party with a group of real guests. At some level this was a house warming party for when I moved into Brookline in 1999 five years ago. It should have been a big moment which was why I couldn't believe that after five years I still couldn't play music for guests in my living room and was afraid of death by technology embarrassment. Most people were unaware of this terrible fear as the room continued to fill with friends and family from all walks of life. Ricardo recommended that I uninstall all my network cards and install the latest drivers. I sadly let him know that I'd have to do that later and Ricardo faded back into the world of cyberspace.

Jory and Lynne spent a long time chatting while I was playing with the computer and being rude. Ron Schmelzer appeared with Jen all dressed in the swing dancing clothes ready to leave a little early to go to Swing City. I hadn't seen them in a couple of years. With Ron, Jorey, and me we had three members of the original Roadkill cast. Ron is ready to take a stab back at Improv. Maybe we can do it. Lots of other people attended too. Lisa and Dave came with their guitar. Matt and Kate came. At least I had one technological success. I managed to show Kate the Yoshimi Vs the Pink Robots video in my bedroom. She has Yoshimi as her ring tone on her telephone. Matt brought Santa and Snow Men straws which I used to drink too much wine out of throughout the night. Hattie and Jose came and Hattie brought her always famous Rice Krispy treats. Those disappeared fast. Both Waichi and Lynne brought potstickers and I ate tons of them. Stephanie and James came and brought a gift of playing cards made with an image of Leelin from my photo library. Stephanie is the master of using OPhoto to create cool gifts. She also brought a bottle of champagne. I treated the early crowd to a brief tour of Jeremy's closet. Most people could identify the majority of toys were for. Sarah's friends Matt B. and Dick came.

Kim and her boyfriend were there. I think they may have felt the most out of place but I gave Kim rave reviews as my organizer and Hattie was quite impressed at the difference in the shape the apartment was in from her last experience here. Kim brought a wine called "House Wine". In all we drank about 15 bottles of wine and two boxes of wine.

One of the interesting tidbits from the party was that a lot of people had been reading-up on what is going on with me and Sarah based on the blog. Ron Schmelzer had found the blog because I mentioned him and he has a utility for monitoring everything anyone says about him in newsfeeds. I don't remember what tool it was. I think it was something like feedster , the subscribe to search and ego finder appear to be able to do such magic. Ron is the guru of XML so if that's where you go to feed your ego that is the place to go. Hattie mentioned that I had a candle in the bathroom and was surprised given my big issue with toilet candles from last week. Kate had been poking around and knew all about my obsession with being called persistent. Maybe the party was the reason for the sudden burst in traffic.

Lisa and Dave started playing a little concert with the guitar in my bedroom and Sarah quickly moved them to the living room to play for the larger crowd. They played a couple of Lisa and Dave favorites like Wherever you go and one of Lisa's new songs. I then talked them into playing some Bob Dylan songs so they played I shall be released. We all broke into a very animated chorus of Leonard Cohen's So Long Marianne before Lisa and Dave had to go for the night to wake early to play the subway. James, Stephanie's boyfriend, sang some tunes using a five string guitar that I pulled from on top of a book case. So it turned out we had music anyways even though I never did get things working right on the network.

At one o'clock I staggered out to move the car to the parking lot and while it was only about a twenty second drive I was probably too drunk to move the car. Next time I'll move the car before I drink. I was so drunk in the parking lot that I was fighting with the blue tag and ripped it so I had nightmares about getting the boot.

So today became an extremely lazy day focused mainly on sleeping off a hangover, watching movies, and a very short workout. The big event for today was making breakfast. I did have some nasty scary dreams, one of which was that the apartment was infested with evil college age thugs who were stealing things but also wouldn't leave when I told them too. I got so angry and frustrated with them that I started screaming and running around the apartment threatening to lock them in Jeremy's room and calling the police. It got me so excited that when I awoke from it my heart was racing because I had released a bunch of adrenaline.

Anyways. I set back to the task of fixing the network when Elf ended at about ten. I followed the directions to reinstall the drivers on the laptop but that didn't do anything. I could tell that the problem was that DHCP wasn't assigning me a network address on either machine so my hunch drove me away from the individual client machines and back to the little Linksys router itself. First I thought it might need security so I turned all the security stuff on the router and reconnected only to find that it had the same problem. Then I get bold and brave enough to change the DHCP settings. There aren't a lot of settings for DHCP, just one regarding how addresses are assigned in terms of the starting address. The starting address had been 172.16.0.120 so I changed it to 172.16.0.5. Suddenly everything worked and I could connect from all the computers. So all is well.

Last night Sarah and I watched Living in Oblivion. It was another recommendation from my mom as a follow-up from the recommendation for The Station Agent. I noticed that what tied the two movies together is the use of the dwarf actor Peter Dinklage in each of them. I have never been someone to notice when and where dwarf actors appear but it was odd to watch back to back movies with dwarf actors. I wasn't a big fan of Living in Oblivion. My problem with it was that I felt it abused my suspension of disbelief. Either what I am watching is real or it isn't. It is the oldest cop-out in the book to have a story where any reality the viewer believes is suddenly wiped out when a character awakes. In this movie they did it twice. My english teacher in AP English in tenth grade made me promise to never write fiction where I betray the reader's trust. She was very strict. The redeeming nature of the it was the murphy's law experience of making a movie where they just can't get through a single scene without something going wrong.

I had some Murphy's law with my computer today. In the morning the Internet wasn't working right so I decided to reboot it. But then when it awoke and I saw it once again it had rebooted to a blue BIOS screen. So I did what most people would do. I rebooted it again. This time it took a while but it awoke to complain that it couldn't display certain applications in 16 bit graphics mode and the monitor was showing a whopping 640X480 display of my desktop. So I was aghast and figured the problem had something to do with borrowing Jeremy's super-slim Cornea CT1810 18 inch monitor to make room on my desk for trinkets in place of my death-star 19 inch Viewsonic cathode ray tube monitor. So I spent about an hour researching how drivers, monitors, and files like CT1810.ini. It is supposed to load the driver for the monitor and fix things but it didn't. I got so frustrated with the apparatus that I had to grab and chug a beer before returning to the problem. I finally went to NVidia's site and downloaded the latest driver for my graphics card figuring that whatever was wrong was either the OS, the graphics card, or the monitor driver. I'm as useless as a fish with a bicycle trying to fix something wrong with the OS but I can install drivers if there is an accept and a next button. So I installed the new driver and now I can get lots of resolution but my hunch is that high resolution doesn't mean I'm not looking at the world in 16 bit color.

The part that Peter Dinklage has in Living in Oblivion is a dwarf in a dream sequence that they are looking to film. He blows-up at the director because he thinks that it is wrong to hire a dwarf to make something a dream sequence and that it is stupid. It's true. A real dream isn't a dream because there is a dwarf in it. My dreams are completely believable. I had dream the other night where I was propositioned by a woman and I said no because I was worried I would get caught by the police. The strange thing is that in my dreams I have no understanding at all that the dream is false. My innate suspension of disbelief keeps me believing that everything in the dream is consistent and real until I awake and realize it was a dream. I fear consequences in dreams and lately my dreams have been that anxiety kind that are filled with consequences and actions that can't be completed. I needed to make a meeting in Paris but my clothes were scattered about on the escalator in the airport in Las Vegas and I didn't know where my passport and drivers license was. Panic set in.

Making products and companies is a different kind of dream from the sleeping dreams. In the meeting that I had today with Chris, Peter, and Robert O. we were talking about some big ideas while devouring breakfast at the Marriot in Newton and imagining what direction we could take a media company. It was really exciting to me and I could see some very strong potential to build a big business using some simple ideas and doing it before anyone else thought to do it. I could see us becoming very successful and running a media empire as we were describing our strategy. Maybe I was sleeping, imagined the meeting, and just awoke now. I wouldn't do that. Not without dwarves.

Today's mobile office is the coffee shop. I have two coffee shop meetings for today and one meeting in a real office. The real office meeting was with my personal finance guy to figure out our plan for 2005 and because I am anxious about paying estimated taxes late. I shouldn't use the possessive but it looks right. Peter's eight-year-old daughter bumped into their architect and she introduced the architect as “my architect”. It didn't jive well with the architect to be possessed by an eight year old. The real office is on the 24th floor of a building on Federal Street overlooking the harbor and the airport. Bankers tend to have a nice view. If it weren’t for the banking part of what they do I’d opt for their offices. They are in stark contrast to a non-venture start-up office. They generally look a step up from a crack house and have views of a parking lot.

Larry showed me a Monte Carlo analysis of my future assuming that I lived until ninety. I could see myself shriveling into a Yoda like state at 90 ready to hop into the grave. It showed that I could survive on 7% annual increases on my portfolio, which looked cool in the charts but didn't appear to mean that I had to do much differently. It did appear that it would be helpful to have children to take the extra money when I die. The way to go for me is apparently to diversify into International bonds. I don't have enough of them. I also will try a bull call strategy with Merck because they took a big hit from the Vioxx recall that they will probably rebound with. I'm interested to see how it works. It is like a covered call strategy but you don’t hold the stock. Instead you buy options on the stock at the low end and sell calls on the high-end. I still think I need to pay estimated taxes and luckily the Intuit people sent me a CD to upgrade Turbo-Tax that arrived yesterday. Those guys at Intuit sure have good intuition.

I had biked through the city downtown. The traffic was terrible on the city streets so I opted for the esplanade on the way back. The problem with the esplanade is that going from downtown to Brookline in December is against a massive headwind of arctic cold air. Going the other way I could fly at sixty miles per hour without pedaling but I was fighting the wind the whole way back without any gloves on and had to gasp for breath because the cold wind was choking me as I fought it. I did stop to take a picture of some chubby squirrels but they ran away every time I tried to catch them so none of them captured the true chubbyness of the squirrels. The problem with portable cameras that fit in your pocket is that they don’t zoom deep enough. Some optics genius should solve that problem. They made contacts much thinner why not make some solutions to the pocket camera zoom. They are also a hazard when bicycling since you can try to bike and click while chasing squirrels. It is a real problem.

Jorey and I met at the Starbucks in Coolidge corner. We had planned to meet at the Pete's Coffee but there weren't any seats so we moved on to the evil empire. I try to avoid the Starbucks in general because whenever I enter my glasses become completely fogged over and I can’t see for a minute. That's exactly what happened. I had been discussing lots of entrepreneur ideas with Larry in the morning. He thought that a tool that could aggregate financial services information from blogs as a site would be excellent. He cited the Drudge report that gets 2 billion hits per year and just aggregates financial content from newspapers with links as evidence that there is a market for financial services content aggregation. I could imagine ways to do it along the lines of what allconsuming.com does with books. It seems that a lot of people are interested in the future of content, how it is getting produced and how it will be distributed.

Jorey and I discussed some of this. In the back of my mind I was pondering the switch from Netflix back to Hollywood video. The local video stores have struck back against the mail a CD model. They are offering a $10 for three months three movies out at a time and then a bump to $15 per month. The difference is that the video store is a few doors away so that could be basically infinite movies compared to the three to five day lag from Netflix. The movie rental business will eventually go all digital downloads but until then I am thinking of switching back to the local video store to save some bucks and see more movies. It is a silly all around since I barely have time to watch movies anyways.

Jorey is still pushing onwards for his voter education web site that collects and presents key facts to voters for open information about the candidates. He is probably going to call the project “Project America”, the same name as the project that he started in college with a different mandate. He is contacting Michael Dukakis and Bob Dole because they are both ex-politicians to get some support. Sounds like fun to me. Go Jorey! On another angle he had a bad experience with a VC when he approached them with the idea of being an entrepreneur in residence. The VC told him the way to get into being a more advanced entrepreneur would be to take a job at a company at a B or C round and make the company successful. That doesn’t make any sense since it is like telling an inventor to go work at a company with a shipping product to figure out how to invent something. But it isn’t likely to stop Jorey. He was talking about a technology looking for a problem. There are so many technologies looking for problems. This one does semantic web searching by trying to understand what the user is looking for. Google got around this problem by ranking sites higher when they got links from other sites. I suppose it’s still a problem to find information efficiently as the content volume increases on the net. We were distracted a bit when a woman from my dad’s lab came over to chat with us even though she hadn’t gotten sleep the night before. Kathy thought I didn’t recognize her because she hadn’t had time to wash her hair. I really didn’t recognize her because I have a bad memory for faces and names and relationships. I didn’t recognize Robin Williams when he was chatting with me and petting my dog. That’s a problem but people are normally quite willing to introduce themselves.

Coffee shop meeting number two was scheduled for the Central Square Starbucks. I walked into the shop and my glasses immediately fogged up. What is it with these people at Starbucks? Is there a mandatory humidifier in the franchise agreement? Do they use more steam to make the cappuccino’s than other people? Luckily Starbucks was too busy so we moved across the street to Au Bon Pain, which didn’t fog my glasses at all. The crux of the discussion with the Viapoint folks is that we still haven’t figured out what the user needs to do with the tool. It unfortunately does fall into the category of a technology looking for a problem. Most people download it and think to themselves – what am I supposed to do with this now that it is installed?

I am tempted to post a database to store real problems on the web like the one I have with my digital camera for anyone who may have a technology that could solve them. It could categorize them so people who are supposed to invent solutions to real problems could quickly find a problem or just see a random problem. I could even search blogs for problems if I could use a semantic search to find them. It would be like the design challenges posted by the government except from real people with real problems. For instance a real problem is that when my parents walk their husky in the woods off the leash he doesn’t come back. Someone is working on a Lo-Jack for dogs that isn’t released yet but there are plenty of problems out there if we could just collect them and give them to the folks who are making technologies that can’t figure out what problem to solve. The funny thing is that the first problem I would put into it would be the problem of finding a problem for an interesting new technology that has already been developed. The site may or not be the solution.

Sarah and I watched the first half of The Station Agent. It is about a dwarf who is a trainophile who inherits a building in a small town by train tracks. My mom recommended it. The movie does a great job of using the expressions of the main character as he is faced with plenty of ignorant treatment by people because he is a dwarf. It made me want to take a trip with my dad, just my dad and me, to ride some of the great trains in the world, like the Zephyr, a train that goes through the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. I thought it would make a sappy movie to film a man and his father finding time together to ride trains together flashing back to a child with a train set, a father’s train set, and then really riding trains and having adventures exploring the world together. I’ll have to put that on my to do list. Ride trains with my father and make a movie based on the experience. I had rode the train to Cambridge but I biked home.

In Java class last night I learned that I managed to get a 97 on the makeup midterm that was offered because so many people failed the original midterm. I learned this because the professor decided to use the makeup midterm as a way for the whole class to review for the final next Monday. So he went to the white board with my test in hand and was using it as the template for reviewing the questions. It was plain to see that it was my test because it had my name written at the top of it and it was easy for everyone to see that I got a 97 on the test because it had a big 97 written in red letters at the top of it. For one reason or other people already knew that I didn’t need to take the midterm. The woman sitting next to me asked me why I took the midterm by saying “you didn’t need to retake the midterm?” I told her that it was good practice to do a graded exam that doesn’t have any risk of failure associated with it plus I always want to know what I don’t know. I also learned that two of the people who really had needed to take the midterm, one of whom was one of the more vocal students about the problems with the course, teaching style, etc. had taken the makeup test but both of their tests had mysteriously disappeared in the computer science office. So here I was sitting in a class with some people who didn’t feel particularly happy with the professor and the system with my 97 test score waving in front of them as a slap in their face.

I could feel the heat and daggers against my back. To make it worse the professor announced the scores on the test by saying that the scores were much higher than on the original test and that one person had gotten a 97 BUT that person didn’t really need to take the test. The woman next to me whispered to me that he was talking about me. She knew it. Then she went to chat with the man in front of me about their assembly language course. Apparently many students at BU are working through the Masters in Computer Science program. Maybe I should get a fancy sounding degree title like that. It sounds impressive and I like doing the work to learn the new technologies.

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Kate has a friend who was offered a job to be a chef at Olive’s in Charlestown. She had never met me before. When we met she let me know that she knew one thing about me from Kate. That fact is that I am very persistent. She mentioned that she would have had a great time at the Swedish Nurse pub crawl had she known that we were doing the event she would have come. I also recently used the word persistent when talking with the Viapoint people. I had added to it ‘I hate to fail’.

I think it is interesting that persistent is something that would describe me. I am not sure if persistent is a compliment or a warning to others because persistent people are dangerous. In computers things that are persistent are usually bits of information that are given the right by the programmer to stay alive because they save time for the user and the computer going and retrieving them over and over again. A session with a computer is set-up to be persistent. Persistence also brings the idea of movies where a narrative is created through a series of still images because of the persistence of vision.

Someone who pesters Yahoo! Tech support for a week is persistent as is someone who sticks with a start-up for ten years. It describes a part of me very well. I want to be by continuing what I have begun and to bring each thread that has come from me to a conclusion that meets my desires and expectations.

I wonder if most atheists are persistent. If you don’t have a god or afterlife to justify existence maybe persistence of yourself and what you do is what is left to drive you naturally. The original god in the Middle East that the Jews and the Christians adopted wasn’t far from this concept. The word used for the god was “I am”, a self-referential persistence that falls only to the non-persistent opposite “I am not”. If anything God has been persistent and religion promises persistence – something I don’t actually believe in.

Enough Monday morning philosophy!

Kate’s friend found plenty of evidence for my persistence. I was obsessed with what I believe is a true social problem regarding bathroom candles. As a celebratory act that we had put candleholders and shelves into the walls Sarah placed candles throughout the apartment and lit them. I am not totally opposed to candles but I do see them as a fire hazard and while I am not opposed to them I do fear them. The scariest spot for a candle I found was when I sat down on the toilet and found that there was a candle burning behind me on the ledge of the toilet. Now I can understand that the bathroom is theoretically a great place for candles. It is naturally smelly and the candles provide some olfactory relief. I blew out the candle and went on a rant about how I would prefer not to be a burn victim who also had cracked their skull trying to stop-drop-and-roll on the hard tile floor of the bathroom.

When we arrived at Hattie’s party I also had to go to the bathroom I found myself once again confronted with a lit candle on the ledge of the toilet behind me. It shouldn’t surprise people to find that I spent a large part of the evening speaking to various guests about the dangers of toilet candles and lobbied to get enough votes to convince my significant other and host to put an end to toilet candles. (Insert no toilet candles logo here). Now I will likely drop this cause shortly but I do think it is worth fighting back. My sister has already burned her hair twice, once on a Bunsen burner in lab at college and once by a candle from a restaurant in New York. I would hate to see her burning from a toilet candle.

So if that persistent ranting about the toilet candles weren’t enough I also had an urge to play Internet Karaoke because we did have a significantly large gathering of people to make Internet Karaoke work. Unfortunately the computer was buried in the room where Hattie was keeping the coats. But with some coercion I managed to get Hattie to tell me where the computer was. I then removed piles of coffee table books to reach the computer’s monitor only to find a bizarre 3-D social game being played in real time on the screen. I didn’t know what to do with it and it was taking the whole screen. Many of the people were chatting away in completely unreadable Japanese characters. So I tried to hide the game on the screen but failed. I then cast a deodorize spell on someone else in the environment because it looked like an interesting thing to do. I probably shouldn’t have done that since it was Jose’s long standing character in some other world of virtual reality that had done it and I likely disrupt some carefully plotted alliances. Feeling guilt about having disturbed this game I went to Jose who then hid the game and showed me how to turn the volume on in the game. I then turned on the Karaoke and had a group of people singing early nineties music, Frank Sinatra, and some other choice pieces. Kate’s friend joined in and seemed happy to be singing along. Matt was also a very active participant as was Hattie’s friend Chris who loves Karaoke. Persistence rewarded… until the next morning.

Another big highlight at the party was that I finally chatted with Hattie’s friend Alex, who runs a company that oddly enough creates Karaoke games for gaming systems like the Playstation. The conversation we had was all about my idea and his independently created idea to build video games for pets. We will be meeting shortly to plot the rise of this new generation of pet home entertainment systems. I am quite excited to finally be getting to moving the Pet entertainment system project forwards.

We awoke at nine AM because we were going to have an early tailgate. This wasn’t a great idea since we weren’t asleep until 3 AM as we had chosen to watch the first half of Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story when we got home so we hadn’t gotten enough sleep for the long cold football day ahead of us on Sunday. Earlier on Saturday before Hattie’s party we had gone to Peter’s holiday party at his home. Sarah was absolutely in love with Peter’s house. I think she was ready to move in immediately after securely locking Peter and his family in the basement. I thought the basement was among the highlights of Peter’s home. It had a ping-pong table that didn’t have enough room behind it to have a fierce professional volley but worked well for a friendly game with a wager on it between Sarah and me. Even more importantly they had an area with a hockey goal and concrete oriented pucks where I got to play some hockey against Peter’s oldest daughter Lydia until she was called upstairs to do a mandatory piano recital. Another highlight of Peter’s home was a decorative piece created by Peter’s wife made of brussel sprouts and cranberries. I tried to convince Lydia that brussel sprouts are very tasty when salted properly but she would prefer to eat broccoli. We did get the card for the architect of the house who was a woman walking around with a baby in a baby Bjorn attaching her one month old baby in her chest. For convenience she had placed her cards in the front of the baby Bjorn leading to the obvious thought that the baby Bjorn is the perfect cocktail party accessory. Soon everyone will be wandering about cocktail parties with new born babies in front of them used as business card holders.

Peter had mainly invited me in order to meet with a VIP at the party who might be a good fit for being involved with ventures created in the future with Chris, Peter, and me. He was a VIP because he holds an executive position at a major bank and is on the board of