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(Click the arrows to see the pictures.)

Slide 2:Kate’s brother Matt came in from LA two weeks early. Matt plays bass for a hardcore band called Terror (“Straightforward hardcore with a negative approach!”: Demo — Band Site), and he just finished a 20-day, 20-city tour. On the tour, Terror hooked up with other hardcore bands like Death Threat and Over My Dead Body. Matt’s got leopard-spotted LA hair now, and he can pull one hell of a Billy Idol punk-rock face on demand. There’s the Billy Idol face in the Healey.

Slide 3: The crew at Senora’s Authentic Mexican Restaurant in West Chester is hardcore, but with a positive approach. Kate’s dad canceled a customer appointment to drop off party supplies, and (from left:) Andrew, Steve, and Heather decorated the table with balloons and sombreros. They also readied the Birthday Flan. Senora’s is the BEST RESTAURANT IN THE WORLD. If you speak to Steve in Spanish, he will respond in Italian.

Slide 4: Kate looks happy here, ’cause she’s just sat down to a pretty table and been given a Snoopy balloon. Dignity intact (so far), she smiles innocently.

Slide 5: Yeeeeah, that’s the stuff. Andrew hands out the sombreros. They’re surprisingly heavy!

Slide 6: Andrew lights the candles on the Birthday Flan, while Steve (just outside the frame) exhorts the entire restaurant to sing. This is working out just great!

Slide 7: The Smith clan is unflappable: once again, Matt pulls his Billy Idol face on request. The Billy Idol/Austin Healey/Sombrero combination is eerie, but I’m sure that the right person could somehow extract a blockbuster movie from it.

Slide 8: As for me, I don’t have the sombrero mojo, apparently: the best I can do is Terminally Bemused.

If you want to wish Kate a happy birthday, you can do it here!

Kate and I will be getting married in two weeks, in a Quaker ceremony at Downingtown Friends Meeting. She’ll be making a stylish entrance in the car pictured on the right, a 1962 Austin-Healy 3000 Mark II. (more pictures of a similar car.) Her dad found it languishing in a customer’s garage, bought it, and restored it. It’s not a pampered Ferris Bueller showpiece, though — it’s a driveable cross between a roller coaster and a rocket sled. Well, kind of drieveable, anyhow. This weekend, in anticipation of our nuptual getaway, Bob “Snuffy” Smith took me out and taught me to drive it.

Which was, of course, kind of stressful. The stiff-upper-lip ethos may have been just the thing for extending the Britannic Empire to the four corners of the earth, but it makes for some pretty gruesome ergonomics behind the wheel. Whether or not you view that as a drawback, of course, is a matter of taste. Any schmuck can smile at the pretty girls while rolling around in a Porsche Boxter. If, however, you can maintain your sang-froid while simultaneously maintaining pressure on the handbrake, gunning the engine to synchronize the gearbox, eyeing the tach, and keeping the shifter in first with a propped knee, then you’ve become a better man.

Which I’m not, yet — a better man, that is. There’s a special kind of anguish that comes when you’re stopped at a shady intersection between two sidewalk cafes, people are smiling and standing up to get a better look at your hip ride, and you miss the synch on first gear and your little red race car lets out a loud, ratchety squeal of pain. Then stalls. With your future father-in-law in the passenger seat.

Later, after I got a little better at managing the transmission, the car put a huge smile on my face. Or a grimace — taking a page from the toe-toasting Rugby traditions in Tom Brown’s School Days, maybe, the Healey engineers had routed a blast of savagely hot engine air on my right foot. Grimacing painfully, eyeballing the tach needle, carefully shifting the gears, I felt hella cool. Like, Fellini-Italian-Count cool. Damn, what a great car.

Skraaaaaaaaawk!! Groooooan!! (Nuts!)

Kate has a new Blog post today.

“There she stands, mighty Everest!” drones the narrator in a Monty Python sketch. “Towering a mile above the surrounding plains: wreathed in clouds, wracked by winds, killer of climbers. Everest — the mountain with the biggest tits in the world!”

Kate and I went to the American Sublime exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on Saturday. The exhibit was put together by the Tate gallery in London. “Sublime”, according to the Tate’s program, describes European’s impression of the New World’s “wild, rugged, and awful” scenery, and their almost religious reaction to its “immensity and boundlessness.”

“Sublime” might not have described all the paintings we saw, though many fulfilled the requirements of immensity. Most of the canvases were five or six feet tall, seven and eight feet wide, with colossal sunsets, rugged mountains and usually a panther crouching on its kill somewhere in the corner. I suppose they were the Victorian equivalent of prime-time television, except instead of T.J. Hooker, you have the rise and fall of a mighty civilization in five turgid panels, complete with maidens in togas leaping from craggy cliffs to avoid the

sweaty clutches of barbarian invaders. If these painters were alive today, they would all be making a lot of money in Hollywood. And, in a way, I suppose that’s what they were doing then: creating easily-admired paintings of vasty subjects on big, bold canvases that can be seen from the back of the gallery.

Not that I’m complaining! These muscular American works could have kicked the ass of any effete cheese-eating European paintings, any day of the week. If you put together a basketball team of these American landscapes, and played a basketball team made up entirely of Old Masters from the Louvre, the score would be 100-0 by the end of the first half, and a Thomas Cole Arcadian Idyll would have smashed the backboard, drunk all the Gatorade, and ravished the cheerleaders.

Kate had her wedding shower the next day (hurrah!), and I took a couple of hours to ride around Chester County on my motorcycle and compare the local landscape to the epic Sublime visions. It was, of course, a lot less dramatic — rolling hills, lots of trees, burned grass, nine-foot corn. But it’s more liveable: no worries about surprising a puma on its kill, or stumbling on hairy, tomahawk-wielding savages in the middle foreground. I found my way to a campground that Kate and I had passed by several times on canoe trips, and gave it a waypoint on my GPS. Here it is: KOA West Chester, Tent Site 27, on the west fork of the Brandywine river. It was hot, hot, hot now, but should be good for some prime camping in September and October! I’ll see how many folks I can entice down for a trip.

Hot coffee and apple cider doughnuts at Northbrook Orchards in the morning! And no barbarian invaders, I promise.

PS. I’m not really doing the exhibit justice: not all the paintings were of the cop-drama genre. these, for example, were really beautiful and placid.

We needed to get outdoors after a long day of statistical math, so I looked up a Geocache nearby and dragged Kieran and Boris out to go find it. Here’s the story, in chronologial order, as you can see depicted at right:

1. FRAME 1: Kieran needs a break bad. Real bad.
   
2. FRAME 2: General skepticism ensues about this detour.
   
3. FRAME 3: Kieran finds the cache. All cares forgotten, he giggles like a little girl.
   
4. FRAME 4: Boris methodically checks the entire cache for suitable plunder.
   
5. FRAME 5: Swag in hand, we return triumphant. “Gosh, John, this was swell!”
   

Staged photos aside, it was an incredibly beautiful day, and perfect for using a handheld GPS device for going to find a tupperware container full of toys in the middle of the woods.

Training, Day 2

I’m in the second day of training at Unica’s headquarters in suburban Boston. The product is actually really cool; it’s a tool to understand customer behavior, send messages to them, track responses — all the stuff that you assume that “evil marketers” are doing from their offices on Madison Avenue, but in reality they actually aren’t doing at all. We’ve been playing with sample data — donor information for gifts to a veteran’s organization — and have been running chi-squared automated integration detection models on them, then naive bayne matrices, then neural nets — I’m floundering in a sea of interesting math that I don’t really understand. (We discovered that the average amount of the individual donation was the best predictor for future response rate.) I’m enjoying it, though, and so is Boris Lerner, even if he doesn’t look like it.

Dean Shattuck, in the foreground, works in [My employer] Boston. He rode his new Ducati Monster to the training session, and we all stood around and looked at it over lunch. Then we compared it with a Honda Gold Wing nearby. The weather’s beautiful.

On the whole, not much going on.

I’m at a training session for a marketing automation product called Unica Affinium today, tomorrow, and Wednesday. This is a picture of the training room I snuck during a break. See if you can find the following elements of a typical software training:

• A maker easel that says “Welcome!”
  
• A proxima screen
  
• Three tiny bottles of water
  
• Two big, fat white three-ring binders
  
• One harried technologist (Kieran) hurriedly calling Audix
  
• A plate of mini muffins.
  

Okay, we ate the mini-muffins already before the picture was taken. Any phone messages sent to me during training will reach me in this conference room, so go nuts!

Kate and I spent the weekend in the city; in fine bridge-and-tunnel fashion, we drove up, parked in Chinatown, and shopped in my old neighborhood. I bought a new Fred Perry shirt, as my collection of boxy, short-sleeved HTMLer shirts was getting threadbare. Also, some soap. Kate bought a purse. We visited the Macintosh store/event that Genevieve wrote about.

On Spring street, in front of Balthazaar, a short Danish woman with a peasant top was taking polaroid photographs with an old bellows camera, then opening the pictures before they were finished and transferring the caustic developer to a piece of cotton rag paper. The images were soft and washed out, with a greenish Seventies tinge. Her folding table was covered with photos, each showing a beautiful NoLita hipster at the side of the frame, traffic passing behind them. Each subject was gazing off to the left; most looked awkward and uncomfortable. Photographer awkward, though: artistic awkward.

We watched her take three photographs of a Korean hipster girl in a bucket hat, looking over one shoulder. While she rolled the negatives onto the wet paper, she asked the girl to translate a blurb she’d gotten in a Japanese style magazine. “Lotte Hansen”, read the subtitle. “New York Street Beautiful.” The photos pictured also had bucket hats, also looked somewhat wistful.

Kate and I had our pictures taken, which (of course), was… well, awkward and embarassing, especially when the crowd outside of Balthazar is watching you intently, trying to whomp up their courage. When I’m not hamming it up in pictures, I suddenly have too many hands and feet. Lotte told me to stop talking, then paused, then took the picture.

The resulting print (at the right, on heavy cotton paper) looks forlorn, but I kind of like that about it. I have enough goofy pictures already, and Kate and I both recognize ourselves in the image. Lotte was very intent and serious about her art, keeping one photo of every three for her collection. “It’s nice”, she said, looking at the picture. “It’s peaceful.”

Admirable Lists of Life Accomplishments:

(or just Life Accomplishments So Far):

• Rhett Creighton
  
• Hugh Gallagher
  
• Doctor Ho
  

Jeremy Fain, Kieran Downes and I are all putting our lists of life accomplishments together to see how they measure up. We’re hoping to crush Rhett Chreighton, and I hope that we can at least hold our own against Hugh Gallagher. Nobody, of course, can top Doctor Ho:

“In China, he is called Wong Tai Sin – the god who fulfills peoples wishes.”

The Ultimate Water Gun is off on another mission

I finally got off my ass today and sent the Ultimate Water Gun off on its latest mission — to Virginia, where mister Jeremy Justice will be recording his exploits to post for all to see.

Well, actually, I convinced my friend and cubicle-partner Kieran Downes to carry the stuff to Mailboxes Etcetera for me, while I took pictures. You can see him gathering admirers on the way.



Then, I met my sister Bridget, her husband Tony, and their friend Amy for lunch. As you can see from this picture, my sister had to ride the short bus to school.