picking blueberries

Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

Not the worst way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Updates

Originally uploaded by foodnerd.

I haven't felt like I've had much time to post, or had much to post about, but I finally got around to updating the About page. Quite a bit has changed, and I guess I'm a little sad that I didn't bother to save some of what used to be there. But one of life's lessons is that, oftentimes, once you've done something, it can't really be undone. And at that point, you just have to let go and move on.

Anyway, all the big craziness of the year is finally over. Well, mostly, anyway. The wedding, the travel, the house sale, school, massage certification and licensing. There's still plenty of leftover crazy to go around -- we've got thank you notes to write and we're finally starting to take some baby steps getting the new house in proper order, but otherwise it's just everyday normal crazy.

In the last week, I took my car to the shop, had the SOOTTAD's car insured and registered in Massachusetts, played some ultimate, worked in the garden, ran shopping errands, went to a BBQ, a baby shower, a birthday party and a roofdeck concert eavesdrop (the Police concert at Fenway Park) and finally broke down and installed the window A/C* units in the bedroom and the SOOTTAD's office.

There always seems to be something. We're still busy, although I'm happy to say that it doesn't feel crushingly so. Maybe there's something about our lives that really is unusual or extraordinary, but in this, I think it's just business as usual. There will always be things that we need to take care of, planning, working, fixing, building. We have projects now, and when those are done, there are already plenty of others that are waiting in the wings. It never ends.

But I think I'm ok with that. It seems normal. Life is an everyday kind of a thing, after all. All is well.

...although a bit hot and sticky, at the moment.

* Unfortunately, no A/C in my workspace at the house, but I should be back in the office-office for the rest of the week.

Back, but still busy

...but at least we have a little more control over how we're spending our time these days.

Ingredients...

...for a good time. (for starters)

Text Spam

I got a new cellphone for the massage business. The idea was to provide a separate number that would provide clean boundaries between my personal life, my engineering life and this new massage business, while also providing a separate voicemail where I could provide more business information than I would on my own cellphone.

And so far, I've received 2 voicemails in some slavic language (I think it's Russian, but I'm not entirely too sure), 1 voicemail that was a recording selling loans, 1 voicemail from a live person trying to sell ads for the WeeklyDig. And today, I got a text message for some loan website.

Up until the last one has just been an annoyance. I try to check the voicemail on a regular basis, and actually spending the time to listen to a junk message just wastes my time. The text message however, costs me money, since I don't pay the flat rate to send or receive them. (I find that the flat rate has so far always exceeded the expense of paying on a message by message basis.) Sure, it's only 10 cents a message, but it's 10 cents I never should have had to pay in the first place.

I called Verizon Wireless about it, and basically there's nothing they can do. It's some "Premium Message" that apparently originates off the internet that they have no control over. (I really hope that means that it costs them money.) The customer service rep told me I could reply with a message to unsubscribe, but I'm a bit confused since I never subscribed to any messages in the first place. I don't even really use this phone.

The concern, of course, is that if I don't unsubscribe, I'll get more messages. But if I do unsubscribe, that unsubscribe message is also going to cost me money. And worse, I wonder if, as with Spam, you respond to one of these spam messages, they then know the line is "live" and they'll put me on a list that that will receive more messages from different addresses from the same unscrupulous spamming "marketing" company or sold to other spammers.

Fuck. I swear, the assholes make it really hard to have a kind and compassionate attitude towards the world sometimes.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Wedding Present from the MBTA

We thought it was bad enough when we discovered that the MBTA had closed the Arlington Station Entrance and exits for renovations through 2008. It happens to be the station closest to our wedding venue. Thankfully people can still use the Berkeley entrances, but it's a slightly longer walk, and doesn't open up right at the public garden. But at least people will still be able to use the station.

Today, JBar forwarded this gem published on the Globe's local news site:

Summer repairs on Green Line will halt D branch trains
"The shutdown will commence on June 23, 2007*."

Great, thanks guys.

At least there are supposed to be bus shuttles and extra express buses. And the notice says something about "distributing materials and making other preparations for the major production work activity." Hopefully that means the lines will still actually be running. But who knows?

We'll cross our fingers and hope that peeps will still be able to take public transportation and get to the ceremony on time.

UPDATE: just called the MBTA and it's confirmed -- they're shutting down the D line from Riverside to Reservoir starting on the 23rd. Yeah, thanks Boston, we love you, too.

* For those that didn't pick up on it, that's the day we're getting married.

Holy Maps, Batman!

Looks like GoogleMaps has been updating their databases and rendering engines. You can actually see buildings at the higher zoom levels of Boston, including the parking exit structures on Boston Common. Crazy cool.

Certified

Whew!
Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

More later...

For now, I think I'm going to go for a run.

A list, of sorts

This is just a mild rant. Apologies in advance.

So I've mentioned that I'm studying for the National Certification Exam for Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork. Anyway, I picked up the review book at the school that was being used for a review class. Didn't go to the class; figured I'd get just as much info reading through the book, and it'd be easier to schedule my own time rather than block out the time to attend the class -- plus I think I saved fifty bucks.

It seemed like a reasonable enough book -- it broke the subject matter into several sections and chapters and had review questions. I was a bit disappointed that it didn't come with a CD or something, since this was going to be my first time taking a computerized standardized exam (yes, I think that dates me a bit), but my concerns were somewhat mitigated because the book indicated that you could access several practice tests online with a handy-dandy passcode that was protected by that crappy silver stuff that you find on lottery tickets and game pieces at McDonald's. (Do they still do that? Is that dating myself again?)

So anyway, the book.

Basically, I'm unimpressed. I'm going to resist calling it a steaming-pile-o-crap simply because I have no other points for comparison, but really, pretty crappy. But I am going to enumerate (ironically, in an unenumerated list) my issues with the book. I'm hoping to find it at least a wee bit therapeutic. Because, you know, it's all about growth and healing.

Anyway, here we go:

• The book includes little notes in the text (which they call "display boxes") which provide "practical applications, additional explanations, and real-life examples for the material covered in the book." Great. Seems helpful. Except for the part where the authors consider the information included within them (and solely within them) important enough to create practice questions on them. Sorry, if it's important enough to be tested on it, it's probably important enough to be part of the main text of definitions.
• Y'know, I'm really glad you provide practice questions -- it's helpful to go through a few questions to see if you've understood a section, or conversely, to determine whether you need to study a certain section of material. Great. It'd probably be more helpful if you'd provide practice questions after every chapter rather than say, after the first 22 chapters, 100 pages into your 300 page review book. Whaddayathink?
• And while I'm at it, it'd be nice if the questions you're asking for a given section could actually be answered by the information in the chapters that make up that section. (ok, maybe part of this problem was that some of the answers might have been found in those stupid "display boxes" mentioned in item one, er, I mean that first dot there.)
• But you know, I'll take the ones that were in different sections, if you'd at least make sure the answers were provided SOMEWHERE in your book.
• Oh, and when you provide practice questions, it'd be really nice if your answer key ACTUALLY HAD THE CORRECT ANSWERS IN THEM. I found 3 errors that I had to confirm by corroborating them with the text and with my old class notes and textbooks. It made me wonder whether some of the other answers were sketchy. Especially when it was unclear what material was being used to derive the answers.
• and when you say "additional practice exams," I generally take that to mean EXAMS, as in, several exams. If you use the same questions and just mix up the order of the questions and the order of the multiple-guess answers for each question, that doesn't count.
• And I'm sorry, even if you're going so far as to call a reordered test a different test, um, you're only providing three tests? Way to underachieve, guys.
• And incidentally, not fond of questions that test for pattern recognition of text rather than understanding concepts. Ever heard of a paraphrase? Especially since I can't be certain that the National Certification Board is going to use the same choice of words as you. An example:
  

  Name the technique that uses the palpation of tender points to guide the positioning of the body to reduce the tenderness.
  (a) Muscle energy
  (b) Myofascial release
  (c) Strain-counterstrain
  (d) Structural integration
  
  From the text: "Strain-counterstrain is a technique that uses the palpation of tender points (or trigger points) to guide the positioning of the body to reduce the tenderness, ..."
  

  Do I really understand that? No. Did I get the question right? Yes. The second time I saw it. Do I feel confident that I'm ready for the real exam? No.
• And, by the way, the "full index" (that they hype in the preface) is not, in fact, particularly full.

And FWIW, I found the book's overall organization to be fairly poor. But that's probably pretty obvious.

I suppose one way of looking at it is that the authors' choice of organization forced me to review more subject matter because I had to spend additional time scanning through whole sections, multiple whole sections, to figure out answers to some of the questions. Not to mention my own class notes and old textbooks. Hey, thanks guys!

Anyway, annoyed, but done now. Hopefully I'll do alright on the test on Saturday.

More with the bad timing...

Civic duty
Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

So, we're pretty much settled into the new house, but there are still boxes of crap littered about, as well as new islets of detritus that are forming where systems have yet to be put into place. We just need a little time, but unfortunately, that's the one thing we don't seem to have much of these days.

Oh, and the bed we bought in February hasn't shown up yet. (We're expecting it this week. Fingers-crossed.)

The SOOTTAD has been managing the final stages of our exit strategy from the old house as well as managing its updates and repairs. But meanwhile, plenty of wedding stuff has begun backing up in our queue. We finally signed a contract with a photographer that we really liked but, um, invites? Right. Yeah, they should probably go out in the next few weeks and we haven't even come up with the wording that's going to go on them.

Oh, and I'm taking the National certification exam for massage (technically, the National Certification for therapeutic massage and bodywork) this Saturday. Which is good, because the National Cert. exam is required for the Newton practitioner's license which I'll need for the space I'm renting with a friend and classmate. It's a room in a Chiropractor's office... and the lease started Sunday. So there's a bunch of stuff that needs to be dealt with for that too.

Oh yeah, and the project at work is in the final two week stretch.

So, of course the last thing I needed was to be selected as a juror in Federal Court.

Lucky me.

Convergence

It is perhaps ironic that I have to log into my Google account in order to access my Blogger account in order to bitch about how my online identities are converging. Or perhaps it is simply telling. Or appropriate.

Regardless, I'm annoyed.

Flickr wants me to link my account to my YahooID, and frankly, the idea makes me a little uncomfortable. I remember back when they first announced that this was happening that there were some people making a stink about it in the forums, and others who couldn't see what the problem was.

Perhaps it's just more evidence of the generation gap that was described in a recent New York Times magazine article -- the gap between those who try to keep a certain amount of privacy online and those who put themselves completely online, their private life, public.

Sure, to be wholly anonymous nowadays, you pretty much have to be off the grid entirely, but I'd like to think that there's still a middle ground somewhere in there that I can carve out, with a little anonymity through obscurity and obfuscation, at least. I probably want people to find me if they're looking hard enough, but I don't really want to just drop it in their lap. A bit paradoxical, I suppose. Or like the article says, maybe I'm just fooling myself:

And after all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and naïve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure.

Back in the day, I only set up my Yahoo account so I could sign up for online stuff without getting my "real" email address spammed. Then my YahooID got tied to a bunch of my mailing lists when Yahoo! assimilated eGroups. That was the beginning of the end, I think. When that happened, all of a sudden my hidden email address was mapped to my "real" address and could be seen by groups of people that I actually interact with in the real world.

So now, if I attach my YahooID to my Flickr account, all those peeps will probably be able to see my photostream. Which seems pretty benign. Except, my Flickr account also links to this blog. And somehow, I've always thought of this blog as being a separate sort of thing. So if I link the ID, the connection's made. Probably fine, right? What's the big deal?

Well, if it's done, it's done. The internet sticks around.

And then how easy is it to out the SOOTTAD, who is fiercely protective of her personal information to the point that there are no unprotected pictures of her on our *private* online photo gallery. I don't even post many pictures of myself in order to reduce the odds of her being identified by association.

Except that the information is already out there. There is a picture of the SOOTTAD out there on the interwebs, with her real name attached to it even. And the Yahoo email address has always been tied to the Blogger account. It just didn't have the reverse mapping from Yahoo to Blogger is all. Oh, F. I already linked to the blog on that stupid Yahoo360° page.

Dumbass. (F'ing Yahoo, pushing and pushing and pushing to continue the convergence. At least I'm not bumping into the namespace issue that other people are having.)

Like I said, maybe I'm just fooling myself.

My timing is impeccable

So, I just switched over to Vonage last week. I've been really happy with the service so far -- cheaper with more features. I get voicemail notices via email. I can check my messages by calling in or online via the web. And I had totally forgotten that my phone supported caller-ID. Schweet.

So, what happens one week later?

Vonage Owes $58M in Patent Case
In a ruling that could have wide-ranging consequeces for the entire competitive voice replacement market, a federal jury Thursday found Vonage guilty of infringing several patents held by Verizon, and awarded $58 million in past damages and imposed a 5.5 percent royalty fee on future Vonage operations. ...

I see that things are operating business-as-usual around here.

On the non-technology front, we're hoping to be largely moved into the new house later this month. There's still lots of little stuff that needs to get carted over or triaged, but I was thinking that I'd finally have some more time to refocus on work, get more wedding planning completed and maybe even hit some side projects I've been setting, er... aside. But I forgot that I got called for Federal Jury Duty at the end of March through mid-April.

As always, perfect timing.

I expect we'll end up closing on the old house right around mid-June, just to properly gum up the works.

When life gives you lemons...

Ice sculpture
Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

...make lemonade.

'Course, seeing as lemons aren't really in season 'round these here parts, it's more like:

when life gives you three hours' worth of shoveling of hard packed snow and layers of ice... make art.

In other news, my lower back is now wicked sore, and I can barely hold a pen in my hand to write from all the shoveling. Oh, and we met some more of the new neighbors helping them get their car unstuck from the snow(ice)bank at the front of their driveway. (Which, incidentally, probably would have been unnecessary if the son had accepted my offer to help dig out the driveway. But, whatever.)

New Banner

Having some trouble getting the image uploaded and usable from Blogger.

Jumping back in; 5 Things

Well, school's done. We only have graduation left this coming Sunday and that'll be it. I'm going to have to spend some time reflecting on what I'm really going to do next -- plenty of half-formed plans that I've tossed around, but I need to give things a chance to sink and settle in.

Of course, there's no shortage of things to do right now. Things are finally getting under control with the new house -- I don't even want to go into the saga involved with hiring people to refinish the floors on the first floor except to say that it was scheduled to be finished in the middle of January and we just had our last interaction with the contractor this morning. We still need to pack and move. And we've really kind of dropped the ball on that whole wedding planning thing... I think we were supposed to send out save the dates about two months ago. We still need to meet with caterers, find hotels for guests, invitations, flowers, photographer? honeymoon?

I finally got around to dealing with some mail that was lying around and as I looked more closely at my National Geographic renewal, I wasn't quite getting what it was saying about getting the January issue or the next issue until it finally dawned on me and my brain was like, HOW THE HELL IS IT ALREADY FEBRUARY?! It's like I completely missed January.

Anyway, my friend Leah tagged me with a meme, like, a million years ago, so I figured this might be a good time to have at it. It's called "5 things you might not know about me." And, of course, the problem that most people experience with this exercise is trying to figure out what people don't already know. People either already knew me before they started reading this here blog (hello, Dr.J) or things are fairly self-evident simply from what I've already written, even if I haven't stated them explicitly. (Hey, did you know I'm a bit insecure? Wow, really?) And then the big challenge: the SOOTTAD has instilled in me a great distrust of putting out too much personal information out on the interwebs, so I have to balance telling you about me, without, y'know, really telling you about me. And more importantly, without outting the SOOTTAD.

So anyway, all that has probably made this exercise more of a challenge that it's probably supposed to be, but hey, I have a history of overthinking problems, so it's really just par for the course.

Ok, here we go:

1. After a shower, I always swipe off as much water as possible with my hands before towelling dry. I'm pretty sure I didn't away do this, but I haven't a clue when I started. I think I'm trying to make the towel have to do less work.
2. In high school, I was the fry guy at the local Carl's Jr restaurant. I worked 3 hours a day (the lunch rush) and the moment my shift ended, I would drive home, strip off my brown polyester uniform and take a shower to try and wash the smell of grease off of my body. I don't think I swiped off back then. That job lasted about 2 weeks, and is the only time I ever worked in food service.
3. I have the (unfortunate) habit of singing when I play certain songs on the piano (and guitar). The repertoire has dwindled somewhat over the years, but I'm still left with a handful of songs, including one or two by Billy Joel.
4. I started using stippling as a drawing technique because it was easier to cover up mistakes. While it's not always an optimal form for creating certain textures, (wavy hair comes to mind, actually, all hair) for the most part I think it's generally easier to render recognizable images because it lets a viewer's brain do more of the work. It's sort of like the way we see specific shapes in clouds -- your brain trying to organize information into identifiable patterns -- and sort of how it's hard to draw clouds that look like specific things while still looking like clouds and not a drawing of those specific things.
5. Despite the aforementioned issues surrounding the publishing of ever more personal information on the web, I do have profiles on several social networking sites, including MySpace. But for the very same reason, my MySpace page currently has 0 friends.

That last one seemed kind of lame, but I'm kind of at a loss for anything else. I mean, you all know that I was divorced, right?

I'm not so much for the meme-tagging, which is probably best since there are only a handful of my peeps that actually do this blogging thing. (and there's that intrinsic Ponziness to it that does kind of bother me) But I will send an optional tag to the SOOTTAD, just in case she wants to participate. Despite feeling strongly against posting personally identifying information, she's mentioned that she's felt sad about being left out of the meme game by some of her food blogging peeps in the past.

Almost There

Hope all y'all are doing alright; I'm hanging in there... not really ready to jump back into things just yet. School is just about over -- just one more day of class and graduation the following week -- but there's still plenty that's keeping me occupied. Maybe I'll try easing back into it sometime next week.

Goodbye, old friend

Goodbye, old friend
Originally uploaded by tallasiandude.

Hope and the Pelagian heresy

Perhaps there's been a bit too much thinking today. Or feeling. Or something. But whatever it was, there was definitely not enough working that needed to get done. And here I am, thinking, or feeling, that I should leave it be and do what's left to do around the house before going to bed, and then going to bed, and I'm sitting here writing a post that I've probably started and cancelled at least six or seven times already in the last half-hour because I thought I should just leave it be because it clearly wasn't ready to come out just yet.

Does any of this make sense? (Don't worry, it gets worse.)

So after learning about what happened to Helen Hill, I was thinking about how these things happen, and what can be done, and what it all means. Which is to say, how do people come to do these terrible things? And, how do you go on after something like this happens? And, well, what does it all mean? And I came to a point where I was thinking about free will.

And it's just like you're watching one of the Matrix movies, and it sounds like a cliché as you hear Keanu Reeves as Neo saying in your head: "It all comes down to choice."

Jenny Davidson begins her post "Helen Hill chose to be good."

You can succumb to the darkness and wallow in despair or you can find the strength to stand up and try to make it work. It seems hopelessly cliché, and yet, it resonates. Maybe it's just that I've watched too many sappy movies, but there it is.

I've recently came to accept that the challenges we go through, the difficult times, while unpleasant, are a part of life. An essential part of life. 2006 was a pretty rough year for me, but I think I went through a lot of growth. I'm in a better place, I feel like I'm a better person. And I realized that without a lot of that hard stuff that went on last year, I probably never would have gotten here. Which is not to say that I'm going out of my way looking for trouble, just that when it comes, I try to accept it for what it is and then do the best I can.

So the idea of free will wandered into my brain sometime around lunch. Later in the afternoon, the SOOTTAD sent me the post by Jenny Davidson where she talks about an idea from a John Passmore book which mentions the Pelagian heresy:

One version of that idea is the thing called the Pelagian heresy, the assertion (contra Augustine, who believed that man could be redeemed only by God’s grace) that man could perfect himself by the exercise of free will.

She later quotes an excerpt:

But we know from our own experience, as teachers or parents, that individual human beings can come to be better than they once were, given care, and that wholly to despair of a child or a pupil is to abdicate what is one’s proper responsibility. We know, too, that in the past men have made advances, in science, in art, in affection. Men, almost certainly, are capable of more than they have ever so far achieved. But what they achieve, or so I have suggested, will be a consequence of their remaining anxious, passionate, discontented human beings.

It is through struggle that we can make ourselves better, and we can help and support one another through it.

Anyway, I feel like I'm rambling a bit, but this whole thought process was nagging at me. And I kept trying to leave it be, until I caught a little synchronicity in Today's Show with Ze Frank. (Of course, theoretically, it was ultimately my choice to post this, right?)

I think that what I wanted to do was provide a small counterpoint to my previous post. I know what to do. It's just that sometimes, I feel so drained. And I need to take a step back and gather myself together before digging in and pushing forward again.

Do what you can. And hope for the best.

Mad World

Helen Hill died January 4, 2007.

I did not know Helen Hill, but it still makes me terribly, terribly sad. But the sadness is overcome by outrage to learn that she was murdered in her home. And it hits that much harder because she was a friend of the SOOTTAD's. As was her husband. As is her husband.

When the SOOTTAD told me about it, she described them as "two of the most purely nice, kind, loving, creative people I have ever met." And all I could think was, what is wrong with the world? What kind of world do we live in where such a thing could happen? Where such a thing could happen to people like this?

The headline in the New York Times -- "Just Days Into the Year, Killings Toll Hits 8 in New Orleans" -- seems absurdly distant. Same for the Shreveport Times. Another body count in a world full of violence. You could quickly scan it and wander off, troubled but largely untouched. I know these things happen, but knowing them, even once removed, cuts to the quick. The connection brings it into sharp relief, and yet it isn't necessary to have that connection to feel its impact. It was fundamentally a terrible thing to happen. A terrible thing to happen to anybody. It sparks anger, outrage and then more sadness.

And yet the despair currently surpasses the outrage right now.

I think about the insulated worlds in which I move. In school, I'm in contact with many people who want to be healers, people who want to make a living making the world a better place. Lots of warm fuzzies flying all around. A hopeful place. It makes me want to bring understanding into my perspective. People can be swept up by the tide of circumstance; desperation can cause people to do terrible things. But this seems to go beyond my understanding. I can't put myself in a context where one could do such a thing and still be within my perspective, my values, my world.

And I am left finding that I can only ask, how can you heal from a thing like this? All I can think to do is try and cherish all the good that we still have and do our best to protect and fortify it against all the bad that is swirling around us, but there seems to be something fundamentally wrong with that too...

The world's gone bad, and I wonder if it's gone past the point of no return.

Before and After

Also known as, what I did on my winter vacation...

Master bedroom

Second bedroom

Third bedroom

Gotta get back to the everyday craziness -- it's been a pretty painful transition so far. There's still plenty more to be done, but it probably won't get dealt with in any kind of appreciable way until the SOOTTAD is back from Chicago for good later this month.