Monthly Archives: January 2005

feasting

Posted on by

The menu for last night:

Kaffir-lime salsa with plantain chips
Goi cuon (Vietnamese spring rolls) with tofu
Baby spinach salad with feta, plum tomato, and toasted pine nuts
Potato-onion bread with poppyseeds
Broccoli in a spicy citrus glaze
Goat cheese, tomato, and basil mini-quiches
Moroccan braised beef stew with currants
Raspberry/blackberry/nectarine/peach trifle

2 bottles pino noir
1 bottle jumilla
1 bottle syrah
3/4 bottle “Old Codger” port

Amy and I are enablers for each other. Perhaps it’s best that we live on opposite coasts…

Advertisement

maybe I can do this thing after all

Posted on by

Got this in the mail last night:

Congratulations – your paper #1568949604 (‘Fading observation alignment
via feedback’) for The Fourth International Conference on Information
Processing in Sensor Networks has been accepted for The Fourth
International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks.
We received 213 papers for the Main Track and 63 papers for the SPOTS
Track. After a through review process, we accepted 44 papers for the
main track and 24 papers for the SPOTS track.

Your paper has been assigned to the session POSTERS – MAIN TRACK.

It almost makes up for discovering the problem I had been working on for the last month and a half was solved in 2002.

putt-putt-putt

Posted on by

I had a pretty long week this week — I can hardly remember the 9 AM section I taught on Monday. It only hit me for real when I had some coffee. I felt like one of those cartoon motors getting extra gas after having run dry. Putt-putt-putt-kachung-grrrrrrrrr… putt-putt-putt. If only stimulants didn’t wear off so quickly.

More posting to come soon on Ian Bostridge, Peter Pears, and other singers.

RIP Big Jimmy

Posted on by

Big Jimmy, the nighttime security guard at my old dorm, has passed away. So sad. I’ll miss the long rambling conversations about people I had never met, his collecting of soda cans, which he traded in and bought us food with, and his sense of permanence. I guess nothing is permanent.

get in my belly!

Posted on by

Say recently discovered dinosaur-eating mammals:

At 1 metre long, R. giganticus was big enough to hunt small dinosaurs, and a newly discovered fossil of its smaller cousin, R. robustus, died with its belly full of young dinosaur.

I guess those dino-burgers from the Flinstones are more plausible…

In other news, go Cobb County for sticking it to the creationists.

a wind in the tunnel

Posted on by

A subtle experience: when taking the T from Harvard to MIT, it is best to wait at the end of the platform — getting on the train there lets you off in front of the turnstiles. When standing near the tunnel that comes from Porter Square, you can sometimes feel a gentle breeze generated by the train hurtling down the track before hearing the low rumble of the wheels on their track. We sometimes forget the nerves on our faces are so sensitive.

Paris Combo

Posted on by

I saw the Paris Combo at the Somerville Theater last night with an assortment of friends. It had been a long time since I saw a show there. It’s a lovely venue, not too big and good visibility. The combo were very good, very French — a little combo of Serge Gainsbourg and Django Reinhardt influences, but very tight playing and singing. If you like Gypsy swing music (like Reinhardt), French cafe chansons, or bands like Pink Martini, Paris Combo are worth checking out. It would be really fantastic to have them play in a small club, where we had a seat at a table with a bottle of Beaujolais. We were up in the balcony in the back, where the seats are so small and the rows so narrow that even I had issues fitting into the seat. Luckily I escaped the horrible knee pain that afflicted Erin and other members of our party. Afterwards we went to cozy Croatian restaurant near Teale square, where I had ouzo and olives. It’s a combination that’s growing on me, slowly.