That’s a mighty fine Unix beard, sir. Not a bad Unix gut either.
Last night, I attended a presentation by Mr. Free Software himself — Richard M. Stallman — titled Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks. I took photos and notes, and you can check them out at Global Nerdy.
While wandering around High Park on Monday — which was a holiday, thanks to the Canada Day long weekend — the Ginger Ninja and I stumbled across the “Hemp on Wheels” truck, pictured below.
Most stores that specialize in hemp products try to downplay the toking aspects of hemp and focus on the fact that it’s a pretty versatile plant that has a lot of non-drug-related uses, such as being a basis of a very durable kind of cloth. These guys just skip the pretense entirely. I didn’t see any hemp-based clothing or bags, but I did see an excellent collection of pipes and bongs, as well as a lot of pretty decent rock paraphernalia. The proprietor was a very friendly greybeard, but that’s too be expected — grouchy head shop owners don’t stay in the business very long.
I asked him if I could take a photo of his licence plate for the blog, and he said “Sure, maaaaan, take as many pictures as you like!”, so here it is…
For the curious, Hemp on Wheels has a website at HempOnWheels.com.
The Ginger Ninja was a bit concerned about my snoring and claims it sounds as though I stop breathing in my sleep — a sign of possible sleep apnea. Although I generally wake up feeling rested, I thought that it would be a good idea to get myself booked into a sleep lab. Hence I spent Tuesday night here:
It was simple enough. After going for 24 hours without caffeine (which gave me a headache, a sure sign that I really should cut down), I showed up at 9:30 p.m. and was led to my room, where I filled out a couple of questionnaires about my sleeping habits and then read while waiting for the tech to prep me.
About an hour later, I got wired up — quite literally — with a number of sensors:
Once wired, the tech went into the control room and asked me over the intercom to do a number of things to calibrate the sensors, such as:
In addition to all these sensors, I noticed the night-vision camera on the opposite wall pointing at the bed. I’m pulling out this wedgie in the bathroom, I thought.
Once this was done, they brought me a reading light to my beside and told me that I should try to fall asleep between 11:00 p.m. and midnight. I was already feeling tired from a lack of caffeine and after reading a few chapters of Everything is Miscellaneous, I decided to turn out the light. It was around 11:30.
In spite of being in a strange bed, having all these cables tugging at me and the bright red light of the fingertip heartbeat sensor, I fell asleep quickly (as I normally do). The bed was comfy and the room was quiet and had a decent air conditioner. They woke me up at 6:30, and after disengaging me from the sensor pack and filling out a one-sheet questionnaire on how I slept, I headed off to work since it was really close by.
I guess I’ll be hearing from my doctor soon.
Like all things, vacations must come to an end. Here’s my final shot of the trip: the Air Canada Dash 8 that we took from Hartford back to Accordion City:
The Ginger Ninja doesn’t like flying in general and wasn’t all too keen on boarding a propeller-driven plane, but I reassured her that propellers worked out quite well for the first half of the entire history of powered flight.
Besides, the plane looked better put-together and more sturdy than Bradley’s Terminal B.
They’re slower than jet-powered craft, but speed isn’t always everything, if the rather luxurious service offered by Porter Airlines is any indication.
The Ginger Ninja and I were going to have to travel some distances that weren’t very well served by public transit if they were served at all, so we decided to rent a car. We needed a car that we could pick up at Logan Airport and drop off at Bradley (Hartford’s airport), and Thrifty was offering the best deal.
“I’m hope we don’t get a PT Cruiser,” she said to me at the rental counter.
“Why not?” said the Thrifty rep as he tapped at his computer keyboard. “They’re pretty easy to drive, and you’re probably going to get one since you requested a mid-size car.”
“I kind of wanted a car with a real trunk,” she said. “One where you can’t see all our luggage.”
“Well, you could upgrade to a larger car,” he said, “but that’ll cost more.”
We were going to have the car for a week, so springing a not-so-insignificant amount of money for a trunk seemed a bit much. We stuck with the medium car.
“Hmmm,” said the Thrifty guy. “PT Cruiser.”
He must’ve seen the look of disappointment on Wendy’s face because he did a little mor etyping and said “Wait, I’ve got another car here.”
He handed us the keys and pointed us at this car:
Looking at our rental agreement, we found that the Thrifty guy had exercised his discretionary powers and gave us a free upgrade to a Dodge Avenger. Thank you Thrifty guy, and if any of the Powers That Be at Thrifty stumble across this post, you’ve got a couple of pleased customers here.
The car handled pretty nicely and had some decent power under the hood. Wendy thought it “felt as if its nose was too wide” — meaning that she found ti somewhat difficult to pull into parking spaces, but I didn’t think so.
My only complaint was the car’s colour, a shade that I referred to alternately as “Obnoxio Blue” or “Trying-Too-Hard Purple”. I will admit that it was easy to spot in a crowded parking lot.
The car had a couple of luxury goodies that served us well on the trip from the Boston area to Hartford. One of them was Sirius satellite radio and the other was this:
I noticed it when we first took the car off the lot and Wendy was doing the driving. I was putting the rental agreement in the glove compartment when I noticed another latch on the dash. Opening it revealed an extra compartment on top of the dash, and inside was a diagram showing its purpose.
“Cool, I’d read about these!” I said. “In-dash fridge!”
It was clearly meant for standard soda cans, but it could accomodate a couple of bottles if you laid them on their sides. It may seem a silly luxury, but if you’ve ever gone on a road trip of at least a couple of hours, it’s actually a nice thing to have. Besides, the auto companies’ market research have shown that cup holders are an important part of the North American driving experience, and a lack of them have proven to be a deal-breaker in a car purchase.
Maybe it’s the way they name cars these days, but “Avenger” seemed silly to us. Through out the week, I ended up singing the song that the Russian guy from Clerks sang, substituting “Berserker” with “Avenger”. In case you don’t remember that scene, here it is (warning: it gets sweary)…
All in all, not a bad car, and a pretty nice deal.
My brother-in-law Andy Ramoniac honoured me by inviting me to join his balalaika group in performing a selection of Russian and Jewish numbers at his wedding reception. Between my terrible music reading — one of these days, I’m going to have to get better at it — and having to read tiny chord markings in a dimly-lit dining room, I decided to scribble out some quick chord charts for the performance:
On our vacation, we had the good fortune of catching up with several bloggers from the Cambridge area thanks to the work of Betsy Devine, who organized a lunch at the Chinese restaurant Changsho. Here’s Betsy with a squishy cow I gave her, taking care of the bill:
All Betsy needs is a squishy cow and some cold hard cash.
We were also happy to catch up with Suw Charman, who came over from London to attend the Enterprise 2.0 Conference taking place that week in Boston. Here she is, taking a shot of me:
Suw Charman takes a photo of me.
We were joined by a number of locals…
…some of whom are included in this shot:
From left to right: Marc Abrams, Michael Feldman, Halley Suitt, Betsy Devine.
One minor gripe: while Changsho’s dinner selection is excellent — the Ginger Ninja and I have had many excellent meals there, including our wedding rehearsal dinner — the lunch buffet isn’t up to their evening meal standards. In fact, it’s no better than your typical Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet place. Not there’s anything wrong with those places; it’s just that it’s Changsho’s dinner food sets certain expectations.
However, the point of this get-together was the people. It’s been a good long time since we’ve seen them, so we’re glad that we had the chance to catch up.