Welcome to Beantown

September 1. On the way home from Jenn's Mom's place, we saw a bunch of cars laden with futons, mattresses, and filled with the packed plastic bags of what could only be college kids, streaming into Boston. We live well north of Boston. There was traffic at the exit that would take them to the final stretch into Brighton, Brookline, Newton, Cambridge and Downtown Boston.

Good luck you kids! Welcome to Beantown.

Me? I'm waiting for the first puck to drop.

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In my Handspring Visor, I have 590 addresses in my address book. There is not one address or name that begins with the letter "X".

Being Recognized

This week, the cashier at the cafeteria called me by my name.

I have worked at my present job for over a year. For almost that entire time, nearly without fail, I go to the cafeteria and pay seventy-five cents for a soda or an ice tea. Occasionally, I'll buy a lunch. I've given her my name once or twice when I didn't have money (the cafeteria allows us to keep a small "tab"). The folks with whom I eat lunch say my name, and she knows and uses their names. I must be filed away in her memory as "the guy who always pays for his soda with exact change." But this week, she used my name. I dropped the change in her hand, and mumble "Here you are, Sharon." She said "Thanks, Rick. Enjoy the lunch."

I think everyone enjoys being recognized.

"How Was Your Weekend?"

"So, how was your weekend?"

It's the obligatory work question after a weekend. How was your weekend? As if people cared. And while some probably do care, I'm sure my answer ("Oh, it was fine.") leaves a lot to be desired. But maybe that's the point. It's like nodding hello, or asking "How are you?" ("Oh, I'm fine.").

So how would I really answer, about my weekend? Well, I spent it chasing around Mia. I spent a few hours on the computer learning PL/SQL. I read part of The Rainmaker. I went to church (but I didn't lector). Jenn and I ate take-out at our usual restaurants (Shanghai Village, Bertucci's, McDonalds).

I napped. I washed dishes. I took lazy swings with a golf club (my pitching wedge). I spent the evenings writing my Mia journal (a personal one). I wrote an entry for this BLOG. While I normally sustain myself on The Boston Globe during the week, the weekend is a feast with both the Globe and the NY Times. For TV, I caught some of the NEC Invitational. I chatted with my neighbors. Jenn, Mia and I all went to Toys R' Us to buy some Teletubbies.

Often, when someone asks about my weekend, it is usually an invitation to listen to that person's weekend. On a Monday, I'm not that interested to hear about someone else's weekend, no matter how good or how bad it was. So my weekend is always "fine". And I often have to remember to volley back the obligatory "And how was your weekend?"

I just want to respond "my weekend was the usual; now let's get to work."

Big Pumpkins

I'm strangely repulsed by the thought of huge pumpkins. The Boston Globe ran a feature on the growers of giant pumpkins here in Massachusetts, men who admit that there's a little "insanity" in them.

The article described a collegial atmosphere at the annual weigh-off in Topsfield, MA, but the craze is hardly local. I visited www.bigpumpkins.com, and prowled through a number of pictures of people growing their prized pumpkins. There are growers in Germany, England, to Manitoba, Canada, and everywhere in between.

Can you even eat a giant pumpkin? The leaves on these things are huge. In the article, Jim Kuhn has several 700 pound pumpkins in his pumpkin patch. When they're that big, I think they should use another word besides "patch".

Spooky though they may be to me, I am impressed at the record growth of the top growers (1262 pounds). But what do they do with them after the weigh-off? There's a video that I could order, showing giant pumpking growing techniques, but it comes with free giant pumpkin seeds. I'm too scared to place these seeds anywhere!

Nikon Coolpix

My Dad just got a Nikon Coolpix 2500, and it's awesome. I'm so ... jealous! My rugged camera looks like an Edsel compared to his sleek, compact device. He came up this weekend with Mom and my brother, and during his visit he tinkered with the camera, and read its manual. Gawd. His camera is half the price of mine (dpreview lists the Coolpix 2500 as less than $400), but it's easily got twice as many features.

My Dad's been a photo-bug since I can remember. At every family occasion, he was always taking pictures. I felt that he enjoyed getting the most out of his equipment. His primary camera is a Minolta model, a fully-automated SLR with manual override. I think he's joining the digital photography age, and I'm happy for him. But I wish I had thought to just give him my camera, so I could run out and get this cool Nikon.

Cooling Off

The weather is cooling off. The evening temperature is 72 degrees Farenheit. Thank goodness.

High Heat

Bleary-eyed, I stared at the weather report this morning, and found that today would be another day of high heat. I'll be at work, avoiding the brunt of it, but Jenn and Mia are home. I also found that Greater Boston is working on eight consecutive days of 90+ degrees Farenheit, not two weeks. Tomorrow's forecast: high 70 degrees Farenheit.

High Heat

In New England, there was almost two weeks of high heat (heat above 90 degrees Farenheit). Jenn and I never put up an air conditioner so we suffered. Our fuses were quite short, and the evening never arrived fast enough (but even when it did, it offered little relief). We have employed multiple fans to move the air, and I have one aimed at my body all night.

The weather should be breaking into cooler climate by tomorrow. I've lost all my taste for the summer.

Elvis

Thanks to a visit I made to Graceland three years ago, today's 25th anniversary of Elvis' death is quite meaningful. I played the King in my car stereo all week. He rocks on, in the hearts and minds of new and old fans. We remember you fondly, Elvis, wherever you are.

Asteroids

16390, 47840, 19540, 79370, 49880, 35190. These were my scores from playing Asteroids tonight, an ancient arcade game that I have been playing thanks to MAME for Windows.

I was lamenting to a gamer at work that my best scores seem to come within the first three or four games. The rest of my games were crap. Tonight's high score: 79370, in game four. But it was a tight 79370. With an extra ship every 10000 points, I almost broke the 80000, but lost concentration.

Since I started up Asteroids (a few days ago), I've been steadily improving. I broke 50000 in the second night of playing. Then 60000 the next night. 70000 last night. I was a decent Asteroids player in my youth: I turned over the coin-op machine a few times. Someone at work suggested I take up a more modern game, but I love the simplicity of destroying asteroids, then firing at a buzzing saucer.

I played for nearly an hour tonight. I hope to post up some analysis on this in the future.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

I just finished reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

Coincidentally, August 6, 2002, is the 57th anniversary of the day the United States dropped "Little Boy" on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, we dropped "Fat Man" on Nagasaki, and five days later, the Japanese surrendered.

The "Bomb Book" as I've come to call it is a comprehensive, sweeping history of the making of the atomic bomb, from the earliest discoveries of the nature of the atom, to the effort made by the United States to harness this power into a weapon of mass destruction (the Manhattan Project), to the delivery of the bombs on Japan, and the forces that led the United States to this fateful decision.

Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears led me to the Bomb Book. He spent a whole chapter describing the explosion of a nuclear bomb. It was fascinating, and it kindled an interest to learn more. Discussing this at work, a colleague mentioned that I would probably want to tackle The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

This book is a monument. The author, Richard Rhodes, must be commended. His bibliography lists 556 sources. He has distilled these plus what was obviously many many interviews into a 788-page book that must be considered the definitive history of the atomic bomb. This book was published in 1986, and it won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

This is the hardest book I've read in a long time. Big novels don't scare me. I've read A Man in Full (700+ pages), An American Tragedy (800+), The Sum of All Fears (900+), and Executioner's Song (1000+ pages). But as someone recently characterized, the Bomb Book is very dense.

I started reading the book on July 13. I spent every evening (I only skipped two nights) reading one chapter. It took me up to two hours to read the 40-70 pages that make up a chapter. Towards the end of the book, I was able to digest a few pages into the next chapter. I didn't watch TV or DVDs. My wife often saw me reading this book at the dining room table, my pen in hand.

Despite the density of the material, Rhodes' terrific writing made it very bearable. His long historical and scientific passages are necessary, but he also turned out some dramatic and suspenseful paragraphs. Mostly, I found myself engrossed and amazed. This really happened, I kept telling myself. Even though I didn't understand all of the physics involved (and there's a lot; a periodic table is presented early in the book, I often referred to it), I felt awe at each discovery that made the bomb possible (fission, the neutron, U235, plutonium). The bold men and women who made these discoveries (Ernest Rutherford, Lise Meitner, Neils Bohr), and the men and women who engineered these terrible weapons (Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Leslie Groves) are captured clearly in this work.

Rhodes has a thesis that I'm still trying to digest: the bomb as the "entity" or strong force that will dissolve the nation-state. The discovery of the bomb will force nations to deal with one another openly or with ever-widening suspicion. This duality, its complementarity, was proposed by Neils Bohr, and Rhodes adopts it as the key proposal of the book. The bomb is supposed to end wars, but of course it hasn't. Will we as a country (with other countries) learn the other lessons of the bomb?

Thanks to this book those lessons are at least written down.

Car-Free

Thursday of last week, the company where I work had an off-site meeting in downtown Boston, and I decided to leave my car at home, and take the bus and T to the venue. Since early 1997, I have been a regular automobile commuter. So the day trip into Boston was a very pleasant change from driving my car.

I have to walk through a lightly wooded dirt path and then down a steep hill to get to the bus stop. I met two nice gentlemen, who cordially introduced themselves to me. It was a marked difference to being alone in my car! There was a nice pace to the morning as we each exchanged pleasantries.

The bus trip was filled with chatting, and people watching. The crowd of people increased as we neared the Alewife T Station, where we would pick up the train. There, I felt the rhythm of people rushing to get tokens, newspapers, iced coffees, before boarding.

On the train, people were in their own "space", listening to music, reading books, magazines, or newspapers. I spoke with my bus-riding colleague until he reached his stop, then sat alone, feeling wonderfully at ease.

My meeting didn't start until 10AM, so when I got to my stop, Park Avenue, I leisurely strode down Tremont Street, and picked up breakfast at McDonalds. Park Avenue is a crowded stop, at the intersection of the Boston Common, the State House, and the start of the Freedom Trail. People going to work were walking briskly, with high purpose. Tourists walked like zombies, looking everywhere except ahead of them, as they drank in the surroundings. I was in between: I was touring a familiar place, on my way to "work".

Some of my colleagues and I compared notes on our various commutes into Boston. Some drove in ($15 to park!). Most took public transportation. Our company chartered seven buses for those who wanted to go the office first. We all acknowledged that our routines would have to be different if we worked in Boston.

What I enjoyed the most last Thursday was just the ability to walk in a vibrant city. In my first year in Boston, I lived in the Back Bay with three other guys (the only way I could afford it). From the apartment, a few of us would often walk to work. We cut through the Public Garden, up Charles Street, then over the Longfellow Bridge to get to our office in Kendall Square (near MIT). People from the world over come to Boston to see these sights, and it was for me an ordinary and mundane walk to work.

And that's the kicker: if I had to commute into Boston by public transportation, it would eventually become mundane, would become ordinary.

When the Red Line train leaves Kendall Square, it rises out of a tunnel, then lumbers over the Charles River, offering a postcard view of the Boston skyline. It's a gorgeous view, and I gawked out at it, while my fellow commuters remained unmoved. I had been away so long it was all new to me again.

Rescueing Trapped Miners

I think the part I enjoy the most about the successful rescue of the trapped miners in Pennsylvania is the sheer surprise on the part of television news reporters. The two newscasts that I watched (CNN and NBC) had reporters expressing their own doubts as to whether any of the nine miners would even be found, much less alive.

This news item made the headlines late last week, but I didn't track the story on CNN. So when I fetched my Sunday Boston Globe this morning, I was amazed at the headline: "Pa. miners are rescued". Tears of joy began to form as I blurted this news out to Jenn and Mia. "They're found!" I turned the TV to CNN.

How rare it is to be forced to contemplate your death. How rare it is to experience what these men experienced for the three days they were underground. We will all want to know what they felt, how they coped, how they came to terms. What did they talk about? What pacts did they make with one another, with God? News and TV will inquire and probe. I applaud Harry "Blaine" Mayhugh's courage to answer some of these questions so soon after this ordeal.

They'll have a special perspective to view the world now. I hope those of us who watched can grasp some of that perspective.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Every evening, since July 13, with the exception of two nights (tonight being one of them), I have been reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb. This is a thrilling and compelling saga about the discovery of nuclear fission, and how that jump-started the building of the atomic bomb. I plan to write a more thorough review when I'm done (I'm on page 318; 470 pages to go).

But I must share the part that made me laugh out loud. I'm at the part of the book after President Hoover formed his Advisory Committee on Uranium. The nuclear scientists are meeting with the Navy and Army weapons "experts". During the lengthy discussion about how to harness a chain reaction into a bomb, the Army expert said, "In Aberdeen, we have a goat tethered to a stick with a ten-foot rope, and we have promised a big prize to anyone who can kill the goat with a death ray. Nobody has claimed the prize yet."

I burst out chuckling. How contemptuous! But can you blame him? To him, these scientists were dreamers! A chain reaction from atomic particles? What did that mean? Of course, we all know how it turned out.

This history of discovery is sure to be the best book I'll have read this year.

Internet Outage

Tonight, we had another outage with our cable modem. This time, it took only a half hour to resolve. There was no lengthy hold times to reach support. Maria took my call initially. Angela (second tier, ticket number 1900728) resolved the issue (she had to key in my cable modem's MAC address back into their system).

For Jenn and I, this represents a "rash" of outages (we just faced a two-day outage last week).

Home for Lost Pictures

This picture made me think of Accordion Crimes, by E. Annie Proulx. Her wondrous book about the many lives a single accordion had touched still resides in small places in my brain.

La Moderna Association has created a home for lost pictures, and it's tantalizing. Like many folks, my house has plenty of photographs, stashed in various nooks and crannies. A majority of them are lumped into a box. Some are in albums. Some are still in their photo lab envelopes, tucked into a shelf.

I sometimes wonder if I'll ever "organize" them. Perhaps with a scanner. Perhaps with some album indexing software. I suspect this is a project that will remain in a formulated state, but never executed. Or executed partially. I'm thankful that Mia's pictures of growing up are on a web site with some organization.

The Highest Free-Fall

I first read about the man trying to break the world record for highest free-fall in Sports Illustrated. It's deeply fascinating to me.

When I was in college, one of the fool-hardy things I did was go for a tandem sky-dive. The sky-diver that I was attached to was casually eating a burrito before our take-off to 10,000 feet. I remember signing and initialing a lengthy disclaimer form (there was a lurid clause that the company wouldn't be liable if I were to somehow hit a plane on my jump). I didn't feel like I was falling. Only when we landed did I feel the earth rushing towards me. Point Break emphasized this fearful feeling.

Michael Fournier will jump from 25 miles up. That's 132,000 feet. From that height, he requires a pressurized space suit and helmet. He will break the sound barrier.

The Sports Illustrated article said that Joe Kittinger did his record-breaking jump in 1960 as an Air Force test pilot, primarily to test "bailout and recovery equipment for future spacemen." His record has been in the books for four decades. The two others who tried to conquer this height have died in their jumps.

Mr. Fournier is set to go in September. I'll be watching.

How to Start Blogging

I was inspired to start this BLOG after reading an article in the Wall Street Journal. Here's their latest take on how to get started.

The Importance of the Internet

My wife and I were without our Internet connection (through AT&T Broadband) for the past two days. We had our service restored just this morning.

It was an unsettling two evenings without the Internet. I kept having to remind myself: "I don't have a connection. I don't have a connection." Jenn had access through her work laptop, and even though I have a junky old laptop with a phone line modem, I thought I should "tough it out."

For two days, I called into AT&T Broadband customer service phone line. I gave an inward chuckle with the happy-voice announcing that I can get more help going to their web site. My longest hold time: 25 minutes. This tells me that we weren't the only ones calling in. In my first call, I reached Tom, who opened a second-tier trouble ticket (1823095). He explained that AT&T Broadband went to a new server, and that customers using the old LANcity cable modems didn't get properly converted. I'll buy that.

I called again later that first evening at 11PM. Again, 25 minutes on hold. I reached Dan. I asked him if my ticket had been updated. He sent me to "tier 2". I spoke with Grant. He said my ticket hadn't been updated yet. One whole night without the Internet. I ended up watching TV (HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm).

Our Internet connection still hadn't been restored the next day. So after work, and after putting Mia to bed, I called AT&T. Only 5 minutes on hold. I reached Jason. Again, no update to my ticket. More TV (ESPN2's Tuesday Night Fights). I called again before I went to bed (around 11PM). I reached Bonnie. "No update to the ticket, but these things usually take 24-48 hours to resolve." This was last night.

My wife sent me an e-mail before lunch today, saying we're back online. I'm relieved as I write this. The Internet to me is just below electricity and water. I'm perturbed when it goes away unexpectedly. This is the first time our service has cut out like it did, and we've had it since June 1998. I'm hoping this is our only outage for next four years.