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Random collection of thoughts this morning:

I just rode on my first Segway this morning. One of our QA engineers was an employee and got a pre-production experimental model as part of his severance, and he brought it in this morning. My question to him after tooling around a little on it: how on earth did [...]

The endgame of the 2008 election season is interesting in a few ways. First, I find it interesting that Obama’s numbers go way up after people get to see him in action (e.g. during debates), and start to edge back down when robocalls and other personal attacks start to hit. In particular, it’s interesting to [...]

As promised earlier, I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts about our performances of the Requiem this weekend, now that I have some distance on the music (meaning: the third movement fugue is no longer obsessively pounding in my head).
I have a long history with the Requiem. I first almost performed it in the [...]

I’ve been in rehearsals all week at Symphony Hall for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus’s first concert of the 2008-2009 Symphony Hall season, the Brahms Requiem with the Boston Symphony under James Levine. It’s an amazing work–I’ll try to describe it in more detail after our performances. But the two really amazing things for this weekend [...]

Two stories caught my eye in the Globe, one with proximity to my vocation and one to my avocation.
The first was regarding the undeveloped land to the south of our offices in Burlington. Pointedly subtitled “city can’t develop land in Burlington, Woburn,” the story details the ongoing dance between citizens of the suburbs who want [...]

I was about to delete an email from Bob Cramblitt on my old blog, until I actually read it and realized it was relevant to at least some of my readers:
Hi Tim:
Thought you’d like to know that Seth Godin, Joel Spolsky, Jason Fried and others are coming to Boston for the Business of Software 2008 [...]

Seriously, people, what is going on with the rain out here? We have had deluging thunderstorms every day this week. There was a stranded van on my commute this morning. On Route 2A in Burlington, for heavens’ sake.
On Monday this week, I was picking up some things at the Walgreens in Arlington Heights, which has [...]

… to write anything halfway intelligent, so you get this instead.
But Estaminet has been writing a fair bit; check out her travel journals from her Oregon trip.
She’s back staying with us, and our parents come in late tonight, so it’ll be a fun full house. This is, of course, the other reason I’m not writing [...]

I participated in a corporate regatta sponsored by America’s Growth Capital yesterday, which will no doubt surprise those of you who know I don’t sail. It was an interesting experience. Three of my coworkers and myself, fortunately accompanied by an able and professional captain, on a sailboat, running races back and forth between the Boston [...]

Broiled lobster: James Hook & Co. goes up in flames
Aw crap. Well, it’s a good thing that George & Becky bought those lobsters last week. But, on a very silly note: on hearing that 60,000 pounds of lobster were in a fire, I find myself wondering: is there enough butter in all of Boston?
(tags: boston)

The [...]

Lisa and I had dinner with George and Becky last night. I hadn’t seen George, a Sloan classmate (and fellow E-52), since one of the last times I was in San Francisco. They’ve been anxious to get some Boston specialties during their visit, so they asked if they could bring lobsters to our house from [...]

Doc Searls has a nice photoset of Arlington’s infrastructure as seen from the most infra structure of all, the remains of the rail line that forms the Minuteman Trail. He also points to a blog about the trail that makes for interesting reading.
Doc and his commenters have done a lot of digging on Arlington history, [...]

It was an amazing weekend. I spent the last half of last week dying of some sort of cold/allergy–it was so bad that I think I was running a fever a couple of nights. But on Saturday morning I could move again. And it was a good thing: since it rained the whole previous weekend, [...]

New York Times: Red Sox Top A’s, 6-5, in Tokyo Opener. For the curious, no, I did not get out of bed at 5:30 to watch the opener. I did, however, tune into the game on AM radio—something I haven’t ever used on my car before—on the way in to work, to hear that the [...]

I was all set to post my favorite Irish-relevant Muppet sketch—Animal, the Swedish Chef, and Beaker singing “Danny Boy”—until the coffee kicked in and I remembered I had already done it.
Ah well. If you’re in a maudlin mood, check out Eva Cassidy’s rendition.