This is my official Farewell, Adieu, Ciao! to Wordpress 1.5.1.2
As I wrote possibly my best blog post in a very long time (does only count as best?), I started going a little crazy with key commands and somehow navigated away from my page, ultimately deleting what I had just spent the last 30 minutes writing.
With no hope of getting it back with this non-automatically-draft-saving version of WP, I decided that it’s time to move on.
So I move in to the future with WP 2.2 . Thank you Eliot, my robot prince. I knew this day would someday come, and I’m so lucky to have you to help me through it.
I’ve been pretty lax on getting some well-deserved Wii talk up on this here blog. There’s lots to announce and discuss about everything Wii, but for now we’ll start with something that we all knew would happen, the elderly love the Wii!
“I used to play Pac-Man a little bit, but with this you’re actually moving around and doing something. You’re not just sitting there pushing buttons and getting carpal tunnel.”
This is one of those things that you can’t help but snicker. But really, my heart goes out because even Robots have human flaws. We’ve all been here before…
On the mornings that I’m not hopping around like a frog, slithering like a snake, or jumping around like a monkey, I still return to one of my most pleasant memories of Cambridge. Not by reminiscing, looking at pictures or thinking of such things, but by reliving the mornings that were so peaceful. As I sit here in the backyard of my parent’s house, my laptop feeding off wireless, with cigarette in hand and coffee by my side, I have that familiar feeling - minus all the noise.
My motto of September was “time passes slowly”, or so it seemed. With some emotional grappling, and major adjustments in life, work, and style, time was on my side, and a little too much so. It’s funny how when one is in what you think to be an ideal situation, the feeling of never having enough time sets in. However, once that situation is pulled out from under you, time slows down, or so it seemed. As I’ve found my groove, so to speak, the time has been running quicker. Perhaps at a good pace now. I can see the end of the tunnel for things that have just begun. But this isn’t to say that one should sleepwalk through life, just to get to that place that she hopes to be. Instead to conquer it with a vengeance. I suppose, in so many words, to make the most of it.
We are heading in to the 5th week of Nutcracker rehearsals. I’ve only been present at 3, because my role as Assistant Director has restrictions. For what I hope to accomplish, I’m giving what I need to be giving. For what other people expect of me, it may be said differently. In so many ways, jobs come down to money, and with money comes a measurement of time. But why state the obvious, child? Because the personal comes in to play as well. Working with a group of people who I have known for 3, 5, some 10 + years, time and money has a whole different meaning. But that pull to keep a value on my time is strong. And if nothing else, it seems like the “right” thing to do. Using computers to measure our time with web-based software like dotproject is a good place to start.
Then it comes to other things in life, where time is measured in money, but for these things, the money doesn’t matter. I’ve been working on Shebrew lately, doing updates for new issues, and putting together a small photoshoot gallery to give a sweet farewell to the lovely summer months on the East Coast. Fall is here everyone, and this week’s theme is “Home.”
In other news, I just finished the book, Tuesdays with Morrie. I told my sister about it last night, and she said that it was on the 10th grade summer reading list last year at Melrose High. Morrie, a teacher, had so many beautiful things to say, and some that I took with me to teach my classes last night. Inspiring to say the least, and perhaps summed up in one of his many beautiful thoughts…
“Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too–even when you’re in the dark. Even when you’re falling.”
The nicest day of the year has rolled in on this fine Friday morning. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and my Munchkin Face Kitty is cackling through the windows. The thermometer says 72, but it feels more like 90. A fine morning indeed, waking up to the sweet sounds of Jeff Buckley’s Lilac Wine, which is my favorite Jeff Buckley song. Then, come to find out in the NYT Arts Section, a movie is being made of this young deceased singer/songwriter.
Maureen Dowd wrote a great column on Saturday about the Prime Minister of Japan, Junichiro Koizumi, and George W. visiting Graceland in Memphis last week. The photo pictured on CNN website is a tame, welcome-to-graceland shot of the happy family. But the real story was when they were inside the Elvis Museum, and Koizumi started doing, as Dowd puts it, “Thin Elvis air guitar, and Fat Elvis karate chops.”
Everybody loves Elvis, naturally. A couple of weeks ago, Eliot and I were watching the Travel channel. It was a program about night life in Japan - which beats NYC by a longshot! Clubs are open all night, and some don’t even open until 6am. Businessmen and laymen alike share in the fun of drinking at these cozy bars, really the size of a kitchenette. And they all do Elvis Karaoke! The only thing missing from the special were shots of the Robots at the hot dog stands - that’s what I want to see.
The 4th of July came and went like the wind, but not without a few spectacular moments. I woke up in the morning with flashbacks to the morning of Rosh Hashanah, when Eliot and I slept through services. It was 9:30am, and we were supposed to have met my parents at 8:30 at their house. I got right on the phone and we hustled to make the drive up to Gloucester. With fears of the parking lot filling up, we still managed to get Cigarettes, Beverages, Dunkin Donuts coffee, and Egg and Cheese bagels! And we made it to the beach in plenty of time to get a parking spot.
~~~
It was a good day for the beach, and a good beach for the day. Wingaersheek beach in Gloucester has a lot of sand bars, keeping the shoreline very long and shallow. So, no big waves to play in, but having the will to stay in the water for a long time and play catch and actually go swimming is just as good.
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We left the beach when it starting raining, and in some kind of technology-deprived mental state, Eliot and I decided to go to Jordan’s Furniture in Reading to see Superman 3D. What a trip! And I’m not talking about Superman. As you walk in to this white concrete building, you are immediately bombarded with insane amounts of stimulation. This includes, but is not limited to, people flying on trapezes, larger-than-life structures made purely out of Jelly Beans, and a wall-size Green Monster robot that is eating a full-size Yankees player. Very weird, but super awesome in the scope of things!
In other related news, some super smart physicists at Stanford are half-seriously studying the physics of Superman. From Slashdot, “The article tells of ‘a scientific experiment in which a researcher put several chickens in a centrifuge and raised them in twice-normal gravity for months at a time. When they emerged, the chickens were stronger and had larger bones and muscles, and greater endurance. In other words, they were superchickens.’ Do they have human sized centrifuges?”
But speaking of regenerating strength in humans and animals, Stem Cells are still the best forward solution to most diseases, including MS.
The nerve cells were transplanted into several groups of rats with spinal cord injury. Some rats also received injections of a drug called rolipram (an agent that also helps to overcome myelin inhibition of nerve regeneration), and some also received cells that specifically secreted the growth factor GDNF (glial cell-derived neurotrophic factor) into the spinal cord. Three months after transplant, rats that had received all treatments — stem cells, rolipram, dbcAMP, and GDNF — had several hundred new nerve fibers, more than any other group. The nerve fibers succeeded in connecting with a lower leg muscle, and the rats showed significant improvement in hind limb grip strength. No other group showed improvement.
On this same thread, I recently read in the NYT that the Roman Catholic church is working to excommunicate scientists who engage in Stem Cell research. I thought this was the “culture of life”. But it seems that to the church, life not yet lived means more than life living.
Picasa is this really great and fun photo indexing/gallery tool that Google developed. It’s much easier to browse through than My Documents > My Pictures, and also it has built in editing features that work really great! Rotating, cropping, red eye, tints, and my favorite…”Feeling Lucky”.
This in conjunction with the Airtight Interactive Autoviewer Picasa Template makes for fun photo galleries!
It took forever, but the verification process is finally complete!
Here is my sister Ang on Halloween - her rendition of Napolean Dynamite…
Here is my Nani, playing Happy Birthday on her favorite instrument….the comb. Oh, the holidays, how I love them!
And last but not least…our Munchkin Kitty after her first visit to the vet. After heavy sedation for blood tests, she was a little loopy at home. (note the clicking noise in the background…I don’t know what the heck that is.)
I’m out of touch with the outside world since I spent 12 hours in Waltham High School on Saturday. It was not one, but two dress rehearsals on Saturday, and yes another one today (Sunday). 3 shows, a lot of work. I’m so out of touch that I didn’t even realize that Art, The Star of Blogging, had retorted to my last post about that man and the blog revolution. So, I’d like to take this opportunity to respond…
[WordPress is a blogging rig and is available free of charge. It has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times to date. The latest version is 2.0.2. You are looking at it right now.] Now as for me, I still stick with good old Version 1.5.1.2, and maybe this has aided in my lack of blog stardom. I’ve seen WP 2.0.2 in action, and things are a bit easier. But I have this little fixation with FTPing, so I still do old-fashioned style.
[Actually, he might know me.] He should be reading 3rdarm.biz! The man tries so hard but David Weinberger will never the Star of blogging. Listen to his story here.
I got my new resume & portfolio site running. Cbear, the root. Bugs? Do tell.
I read a fun article on A-List Apart. The promise of porn…
I read a review on a book about the words we use in the English language. His name was Richard, I can’t remember anything else. Hmm….good use of words Richard, they really stuck!
Mainly, I wish NPR had Boston offices so I could work for a radio station that’s super awe.so.me. Podcasts are the craze. They be some Chinese cast-pods coming in to Cambridge Wed. night, I heard from the 3rd arm.
As I wrote possibly my best blog post in a very long time (does only count as best?), I started going a little crazy with key commands and somehow navigated away from my page, ultimately deleting what I had just spent the last 30 minutes writing. 
The nicest day of the year has rolled in on this fine Friday morning. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and my Munchkin Face Kitty is cackling through the windows. The thermometer says 72, but it feels more like 90. A fine morning indeed, waking up to the sweet sounds of Jeff Buckley’s Lilac Wine, which is my favorite Jeff Buckley song. Then, come to find out in the NYT Arts Section, a movie is being made of this young deceased singer/songwriter. 
Maureen Dowd wrote a great column on Saturday about the Prime Minister of Japan, Junichiro Koizumi, and George W. visiting Graceland in Memphis last week. The photo pictured on CNN website is a tame, welcome-to-graceland shot of the happy family. But the real story was when they were inside the Elvis Museum, and Koizumi started doing, as Dowd puts it, “Thin Elvis air guitar, and Fat Elvis karate chops.” 
