Dirac Angestun Gesept

Dinner at Mary Chung’s with a good-sized (but not too large) group, celebrating a birthday, is a great way to spend part of an evening. You get to try a fair number of different dishes, congratulate the celebrant, and generally have a good time.

Less enjoyable news of the week was finding out that in the Kevin Bacon “trace your connections” game, that someone only two connections away from me was not only killed, but blown up in a rather extreme way. (One of Rafik Hariri’s sons was a classmate of mine at BU, and was in my group for the MG 422 group projects.)

I have the slow-but-cheap data connection working using my phone, the laptop, and the USB cable (no BlueTooth, it’s an old phone). 14.4kbps may suck, but when it uses your standard voice minutes and you have unlimited nights and weekends, it makes a useful emergency backup when traveling in situations where the airport or hotel charges insane amounts of money for faster access. It’s good enough for quick Web hits or ssh-ing in to fix something.

Boskone is rapidly approaching. I’m looking forward to it.

Lots of stuff has been happening at work. None of it is really worth writing about. Any readers likely to care already know everything.

I had a minor computer problem, which has been fixed. Apparently CD burners aren’t supposed to emit smoke, but if they do, it’s best when they do it while under warranty.

My new game at Friday’s gaming session this week was Klunker. Gaming was fun, even if a bunch of the folks who showed up got caught in a long game of Avalon Hill’s Civilization & Advanced Civilization.

I twisted my ankle somehow, and it really hurts. My wrists haven’t been all that happy either.

I broke my Movable Type installation by upgrading perl, then fixed it.

So there’s a massive water main break not far away from here, and a chunk of Kendall Square is flooded.

They had to evacuate some buildings adjacent to the break, including the Marriott hotel, because basements were getting flooded and the buildings might therefore lose power.

Traffic was (maybe still is) totally messed up, but that didn’t affect us, since we could just walk around the affected area.

Unfortunately, the water main break also means that large portions of Cambridge have low or no water pressure.

Including my office, H’s office, and our house.

Bah.

I sure hope they get this fixed soon.

EDIT: Our water pressure seems to have improved, and is now back to normal or close to it.

So, I heard the mail arrive (I had shoveled the front steps and a path to the curb already, so the whole “rain nor snow nor glom of nit” issue was out of the way) and headed downstairs to get it.

Then I realized that I was really cold.

The setback thermostat had done its job perfectly, turning the heat down during the day when I’m at work. Except that I’m working from home today. Oops.

I still have to dig out the dryer vent so I can do laundry without risking CO problems (gas dryer).

EDIT: the vent wasn’t drifted over, so I only had to dig out the back door enough to see that it was okay. Hooray!

Boston’s Logan International Airport is basically closed. Their departure status page claims that some flights are on time, but if you check the airline’s web site, it will often show the flight as cancelled.

SmarTraveler is showing basically all roads in the Boston area as “Severe weather. Avoid travel.” including the Mass Pike (I-90).

Amtrak’s morning train to NYC is “Estimated arrival: 3 hours late”. Call or check their website for info on your train if you are traveling by train.

The MBTA transit updates page shows delays on all subway and commuter rail lines, and changes or cancellations to bus service. Buses will be using “main roadways” only and will not be following the established snow routes. No boat service to Quincy or the Charlestown Navy Yard.

It turns out that January 7 is my “blogiversary” (eugh, what a terrible word), though I’m 23 hours early for the exact time of my first post.

So, looking forward at what I hope to be posting this year:

Con reports for Arisia and Boskone, at a minimum. I’m probably also going to do Vericon as well, since it’s even closer than the other two in-town cons, and I’m thinking about one out-of-town con. The current leading candidate for that is Minicon, though I’m open to other must-go suggestions. No Worldcon this year, though NASFiC might be doable.

A conference report from at least one USENIX conference (LISA by preference).

Book logging is something I’d like to start doing, though I probably won’t post about every re-read. Still, I’m going through enough books that I can probably get a steady stream of posts that way, which will help me keep current on other stuff too by keeping me in the habit of posting.

I’m really liking MarsEdit, though I should have been smart enough to just register it along with NetNewsWire 2.0 (or just bought a license for 1.0.8) back when I bought that, since it would have been cheaper.

I haven’t been blogging much for the past couple weeks; the holidays, and digging out from ‘em, has slowed me down.

A quick recap of the interesting bits:

We went to Vancouver, BC for the holidays, on the grounds that it sounded like more fun than Cleveland and allowed for my sister-in-law and her SO to drive up from Seattle.

Travel as always had its low points: we got to wait for our delayed BOS-YOW (Ottawa) flight in a boring gate area with no easily reachable power outlet. We arrived at YOW, cleared Canadian immigration and customs, found the transfer baggage desk closed and had to recheck the bags at the main counter, which had a long line…but the YOW-YVR (Vancouver) flight was running late and we had plenty of time anyway. The Ottawa airport is nice and new and has WiFi, which for the moment at least was free as well, making the wait not too bad.

Vancouver was neat, since I hadn’t been there in about 20 years. I was also able to pick up a couple Corrs DVDs I’d wanted that have finally shown up in Region 1 NTSC, even though the weak US dollar made them not as cheap as I would have preferred. I do wish we’d had more time there…we’ll just have to go back.

The flight back connected through Toronto, which meant we got to change terminals on the bus and then walk to the US borderpreclearance area, which judging from the length of the walk is actually in Buffalo. The last flight leg was uneventful and arrived early, which would have been more useful had the car service not screwed up and thought our reservation was for the next day. Sigh. Cab it was, then, and off home.

Then, of course, to catch up on the backlog of email and such at work. At least it’s been a pretty quiet week, so catching up hasn’t been too bad. I could do without the snow-turned-to-slush though.

So, we now have a new family tradition: sushi on Boxing Day. Yum.

It’s fun to be on (or, well, under) the flight path for the standard Fenway flyover approach. Vooooom!

This weekend, a group of ships from the NATO STANAVFORLANT (Standing Naval Force Atlantic) are in Boston at the Charlestown Navy Yard (near the USS Constitution), and today they were mostly open for visitors.

The information we’d had from a USENET post turned out to be a bit off reality; the ships didn’t open for the afternoon until 1400, but it wasn’t a huge hardship to hang around and see what else was going on. The bonus was that the post had only listed one ship as being open, which was an underestimate…five of the ships listed as being currently in STANAVFORLANT were there (the German FGS Spessart was not in evidence) and as it turned out all of them were open to some extent, though in one case that was a minimal extent.

We first visited the flagship of the group, the HNLMS Jacob van Heemskerck (F 812) of the Royal Netherlands Navy (class ship of its frigate class), and the German Bremen-class frigate FGS Niedersachsen (F208), which was moored outboard of the van Heemskerck and is notable for having saluted the USS Doyle on Sept. 11, 2003. Both ships had their main decks open for visitors, with explanatory signs added in English and helpful crewmembers explaining things as well.

We then moved over to the other mooring, where the USS Simpson (FFG 56, Oliver Hazard Perry class); the Spanish SPS Navarra (F 85, Santa Maria class; the Santa Maria is the Spanish variant of the Perry-class) which intercepted the unflagged freighter So San carrying North Korean weapons to Yemen; and the Canadian Halifax-class HMCS Ville de Québec (FFH 332) were moored.

The Simpson was not offering tours, but did allow access through to the Navarra; there, tours of the main deck, the helo deck and the SH-60 parked there, the upper deck, and the bridge were given by members of the ship’s company. Unfortunately, even two years of high school Spanish, useful as it is for travel (”por favor”, “gracias”, and “¿donde está el baño?”) didn’t give me useful vocabulary words for “anti-submarine warfare”, “close-in weapons system”, or “surface to air missile”. Still, it was an enjoyable experience, as we got to see much more of the ship than we had expected to; it was reminiscent of an airside bus tour of Munich airport we once took, which was conducted entirely in German and was therefore an exercise in putting stories together around the few words we did recognize.

Beyond the Navarra was the Ville de Québec, which like the Jacob van Heemskerck and Niedersachsen was allowing main deck access, plus the ability to climb to the bridge deck for a look through the windows and the chance to visit the helo hangar with its Sikorsky Sea King and talk to the helo crew (one of whom is on an exchange from the United Kingdom). This ship was the first on the scene of the Swissair 111 crash.

We finished our visit there, having enjoyed the afternoon immensely, and headed home.

(The ships previously visited Baltimore and I believe are headed for Halifax next.)