In an attempt to better humanity I have downloaded Windows Media Encoder. Using this tool I will be able to share what I see on my computer screen and add audio voice overs to it. The practical applications of this are countless but my primary motivation was to allow people to experience the wonder that is a smart organizer first hand. But before that I first needed to go through a bit of the learning curve and to install my cheapo Labtec Vese 504 desktop microphone. Upon installing it I recorded this gem to test the levels. It is something about underwear.

I then started to play with skype but with most communication tools I had nobody handy to skype with. I am easy enough to find on Skype. I am Dan Housman with the username dhousman. So I chatted with Jeremy for a while. He was in a cafe in Australia or something like it.

So I graduated to the WME from pure sound recording and I recorded this documentary about Microsoft Excel.

I then went to do some testing through remote desktop while installing. It is also an out take including some spilled cranberry juice.

I intend to be better at this by the end of tomorrow morning. I will fix things like the resolution. My handling of the juice and my own rhythmic vocal pattern.

I was inpired to do this after listening to NPR this morning as they were going over celebrity voice overs that most people don't even know are the celebrities like Julia Roberts for AOL. I recommend the game guess that voice over star.

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On Easter Sunday I went with Sarah to her parent's house in Bedford. Among my many pursuits is to eventually be able to fly an airplane but since I am a little short on cash and I can't even drive a stick shift car yet I decided to work this weekend on solving the problem of learning to drive the stick shift by driving Sarah’s Passat around. On Saturday we took the Passat to a local church parking lot where Sarah sat in the car and gave me useful instructions on how to drive the manual transmission. The general advice she gave me was the same as the advice I had been given during prior aborted attempts to drive a standard. They are the following – To get the car into gear you should lift up on the clutch and down on the gas so that one is going up and the other is going down at the same time. So throughout Saturday for about an hour I managed to make both Sarah and me sick in a strange rocky amusement park style ride where I would stop the car, try to put it into gear, stall it so that it rocked back and forth jostling us to near the puking point, and then turned the car off and started it again. I got a little further than this about 20 percent of the time where the car would either go into gear or be rescued from stalling out by pushing back down on the clutch. Sarah wasn’t too impressed with my style when the Passat actually did get into gear because my solution to the problem was to give the car ridiculous amounts of gas to overcome inertia that would then cause the wheels to make a screeching noise and skid as it popped into gear. Finally at the end of a long hour where both Sarah and I were sweating heavily and beginning to show early signs of having a pre-post-traumatic stress disorder we went back into the condo so that we could fight over who got to puke in the toilet first.

So on Sunday I got some great advice from Sarah, her mother, and her grandmother on how to drive a stick shift including the basic diagram of an H that Sarah’s great grandfather had shown her grandmother to explain where all of the gears were and warnings from Sarah’s mother that I should watch out for the kids in the neighborhood playing ball. Afterwards I decided to spare Sarah a repeat of the pre-post-traumatic stress and set out on my own in the Passat to drive around the quiet Bedford neighborhood of Sweeney Ridge Road with a stick shift car. My basic strategy was that my problem with the stick shift wasn’t driving it but getting it to move, so I defined my practice routine to be to move the car into gear in first, drive to one of the cookie-cutter mailboxes in front of the next house and then stop, take it out of gear and then start again to try to get it into first.

At first I was having tremendous problems as I did the day before but I had upped my percentage of successful starts from 10 percent to about 40 percent within 10 minutes. As I was creeping from house to house and had gone around the block about three times I noticed that some of the people who were out walking on their quiet suburban Stepford street were looking at me as I proceeded from mailbox to mailbox. Sweeney Ridge Road is not the most central street in Bedford. You need to take three or four turns off of the major minor road in order to reach it. So although I hadn’t expected it I was confronted in my slow crawl of a journey down the street by a police car driving in the other direction patrolling the street. The pair of officers looked at me as they drove past to commit my face to memory and most likely took a photograph of my with a hidden camera on their cruiser and then wrote down Sarah’s license plate for any future reference as a potential source of suspects for future crimes in the area. (See the Bedford Police Log). I don’t know yet if I made the log since the edition covering Easter has yet to be published. I can imagine the log entry:

A suspicious looking Passat was reported slowly driving from house to house on Sweeney Ridge Road. The driver had a red beard and was looking into mailboxes and listening to Led Zeppelin.

I had been at it for about 45 minutes and was getting very good at popping the car into first gear. The trick for me was that I finally realized that it was a bad thing to pull all the way up on the clutch. The right thing to do is to leave the clutch near the point where it catches and then slowly come up on it as you feed gas to it. The up/down advice hadn't mentioned that the last 5 percent on the clutch is where you need to take your time pulling up. At least that is my opinion on how I was doing in learning. I could be doing it totally wrong though. So I was starting to get better at it and was increasing my pace from each stop. It was a nice day and I was sweating due to the stress of trying to learn how to drive the stick shift so I had my window open. A six foot two man with a moustache on a mountain bike drove past me and looked me in the eye as he biked by. I stopped the Passat because I wanted him to go by before proceeding. Rather than biking on he made a snap decision, squeezed tight on his brakes, skidded around into a 180 and then biked back to address me in my window. He said 'What are you doing here?" while making a threatening face. I was clearly sweating and already nervous so I told him that I was learning to drive a stick shift car. He wasn’t satisfied with this answer so he asked "Do you live here?". I told him I didn’t so he asked, "Why are you here then?" I told him that my girlfriend lived down the street as he continued to encroach me bending down and examining me with his big head practically into the car window. Then he asked "What is her name?". He was clearly trying to foul me up with a cross examination question. He was probably an evil Bedford lawyer. I squeaked out "Sarah Carvey?". He seemed to have a glint of recognition come over him so he let me go while seeming to overcome an internal struggle of whether to accept my answer or pull me out of the car by my Boston College golf shirt and Zildjian jacket to pummel me on the street for putting his family at risk for a child abduction. Then he biked off.

I managed to get the car back into the driveway shortly after that incident. I'll be flying an airplane in no time. Probably down the street from Sweeney Ridge Road at the Hanscomb airfield.

Microsoft released this new update to the search.msn.com site where they have people writing about interesting things that they found. It is a new thing for search engines from what I can see to actually point out interesting things. Right now it is just a media gimmick with a bunch of fictitious characters like Cy a guy who is into conspiracy theories. It is funny that they are pointing to specific search terms where you can find a video and then the other search results come-up as well. The search results below the entry are pretty funny. While the search results probably will change quickly this one for Behind Closed Doors, a Japanese Chicken of the Sea commercial, the search results included Behind Closed Doors: The Horrors of Animal Hoarding and Behind Closed Doors –Expert Opinion About Masturbation.

Today was user feedback day. What that means is that I personally attempted to contact everyone who had downloaded the software for the past two weeks to ask them for honest feedback about the product. This is the recommended way to make a product better according to most mainstream marketing books, successful entrepreneurs, and expensive advisors. Doing so should be only attempted for people with strong egos and are not at risk for severe life endangering depression. Basically asking for feedback on a new software product is a masochistic activity akin to walking around as a Caucasian reporter during a riot in Los Angeles.

So while I didn’t receive death threats I did manage to get plenty of disheartening feedback. The summary of the feedback is that our software should change the marketing literature to say that we are an uninstallable application that takes too long to start-up then causes systems to slow to a crawl while being unintuitive and arrogant and then can’t be completely uninstalled if it had been installed. My favorite comments of the day were as follows. The authors will forever remain anonymous:

“My impression is that the software is arrogant. It simply assumes that
it is the best of everything and gives no links back to a familiar
environment.”

“It was confusing to me, and I wasn't sure if learning how to use it was worth the time and effort.”

“Unfortunately, I didn't get very far and uninstalled the program. It was too confusing for me.“

“I am very open to new environments and am sure yours is good; I just didn't trust what was going on.”

“I believe there is a fair way to go with this product. I was disappointed that this was a thick client application and not a browser based tool. I do not feel it is intuitive.”

So after a long day taking a beating from the user community I went home to read my latest Annals of Improbable Research. A couple of articles referenced stood out to me. The first was:

Kiwi Women Complaining – “An Investigation Of The Effect Of Lifestyle, Sex Roles, And Demographics On the Complaining Behavior of New Zealand Women,” William Strahle, Michael Duffy and Ralph L. Day, Journal of Consumer Satisfaction, Dissatisfaction, and Complaining Behavior, vol. 2 1989.

I looked and the JCSDCB journal does have photos from their annual conferences in 2001 and 2003.

Since it is Easter I also was fascinated by a military paper entitled Jesus the Strategic Leader that included a full Pyramid Model of Jesus the Strategic Leader. Photo diagrams from Gregg F. Martin’s “Jesus The Strategic Leader” report from April 5, 2000.

Although nature in New England is starting to show signs of spring emerging in the form of crocuses and budding trees awakening from a long and heavy winter I have found that I am covered with a large volume of death oriented imagery. Easter is among the perfect examples of a morbid life-death duality found this time of year and today is Easter Sunday so it is particularly of some interest. The stated reason for Easter as a holiday is that it commemorates the death of Jesus Christ when he was nailed to a cross after a last Passover supper. The holiday itself has many festive elements about spring and birth though including the searching for eggs, fecund bunnies, and yellow or purple chick shaped marshmallows on sale at Walgreens. Passover itself, the original Easter celebration, is shrouded in a lot of death images. The climax of the Passover story is about the worst plague possible being placed upon their Egyptian task masters to have their first born son slain. Don’t forget the Lulov and the palm leaves that people walk around with this time of year. Jesus is God’s first born son and he gets the short end of the stick right after Passover.

I have been watching the first season of Six Feet Under lately because Sarah and I finished off the whole Seinfeld DVD set. I have become a big fan of the writers of the show because unlike most television and movies where the dialog and emotions of the actors seems flat I have found that the people in Six Feet Under have very real responses to each other. At times I wonder whether they actually wrote the dialog at all or if the people were just told to improvise a real conversation. One example I saw of this was a conversation between Nate Fisher and his girlfriend Brenda. They had been getting deeper into a relationship and she had pulled away. They then got to examine why and she told him that she had gotten into serious relationships before and it had never worked out so she had to back out to avoid the pain she had before. It was a very real dialog and very similar to my own experience in new 3-6 month relationships. The same is true in a lot of the scenes in the series for me. I could just be a morbid person but I think that the truth is that death is such an overwhelmingly important part of the reality of life. So when a writer and actors are brought into a show that is allowed to treat death like a regular part of every day activities then the content becomes free to be true. Even reality shows like the Bachelor don’t seem anywhere near as real as Six Feet Under. Reality includes death and it isn’t a small piece of the equation of life. People like me worry about what might happen if my parents die, what I can do to live longer and healthier, what my legacy would be when I die, whether I am spending the short time I have well or poorly.

In the Six Feet Under episode that we watched last night a child accidentally shoots himself with the parent’s gun. It is that nightmare scenario that they warn you about on the big billboard over the Mass Pike as you pass Fenway. In discussing the death of a child Brenda mentioned this: “When a child’s parents die you call the child an orphan. When a man or woman’s spouse dies you call them a widower or widow. But when a child dies there isn’t a word to call people left behind. I guess that is too fucking awful to have a word.” I also am a fan of John Irving. His books also seem a little fanciful but they have a reality to them as well. When I read the World According to Garp for the second time I read the preface where he explained some of his inspiration for the book. He felt that most of Garp and his writing is about a father’s fears about the lives and safety of his children. I also recall a Jane Goodall special from PBS about a mother gorilla whose baby died. She starved to death alone in mourning.

The news is filled with the Congressional case about Terry Schiavo, the woman in Florida that is in a coma, brain dead, a vegetative state or whatever the expert witness wants to claim in order to support their case. The fight is between the right wing, now in power of congress, fighting for the life of a daughter and the ability to usurp the control the courts have over life and death against the left wing fighting for the wishes of a woman as told through a husband. Jeremy was inspired by the event to write his own clarification of what he wants to happen. I quoted his weekly email below. He’ll be back in Brookline by the end of April. Happy Easter. I’m heading to the Carvey family Easter gathering tonight.

On reviewing how spring is intertwined between birth and death my thoughts and conclusions on Easter and Passover are this. Certain stories stand the test of time with people because they resonate with the most basic of instincts programmed into the genome through the constant picking and choosing from natural selection. The survival of children and their genetic passing of the torch of each individual's own genome created a strong selection pressure for paternal and maternal instincts. These bred instincts cause us to feel a truth and resonance that we can't help but maintain an interest in rituals and stories intertwining our thoughts and lives with the loss of children including the children of our own enemies, our own children, or the loss of a divine child representing that central fear in a broader spiritual sense.

In light of recent events in Florida I would like to clarify the following to as
many people as possible:

In the event that I, jeremy m. isikoff ever am determined to be in a vegetative, mineral, bacterial, viral, fungal or other non-human or non-conscious or non-living but non-dead state or altered state of any sort I absolutely desire to have any and all means employed to keep me in such state of death avoidance indefinitely and at any expense including but not only including the following methods: tubes, wires, pulleys, batteries, pumps, servos, iron-lungs, monkey, pig or other substitute animal parts, cheap plastic replacement organs, computer chips, carburetors, dual overhead cams, windmills, nuclear reactors, levers, buttons, string, duct tape, shoe laces, massive injections of fetal stem cells, bubble gum, transmissions, differentials, symbiotic parasitic organisms, man-machine interfaces, experimental medicines, voodoo potions, votive candles, prayer, feng-shui, liquid nitrogen, antifreeze, flubber, medicinal marijuana, pyramid schemes, pyramid shaped objects, crystals, psychic healers, acupuncture, that guy vinny with the magic hands, virgin sacrifices, virgins, breast therapy, radiation therapy, and any and all manner of quackery or charlatanism necessary to delay my death or at least make the boring non-conscious state less boring to those around me. In addition I wish to be always outfitted in a beige suit and a panama hat except on my birthday when the hat can be swapped for a birthday hat of the paper variety and one of those holiday honker things you blow and it makes a noise can be connected to my breathing apparatus via a T type air hose onnection. Said honker must be removed the following day however and not left hooked up out of laziness in anticipation of my next birthday like a Christmas tree decorated and never taken down.

Additionally, being out of shape in my present conscious state, I would like to be put on a strict regimen of unconscious workouts consisting of heavy exercise of all major muscle groups including abs and gluts and biceps and legs as well as aerobic exercise so should any of the aforementioned therapies bring me from non-conscious state to conscious state i will also be in a studly state of body shape. It would also be kind if i could be attended to by only female blonde busty nurses. I would also like to have stephen hawking and richard feynman’s lectures played regularly as well as bob dylan albums and npr.

Continuing, should anybody claiming to be my "legal guardian" object to any of the above therapies or attempt in any way to let me "die with dignity" they are to be immediately revoked guardianship and guardianship passed to the next person in my family willing to keep me alive as long as humanely possible in any of the above mentioned non-conscious states.

Additionally, so that no conflict of interests should arise, such guardians are notified now that nobody in my immediate family is specified as beneficiaries to my assets (consisting of one bank account) and that such beneficiaries (all former girlfriends) are listed with the bank that holds my money and such money can be dispersed to those beneficiaries upon my real and actual death and not merely my changing of states.

Finally as to custody of my cat chloe, she can in the event of such altered states remain with the newall family as long as she is brought to visit not less than once weekly for at least 3 hours. I hope this clears things up. (BTW I’m completely serious here)

On Friday afternoon Sarah and I borrowed the pug dog. Since it was Stephanie's birthday recently I decided to take him to Petco to find a good toy that would suit both Stephanie and him. When we arrived at Petco I noticed that the magic that I used to have when I went there seemed to be missing. I can’t explain why but it was just like going to any other store to me. I used to get very excited to bring Bijoux to Petco and it would be an adventure to get nylabones, doggie beds, squeak toys, rawhide chews. We would meet other dog owners, sometimes neighbors like Mike and Bethany about to bring their own puppy home and looking for parental puppy advice. The people at the store used to fawn over how beautiful our dog was. This time it was just an empty experience walking around. We resorted to looking at the pets themselves including the birds, fish, and reptiles. They don't sell dogs at Petco anymore. I was a little bummed out that the store was lame so I researched which electronics products were available at the store and how much they sold for as part of my video games for pets project. The main products were the electronic collars that give shocks to the dogs if they bark or go outside of electronic fences. Most of them were over a couple hundred dollars. It confirmed that pet owners will spend a bundle when motivated to on their little buddies. We took the little buddy and proceeded home.

On the way back from Petco the PT Cruiser made a boing noise and when I looked at the dashboard I saw the temperature gauge had gone into the red. So I turned the car off at the light and then pulled across the street into the KFC to give the engine time to cool and me time to think. We had only gone about half a mile and were still a mile and a half from home. Sarah mentioned that if we were out of oil and the engine were to overheat a piston could shoot out and the engine would be permanently ruined. So after about five minutes of cooling time I started-up the car and then spent another few minutes trying to negotiate my way around the drive through at KFC where a chain link fence had fallen down blocking any logical exit from the lot. The PT Cruiser went boing again so when we reached a long traffic light at the end of North Beacon I turned the car off as we waited.

I spotted a Valvoline oil change shop that was just around the corner from the KFC and made a straight shot to the back door exit. Sarah was complaining that they were probably closed and that I was on the wrong side anyways. I pulled the cruiser around to the front side of the shop and tried to explain my problem with the car overheating to a man who looked like Pedro Martinez might in about 10 years. I pulled into the bay and had to slowly because there is a huge hole in the bay that exposes an underneath part of the Valvoline shop. In that area I believe it is where bad souls go to suffer since you can apparently work down there but as you do random fluids spill out of the cars above including engine oil, neon green coolant, and blue windshield washer fluids.

The team at Valvoline were interested in my car and placed a rag over my engine causing it to steam tremendously. Sarah and the pug dog stood behind a glass wall where you can watch your car by treated like you are in an operating theatre in a hospital. Leelin didn’t seem to have much interest in the whole affair and the fumes from the shop were making Sarah sick. She also claimed to be cold but didn’t want my jacket. The engine was steaming very heavily and one chubbier Valvoline oil change employee was slowly turning a cap within the engine where a large volume of steam was shooting out. I asked him what the problem was and he said that I had no coolant and the radiator was overheated. When this happens immense pressure builds along with superheated gases in the radiator so he needed to release the pressure slowly through the cap to cool the engine and to make way for the coolant to be added. He mentioned that if he were to quickly release the cap that it would shoot into the ceiling at about 100MPH. It was similar to the problem of opening a shaken can of soda.

The pug dog was quite indifferent to this comment but it led me to join Sarah and Leelin behind the safety of the glass wall. The crack Valvoline oil change team then took control of my car and found a large jug filled with the special coolant, not the bright green stuff, that was needed for a PT Cruiser radiator.

Since I was already in fluids mode I also let them know that I likely didn’t have enough fluid in the steering system because it was making a ton of noise when I turned the steering wheel and I could also use some windshield washer fluid. They pumped both of these fluids into the steaming engine through these long hoses connected to pumps that worked like soda machine spouts with the Wonderbar attachment from a pub. The severe state of dehydration and fluid abuse that I had caused the PT Cruiser led the man who looked like an older Pedro Martinez to inquire whether I bought the car new. I told him yes. He then asked if I took good care of it and I emphatically shook my head no. Sarah chuckled and the pug dog looked around curiously.

When the whole filling procedure was complete I asked Mr. Valvoline what the fee was for the wonderful service he had done on the car. Being used to a dealership I was expecting that it would be somewhere between $100 and $500 for the labor and fluids combined. He let me know that Valvoline doesn’t have any pricing structure for providing fluids for steering, coolant, or windshields. Their policy is to provide a top-off service for any of these fluids for free to either customers or people who come in off the street. His recommendation to me was to give a tip to the crack pit-crew who had serviced the car. I fumbled with my wallet for individual tips and settled on a $20 that I gave him for the work he had done.

Later I drove the pug back to Stephanie and the car was running wonderfully, cool, and the steering column no longer squeaked. Leelin was jumping for joy when he saw Stephanie and James. I think he had been plenty scared by having been handled and driven to Petco by a petsitter with such terrible bad car maintenance. I would apologize but when I kissed him goodbye I recalled that pug dogs have horribly bad breath.

So if your car needs fluids or even think you need fluids I highly recommend the people at Valvoline oil change pit stops. It could change your life. Tell 'em Leelin sent 'ya.

We made a sale this morning. It came in from the Internet from Denmark. The product is only $50 but it is exciting to make a sale to someone you have never met for a product that is just bits any bytes. So, of course I have been walking around all day with my chest out thinking I was destined for greatness. It reminded me of the article I was reading last night in the Annals of Improbable Research. No it wasn't the one about how yawning could be closely connected to sexuality including facts that Chimps that yawn more often tend to have higher levels of testosterone and are often higher in the social ladder when it comes to reproduction. I have been yawning more since I read the article. The article I was reading was about copying of citations. It included this little passage about greatness.

Greatness? Or Just Simple Probability?

During the "Manhattan Project"(in which scientists created the first nuclear bomb), Enrico Fermi, the physicist, asked General Groves, the head of the project: "What is the definition of a great general?" Groves replied that any general who had won five battles in a row might safely be called great. Fermi then asked how many generals are great. Groves said about three out of every hundred. Fermi conjectured that considering opposing forces for most battles are roughly equal in strength, the chance of winning one battle is 1/2, and the chance of winning five battles is 1/2^5 which is 1/32. "So you are right General," said Enrico Fermi. "About three out of every hundred. Mathematical probability, not genius."

I have been thinking that I lose a lot of time while driving to Burlington and back that could otherwise be productive. That is why I intend to start using the productivity boosting car desktop. It is only $62 with free shipping and handling. Here is some more info... from OnlineOrganizing.com. Seriously... if I could just type while I drove it would work fine and be relatively safe on the highway.



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Last night, March 20, was the opening night for Off the Shallow End. Our next performance will be on April 3rd, which is also opening day for the Red Sox. It was a great success for a first performance of a bunch of students. I had hung up my improvisational glove and cleats when I finished with MIT and made a mad rush to become an entrepreneur at 930 Mass Ave. I was inspired by the Roadkill Buffet and set out to become an improvatreuneur, a person that passes through life to become whoever I needed to be to fill the role needed. I could be a CEO, a VP of Sales, venture capitalist, marketing, engineering, QA, scientist, writer, graphic artist. What difference does it make who you are if you are going to end up playing a role anyways.

The show was funnier than I had expected us to be. We had been flat during the practice on Tuesday night with three people missing due to extreme illness and half the group moaning about fevers high enough on the FM dial to cause amnesia. I had needed the practice as a learning experience on the microphones and got chewed-out by Sharon for making knocking sounds when nobody was knocking and getting into a pushing match with Aaron while trying to pretend to be little kids but ignoring the scene itself in the foreground.

The audience was a big help. I could see as we stepped out that a lot of people were there to see me. My parents had come, with my dad sitting like he normally did to watch my baseball games as a kid out in the park behind our house, on the road during lights games for the All star team, Babe Ruth games at Albemarle, and varsity games at Newton North when I didn’t really play much. My mom was happy to have come. This morning she wrote me an email about how much we made her giggle and to keep having more gigs. Sarah had brought a big crew including her mom, Lynne, her sister, and Nick. Lisa was in the front row with Dave and Robert. Hattie had found a seat but not next to Kate and Matt. Bringing in the full ChannelWave team were Ron, Jenn, Stephanie, and James. So out of the 90 people in the audience I had 15 ringers. Thanks to all of you who came. It was good to have a full roster rooting for me.

I recall a bunch of things from the show. I had been a gardener posing for a pair of old ladies that liked to look at the sexy young gardener and I was hosing myself down and rubbing my chest hand hair with the hose used for watering the rose bush. Joan and Mike got into a funny little fight in a scene. Joan is eight months pregnant and Mike called her fat. So she retorted that he was going very bald for a seven year old. Joan also did her Juan Carlos impression while Suzy played a knocked-up wife not interested in having a baby. The crowd was great because whenever they laughed it was clear how to make them laugh again by making whatever we were doing bigger. I also managed to play my typical role from home – a man in love with his computer to the point where he neglects his wife. In one scene we had multiple people picketing with signs in Mike’s living room trying to convince him to sign petitions. We had let ourselves in by sneaking through the window and unlocking the door.

I did a monologue about growing up in Watertown and having the fire department stop Aaron Dushku and me from lighting snakes and firecrackers on the curb in front of his house. Aaron Dushku's name is familiar because his sister is Aliza Dushku, a sexy actress from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I remember the last time that I met her it was Aaron's turn to change her diaper in we took turns making farting sounds with our lips on her stomach. So I can say I kissed Aliza Dushku although she would deny it.

Following my little monologue about the fire department Gadi, Aaron, and Mike were in a scene on a roof and threatening to jump off. I got to play the police officer telling them to jump off the roof. At first I just wanted them to jump into my untested police net but then I started to threaten to shoot them with snipers if they didn’t jump. We finished the show with a Scrabble battle royale where Marlena needed to find a word with both Q and Z in it. She came up with Quazar and then all hell broke loose as we had planned at the beginning.

After the show we celebrated with relief and awe that we had been funny drinking a bottle of Veuve Cliquot that Gadi had procured along with a bottle of champagne Mike had brought. Sharon gave us good kudos. After the show for Improv Foundry we went back up to participate in the Improv jam. Schmelzer was absolutely amazing in a flashback sketch he did where he played four or five roles including a photographer asking for ridiculous looks from a girl who did an amazing job of creating the looks he asked for, a tsunami vacationer, and a chinese restaurant co-ordinator who barked out numbers for everything. After that we all went to Bukowskis and had some food and beers to celebrate. What fun! It is good to be alive on nights like that.

So that was opening night. Tonight I watched Mr. 3000 with Sarah. With all of the baseball hearings last week about steroids I had it on my mind. I am still kicking myself for believing that the reason for homeruns in the 90s was that the balls soak in a different type of mud each year and that changes the dynamic of how bouncy the ball is. I remember pondering and feeling amazed at how such a little thing as rubbing a baseball in some mud could make such a huge difference in the performance of the balls and the outcome of the game. The real answer turns out to be steroids. This is the perfect example of why you shouldn’t jump to conclusions to get behind a good theory as a scientist until it has been proven. The mud theory of homerun balls is just plain stupid.

Mr. 3000 is not that great with regards to continuity but it had a lot of levels for me. The story was of an aging former star who had been selfish his whole career and was now back to achieve the last three hits he never reached. It is a universal theme to try to return to something that you left behind and whether they did a good job of it in the movie I could relate after just having done my performance after ten years of staying away from an audience other than the rare karaoke night out.

As I was watching Mr. 3000 one of the main characters, a homerun hitting star, looked familiar to me. I guessed that T-Rex might be someone who had been on my baseball teams when I was a kid. He looked like Brian White. Now I didn’t play baseball until I was about 9 but I immediately tried out for little league when I was 10 and I was put on the Phillies. We weren’t the best team in the league but we had one of the best athletes because we had Brian White, the son of Jo Jo White, on our team. He was the cockiest little ten year old anyone could ever meet but he was incredibly charismatic and was sexually about five years ahead of me when we were both 11. Brian wasn’t just on the Phillies. He was also on the traveling all star team and later joined the same Babe Ruth team as me, the Oak Hill Cubs.

So I had played about eight years of baseball with Brian White and while I thought Bernie Mac’s swing looked like an actor’s. T-Rex had a real baseball swing. As I watched the credits roll by at the end I saw what I had been guessing throughout the movie. T-Rex, a baseball star, was being played by Brian White, my former team-mate and baseball equal. I think I batted third and he batted fourth.

I haven’t played baseball in a long time. In high school when I hurt my back it started to become hard for me to bend over to pick the grounders off the ground in the outfield. I probably didn’t help myself by needing glasses either since I was misjudging fly balls and not hitting too well. I had done well in practice at times. One afternoon during batting practice I hit three balls from the backstop over the fence in a row at the Newton North field while we were keeping score of the number of bases our hits would be worth. At the end I ran around the bases for a victory lap and Joe Blanchard whispered something intimidating, nasty, and bullying in my ear. My lack of playing time also could have been that the coach had a grudge against Jews since Scott Mazur and I spent a disproportionate amount of time on the bench together throwing little rocks into overturned helmets. The last time I remember playing we had a ChannelWave outing at Thompson’s Island when the company was at it’s biggest and Charles Chu had just gotten a $5000 referral bonus for bringing a business development team member into the company that was all spent after the retreat in a frenzied drinking party at Tia's.

The right field fence for the softball field at Thompson Island is really just a pile of bushes. It made a short porch. I hit the first pitch so far into those bushes that nobody could find the ball.

Unfortunately I didn't get involved in any NCAA pools this year because of the disbandment of the old company and it is tough to do with such a small number of people, most of whom don't watch college basketball - myself included. Usually I like to pick a team like Gonzaga to go a long way because they have a cool name. It probably is for the best since I would have picked BC to go a long way and they didn't.

I did see a story about another betting pool this morning on CNET called Dylan Nerdery Unleashed Online about betting in a similar way on Bob Dylan's set lists.

I put the pictures up from the CW Reunion party ... View them.

Don't forget to come to the Off the Shallow End Improv shows/recitals this Sunday or on Sunday April 3rd. The shows are at 7 PM and making reservations through ImprovBoston and coming early is apparently highly recommended.

The past week I have been working towards the send date on our press release and web site updates announcing our latest version. It has been fun times for me and includes many of my favorite start-up adventures. I haven’t worked on a tiny team of people for years and I love the nature of dealing with situations where you need to figure out how to solve problems yourself because nobody else is going to solve them for you. I became the copywriter, QA, product manager, documentation author, web site HTML designer, graphic designer, PR guru, and partner and alliances manager when I joined this gig.

The great thing is that these items are all interconnected. The product needs to have the right stuff in it to be ready for the release and it has to work. But to make the release really of some value you need a big partner that can vouch for you since your voice needs to be amplified by someone. In our case we decided that Google was as good of a partner as we could find so Chris built an adapter to their desktop search. We also decided that we could make more waves if we offered something for free, so Chris and Aaron re-architected the licensing system and the registration system – which was required anyways so that we could offer the core of the product for free. The fun part was working to time when the software was ready – sorta working with the licensing system on Wednesday, the press release was approved – Google last Friday, putting the web pages up, and most importantly getting the product live on the Google Desktop Search plug-in page.

Now I can’t say that everything is beautiful since I have been relearning HTML after having put down Homesite as an editor in 2001 only to find that Macromedia is much happier with Dreamweaver and supporting strange new things like cascading style sheets and the frightening DIV tag. I also got a chance to learn a little about using Illustrator to produce a couple of graphics. I'd rather use Photoshop but I didn’t have it handy at the time and Illustrator does a much better job than Paint. The biggest problem is that my artistic sensibilities with the visual arts are roughly equivalent to a tone deaf singer.

So the results of the release about 24 hours after we went live on the GDS plug-in page, and 18 hours after we went live with the PR Newswire feed is that we got about 100X increase for today over our average day of downloads.

We even got a sale directly attributable to the whole process. I am enamored by the ability to sell items without the long negotiation, RFPs, and calls to the board that are so necessary to sell enterprise products. So I am living with the rush of seeing my stats that I obsess over do their short term hockey stick jump and having a grand time imagining how much fun it will be to tackle Flash programming and make some animated ads that put our point across.

Tomorrow is the big ChannelWave reunion party. I am looking forwards to seeing everyone again. I heard some people like Stephen D. won’t make it but I think we will all have a grand old time reconstructing our past lives. Other people were probably thinking and searching among memories of ChannelWave. I received this note today as an anonymous reply to one of my postings…

"You were the angel I needed when I needed one, and for that alone, ChannelWave was my miracle. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your caring and patient soul."

When I see a message like this addressed to me, even anonymously, I remember what people always tell me about my father or mother being someone important in their lives because of how they cared and tried to help people. I am proud that I might have learned something from my family as I grew up about priorities and can put it into practice in what I do for work. Building a world where people feel wanted is the best way for me to feel wanted and fulfilled myself. Thanks to whoever wrote the note. I only wish I could make more enduring miracles. But with grateful words like that every day I would barely need to eat or breath and I can keep believing in my dreams of living in a better world.

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I had a chat session with Jeremy this afternoon as he was waiting to see if his helicopter pick-up to drop him onto a glacier in New Zealand would occur because it was a cloudy day. I was busy franticly making web pages and updating pages to prepare for our press release scheduled for tomorrow morning so that the web site reflected what was included in the press release. I also am running out of time to promote the big improv event this Sunday and on April 2nd. The postcard, which is way cool is available in PDF form.

When I got home it was already about eight and Sarah had gone wild with her order from Vinny Testa’s after probably forgetting that they serve portions for groups of ten. So we got through the salad and the scampi but there was a large tray that looked like it came from a caterer that went right into the fridge.

We had been debating how little we had prepared to do tonight because our latest movie selection left us with only one movie – The Five Obstructions and given that it seemed like an artsy movie similar to Run Lola Run, Sara thought it would be better to read or put her head in the oven than to watch the movie that we had.

Luckily Kate needed to get her Rio charger back from the ski trip so she stopped by sporting a spiffy new and straight hair cut. She had already gotten herself some sushi but otherwise she could have helped us with the massive tray of pasta, cheese, meat, and other items that we never opened. Since we didn’t have any entertainment other than each other we just sat and chatted for about 45 minutes. Kate was a good source of entertainment for us since she has good stories. We talked about Easter and Passover a lot because it is coming soon. Kate had a very fun event she used to go to with her parents as a child where they converted an entire golf course into a giant Easter egg hunt. She loved the hunt but was not successful as a finder of the eggs. So her father would keep a couple of eggs in his pocket handy and artfully drop them on the ground near young Kate to give her the illusion of having found the much sought after egg. The discussion about egg hunting reminded me of the Passover Afi-komen, the matzoh piece that we Jews have to search for to end the Seder. I think the easter egg is some blend between the search for the Afi-komen and a pagan ritual.

We were considering when we would go to Olive’s to test the patience of Kate's friend Meredith and try her pasta. I mainly wanted to learn more about restaurant party culture. Kate and Sarah, with some prodding on my part, got into their stories from crazy blue collar jobs from when they were younger where the workplace was filled with massive drinking, lots of promiscuous sex, and plenty of drug use. At one place Kate worked at the boss only hired pretty girls and then would try to seduce them. If he was making progress they would get better shifts but if they didn’t then they would be relegated to dreaded shifts like the 8 AM Sunday brunch shift. Sunday brunch was dreaded because everyone would drink until they would drop on Saturday nights and then have wild promiscuous sex or so it was implied. The fry chef at the restaurant was hired because he was a drug dealer and could supply the staff including the chef adequately with cocaine. So on the Sunday mornings when Kate was working because she wouldn’t play the manager’s games she once in a while would serve a dish then visit the bathroom to regurgitate then on to the next table. One table at a time.

Sarah had some crazy camp stories involving wild times in Bedford between camp councilors and swim instructors who would have full multi-keg parties on Thursday nights and then blunder around with massive hangovers on Friday mornings with sunglasses on to keep control of the little tykes in the camp.

I was feeling jealous and left out because I lacked a time and place when I worked in an incestuous, drug addled, party culture location. I just told them about how I worked with Hitoshi, the Japanese post-doc and got pretty good at working the centrifuge and doing mini-preps. There were probably lots of wild orgies involving the e coli and yeast cells when we zapped them via electricity or heat shock to induce plasmids and cosmids but other than that it was a dry summer.

I often come across situations in product management for software that I find a perfect activity for a computer to do on my behalf and when I present it to engineers they chortle that while the computer can calculate the value for me it would take five minutes to give me the answer and I would be unwilling to wait that long. So while direct and specific questions may be incompatible with my interaction to my computer, it has plenty of spare cycles to do work for me while plugged into the power cord that I supply it. This is why people have recruited desktop computers to do useful things like look for aliens (SETI at home), and calculate the folding structure of proteins(folding at home), or transmit illegal copies of Metallica songs to strangers while they are apparently idle. While I think these are noble goals I also have the belief that while slavery is not a moral way to operate with people, that the computer really is my property and it should be doing work for me at all times. In fact I grew-up with a good Jewish guilt ridden upbringing where my parents told me that I had to clean my plate because people in other countries and in unfortunate places in this country didn’t have enough food to eat. So I detest the idea that I am wasting all of these valuable computer cycles when I am not sitting in front of it.

Lately I have been provided a lot of software that does work for me on my computer in the little tray on the right hand corner of the screen. At first these did things that could be done far away from me but more efficiently like a weather-bug to provide me with the weather. This has gotten supplanted by more useful bedtime machinations like indexing my hard drive so that I have a workable search tool from a couple of major desktop search products like Google Desktop Search and MSN Desktop Search. At Viapoint we are working on ways to organize all of the information in your life while you sleep so that the next day you have what you need all tidy and ready to go.

This type of as you sleep software I think is a revolutionary leap despite it having a long history of other products and many impatient initial users getting nervous about the big numbers of memory consumption or the fighting among the software products for the unused cycles of the processor to trick the others into believing the computer is really active. There is a long history of computers working while we sleep. Products like OLAP take mounds of data that you can’t just query and mold them into summaries that executives can use to make statements like "The COGS numbers look good this quarter and the forecast for APAC is showing real progress."
I think going back to working in your sleep to organize information goes further back than computers themselves. As humans we sleep and scientists suggest that when we dream our brains are actually doing work to cement ideas from our short term memory into our long term memory. Our sleeping brains are busy while we are dreaming synthesizing the trends and flushing out information that has been deemed unimportant for memory. We are organizing and indexing our own internal desktops. So I am hoping, while I don’t want my unconscious slave computers to get too unruly, that in a sense I can satisfy my guilt in wasting cycles by allowing my computers to do the dream work of organizing my thoughts at night while I do the same in my plush bed.

Alternatively I could give access to nocturnal aliens who need my computer to support a complex deceitful plot to monitor weather patterns in an attempt to find the perfect weather for an E-Day to invade the planet and enslave our race while listening through their orange and green ear bud horns to "Nothing Else Matters".

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Today at lunch time Shelley asked me if I wanted anything from the Supermarket for lunch. I had to turn her down. At first I had thought that the idea of going to the Shaws across the street from us was a great idea because the supermarket should have some great lunch items and more selection than anything else. I was mistaken on our first trip there when I was first warned that the sandwiches made at the deli counter took a long time to make and then discovered first hand through a disaster of a roast beef sandwich that took over half an hour to make. So I have mainly eliminated eating at Shaws for lunch except for days when some groceries like cans of tuna are needed around the apartment.

I was taken a few weeks later to La Cascia's, an Italian sandwich shop and bakery, that is a five minute drive away from headquarters. This shop is among the best sandwich shops I have been to. What sets them apart is that they seem to not only make sandwiches but the folks at the counter love making them. They try to embellish your order and show sincere interest in creating a fantastic sandwich for your lunch. One guy in particular is my favorite because he just oozes with his love of his job. Today when I was ordering a sandwich for Chris that I was taking back with me he took a special interest in what kind of mustard would be best. When I wasn't sure about spicy or yellow he offered to send me home with some spicy mustard in a container on the side just in case.

I think one of the keys to a good sandwich shop is whether they serve Boars Head meats. Boars Head is all over La Cascia's. They even market Boars Head spreads. That was what Eddie, the cuban guy, who ran Montrose used to rant about. He would make sure everyone at the little grocery store knew that he carried the Cadillac of meats. Eddie was slow to make his Cuban sandwiches but I couldn't resist that pressed sandwich filled with pickles, swiss, ham, turkey, and sauce.

So I go to La Cascia’s every day now and I cycle between sauce oriented items like the chicken and eggplant parm, Italian’s, steak and cheese, steak tips, paninis, and tuna melts. Yum.

Time for dinner! Sarah brought home burritos.

BTW - the key info:
La Cascia's Bakery & Deli
326 Cambridge Street # A,
Burlington, MA 01803 (781) 272-5203

While on the ski trip last weekend Sarah's co-worker Tobey recognized me from somewhere in her past. We quickly rifled through some options like MIT, ChannelWave, Newton North, and friends. Toby looked back into her memory banks and recalled that we had met at temple. I am not someone with a long history of joining synagogues so the only temple that I could remember going to was one at Wheaton College that my parents used to take Lisa and me to on high holidays when we were children with a woman reform rabbi who had a choir that sang Leonard Cohen (Who by fire) and Cat Stevens songs (Morning has broken) along with spiced-up versions of traditional favorites like a song that I don’t know the name of but sounded like hashana haba-ah. We also would feed ducks on Yom Kippur near the cafeteria as we counted down the hours to dusk.

As it turned out Tobey also recalled the same choir from Wheaton and had recognized my grown face at 30 from whatever younger face she likely saw when I was a teenager or younger. While not completely miraculous that she could recognize a face from a crowd from so long ago and before I had a beard I can only wonder whether we had met or talked. Maybe she had been a girl my age at another pew that I distractedly had a fantasy crush on while hoping the rabbi would stop making me pledge my devotion to the Hebrew lord in Hebrew.

I see people everywhere who look familiar to me. Every once in a while I see them enough times that I can track them back to where I first saw them. The best example of that is the guy who sells wine at Best Cellars that I kept seeing at Red Sox games and bars. I saw two recognizable people in the past few days. One spidery woman at the rock gym who was thin with dyed orange and blond hair looked like she might have been someone who I went to high school with. Another blond short woman at the bar I met Hattie at also looked like she was familiar. It is interesting how in crowds of people you can vaguely recognize a single face and from that point on the rest of the crowd disappears as your mind goes to work on finding the relationship to them.

Speaking of being unable to recollect relationships, I met Hattie in the bar formerly known as the Good Life. I'm sure the new bar has a new and memorable name but unless I go there every day I quickly fall back to the name I know for the place. Hattie and I had some miscommunication on where and when we were meeting as she was waiting for me to call her to let her know which bar I would be waiting for her in. So I was in the bar alone.

When I am in a bar alone I usually have a book, video game on my phone, or some other distraction keeping me from looking like a single guy hunting for a new girlfriend. This time I didn't have any of these items handy so I stared blankly feigning interest in the college basketball on the 42 inch HDTV screens behind the bar. This was working fine for the first fifteen minutes I was waiting but one gnarled looking man with a stubbly face who was sitting alone and wearing a Patriots baseball cap thought I could use some companionship and was looking for some for himself. He offered me the seat next to him while I waited.

The first thing he let me know was that the brunette bartender would be really hot if she didn't have a big ass. The brunette brought me a Sam Adams. Mr. blue collar wanted to know if I had any children. I told him that I didn't yet but I was planning on it. His children must have been something on his mind. "When they are being born make sure that you are there and you film it. There is nothing like it. I loved my wife," He said as his yellow eyes grew a little watery, "but when my kids were born I loved them a lot more than I loved anything in the world. It was a whole different story how much I loved those kids than my wife. Don't get me wrong. My wife and I split about eight years ago but I pay for those kids and I have a great relationship with them. These past eight years I have been on a tear!" He looks back at the bartender's too large ass. "I grew-up poor but I want those kids to have a life like I never had. You know I could live real happy with just a roof over my head, a beer, and some clothes to keep me warm. I worry that my kids might not appreciate everything they have. That's a tough one ya' know. You want to give them things you didn't have but you don’t want them to be more needy than you are. I’m done having kids though. Last year I was with a woman and she told me when she was about four month’s pregnant with twins. I thought I was going to be a father again but then in the fifth month both them died and were born still. So I don't think I'm having any more kids."

Hattie walked in and I moved to the other bar with her to avoid finishing the conversation. I think he was glad to unload some of his thoughts on me. Maybe I’ll recognize him if I see him again?

Last night I went to see Nobody don't like Yogi with my parents. Among the malapropisms I recall one line that struck me as very smart. He was telling his wife not to worry so much that his kids spilled their drinks all the time and Yogi said – "People die, why shouldn’t milk spill?"

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On Thursday afternoon we held the first annual stockholders meeting for Viapoint. This meeting coincided with Aaron's 50th birthday. So we all trucked out after some yays to vote me onto the board of directors to MetroRock to celebrate. Entering the MetroRock gym is an entirely overwhelming visual sight due to the large volume of knobs, colored lines, muscular climbers that looked like ex-gymnasts who had found a use for the muscles needed to do the iron cross, swinging ropes, fake arches, and plush blue floors. It got my heart racing before I opened the door from the lobby into the gym.

MetroRock is a big warehouse in Medford filled with big fake rocks covered with holds. Some of the rocks are boulders about three times the height of the average grown woman. The rest reach to a high ceiling about forty feet in the air. The holds, little odd shaped pieces of plastic screwed into the fake rocks, are marked with tape of various colors to mark the routes to climb them. At the bottom of the routes the walls have little laminated paper placards that at first look like hand written awards for Jr. high school students having climbed the walls complete with grades of the child. These placards mainly start with the number five and then have some digits after them. Some, but very few have a six on them.

The numbering system on the rocks represents the degree of difficulty. Upon asking Aaron why they start at five he went through the list of the numbers before five. In a fully labeled world the floor would be labeled with a one. A one is a completely flat surface. A two is something with a slight incline but no obstacles. This would be something like the walk I had to do to get home from school every day. A three is an incline with obstacles like big rocks. I think most of Monadnock is a three. A four is where you start to get big rocks where you might climb over but if you fell from any of the rocks you would most likely survive. A five makes a sharp shift and is an incline so high you need to climb it and goes so high that if you fall then you could die.

I didn't have much of an interest in dying but I did want to climb the rocks. The MetroRock people also were averse to the concept of us dying as well so they created a policy where beginners either need to take a belay test or take a course with an instructor to learn the basics of rock climbing if you want to climb. So Shelley, Chris, and I went to take a course with a lovely instructor named Jen while Aaron and Misha, his designated friend of his son's belaying partner took Aaron up and down the rocks repeatedly.

The course was mainly about creating knots. The first knot actually was trying to fit myself into the harness itself. It was like trying to get dressed in a snake. I am hopelessly useless with knots but I managed to learn how to make the required doubled over figure eight knot after about ten tries and having made some of the worlds most convoluted knots. The trick that Jenn taught us was the one that they teach kids for remembering. Make a head, strangle it with the rope and then poke it in the eye. You also need to learn how to work the bottom of the rope. This consists of paying attention to make sure that the person climbing has enough tension and not letting go of the rope when they are falling. This would seem quite simple but among the exercises was to fall off the wall and surprise the person below. Shelley had difficulty surprising Chris and was voted the worst actor. I climbed a little too fast for Shelley and had tons of slack in the rope so Jenn thought it would be safest to make me stop climbing since I could fall about six or seven feet if I suddenly surprised Shelley and fell off the wall. I then got tangled in the rope and would have hit my head and split my skull open if I hadn't fixed it.

We did finally finish our class and were pseudo-certified for the day. In order to really be certified we would have to return on another day and take the official rock-climbing test that includes putting on the harness, tying knots, making sure the buckles are doubled over, and belaying or climbing safely. If I do this I will be able to replace my blue card with a red card and become a member of the cool MetroRock climbing community.

After the rock climbing event we all drove about five hundred miles through Medford. Medford actually is incredibly wide, and went to dinner at Bistro 5. The food there was exceptionally good, especially by the standards of the town of Medford. The place is decorated with Venetian masks and artwork featuring people in Cirque de Soleil style costumes wearing Venetian masks. It is a small place but apparently used to be even smaller since one reviewer of the restaurant online had complained that it had lost the quaint feeling after over expanding. I wondered why it was called Bistro 5 in case it might be related to the numbering system of climbers but that isn't very likely.

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The one thing I can say for sure about our ski group was that we aren’t the people who are first in the lift lines at 8:20 AM when the first lift takes off for the top of the mountain. This could in large part be due to our general understanding that the main point of a ski trip with 18 people you sorta know through various social networking circles centering around Sarah and me is to drink lots of alcohol, stay up late, and play silly games. On the first night I had cooked meatballs and spaghetti but hadn't seen Robert at all. I was placing a heavy bet against his arrival at all.

He had actually decided to save a few moments on leaving to not print the instructions from Sarah and assumed that we were staying on the mountain. So he was a little confused when he arrived at the mountain at 11:00PM after having stopped at the New Hampshire State Liquor store to purchase Goldshlager and Jaeggermeister. Kate and Matt had been far more upper class by purchasing a case of wine with labels containing pictures of birds on them to add to their bird wine label collection. Most of the rest of us just had our own plain beer, wine, and vodka.

I had been preparing Sarah’s workmates for the arrival of the Acadian wonder since two of them, Amanda and Lena, were both of Canadian heritage and with three francophones in one room I was hoping to hear an argument in French about the right for Quebecois to secede or how the Acadians deserve all of Canada. But Robert was detained slopeside for half an hour with only his wits and a white pages phone book to find the number for the address we were staying at. A few calls later from house to house and he was able to arrive about when I went to bed on Friday night.

Toby, another of Sarah's workmates, had bought a pair of snow shoes but had never snow shoed before. Toby also thought that it was good to have a name most people didn’t have but that unfortunately it was hard for her to walk in dog parks because so many people have the name Toby. Robert once walked a dog with a human name like John and had been heavily chastised by a fellow dog owner and lover for having a dog that was named after a person instead of a good dog name like Manju or Pokey. Robert also was the only other member of our ski trip who owns a pair of snow shoes. He had bought them while in his six month relationship with Andrea, the woman activist who thought he wasn’t active enough. He had fought the purchase since he figured it was very possible that he wasn't going to like snow shoes and it was just a bad investment in a relationship. Robert didn't bring the snow shoes.

So after a night of heavy drinking and wearing of hats and wigs, including a blond wig that I wore while stuffing my shirt with whatever I could find to give the illusion of breasts I went to sleep with the false hope that I could awaken to arrive just in time for the first lift to leave with my rental skis and to test the new $130 pair of goggles that I had been skillfully sold by the goggle enthusiast at the checkout line at Ski Market. They were quite phenomenal and I encourage anyone who uses crappy goggles to try the high end ones.

So the next morning Matt was going to drive over to the resort with me. I crawled out of bed around 9:30 and Matt had been preparing to leave for the prior three hours. So just as I had grabbed my coffee it became clear that I would need to sprint up the stairs and dress quickly for the mountain in order to get a ride to the slopes. Matt and I made it up and down for half the day in the morning and I met with Roberto, the mad Acadian, on the slopes after having lost Matt when I went down a different trail from him in the afternoon.

Robert gave me a full report of his adventures the night before and relayed the most interesting story of the day for single folks, actually folks riding in the singles line to reduce the time waiting, who overhear conversations while on the lift. He had been on a quad where the other three guys were chatting about their après ski the day before at Stratton, the next mountain north, where they have a small wood paneled room used as a strip club. Robert also reported his willingness to make good on the darts debt from a month ago to make me breakfast.

The skiing eventually got my legs cramped and tired so I wasn't too sad to leave the icy mountain when the lifts closed to return to the home base where people were cooking a feast for forty people. Among the heroes of the feast chefs was Matt B., who selflessly sat at home for the entire day on Saturday basting a succulent brisket instead of skiing. The dinner included the brisket, salad, chili, vegetarian lasagne, 4 cheese mac and cheese from Martha Stewart's own jailhouse recipe, lots of bread, and an assortment of deserts. The dinner went off without a hitch and afterwards Dick and I did all of the dishes but Dick did the main work because he had claimed the sink area.

The only odd hitch with dinner was when Robert asked me to pass him the brownie dessert and I tried to pass it to him. He then took a brownie as though I was serving it to him. I tried to explain that passing and serving were different things. Just before we got into fisticuffs over the right for an independent Acadian state to be as constitutionally necessary as the Palestinians right to their own state he agreed to disarm and pass the brownies to other people. He did later find a slingshot that he shot at Sarah without any provocation. It is likely that it had something to do with the Syrians pulling out of Lebanon, but you can never fully understand what the Acadians are thinking because they think in French.

So we stayed-up late again playing games and discussing with certain people whether you receive similar general skepticism from people about your character if you are an atheist or a woman who has decided not to have children. I also explained that the whole idea of converting to Judaism to make a Jewish mother happy is a silly modern thing since Jews never really believed in conversion until very modern times. Jews considered themselves a race as much as a religion. That was the whole point of the god liking them more than other people and being the chosen people. You weren’t supposed to become a chosen person by praying to the Jews god. That was what the Christians created and it was a very popular thing so there are now a lot more Christians than Jews. The Jews big innovation was that you could worship somewhere other than the one temple in Israel that held the ark of the covenant, which according to George Lucas, is somewhere in storage near Nebraska. We also played the movie relationship game while other people played scrabble.

So the next morning we were once again unable to awaken in time for the first lift. It was at this time that I had the revelation that I would never be able to wake-up early like real skiers do unless prompted by force. We probably did awaken fairly early but Robert’s breakfast dart debt payback probably added about an hour.

We did meet folks on the slopes. Kate and Matt had figured out how to cover most of their skin with clothing. When Kate had bundled-up at Bullwinkle's grill she looked like she was the invisible woman, such that if you removed her clothing and sunglasses that covered her whole body you would find a completely transparent person. Matt prepared to rob a bank before skiing with a very ghetto ski mask. I just looked like a bug with my new $130 goggles.

In all we had a very fun trip to Sugarloaf. On the way out Sarah was supposed to pick me up but the over wouldn’t turn off. Since she was my ride and the person most connected to the security deposit she hadn't picked me up on time. Instead she was calling the fire department and the owners trying to co-ordinate a 3-way call with the owner to get the right set of activities down for leaving. But after she picked me up other fellow ski folks had solved the problem with the stove. So we packed the car up with all of the things people had forgotten, like Kate's Rio charger and Robert’s Jaeggermeister and headed back on the long car ride back to Boston.

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It is quiet in Brookline tonight amidst what looks like a blizzard. This is partly because I unplugged my faulty disk drive from the pile of cables inside of the desktop computer. At least a blizzard that is what it looked like for the past hour as I fended my way through the snow from Inman Square to try to pull the PT cruiser into my newly rented parking spot. The spot is a good fifteen minute walk away and I have only successfully parked in it three times so far. I finalized it on Thursday night as I was panicked to find a space for March. The owner of the space was an eccentric man named Dan and he was speaking with me on the telephone as I was spinning around a parking lot near Ski Market to rent a snowboard for the ski trip this weekend to explain to me how far he thought the space might be. Dan was giving me the first shot among the eight calls he had received from his craigslist posting because I called him first at 10:30 PM the night before and because my name was also Dan. I figured that when it comes to Brookline parking, especially after having an awful night prior learning about the Thursday street cleaning rules in Allston that even if the space was in a remote farming village in Malaysia I would take it. I would have gone directly to meet Dan but he was on a mission to Toys R Us that he would later explain to me so I had to wait until 10:30 PM before I could rendezvous with him to review the parking spot.

Unfortunately Ski Market does not rent or sell snowboards. They directed me downstairs to the underground where they deal with the dregs of the society interested in sports, clothing, and general culture surrounding skating. When I arrived in the basement below Ski Market I entered what appeared to be a non sequitur scene from one of my dreams. The room smelled musty of the funk from unwashed cotton hooded sweatshirts. On one side of the basement room two twenty five year old kids with colored hair and skater gear were sitting in a mock beaten living room watching skating videos. Behind them was a room about the size of a basketball court filled with home fashioned wooden ramps where a skateboarder was rolling up and down with a helmet on.

Behind the counter a heavily pierced muscular but overweight man was standing with headphones on in front of a large sleeping dog while another man behind the counter was talking intently on his cellular phone about a deal that was going down. I tried to gain the attention of either of them for a minute without any extensive verbal nudges but I finally gave the one with the headphones on a verbal cue that I was interested in being served. I probably didn't look like their kind of customer when I asked them if they rented snowboards. Their answer was a firm no because they had just had a sale that they run every year to sell all of the snowboard rentals as used snowboards and thus they no longer were keeping any snowboards in stock. This might seem like a normal thing to do but at the moment there is a blizzard outside in Boston and it is likely to continue to generate plenty of snow around here until mid-April. So I went back upstairs to rent skis at the Ski Market instead. All of this was totally avoidable since last year when our ski trip fell apart due to bad conditions and a bed/flimsy piece of wet foam on the floor by the area where the wet ski boots were stored, that was unsleepable for Robert, we had been given vouchers for Sugarloaf including a lift ticket and a rental at the mountain. They had expired but Robert used his when he arrived.

So I had loaded the car with downhill skis for the night and dropped off Sarah when I arrived at Dan, the eccentric man with the parking spaces house. I realized immediately that I was in another country and would need to bring a source of water and supplies for a three day hike every time I wanted to go to my car, but I had to put the car somewhere for the night, and I could use the exercise walking back. It took me over two hours to return home to the apartment because I both needed to talk to Dan about everything and then had to hike home. Dan is an interesting person. He claims to be one of the few people on his street who is not a doctor or a very successful software person. He grew up in the house where he now lives.

Dan and his wife are artists who put on plays to raise money for women and children in the Boston area affected with AIDS. Their house would probably fall down if all of the collected items inside of it were removed but they provide a full store of interesting items. Upon entering the house I was introduced to the lovely black and white hallway. In this hallway they have collected items from any part of their lives that are only black and white. This includes stuffed animal zebras, prison uniforms, dice, frightening white faced clowns, album covers, and a host of other items. I would have taken a picture of it if I had the camera with me. At the end of the hall is the kitchen where a small speckled Dachshund (Weiner dog) lies in wait for you to approach and then barks behind a piece of plywood that separates the kitchen from the black and white hallway.

Dan is considering writing a book on plastic figurines. He has become an avid collector of figurines and began to introduce me to his collection. It took me a while to realize that a figurine is basically what I would call an action figure. His trip to Toys R Us was to acquire some new figurines since he likes to buy them in the box at prices below $10 when they are marked down by the stores. He was very interested in the fact that they have begun packaging heroes along with villains in single bundles and showed me his Spiderman and Doc Octopus bundled set. He also found it interesting that sometimes the manufacturers will sell the same figurine but with different heads. He found two versions of the same Wolverine, one where he looks human and the other where he appears to be wearing a mask. He also was fond of a group of figurines that were children dressed for Halloween as the cast of Sponge Bob.

Dan was also nice enough to explain to me how the parking situation works in his driveway. He has room for three parkers and his car. His car actually blocks all three parkers into the driveway so it is better if the parker is looking to leave later in the morning or enter earlier in the evening. Dan is happy to monitor the driveway and he will avoid parking people in until 2:30 AM by watching to see if everyone is in. The driveway in the winter becomes exceedingly difficult to back out of so his recommendation to me was to back into it down the steep hill and then cut the car to the left in reverse around the other cars. He claims there is a grotto in the yard that parkers are welcome to use and that if I don't have a place to garden that he and his wife would be happy to give us space in their yard to create our own garden. I didn't see much room for either a grotto or a garden but it isn't spring yet so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

So tonight I went to park my car after coming home from Improv and distributing the post cards to everyone in my class to advertise the show we are doing on the Sunday March 20th and Sunday April 3rd (7 PM reserve tickets in advance at improvboston.com and don't come late or you will lose your seat). As I tried to reach Dan’s street the PT Cruiser started slipping and sliding as it tried to mount the hill to reach the parking space. I backed it out then drove around Brookline looking for another route to the top of the hill but finally gave in and parked on Alton Place a few steps from 50 St. Paul since I may as well have a convenient parking space if they are going to give me a $50 ticket. I do feel at the moment like I am gambling with house money because last Wednesday night, the one from the big fiasco of driving around Allston looking for a space, I didn’t actually get a ticket. Maybe I'll get lucky again?

The ride up to Sugarloaf on Friday, while a long four hour journey, was punctuated with some highlights. The highway was marked throughout with signs welcoming the 133rd home from Iraq including the standard American flags hung from bridges, hardware stores replacing their spring sale promotions to thank the soldiers and cardstock in windows in small towns. We got more connected with the 133rd when two police cars came charging from behind me to scare the bejeezus out of me. They passed the PT Cruiser and then caused a small traffic delay that I contributed to with my own rubbernecking as they removed some well wishers with a large fabric sign standing on the side of the road near their Volvo.

Sarah, the 133rd, and the PT Cruiser all got hungry at the same time so we pulled into a rest stop for some Burger King. Just as Sarah and I got out of our car about five hundred soldiers dressed in desert camouflage gear abandoned their luxury transportation buses and entered into the rest stop. We did the only reasonable thing and joined the parade of well wishing family members at the rest stop in some clapping and cheering.

At first I feared that this could cause a major delay for obtaining sustenance. I wasn’t about to deny any soldier who risked his life for the country and freed the Iraqi people, his right to eat his first cheap hamburger on American soil. But the soldiers were far more interested in the bathroom, the well wishers who were greeting them with the jump and hump excitement expected of a wife with children missing her husband at war, and swarming the pay phones to make calls to co-ordinate their final arrivals. Only a couple of shaved heads hopped into the line at the Burger King with us. I was tempted to give the army folks a congratulatory statement like "We really appreciate everything you have done." or "good work" but I couldn’t find a good opening and I lacked the context to just grab a random soldier to congratulate and thank them. Someone should let the soldiers know that people are thankful even if they appear to be focused on snarfing down spicy chicken burgers. I almost loaned my cell phone to one of the soldiers waiting in line for the pay phones but Sarah was in the bathroom at the time so it was awkward.

The highway itself had some great signage worth noting. I would have taken photographs of it but I was driving and it would have created a real hazard. The first one that I noticed was a road side Applebees on Rt. 4 that advertised the following: "Beer Pong Tournament – Inquire Within". We also passed a small shack about the size of three garages that was in the middle of nowhere in Jay Maine with the sign "Steppin' Out Disco Club". My favorite was a small blue two story house built too close to the side of the road for most people to consider living in it. Where there would normally be a pathway into the house the owner had purchased a gigantic plastic arrow about twenty-five feet long and about eight feet high. The arrow came almost all the way to the door making it appear that you might need to avoid it in order to get in the door. Written on the arrow in replaceable letters was "Jane's Electrolysis".

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While discussing the potential market for ethnic lawn gnomes with Hattie, Robert, and Jose over breakfast at Sugarloaf I learned the history of the Buddha bathtub shrine. We had gotten connected into the whole lawn gnomes meme after Hattie had been calling Jose, her fiancée, "dude" in an effort to avoid using pet names that might be embarrassing. But after having it pointed out by helpful fellow ski lodgers to her that she kept calling her fiancée dude she changed over in one instance through a stumbled mixture of the two where she called Jose honey-dude. Robert and I thought that the appelation honey-dude would make a good figurine or lawn sculpture. It would look like a plastic bear shaped honey dispenser but would be dressed in trendy gangsta street clothes. But the real question came down to what people actually do pay to put onto their lawns including figurines of religious figures like Mary and Jesus.

Jose, the honey-dude, had noticed that in Cambridge and Somerville he often sees figurines of saints, mostly Mary, surrounded in a half-shell made out of what looks like a bathtub. Hattie actually knew that the half-shell doesn't just look like a bathtub but it actually is a bathtub. Apparently the bathtubs that were standard installations throughout the Boston area were the kind that stood on the floor on feet, often feet looking like talons clutching balls. As styles changed and bathroom technology improved with injection molded plastic tub-showers many of these baths were replaced with space saving shower capable built-in tubs. Most people don't know how to dispose of an antique thousand pound metal tub with metal feet.

The more religious Catholics of Boston, many who were living in lower income immigrant Italian neighborhoods in Somerville, are apt to place shrines to their favorite saints in their lawns. The insides of the talon footed tubs made a perfect backdrop to the shrines of Mary so they dug holes in their lawns to bury the tubs so that the top third of the tub would form a half-shell around the virgin's figurine to protect it from rain, raccoons, and amorous lawn gnomes. They would also paint the inside of the tub to make it colorful to highlight the religious beauty in their yard.

America is a land of new immigrant populations moving into urban centers and rent in the Boston area has continued to increase to gentrify neighborhoods. The Catholic Italians who settled Somerville and planted bathtubs in their yards, have been supplanted over the past fifteen years. One main immigrant population settling around Somerville is the Buddhist Chinese. The Chinese have a long history of gardening as can be seen in their artwork. They are also familiar with the idea of placing figurines in their yards and temples for beauty and luck. Upon finding lawns with a tasteful lawn decoration of a bathtub with feet planted into the ground with the mother of the lord Jesus Christ in front of it, they tastefully removed Mary and put obese but jolly Buddha sculptures into the half-shells instead. That is why if you look carefully into some yards around Boston that you will find a Buddha in a bathtub.

I would like to make a coffee table book out of these rare creatures that are so rich in the history of tackiness. I haven't actually seen on yet or else a photograph would accompany this short historical note. I intend to go on an official expedition by car and to make a PDF based map publicly available of Boston that includes markers for all of the bathtub oriented lawn art. Maybe I can publish it with the money I make from the ethnic lawn gnomes?

Jeremy arrived in New Zealand. Among his thoughts was this passage about passing through customs.

"So sally last week persisted in asking me if i could
ever say anything positive about anything and why I
was always being so critical and making such sweeping
generalizations like "americans have bigger houses
than australians". Now frankly this is a rather
obvious statement considering ive yet to see a single
australian house near any city with more than 1/4 an
acre of land, most of them situated on 1/8 and being
about 1000 square feet or the size of a smallish
american apartment but she was irritated at my
supposed critisism of everything and her country. Let
me set the record straight: I love australia. I think
the girls are beautiful, the country wild and varied
and empty and adventurous and full of beauty and lots
and lots of really cute fuzzy little animals. My so
called critisims are really just me pointing out the
subtle differences that i find intriguing and that i
like to think about because i have nothing else to do.
She found this excuse less than convincing and for
all practical purposes kicked me out. Upon which I
decided to go to new zealand and meet my sister who
was flying over to contemplate emmigrating to a
country that I believe but am here to confirm is far
inferior to australia in most ways except perhaps
skiing and rugby. Strangely the customs agents in New
Zealand didnt belive this. Not the part about their
country being inferior but the part about me deciding
to come to new zealand the day before yesterday on a
whim when my girlfriend kicked me out. They gave me a
really thorough snap questioning trying to trip up my
ridiculous girlfriend kicked me out story and sister
coming to New zealand story and finally I broked down
and told them the bird god told me to visit new
zealand and start my new life as supreme lord of the
ferns, living in low-lying gullies completely naked
and emerging only to feed on the flesh of young virgin
girls. This seemed to satisfy them and they let me
proceed but not before another gentleman approached me
later in line and asked me a final snap question about
what language i was programmer in to which i replied
C# and he nodded his head and said "pretty boring
stuff eh" as if he had any clue what the fuck i was
talking about. Customs agents hate me, which is odd
cause if i was smuggling things you'd think I would
shave before flying and not travel alone looking a
drug smuggler. Maybe they think im using reverse
profiling against them who knows."