Cape Cod Renoir?

This was a picture I took on Tuesday that reminded me of all the Impressionist paintings that I saw in Paris and Amsterdam. Earlier this week, Cape Cod was the place to be. Check out this sky!



The lighthouse on the left is the tip of Cape Cod (while passing it on a Whale watching boat). On the right you see the Pilgrim Monument of P-Town. Here's a closeup of the Pilgrim Monument.



Sorry I didn't get any pics of the whales. (I was too rapt by the beauty and majesty of these creatures to take pictures.) This vacation was made possible in part by my brother, John. Here he is pictured with Krishan (7) and Vishnu (3.5), two very bright and fun young boys.




Can't you just feel the fun of sand digging and kite flying?



Vishnu dreams of his P-town flying machine:


For John's birthday (while I was there), he got a great board game called "Ticket to Ride." Here he is gaming with his pajama'ed sons (who wake up very early).


Rita, John, Krishan, and Vishnu: thanks for a fun vacation! Much love from Lisey-boo!

What's better than bawdy humor?

Classical geek humor!

Provincetown

P-town is an awesome place. And the weather here is perfect (possibly more beautiful than the Pacific Northwest?)...


And I have an awesome family! I will post pics later.

On the road again...

Bob the Builder...can I finish my dissertation? "YES you can!" (What positive reinforcement to have on one's 3rd of 4 dissertation research interviews.)



When I got back to Boston from the interview today (which was in Hawley), my nephew reminded me-- "That's my bag!" Here are some shots of Western Mass, a very beautiful place.





From lunch in Shelburne Falls...


Peter Blanchette was playing his archguitar (http://www.archguitar.com).

Hot Rods!

I got a text message from my buddy Phillip (Warning! Myspace w/heavy metal):

Photoshoot tomorrow. Starts at 10 am.

He'd gotten a top photographer to come out and shoot some pictures of models in front of hot rods. I took a picture of my car on the set:


Then, when he loaded the picture HE took into his laptop, I took a snap of the laptop.



I'll eventually get a copy of the final image, and I'll post it up here then.

Nice, eh?

A moment of silence, please.

For Troy Henson, who passed away this morning. Troy's boyfriend Todd was the guy in Elise's bridal party who didn't sing. Troy was a great guy whose illness kept him from attending our wedding, and we are deeply grieved at his passing.

Here's to you, Troy. Rest in peace.

A week later

and my computing situation is back to normal. Had some hiccups with the backups that made it take longer than I should have, but:

Apple took my laptop Thursday.
They fixed it in Houston on Friday.
I had it back at 9:00AM Monday. Go, Apple! Quite happy with that.

I figure, the hard drive was kind of small, and they've just replaced it with a fresh one. Why don't I upgrade it? So I took the lappy right to Onyx Consulting and had 'em pop in a 320GB drive. That was done by 3PM.

I went to restore from backup, and it didn't really work out. Turns out the backups were corrupted somehow and the system couldn't read them. So I had to pull all my info off of Elise's computer, where I'd restored it on Thursday, instead of directly from the backup. Kind of messy.

Then I found this article which tells me how to fix the corruption in the backups. So I'm running those steps now, in the hopes that soon I'll have everything running smoothly again.

While I'm a little ticked at the pain it's been to restore, I'm still happy that I have been successful at restoring, with only a few small things lost.

Remembering Deutschland

Today we all had a dog day. Just rested, played and ate. Steve made currywurst out of some sausages I bought at the store and we had a good time reminiscing about our leisurely days in Germany. Then we really got the bug and went to a German bakery in Stone Mountain and found brotchen. We also got more sausage...and a hot pretzel.


We drove into the Stone Mountain park and let Jilly have some time with the window down (her favorite thing). We happened upon an old mill house, waterwheel and a little waterfall area. We took off our shoes and all put our feet in the moving water (even Jilly). It was like a rustic spa. Jilly was so hot that she laid down in the water!

(Caution: Objects in mirror are sweeter than they appear.)

Rough Day

I woke up this morning with a 10AM appointment to see the Mac support folks (aka Genius Bar) about my laptop. It crashed a dozen times yesterday, I'd fix it, it'd crash again. Bad stuff. So when I woke this morning, I checked that it had backed up at 7AM, then shut it down and took it in.

At the store, the computer completely refused to boot at all. The guy ran it through some diagnostics and determined that both the hard drive and logic board were failing. So they packed off the ol' Lappy to the service center, to have those parts pulled and swapped.

So at 10:30AM I was without a computer. This wouldn't be a big deal if it were just a personal machine, but my employer has never gotten around to issuing me a work computer and so I was doing that on my Mac via a Parallels machine.

Nice, eh?

Well, I'll be on Elise's for a few days while I wait for work to get me something. Hopefully I'll hear tomorrow.

The Barbecue Song

MAN, I wish I'd written this one. It's great. The only thing I disagree with is the characterization of Alabama by the mayonnaise sauce. I've found some magnificent sauces in Alabama (see: Dreamland.)

But it's hilarious!

Videos

I guess I never really posted this to the blog, but we put together a ten-minute photo montage set to the Sigur Rós song "Viðrar vel til loftárása", which had just the right progression for the mood; searching, yearning, soaring, triumphant, and then at the end, getting a little less structured, less planned, etc. Enjoy it.



Also, I have some experimental music here. I got this software called Reason, and remixed Arnold's 2004 convention speech into a song "Blinded By Hate". I played it for Elise, and she suggested I make a video for it. So I whipped up this in iMovie; my first attempt. Kind of fun, but be warned, lefty content.

Today at church was our 3rd annual Blessing of the Animals. Jilly got blessed. And she is quite a blessing, even though she attempted to steal more than her share of the doggie eucharist.