pseydtonne | What I did this weekend

I'll start with the lessons learned, and then you can choose to read the story:

You can never spend enough time with your S.O. so don't assume you have;
You can get so swept up in a particular solution to a problem that you can no longer tell you aren't solving it;
I am enjoying life again;
There is a lot of good vegetarian food in Boston.

With these in mind, I offer

Friday night I met up with a bunch of friends to get Indian food.

chaggalagirl had been hankerin' for India Palace in Union Square for a few weeks. All I'd been waiting for was a commission check. Got a nice one. I had also been fed by a premium channel's rep only two hours before, so I wasn't ravenous and thus chose a lentil dish and some nan.

I chose well. I love when lentils turn to mush and get viscous like refried beans yet still have some comrades with structural integrity. Protein! Put this with aloo nan (flatbread made with potatoes) and you have a hearty meal. Put this with fascinating conversation from

michigansundog,

tkitch and many others and you get a great night and a well-tipped staff.

Then

michigansundog and I went to a psy-trance dance. The DJ was in fine shape and dropped some lovely bombs on the crowd. At first I was a little squicked that I was significantly older than the median attendee. However, the visuals and toys won me over. The best toys were these machines that spun knotted ropes. This will be hard to describe without a drawing but I'll try.

Imagine a little over five feet of double-thick, knotted shoelaces bound to a ball-bearing base and a sturdy brass gear attached to a motor. There is a support pole to suspend the motor assembly over the base and also to contain a blacklight. The motor spins the rope quickly enough that the slack creates standing waves. Since the rope is day-glo, it looks like there is a dual sine wave floating in the air. The combination of speed, UV light and torque quality gives the impression of seeing a sine wave spun about the x-axis to make two 3-D bulges. You can then put your hands into the path of the rope and reshape the waves. When left alone, you have the simple sine curve; when you reshape, you can get three bulges, four, all the way to seven. I had a lot of fun playing with this trip toy.

I also had a great time with

michigansundog. She's very good at helping me find play in my life. I get too into my work life.

Saturday Maggie and I had all sorts of plans. However, her plan of not leaving the house except to have me grab dinner was the best one. I get very afraid of being in my apartment all day because it reminds me too much of the summer I spent after college, depressed and incapable of getting out of bed. She makes it work well to be at home by being snuggly and letting my words roam.

Some of you haven't been outside of a relationship since, say, grade school. I've only had this one successful relationship and a few fubar ones. I treasure every moment I get with Munkee because it's vindication that I don't have to be alone.

So, of course, I fucked that up a bit today by not coming home promptly. Maggie doesn't get every weekend off. I had promised I'd come home after the MIT Flea so that we could run some errands and visit a friend doing a sleep study in town.

Instead, I ran into at the Flea. I had been really wanting to hang out with him because he rules immensely. So we hung out. I didn't want to stop hanging out, so I wound up running errands with him.

I was itching to see him get this behemoth he bought into working order. He bought an old server about the size of a dorm fridge -- an H-P NetServer LH Pro 6/200 (Pentium Pro 200 MHz, 288 MB EDO RAM, six SCSI drive bays (three of the six sleds included, each containing a 2 GB SCSI drive). As geeks, we saw this as fuh qing cewlle!

However, I got so hung up on the idea of seeing this thing work that I forgot about Maggie. She was upset with me when I got home at 6 pm, nearly five hours later than I'd planned. I could see

hakamadare getting as into this box as I would. However, I was also looking at this from behind him -- literally, in that he was at the keyboard, monitor on the server and butt on the floor, while I was sitting in a chair a few feet back; and figuratively, in that I could hear this somewhat noisy box taking up 410 watts and sizable floor space. I saw that its internal diagnostics spread beyond the firmware and required partitions on the drives. I forsee a future argument about "that noisy box under the desk and too close to the TV", one I hope doesn't happen.

I got home and hugged Maggie a lot. I owe her. I also need to check on the laundry. Thank you all for a fine weekend.

Oh, I almost forgot! I found a copy of Ted Nelson's seminal work on seeing the future value of computers for normal people, Computer Lib. This thing is a mind bomb from 1974. Nelson is the visionary beyond hypertext -- you know, like clicking here. This was a steal cuz i got it and another of his books for a total of ten bucks! Mind you, even he is still in battle about the meaning of hypertext (uhh, see the three paragraphs linked above) but no visionary can get everything understood. We're in process...

...all of us.

-still learning, Dante