Boston Common has been making up for lost time with a stack of posts today. The discussion of Storrow Drive bridges vs. folks who can’t read clearance signs (so far the bridges are batting 1.000) is as amusing as always, including a pointer to this photo of a truck post-bridge. Can you say “can-opener effect”?
On Saturday, we made it out to Waltham, stopping at the Farmer’s Market before going into The Construction Site to pick up additional Cuboro blocks to feed my new addiction.
Having the Cuboro set at work has been great; it’s forced me to keep a chunk of desk clean, given me something to do during ergonomic rest breaks that actually does force me to stretch and move around, and entertained visitors.
Today we spent the afternoon in the South End enjoying the weather, the South End Open Market, and checking out the sale at Lekker Home Furnishings. We then walked up to Boylston Street, walked across the Public Garden and the Common, spent a little time moseying around Downtown Crossing, and finally headed home to relax.
A nice quiet weekend with no big projects, nice weather, and no DNC craziness…all of which I enjoyed while it lasted. Next weekend…not sure what we’ll wind up doing.
Swung by SGS last night for a round of gaming. Aaron was there opening up three new games, including Attika.
We decided to try a two-player game while we waited for additional folks to show up. It’s an interesting building/connection game which has some nice features. The hex board and resources reminded me a bit of Settlers at first glance, but there’s much more emphasis on territory, no trading, etc; it’s not really Settlers-esque at all.
The buildings can be built without resources if you can either find the right spots on the board (pre-printed resources) or for free if you follow the tech treebuild order printed on your card (and have the spaces to put them in).
Two win conditions: build all your buildings, or connect two shrines. The latter seems more likely in most games.
Aaron won, unsurprisingly. By that point, Kevin and Ed had shown up, so we played another game with all four of us; it’s definitely a different game with four, though it tended to be two at each end of the board there was enough going on in the middle to keep it from being two separate games.
I like Attika. I’ll probably want to play it again next week.
Aaron then left, and (after I nixed Funkenschlag due to lack of remaining brain cells from the week) we played a game of Settlers/Cities & Knights/Seafarers, which, despite a fairly rich board, ran slowly. Bad rolls–very few 8s–and an early attack by the pirates slowed us down; we never did get to the other island, or even build any boats, so the Seafarers part wasn’t really involved.
After that, a quick round of Can’t Stop as a nightcap; when that finished, it was time to go home and crash.
Elect a Muppet CEO is a cute little demo of how instant runoff voting works.
I think many of my regular readers (both of them, probably) are familiar with it already through the Hugo Award voting process, but this may be a nice way to demonstrate it to folks who don’t have similar experience.
Cambridge uses single transferable vote (similar to IRV, but designed for multi-seat elections like City Council and School Committee), which makes for interesting shifts as the second, third, etc votes are transferred.
Window blinds installed, check.
New web server and mailing list server installed, check.
House tidied up…er…well, the piles have been shoved into the more out-of-the-way corners of their various rooms.
Some days you just gotta take what you can get.
Off to the groundbreaking ceremony for the new building for the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Speakers at the groundbreaking ceremonies will include Broad Director and MIT Professor Eric Lander, MIT Provost Robert Brown, Harvard President Lawrence Summers, Whitehead Institute Director Susan Lindquist and Cambridge Mayor Michael A. Sullivan.
Shame the weather is so cruddy.
So now the dilemma starts as to what to do next week on Wednesday evening:
Taste of Cambridge or Boston Blog Meetup?
Why, oh, why did they have to both be the same night?
Via Inner Bitch comes an eBay auction for the Good Eats kitchen with bonus dinner cooked by Alton Brown.
Too bad I didn’t win that huge lottery prize last week…the reserve is only $850K, so $117M would leave plenty of room. I suppose buying a ticket would have improved my odds…marginally.
UPDATE: actually pasted in the link to the eBay auction this time…sigh.
BoingBoing recently had a pointer to Ewan’s quest to hit every Zone 1 stop on the London Underground.
This reminded me of the best publisher of books on the Tube and other rail and metro systems, Capital Transport. They have several books done in cooperation with London’s Transport Museum and most of their catalogue is available at the LT Museum Store.
My favorite of their books is Metro Maps of the World, which has maps of all the world’s major urban transit systems, with notes on their history and a frontispiece showing the systems laid out as if they were stations on the London Underground.
There was also a poster of this map available from the LT Museum Shop itself, though it doesn’t seem to be on their web store; I don’t know if it’s still available; I can’t find the book there either, at the moment.
UPDATE: Guardian review of the book, found via a link from Going Underground’s blog.
Cool marble racing stuff. Conveniently available at The Construction Site in Waltham, which also does mail order.
Now, to make a marble track that runs past the lava lamp….
