Fun fact: F Scott Fitzgerald and family are buried next to the chapel where Ange & I are to be married. Neat.
BTW, if any of my few readers happen to be job hunting, let me know, as our company needs programmers badly.
Date saved
Well, some progress has been made in the wedding planning, including the tentative selection of date: 15 Sept 2007. First, though, we have to talk to the priest this weekend and consequently do a bit of acting as to the degree of our collective piousness. Here’s hoping we’re judged to be adequate.
Not much else going on this weekend, other than the Battle of Techs on the gridiron. May the worst team lose!
People are dumb
I saw a guy with a sticker on his backpack today that said “Rideing Durty.” Now, I know this has something to do with some song, and that it is also cool/trademarkable in some circles to spell things wrong (see Fabolous), but seriously, rideing? If you were the printer making said sticker, how could you let that one get through?
Also, Oscar Mayer is now making cooking hot dogs easier. Is this the state of culinary despair to which our society has sunk, that cooking hot dogs is too onerus? I love the write-up in the press release: “Preparation is easy, and there’s no cook top mess or boiling water!” Oh, heavens, that my prayers have been answered so fully! I fear I’ll be telling my future children how I remember it taking almost a minute to make a hot dog, and we had to open the buns ourselves! And grilled cheese, boy was that a sisyphean task…
It’s always rainy in Philadelphia
Well, because the last trip was such a success (rained out ballgame), this Saturday a few of us are heading back to Philly to cash in the raincheck. Here’s hoping we have enough time for a wiz wit (and of course to soak up all the culture that PA has to offer.)
In other news, I have a new laptop. After getting pissed at my Dell for its recent habit of turning itself off whenever it feels like it (hmm, just like my old Sony!), I picked up an Intel MacBook. Yep, my IQ points are already receding. First thoughts — OSX is pretty cool but I probably won’t use it much: better than hockey pucks but still too graphical for a real Unix user.
I installed ubuntu on the other half of the hard drive, and discovered an interesting failure mode of the use-sudo/no-root-password mindset. If you change the hostname (via vi /etc/hostname) without updating the hosts file, you’re screwed: sudo won’t work anymore so you have to boot single user mode to fix it. Ubuntu is a slightly more polished debian, but some things grate: ‘nano’ as the default text editor? Icky.
The mac keyboard needs some work. No PgUp/Dn, Caps lock is huge and frequently triggered, Backspace is called Delete. A little xmodmap and it’s not so bad though.
Perfectly reputable business
Sign seen in Falls Church:
Engaged
Here’s the pretty present I gave to Angeline yesterday. Yes, that’s right, I’m soon to be among the few people on earth to have both code in the Linux kernel, and a wife.
She came over to my house after work, where I had candles burning and a half dozen roses in hand. Then I produced the ring box, knelt, and popped the question, to an enthusiastic ‘yes!’
She knew it was coming so it wasn’t a huge surprise, but I kept dinner secret, so she was thrilled when we showed up at Galileo for dinner. There, we enjoyed a three course meal that was delicious, though skimpy (we skipped the pasta course which is probably why I’m starving this morning). Angeline had candied beet salad, breaded sea bass for the entree, and three kinds of chocolate for dessert, while I partook of the grilled tuna salad, three kinds of rabbit, and three kinds of gelato. Marvelous, but still needs work to match up to Five Guys.
So far no concrete plans have been made regarding dates, venues and all that but I’m sure I’ll blog about various wedding minutiae in the year to come.
105
What I want to know is: when are we going to get the terrorists for making it so hot?
Philly
Last weekend I jumped on a bus full of snippy former Atlantans and visited my favorite city within a 3 hour drive (DC excepted of course)… and that is Philadelphia. But you already knew that because of the subject. So you probably also figured that I would speak again about how good Amoroso’s rolls are when covered in beef and provolone, and you’d be wrong, because this time I got Cheez-whiz. Anyhow, our goal was to go watch a Braves-Phillies game in the stadium over there, but it rained all afternoon, so instead we watched “Phillie [sic] Phanatic Goes To Hollywood” on the jumbotron until they called the game. Then we ran up the steps of the art museum just like Rocky, if Rocky was really uncoordinated and was nine out of shape people who have never been in a fight. Finally we had awful food in an awful bar, then came home. I swear I had something interesting to say but I forgot what exactly. Oh well.
Kicks
They’ve been around a while and made the blog rounds a year ago, but for the first time I saw a pair of these in the wild. From the people who brought you MP3 player shoes come the coolest thing I have ever seen: shoes with spinners.
Delayed
Delays on Metro today:
- A train experiencing mechanical problems at Reagan National
- A broken track circuit at Federal Triangle
- A sick guy at Pentagon City
I might consider this some sort of perfect storm of mishaps, all just happening to occur during a single commute on all of the lines I take, except that this is starting to be the norm.