It was a bit of a wild weekend, as Sectionals was scheduled for Saturday and Sunday. Unfortunately, the remnants of hurricane George (or was it Ivan?) passed through the area on Saturday, too late for the tournament to be pushed back. So we played about 30 minutes of frisbee in 55 degree pounding rain with 20 mile per hour winds! About when I was ready to call it quits on my own, the tournament directors called things off and I took a big fat nap for the rest of the day.
We – Lovefly9, a team pieced together from bits of Love Child, Blackfly and Tidal 9 – played four and a half games yesterday, and other teams are going back to play more next weekend. Since we were in it for fun (rather than trying to go on to regionals) and most of the team is going to Clambake next weekend, we’re not gonna finish sectionals.
The weather lately (Saturday excluded) has been absolutely perfect – I even broke out the leather jacket I bought in Italy. If you’re in New England, hope you’ve been enjoying your month of fall.
posted September 20, 2004 – 11:23 am
Yesterday’s trip to the Apple store was a success, and I’m now happily running the GIMP at home.
posted September 17, 2004 – 8:17 am
I’m off to the mall (ick!) at lunchtime to pick up the latest version of Mac OS X (Panther). I’d really like to be running the GIMP at home, and my options are as follows:
- continue running OS X version 10.2 and spend about 6 hours compiling and installing X11 and an old version of GIMP (1.2 instead of 2.0)
- spend $100 on OS X 10.3 and get pre-compiled versions of X11 and the GIMP
- wait ’til January for Mac OS X Tiger to come out
- buy a full version of Photoshop for my current OS (at $600, not a pleasant prospect)
Since I’ll use GIMP for a bunch of stuff this fall (photo editting & portfolio stuff), seems like spending $130 to get the latest version of everything running without a headache makes the most sense.
The hardest part of the trip is gonna be resisting the urge to buy the pretty toys they have at the Apple Store.
posted September 16, 2004 – 8:48 am
Nature published (online, at least) the responses of Bush and Kerry to 15 science-related questions. While I was hoping for some interesting answers, those posted just reinforce the fact that the Bush campaign has its head in the sand and the Kerry campaign gives the boring answer without really taking a hard position on any particular issue. It’s gonna be a damn close election, I think.
Speaking of close elections, the Tuesday Democratic primary for the Massachusetts State Representative in Somerville/Medford came down to about 120 votes! I’m glad Sciortino won – he ran on a platform of equal rights (among other things), in contrast to Ciampa, who voted in favor of a Massachusetts constitutional ammendment to ban gay marriage.
posted September 16, 2004 – 5:51 am
I took the 120 negatives from Ithaca to Cameras, Inc. last night, and also picked up a used light table. The light table is the perfect size for looking at a whole archival sheet full of slides, and the color is much better than holding a slide up in front of either a white portion of the computer monitor or a light bulb. Once I get my loupe from B&H;, I’ll be all set.
As a side note, I did some shopping for the light table and loupe at Hunt’s Photo in Melrose and found them to be completely un-helpful. They lacked any real knowledge about the items they tried to sell me, were seriously overpriced, and the customer service was severely lacking. Guess I know where I won’t be going again…
The Ithaca pictures should be back on Friday.
posted September 15, 2004 – 12:16 pm