Travel
And so begins my final full day in Boston for a long while. It's a feeling that I knew was coming since last year, but finally set in. I'll be making my last rounds around the city in the morning, and plan on finishing up the packing in the afternoon, leaving Saturday morning for the 6.5-hour, 400mi / 650km trip to college. Hopefully it won't take me all that long to get situated there so that I can come back and detail the move-out and move-in.
Anyway, the past few weeks have been rather eventful:
My rooming situation has been up in...
At 10:30 this morning, I walked across the MIT Bridge to a bright, blue skyline.
At noon, I left work amidst a downpour, with fog obscuring anything after perhaps 25 floors, and was drenched by the time I made it down the street to the train. Go figure!
In the absence of anything interesting to talk about, why don't I post some ranting filler content that I wrote on my handheld a few days ago?
For the past few weeks, I've noticed that the MBTA conductors have, strangely, become several orders of magnitudes more, should I say, "enthusiastic." As I'm writing this, I'm on the Red Line, and the conductor has overridden the automated stop announcements altogether and instead substituted her almost ecstatic-sounding voice: "Now, Approaching, JFK/uMass! Please gather all of your personal belongings! Doors, opening on the left!! Commuter Rail service and local bus connections! You are our...
I was going to save this post for a time when I had a photo to prove to Antony that I am, in fact, not rich, but it's taking me too long to produce that photo.
The news as of last week is that I am now the owner of a '99 BMW 528i, which a number of my friends have dubbed the "Donmobile".
For more photos, check out this post on the SD701 Forums.
(To Antony: I am poor, the 528i was the base model BMW 5series in 1999.)
(To Dave: I don't have any plans to run over your mailbox.)
I'd like to someday compare the efficacy of an hour of the expensive Antony-sanctioned Wii Fit to the cheap Don-sanctioned method of taking a 4km walk while wearing a 15kg bag.
It's 10:35, I guess that's not too bad...
Google Maps says the round trip is 2.8 miles. So if we subtract the two minutes spent at the bank, ten minutes at the store, and another five minutes at the post office, that's... what, three miles an hour, excluding the time spent waiting for traffic to stop at intersections and resistance from 55mph wind gusts? To Antony: Don needs to get fit.
I'll post when I get back.
Podcast co-host Mark and I yesterday drove out to Rochester, New York to visit our old co-host Jeff at RIT, among other things. That said, we'll probably be recording a show later tonight, for old time's sake. Stay tuned for photos.
...square-drive screws are your friends. Phillips-head screws are not. Neither are ni-cad batteries, nor are the prohibitive price of air-driven nail guns which in retrospect would have easily cut our total time spent by five or six hours.
I spent some of my weekend helping my friend finish his Eagle project. His task was to build a segment of a bridge through a swamp in Reading, Massachusetts. Admittedly, it was a pretty good learning experience: I had some exposure to woodworking, and perhaps more importantly, as my friend put it, was introduced to something called nature: "No, nature doesn't have power...
A trip to the Boston RMV left me with some rather disheartening insight as to the way the office works. Here are a few things I noticed while I was there.
After an hour of waiting, my number was called, and I proceeded to one of the service desks. As soon as I get there, the computer blue-screens and reboots. From the boot messages I realize the machines running the RMV are running Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 4, and have most likely missed whatever security fixes were included with SP5, SP6, SP6a, and the Post-SP6a Security Rollup.
The representative at the...
<sarcasm>Aren't my post titles creative?</sarcasm> I've been trying to post something here all week, though it's been boring enough that I haven't found anything substantial enough to dedicate a full post to.
Yesterday I joined the 10k Good Friday Walk. I'd put the number of walkers somewhere slightly over 300, as we managed to overflow the 250-seater auditorium at school upon returning. Not a bad experience overall, perhaps with the exception of the weather: while it was 41°F outside (which, around here, isn't so bad for this time of year), the wind gusts of over 35mph kicked up the salt and...
"I don't speak Gaelic."
So, roughly twenty-five other guys from school and I spent five days in and around Dublin, Ireland, and I returned yesterday with some very basic Irish history, though substantially more than what I had boarded the plane on Friday with. What's more, I have a grand total of 176 still pictures and 2.5 hours of digital video to share. Get some popcorn while you're at it: this is a long post.
We departed Logan International Airport at 6:30 PM and, with the time change factored in, dragged ourselves quite groggily and jet-lagged into Dublin at 5:45 in the...