"Desert Caution: Once 'Stormin' Norman,' Gen. Schwarzkopf Is Skeptical About U.S. Action in Iraq"

[via Daypop Top 40]

Get ready for the big show tonight with the "State of the Union drinking game"

[via Daypop Top 40]

Yesterday, when she got back to her hotel room in New Orleans, Terri watched the original version of Bedazzled, which features Dudley Moore and Eleanor Bron. Earlier that day, back home in Cambridge, I had watched Doctor Zhivago, which features Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie. I suppose that's only amusing if you're familiar with the Yo La Tengo song, Tom Courtenay. Terri claims that she thought of the line from the song when she saw Eleanor Bron, too, but she still associates her more with the Beatles' movie Help! (which is of course also the reason that she appears in the YLT song). I can say no more.

We hung out with Chek today. He's in town because his roommate was in Boston for a science fiction convention, and he decided to come along for the ride/mini-vacation. It was good to see him and catch up. We now have a good reason to go to upstate New York more! We are working on improvements to the web site, and just ordered food from Bombay Club.

Go Howard Dean.

Dean criticized the president's education plan, called the ''no child left behind" act, by calling it the ''no school board left standing" act.

Reading The Godfather. It's kind of pulp but I can't put it down. Schmaltzy and no great style, but the story really hits some buttons emotionally, and physically. In the chapter where Michael kills of Solozzo, I felt an adrenaline rush.

In the New Year's spirit of taking stock of where we were and where we are going, here's Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think," which predicts, among other things, the PC and hypertext. 

I find its optimism is a bit giddy, even though I am generally a technophile. I wonder how many of today's "visionaries" will be as correct in 50 years. I certainly can think of none of their visions which I actually think I want to see come about in 50 years. I can think of none who have such a humanistic outlook; everyone these days is hung up on different ways to fundamentally alter what humanity is, that I can think of no one who even tries to prescribe what a good life might be.

Maybe I'm fishing for a counterexample.

Orgnet. Interesting.

Happy wedding day to Kim & Glenn! I'm killing some time before I have to go to my assigned duties, so I thought I'd lug the laptop to somewhere where I could get internet access, so, even though Terri is going to kill me for setting foot inside one, I'm at a Starbucks, leeching from one of their new wireless internet access points. It's a bit rainy outside, so even though the Manassass battlefield is only an exit away, I'd rather be at Starbucks. I've always felt that there are enough civil war buffs in the country that it's well covered. I'd rather remember things just as they're about to be forgotten. Last night Terri spent the night in Alexandria with Kim, so I was on my own at the hotel this morning. There are three or four different kids' teams staying in the hotel: field hockey, soccer, track. The continental breakfast room was packed with them this morning. I ran in to Al and Debbie, then Suzi and Anita. I ran to CVS to see if they had any umbrellas better than the one I already have, and when I got back Sue and Nate were down, just about on their way to the hair salon in Alexandria, and they were talking to Kay and Larry. I talked to them for a while, and then went back down and talked to Helen and Harold, who were sitting with "Johnny O." (a.k.a. Watson) and Maria. I probably should actually head out and see if I can get cell phone reception and try to get in touch with Terri. I have to admit that I'm completely addicted to being on the Internet, and was starting to feel weird after being disconnected for the past few days. I also have to point out that I would be utterly addicted to C-Span Radio if we had it in Boston. Til next time...

I think Edie likes The Pogues.

Maybe you noticed, maybe you didn't, but the site's down right now for repairs. If you don't care about the painful details, skip the rest of this paragraph. I bought a new router, because Microcenter had wireless routers on sale for $60 after rebate, and then I could use the wireless card for my Forrester laptop at home to have a connection to the Internet anywhere in the apartment. But something about its port forwarding is different than my old router's, so for some reason, I couldn't get Apache configured to actually answer requests right. So I decided to just reformat the hard drive on this machine, and start from scratch. I set a lot of things up on that machine before I really knew what I was doing, so I had been meaning to do this for a while. Anyway, it'll be back up by the time you read this, since you won't read this until it's back up. I have time for these home IT projects since Terri's away in D.C. at a conference. She's staying with Kim, so they'll also be doing some wedding-oriented stuff like Kim's bachelorette party. We flew to Pittsburgh last weekend for Nora's wedding. It was all a whirlwind, but it was nice. I got to meet many famous people from Terri's youth, like the other Gallers and Nora's friends Nico and Leslie. We also made an effort to drop in and see Greg and Dawn since Dawn is with child and we're excited for her. We stayed at the farm, and even though I swore to myself that I'd do no manual labor, I got some nice scratches on my face while helping Mom & Dad clear some thorn bushes near the back property line.

Terri and I went on a record-buying rampage through Cambridge's many fine used vinyl shops this evening. We picked up albums by Robyn Hitchcock, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Scriabin, Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby, Jack Teagarden, and Lester Young. While I eat some Cocoa Blasts and write this, Terri is now typing things on Matt Shaw's typewriter, which is still sitting on our dining room table from when we were working on the flipbook project for Sarah & Michael. I'm looking forward to the long weekend. It's Columbus Day, which is still celebrated in Boston.

The site improvements are coming along. I found some really nifty software to make photo galleries, whilch should make it way less time consuming to make our little photo albums. The photo albums it makes are nicer and easier to navigate, too. One of these days, all two of you who come to this site will come back to find it utterly transformed. I'm reading many things simultaneously; The Decameron, one of Terri's college textbooks about Buddhism, and some stuff I bought in Portland (starting with some essays by Octavio Paz). I spent some time at the Apple store at the Cambridgeside Galleria last night. I would love a schnazzy new G4. But I'm trying to be realistic, and ask myself what I would do with that that I can't do with my current computer. There's really very little. iCal and iPhoto are the best parts of it. But it's not like I'm so busy that I really need iCal, and it's not like we even have a digital camera that we'd even need iPhoto. Anyway, I'm trying to stick to my guns. I care more about software than hardware; I care more about what people actually do with software than the software itself. Which is what led me to find the schnazzy photo gallery software and inspire me to actually do work on the website.

It's that time of year again! Terri (and even I) watched PSU clobber Nebraska last night; it's a nice change from the past couple of seasons. In more important news, we capped off the end of the Anniversary Week™ festivities this evening by taking the top of our wedding cake out of the freezer. It still tastes pretty good, which was a pleasant surprise.

Hooray! I got Blogger working again. The Terri & Ezra Show website never quite recovered from the change from MediaOne to AT&T Broadband. It broke a lot of the images on the site, and AT&T has goofy restrictions on its FTP site that make it impossible for Blogger to log in. I was going to write my own weblogging software, but it just didn't seem quite worth the effort. Anyhow, it comes as part of a renewed effort to get the Terri & Ezra Show back up again in honor of our first anniversary. Woo hoo!

Terri was sick again today. She didn't go to work. I keep telling her she has mono even though she doesn't have mono. I'm hoping she'll think "at least I don't have mono."

I came home, we went to Trader Joe's to buy gnocchi, and then I drew pictures of turtles while she edited Chapter 5 of the book she's working on.

Have I mentioned that I am married to the greatest? She's knitting me a new hat!

I have to point out that I do not deserve this.

I lost the last hat she knit me. And the hat was an undeserved present after I lost the scarf she knit me.

Yesterday while we were in Harvard Square she took me to Woolcott & Co. and we picked out some colors. Hooray!

Overheard shouts from the living room:

"Oh my God, run run run run run run, oh he's not fast enough, run! Oh! HE GOT IT!"

"Bloooooock!! Yeah!!"

"That was interference!"

I'm a hacking, wheezing, gurgling mess.

I'm not exactly sure what I did that brought on such a heinous cold, but here I am on the couch with a laptop, some O.J., a box of kleenex; I am completely uninclined to move.

Terri has wandered off to watch the Penn State vs. Michigan State game.

Yesterday went into Harvard Square and did a little preliminary Christmas shopping and took in the sights. The Charles Hotel had its big tree up, and there was an undecorated one in front of Warburton's (the stealth ABP) where the fire-juggler always stands. I was feeling pretty bad already, so I didn't last too long before Terri had to guide me to Tealuxe. I got some black Indian tea because I liked the name (Golden Tippy Assam), but I should have had some of what Terri had, which was Kashmiri chai, because it would have been much more theraputic.

So while I've been couch-ridden, I've been fixing up my linux installation on my work laptop, outfitting it with the latest lovely Gnome desktop from www.ximian.com. I love these guys; I think they're just a couple of steps away from making linux usable by the masses. Combined with StarOffice, it's actually finally possible to make your life Microsoft-free (without giving up your computer).

I've also been spending the day working in the secret lab alongside Terri cooking up a project that we will soon unleash...

I hope my immobility lasts long enough for me to make another uninterrupted foray into War and Peace, which I've been reading since Seattle.

More photos are on the way... we got 12 rolls back last night but were too tired to scan them after we looked through them all. There are still 2 more to come back (though 1 of those is not of wedding stuff) and 2 rolls still in our cameras.

Time to go hop in the shower and get ready for work.

So, greetings from the new news site. We're now using Blogger to give us a simple way to update the news page. We gave it a test run in Europe to do our honeymoon updates and it worked out pretty well.

Given the time and inclination, I could, of course, custom build my own system to update the site but it hardly seems worth it given that Blogger is really simple and well-suited to the format that we had already been using. Plus it makes it easy to archive old stuff, which we hadn't been doing before.

Our other goal is to get some more photos scanned and posted, so off to get cracking on that.