Blinky Lights and Shiny Objects

A few blocks away from the bookstore as we walked back to the hotel, I was waiting for the light to change to cross the street. A man approached, looked at the bag I was carrying, and asked, "Did you just buy the new Harry Potter book?" "Yes," I answered, unsure what else he thought it might be, considering it was close to 1 am on Saturday morning, and the street was crowded with costumed fans. "I'll give you 200 dollars for it." Then he pulls out a wad of (Canadian) bills and starts counting. I didn't respond immediately, but when he looked back up at me I realized that my face was distorted with an expression of disbelief and disgust. I quietly squeaked out "No," and the man shrugged and walked on. "You should have taken him up on it." "I don't want to wait in line for four hours to get another copy!" "That's a lot of money." "That was an unfair question! And if you really wanted to tur...

Vacation plans for this year are shaping up. We've got tickets to Montreal (AA frequent flyer miles = Canada for the same rate as domestic) and a reservation at a hotel . Generally the rest of the details about what we'll be doing are best left to "whatever we feel like" but this time I've got to take care of one more item. I will be in Montreal for the release of Harry Potter book 7. I hadn't read any of the HP books before the 6th one came out. So last time I didn't care. But this time, I want that book as soon as physically possible. If I wasn't travelling, I would pre-order at Borders or Barnes & Noble and go to the midnight release party. Now, I've got to put some more thought into this. The easy way out would be to order from Amazon.com and have it delivered to the hotel. But I'm worried about the logistics of that, and ruining all of Saturday waiting around for the package to show up. No, I still want the book on Friday nigh...

Does anyone who reads this blog have any advice for me on Sergers? I'm in the market for one, but I'm having a difficult time getting good information to make a decision. There just isn't the critical mass of opinions online about this product - sewers as a group do not generally contribute as much content to online communities as computer people, or even car people. I'm getting suspicious because while there is a lot of "I wouldn't buy X because it is junk," there isn't much "I did buy X and it was junk." People seem to easily put down the brands that they did not buy, but when it comes to what they did buy, no-one is saying they screwed up. The negative reviews just aren't there, so I don't know how much I can trust the good reviews. Are the good reviewers just the lucky people who got the good machines, and the unhappy people just operate under "If you can't say something nice..."??? Or are we in a happy state ...

First, really quick, here's how the race went: Official time: 49 minutes 16 seconds Time I was moving forwards: 44 minutes 54 seconds Time from start to finish: who knows? I never did figure out where the starting line was - it wasn't where the map said it was. The announcer kept saying things like "the start is towards Balbo Street" and "the start is 300 yards north of last year's start" both not really helpful in determining the absolute location of the starting line. I ended up separated from the others from work, and fairly far back in the pack. You can see from the times above that I spent over four minutes standing still after the starting horn sounded. After we got going, I spent the whole race trying to get around the slower people who had started ahead of me. And I'm not fast. But the important thing is that I actually finished in less than 45 minutes of movement, and I probably went farther than 3.5 miles if you count all of the side t...

[Edited between square brackets on 7/9/08] At work on Monday, April 30th, we all got some horrible news. One of our fellow Opto-Mechanical Engineers had been killed in a car accident over the weekend. Myke Minbiole was 29 years old. He had been married less than a year, his wife Julie was also in the car but she was out of the hospital in a day or so. He had been working at [our company] since he graduated from Northwestern. I didn't know him well; I knew of him and he was always friendly. But I am closer friends with several of his close friends. The whole department was affected, and all of the others at work who had spent time with Myke were also touched. We know a few details of the accident. It happened around midnight, as they were driving home from a visiting friends in downtown Chicago. His Pontiac Sunfire was t-boned on the driver's side by a 2007 Cadillac Escalade. Literally a hit-and-run: the occupants of the SUV (some reports said there were four) got out ...

Yesterday was Earth Day. I hadn't planned anything special. But our house decided to celebrate by burning out one of the compact fluorescent bulbs in the kitchen and - this is the fun part - getting a small gas leak going in the dryer! I was late getting laundry started on Sunday (like 8 pm late) and when I took the towels out of the dryer where they had sat overnight, they smelled VERY STRONGLY of gas. We have a gas dryer (and stove, water heater, furnace...) so I was pretty concerned. The smell was really only strong inside of the dryer. I opened the window (at least the weather was nice) to air out the bathroom. Then I called the gas company. It took a few times to get past a busy signal, but then it took a while to get through the voice mail system. (I'm glad it wasn't a dangerous emergency...) In about a half an hour a technician pulled in the driveway. He comes in with a fancy piece of equipment that has a sniffer on the end and sounds like a Geiger counter ...

When life stops changing drastically every four years, time can start slipping by without making much of an impression. Recently I've become aware that going along in my rut (it's a good rut, but still, I'm doing the same thing week after week) isn't letting enough fun into my life. So I'm making an effort to jump at chances to have new experiences interspersed day-to-day. Last weekend I took Sara up on her offer (see comments to previous post) of going out to a college acapella competition downtown. I've been in choirs and choruses for the majority of my life, but I wasn't quite enough of a chorus geek to be aware of this particular sport. Apparently at some larger colleges (larger than Rose, at least, which was the same size as my high school) groups of students get together and practice acapella songs to perform and compete with other groups. It isn't barbershop, madrigal, Latin chanting, or do-wop. These songs are arrangements of popular music,...