My Boston Picks

I've needed to write this post for ages, my favorite places to go in Boston, to give to people who are going up there for the first time. These are just places that I love to go, and not at all "What tourists should see in Boston" definitive kind of list. Heavily slanted towards food, because I love eating.

1. Mike's Pastry for cannollis and other Italian desserts


2. Toscanini's (One in Central Square, and one in Harvard Square) for great ice cream flavors


3. Newbury and Boylston Street shopping


4. Trident Bookstore and Cafe on Newbury St


5. A walk down Charles St (great little shops, and there's an excellent pizza store along it called Upper Crust), then walking up to Louisburg Square


6. Boston Public Garden


7. Walk along the Esplanade, which is a waterfront park. It runs from the Longfellow Bridge to Harvard Bridge. Actually, you can keep going down to the BU bridge, switch to the Cambridge side, and complete the loop on Storrow Drive to Longfellow bridge, but that's LOOONG. Along the Esplanade, you can see the Hatch Shell and watch all the sailboats in the Charles River Basin.


8. walk down the Infinite Corridor at MIT: go to 77 Mass Ave. walk up the stairs. walk straight ahead, and all the way down the hallway. If you don't know the MIT campus well, you might then want to turn around and go back the way you came, or risk getting kind of lost


9. Walk down Commonwealth Avenue in the evening on a sunny day


10. Walk Central Square to Harvard Square


11. In Harvard Square, walk around the Harvard campus a bit


12. Also in Harvard Square, go to the Fogg Art Museum (free on Saturday mornings until noon)


13. Go to Peet's coffeehouse in Harvard Square


14. Go to the great little gourmet store across the street from the Curious George store in Harvard Square. I think it might be called Cardulo's


15. In Back Bay, go to the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum. My favorite art museum in the world.

cameron!

Cameron finally decided to let me take some pictures of him two weeks ago, and I'm finally getting around to posting a picture. He's such a serious little guy, unlike Declan he probably could really take care of some sheep. (Declan would be useless, unless the sheep were red dots.)



Also up on flickr is one of him with Declan, sitting on the front steps. They like to wait at the top of the stairs with their little paws hanging over the top step, to welcome everyone home.

The Savannah

A while ago, I posted about asking my grandpa about which boat he was on in WWII. He was on the Savannah where he operated the radar used by the ships guns. Now I have to write down all the great stories he's told me about the boat, or at least bring over a tape recorder and ask him to re-tell them to me.

Green

I've been reading the new web worker daily blog recently with a lot of interest, as they have some nice posts about working from anywhere. It's my favorite thing about the dotcom world in general- I'm sitting on a train with a laptop and an EVDO card and getting more work done than I often do in my office. Even there, though, I'm often not at my official desk. So my office is my messenger bag- has my cellphone, powerbook, headphones, water bottle, sweatshirt, and laptop charger. That would be a full office kit for me. I love the freedom to work anywhere that the laptop and EVDO give me. I've gotten very spoiled very quickly.

Last week I bought a new timbuk2 messenger bag in olive/lime green/white. The "olive" shade is actually exactly the same green as my green pebl. Since I love this shade so much, I'm thinking of getting one of the new green ipods, which is also this nice shade of green. Hmmm. (The other choices I'd go for are pink or black.)

5 years later

Today was the 5th anniversary of 9/11. I vividly remember waking up at 6 AM in Seattle five years ago, and logging into a Seattle news website to see a photo of the first plan hitting the tower. I spent most of that morning sitting on the sofa, watching what happened. I'd been to the twin towers a few times, but not since I was in high school. But I'd been in NYC just 3 months before, visiting the Met with my cousins. Somehow, I knew that day that I really was going to move to NYC one day. So five years later, having just come back, I'm so glad that I did. I love New York.

No one mentioned the anniversary today, other than discussing the short evacuation in Penn Station this morning, which happened right when I arrived. I snapped this picture right before I got on a train to go home.

Omakase Crime Stoppers!

Bandon's dad, one of the Omakase developers, sent me this link this morning. Who knew that an adserver could help uncover something like this!

Exposure or Exploitation? Mark Cuban's HDNet releases performance DVDs without telling local and national artists -- Is it the price of promotion or an abuse of creative rights?

From the article, here's how this all was uncovered:

In fact, we only found out about the existence of the DVD’s by sheer chance. Mike was testing a new contextual ad unit from Amazon on TexasGigs, and it pulled up ads for the video of the Cunniff benefit. And then, in the course of searching around for more information, we found episodes of True Music available as paid downloads on Google Video.

Based on the heavy use of local bands, we then sought to get some info on the series from HDNet and the bands involved for what we thought was a simple story about cool DVDs of local bands hitting the market.

The problem was that when we contacted bands for information, we got one of two answers:

“What?

or

“What the hell?”

Where is NJ?

A handy Penn Station hack that I learned today from a NJ Transit conductor. If you want to find the front of a NJ Transit train when you're boarding from the platform, turn to put your right shoulder closest to an even numbered track. You're then facing the front (for NJT - the LIRR, I believe, uses the other side as the "front"). This is super handy because I often run down a random staircase in Penn Station, end up disoriented, and take a moment to find a "New Jersey ^" sign to orient myself.

mom & her family

mom & her family
Originally uploaded by wck.

I recently discovered a nifty feature of my scanner. I can scan tiny photos from my grandparents' photo album and get pretty decent largish scans from them. This was a roughly 3" x 4" photo originally but the scan came out really nicely. So that's my mom and my uncle and two of my aunts, as kids.

summer in NJ

Things that I have not done this week because it's been too hot: go sailing, fertilize my vegetable garden, walk to B&H (right behind Penn Station, geesh I'm lazy) for more film, take the shuttle to Grand Central for the food court.
Things that I'm doing in the coming days: getting my car's bumper repaired, getting a haircut, going to a conference, and hopefully all of the above.

My commute has been lots of fun this week, as I've been download Mythbusters episodes from the iTunes store. Of course then I have to try not to laugh on the crowded train on the way in, I failed at that three times this morning (I watched the cell phone gas station episode). This evening, I'm going out to dinner with Kate and Ana, the second time in a week! The weather is nice today for an outside meal.

babysitting the baby geek

I'm babysitting Kate tonight, and she was quite the teeny geek girl this evening. First, when I walked in the door after getting home from work, she said "oooh, I like your black google shirt!" I asked her how she knew it was a google shirt (so far as I know, she doesn't read yet, although she can do her ABCs). She said "I have a google shirt too, it's white." Which is true, I gave her a tiny toddler size t-shirt, but I'm suprised she picked out the logo on both.

Then we sat down and watched the new homestar runner. She likes Strong Bad. But only after I take the privacy filter off my laptop. When she sits down on the sofa in front of my powerbook, if it's on, she points to the screen and tells me to take it off. After that, we went to maisy to read an online book and play games. After that, Kate wanted some Miffy. "I don't know, Kate..." I started to say. She looked at me & said "You have Miffy in your computer, you have everything." Heh. Three years old, and she understands the internet. Pretty good.

Umbrellas

It's been rainy in NYC for 2 days, another opportunity to ponder all the umbrellas in this city. When I was walking to Penn Station this evening, it was raining - not misting, but not very heavy. In Seattle, there would be maybe one or two umbrellas out, but here everyone had umbrellas. I had to be careful not to get poked in the eye walking down the sidewalk. I didn't think the rain really justified that many umbrellas, but it was kind of neat to see a long sea of umbrellas running down the sidewalks, touching each other, all moving towards Penn Station. Then I got there and discovered that it was a zoo-- all the trains on Standby, hundreds of people packed around the monitors-- so I got a smoothie & a WSJ & retreated back to my sofa. Getting squished into a 2 hour late standing room only wet train with hungry and tired commuters for 70 minutes is not my idea of fun.

Grand Central Terminal

I had a very short post-work amble today (my leg, which was mostly recovered in early May, didn't deal well with all the exploring I've been trying to do). I walked through Bryant Park, then headed over to Grand Central Market even though I was stuffed from dinner. I love walking through the Market, and this time I stopped at the chocolate stop. I was thinking of buying some salad as well, but I was afraid it would go bad before I'd eaten it. Instead, I just admired all the veggies and cheeses and fish. Yummy just to look at.

Mats

I took two pictures today that I wanted to post to flickr, but I sadly left the cable that connects my camera to my ibook back in NJ. Ack. If only my camera had bluetooth or wifi! One was of the Empire State Building on my walk to work this morning. I was standing out on the edge of 5th Avenue waiting for a break in the cars so that I could jaywalk across, and I looked up, and noticed it was really nicely lit by morning sunlight. On my tiny preview screen it looks like a nice photo, but it's stuck on the camera until I get ahold of my cable again. And I'm really seriously thinking about getting EVDO. I need to do a little more research on it, and try to figure out if it works out in northern NJ. My GSM cellphone doesn't work too well out there, so coverage might be pretty spotty.

I found a blogpost on how to cut mats for your artwork today. It's a great, clear guide. It also gave me flashbacks to Jewett at 4 AM the night before a project was due, attempting to cut my own mats. I don't know how I graduated with all my fingers attached, because exhausted college students and mat cutters are a bad mix. I usually prefer to buy pre-cut mats from Target these days.

Quotable Geeks

I collected a few goofy emails and quotes over my years at amazon, and here are some of my sharable favorites. There are a few which I love more, but I can't really post here. If you know me, you know which ones they are anyway. So...

"I don't think my ego has ever been more bruised. Imagine, being mocked by developers. Shouldn't I be taking your lunch money?" --A non-technical good friend, circa 2001ish

"Correct. The first set of numbers is an order id. Walk softly over the rice paper Grasshopper." --Alan

"The Fantastic Four is such a rip off of The Incredibles!" --Jonathan

Jon: "So this is SOL?" James: "Give or take."

John: "Let's reinvent the wheel." Jon: "Our wheels have to be upside down."

"Good morning Japan!" --David, 3:24 PM JST

"Let's replace the working software with Folgers Crystals!" --Scott

(after my friend's dog, Bandon, ran away...) "Thanks for all who helped look for Bandon. FWIW, he was where we suspected: smoking a cigarette, playing poker in the basement of the parking garage." --Greg

books

One of the things that I want to do when I get back to NJ is to ask my grandpa the name of the ship that he was on during WWII. Kicked off by finally reading a few more of my books on Bletchley Park (I've been mildly obsessed with it since college), I've been tearing through a bunch of WWII history books. In the last few days I've finished An Army at Dawn, The Liberation of Paris, Enigma: Battle for the Code, Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, Codebreaker's Victory and Finest Hour. The Liberation of Paris I turned up in a used bookstore up on Capitol Hill, and read a few pages of it standing in the stacks. It's a very quick read- I think it took me all of 4 hours, with breaks, to go through it.

I also have Combined Fleet Decoded here, it's next on my list (and From Fish to Colussus on my amazon wishlist, which I might end up buying myself). Out of all of these, An Army at Dawn and The Liberation of Paris have been my favorites. An Army at Dawn has its own website and is supposed to be the first of three books on WWII campaigns. Hopefully the next two will be as engaging. The website just says they "will be published in the coming years".