McCormick and Schroeder on a chairlift somewhere in Utah, courtesy Schroeder’s new picture phone. As I’m posting this, they’re still on the chairlift.
Archive for February, 2004
Ah, technology
Sunday, February 29th, 2004
Go fam
Friday, February 20th, 2004Our family tends to travel in spurts and this is apparently one of them. Jeff, who was in San Fran last week is now here in Madison. Jack and my Dad are skiing/boarding in the U.P. and Jen is on her way to Slovakia, wherever that is.
MA, NH and ME
Wednesday, February 18th, 2004In keeping with my tradition of the millennium, I fled the state to celebrate Valentine’s weekend. After a rather long day I arrived in Cambridge Thursday evening just in time to play Trivial Pursuit – Genus 5 – with five of Stacy’s HLS friends. If you ever need a good dose of enlightenment and/or humility try playing trivia games with wicked smaaat Harvard law students who are 10 years younger than you, it’s very effective. Still fun though, and Friday was even better. It’s pretty much impossible to have a bad day when you’re with Stace, in Boston, it’s sunny out, there are munchkin donut holes on every corner and an Apple store only a T stop away. It’s all good. Except we’re still not very photogenic together, so alas, no photos.
Saturday I met up with Bill, my ASU buddy and fav tour guide, who updated me on the big dig progress on our way out of town. We arrived in Portland, Maine in record time and found out the town is slightly obsessed with Valentine’s Day… there were hearts everywhere and interesting young people giving out more hearts to people downtown. Our next stop was Cape Elizabeth and the home of Bill’s friends, the Spragues: Schooner (their lab), their son Spencer, Shaw and Liz (not pictured), who treated us to an off-road tour of the area. Who knew the beach could be so much fun in winter? Our outing was followed by good wine and a trip back into town for dinner, flowers and a couple hours with Howie Day. An excellent time all in all despite a few traumatic moments and losing $50 to Bill who, defying material science and logic, was able to remove a cork from the bottom of an empty bottle of wine.
Café Momo
Thursday, February 12th, 2004Wednesday night at Cafe Montmartre.
Geek humor
Monday, February 9th, 2004If you’re at all familiar with html, check out line 28 of this ad. Irony doesn’t get much better than that.
New and unimproved
Sunday, February 8th, 2004Is it me or are people settling for a lot less nowadays? Things which come to mind which were supposed to be better but are actually worse are: the new iPod, the new Princeton Club, George Bush (and the government in general), Toyota Celicas, Safari 1.2 and the ‘04 Superbowl half-time show.
PDA [not-so] Smart
Thursday, February 5th, 2004As mentioned below, I sent my 5 GB iPod in to PDASmart in late December, which is one of two companies I found that sells replacement iPod batteries. After they informed me the motherboard was toast I told them I’d pay to have it shipped back, still broken, and they told me they would keep the new battery they had sent me and give me a refund for it. Fair enough. To make a long story short it wasn’t until after numerous emails, phone calls and the threat of prosecution that I actually saw my money or iPod returned over a month later. Everyone I contacted at PDASmart was very nice and seemed genuinely apologetic for the delay(s) but I heard the same excuse three times (‘I don’t know why your card wasn’t refunded, it should have gone through yesterday’) so I’m not sure if we’re talking about fraud or just some serious incompetence. Food for thought though, if you’re in the iPod replacement battery market.
February 2004 update
Sunday, February 1st, 2004Oh yea, it’s February in Wisconsin again. Currently we’re in the middle of a sleet storm and it’s a balmy 23° out which, on the bright side, is 30° warmer than the temperatures last week. One amusing thing about all this snow and ice is that you can actually see a bit of divine retribution in action. It’s pretty satisfying to see people fly past me in their rear-wheel drive cars and then see them up on the sidewalk, irate about the large dent in their side panel, a half mile down the road. Not that I would ever wish for anybody to get hurt but if you’re speeding on your Honda Spree during a snowstorm in heavy traffic… well, that’s just Darwinism waiting to happen.
The snow has also afforded me a chance to go on my annual snowboarding voyage to Devil’s Head with the Vilas (now Dayton) boys. I haven’t had the big wipe out yet that Hu assures me will come sooner than later, so I continue to enjoy it.
By-in-large January was pretty low-key, but there were a couple moments of excitement. My grandma turned 80 so we had a big family gathering in Delavan to celebrate. Our gift to her was a scrapbook with individual pages made by each of her descendants and a slideshow presentation of the whole thing for good measure. I found the whole scrapbook-page-creation process kind of stressful (don’t we use layout programs to avoid all that cutting, layering and measuring?!?), but in the end created something I wouldn’t have thought possible. For so many reasons. The things we do for our grandmothers… 
The other exciting event this month was the purchase of my second iPod, but you can read about that in the babble section if you’re so-inclined. I’m still and will always be a devout Mac-user but Apple sometimes makes it difficult to keep the faith..