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Mountain Laurel and Steel Cage Monster Wrestling I wanted a really strong contrast of a day on Saturday, so I took the Metro-North train up to Garrison and hiked down the Appalachian Trail to Bear Mountain, about ten miles. It was an incredibly beautiful late spring day, and at the end of the hike I…

The Feast of San Gandolfo and the Red Mike Festival Band My block is a big festival block — in fact, I get the feeling that it’s the nucleus of what remains of Little Italy. Mulberry street was closed for the feast of San Gandolfo this weekend, and all the populations of my neigborhood were…

Ancestral Memories of Elevator Music I made an astonishing discovery in a nautical-themed restaurant in Maine the other weekend. The music piped into the dining room was an odd choice for a linen-tablecloth restaurant, but it spoke to me in an oddly compelling way. Like Navin R. Johnson, I found myself oddly drawn to this…

Kaiju Big Battel My friend Dan Check, who just graduated from Pomona College, just sent me this message: …I’m thinking about going to some kind of monster cage match wrestling. This seems like something you might like, so I’m inviting you to come with. Might be seedy, but will probably just be fun. See www.kaiju.com…

Kate and I went to visit my mom in Belfast, Maine last weekend. We visited Kelmscott Farm, where earnest sustainable-agriculture majors preserve biodiversity by raising COLOSSAL Old Gloustecer pigs, as well as lots of other cool-looking animals. The pigs looked and sounded like ocean liners.

I reached a programming milestone today! I wrote and compiled a COM object that interacts with my Tikaro server. It’s pretty simple; whenever someone asks for the streaming webcam window (under the webcam image above, click “popup version), the resulting .asp page sends a command to a COM object, which in turn causes the webcam…

I went for my very first grown-up physical today. After finding that a recommended physician doesn’t accept [My employer] insurance, I found the office by doing a location-based search; the closest medical practice to me is 0.1 mile from my cube. Walking around the corner to “Boro Medical Practice PC” this morning, my nerves were…

I bought a GPS unit for my Palm Pilot this week, and it’s really, really really cool. It takes the unit about a minute to figure out where it is (and it doesn’t work at all in New York, too many buildings), but once it’s warmed up it only lags behind your position and direction…

I launched two new sites today! I do freelance work in the evenings for Bauer Publishing, a publisher of (mostly) women’s service magazines. The work for the sites, to a large extent, is done by myself and graphic designer Jeff Eades — he designs, I code. So far, we’ve made the teen celebrity site J14,…

Caveat Emptor, Cave Canem, et Caveat Pontifex! Kate took me to the Christies’ Evening Sale of contemporary art last night, at which Maurizio Cattelan’s Pope-felled-by-a-meteorite installation La Nona Ora was sold for just about $900,000.00. A Bruce Nauman cast entitled Henry Moore, Bound to Fail went for three times its estimate, at nine million dollars.…