So I spent last week in Boston. I was at a conference for most of it, covering a content management system (drupal) we use at work. I had a great deja vu moment when I first checked into my hotel – turns out it was a place I stayed with my family ~25 years ago. Susan came Thursday night, and Friday we did a walking tour of the city, making our way from the hotel to the Museum of Science, where we spent a good part of the day checking out the exhibits and taking in a planetarium and Imax theater show. The Imax show was especially cool. I’d never been in an Imax theater before and I loved it, I want to see more of them. After the museum we wandered down to Quincy Market, desperately searching for local coffee houses and getting lost along the way. Sadly Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks seem to have driven all the local coffee houses out of business, and we never did find anything, settling finally for Starbucks in Fanueil Hall. I hadn’t been to Fanueil Hall in over a decade, and perhaps I’m looking through rose colored glasses, but the Fanueil Hall of my youth was full of local companies and fresh food. Today it’s literally just like an upscale mall’s food court. We decided to bail on dining in Quincy, took the T back to our hotel, and cabbed it to a local Tapas joint in Boston’s back bay area.

Anyway, all in all I had a pretty good time. It was tough being away from home for a week, and I missed Susan and Soolin, but I had a great time on my birthday exploring Boston on foot, the tapas was excellent (squid stuffed with tuna and stewed in squid ink? Tastier than it sounds!), the Sangria flowed like water, and the hangover was almost unnoticeable. I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

I spent last week in Boston at a conference. I was in a hotel with slow, crappy, unsecured wireless internet which I didn’t trust logging in over, hence the lack of posts from me last week. I’ll get back to my occasional postings this week.

I’ve been posting pictures of my adorable little niece from time to time. Turns out the perverts have been watching some of the pics my sister has been posting on flickr, based on the way she’s been tagging things. To which I have to say:

My poor niece is going to be permanently traumatized when she finds these in the wayback machine when she’s in her teens.

Soolin is my three year old Golden Retriever. Early in her life the two of us went through what I not-so-fondly call ‘the worstest dog story ever told,’ and I still shudder to think of it. Yesterday another incident occurred which comes close. Susan and I took an afternoon walk on the bike path to the local Whole Foods. On the way back, Soolin inexplicably stopped to slurp up a giant dog turd. This alone was disgusting – I saw the whole thing from close range and it wasn’t pretty. It got worse though. When we got home Susan soon noticed that one of the dogs had gas, and after a while we narrowed it down to Soolin. The next couple of hours were mildly unpleasant but bearable. Then Susan and I sat down to play some coop Lego Star Wars, and at some point it began to truly and profoundly stink in the room. At first we both thought it was still the dog gas bringing its ‘A’ game, but the room became unbearable and Susan noticed Soolin had thrown up onto her dog bed. Nestled in a pile of kibble goo was the partially digested giant turd she had eaten earlier, stinking so badly it induced my gag reflex. Susan took the dogs outside while I attempted to clean up, and it’s a good thing for all involved that I was the only one in the room. How I managed to keep my gorge down I don’t know, but the whole thing was unpleasant to experience and would have been even worse to watch. I’m picturing the blueberry pie eating contest portion of that Steven King flick and thanking the stars we didn’t end up there.

All is well now. Soolin seems recovered and the only tangible loss is one irrevocably grossified dog bed, but man oh man, while I love my dog I do loathe the excretory incidents.

Ok, so the news of the Giants win is all over the planet at this point, and it’s not like I have anything super insightful to add, but…man, how fucking cool was that! The last 9 minutes of the game were 9 of the most excruciating minutes of my life – all game I had been waiting for the Patriots short passing attack I had been watching all season to show up and destroy us, and when the Pats finally marched down the field and scored in the 4th quarter I felt like all the wind had been sucked out of me. I had started getting hopeful that we could actually win after the Giants went up, and after the Pats score I was like…ugh, just like the Giants to get my hopes up and then crush them…but then…but then… the best drive in Giants history, the coolest catch by a Giants receiver since Mark Ingram’s amazing acrobatics against the Bills in the last Super Bowl the Giants won, and a suddenly mobile Eli Manning not only managing to escape the rush but managing to throw a reasonably accurate ball while on the move, something he never seems able to do. It was fucking amazing. When the defender fell down on Burress and he pulled in that go ahead touchdown I literally jumped around my dining room hooting, it was so freaking awesome. I’m still in shock, and I grin every time I think about it.

So: Yay Giants! Eli just paid the bill for what we paid for him, Coughlin finally gets a trophy and proves he can advance in the playoffs, Strahan gets a well deserved Superbowl victory to cap a hall of fame career, and Tiki can suck it up like the little bastard he turned out to be – poetic justice for him for sure.

[edit] one last comment, one which I say with a bit of wistfulness and in my role as Patriots fan (I’ve been watching every game they’ve played since I moved to Maine back in 1992) – the Patriots now go down as perpetrators of the biggest choke in Superbowl history, eclipsing the Colts choke against Joe Namath and the Jets way back when. Had it happened against anyone but the Giants, I would have been devastated, so Pats fans, I feel your pain. But they choked against my beloved Giants so – sucks to be you, but whoo fucking whoooooooo!

…. here’s a recent one from a hike a couple of weeks ago:

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Cheeseburgers in a can. I kid you not. We’re doomed, folks, even if they are delicious.

!!!

[via]

A picture is worth a thousand words:

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(my sister is publishing tons of these over on her blog – I’m just cherrypicking the best of them but if you feel the need to overdose on cute, check it out).

There’s a pretty good piece over on wired.com about a company that’s developed a strain of bacteria they claim can produce fuel at around $1 a gallon using non-food biomass as the source. It’s pretty interesting and one of the most promising of all the alternative schemes I’m aware of. The article fails to mention that a gallon of ethanol contains much less potential energy than a gallon of gas, but even so based on the comparisons between corn and switch grass based ethanol production this process looks really promising.

…this faked O’Reilly book cover gave me a laugh. We just rolled out a bunch of new services at work as part of the start of the spring semester, and as per usual, only negative feedback. Needed something to brighten my day and found it.