Monthly Archive for December, 2007

- Boston accents really are funny. I was conditioned not to respond much to them, while living out there, but when my Mom’s friend Joyce started talking about the Pops concert they went to and mentioned the “orchestra” (Auk-sturrah), I almost cracked up. I didn’t hear too many other examples, but once I heard that, my ears were sort of listening for it. No one’s mentioned anything overly funny about my accent out here. Dad trained himself out of his Boston accent to be on the radio, so I grew with a midwesternized sort of accent… but there are discrepancies, mostly in vowel sounds; some double-O words like roof and room have an oo sound in my head, not a uh sound… and it seems that there’s some long E and long A differences, too. Sarah works on N McLean Blvd. The first time I went there, the directions her mom gave me included a street that sounded like [Shirley] MacLaine… and of course there’s the example from that Threadless shirt that rhymed Cherry with Fairy, that might be close enough for spoken poetry, but one has a clear eh sound to me, while the other has a long A.

-  I miss playing music. I knew that already, obviously, but I took a ride with Mark to a couple music stores, looking for gifts for Raianne, and I missed even that part of the scene. Hanging around talking to music store employees, seeing how knowledgeable they are, guessing what kinds of shoppers the other people in the store are: parents, multi-instrumentalists, strictly piano, garage band kids, etc. I also almost went to a show at Ralph’s. I was extremely tempted, just to see some local music, even if it was metal(!) … but I didn’t end up going, mostly because I didn’t have my earplugs with me, but the yearning was there.

- While the GPS is useful out here for finding out how long it’s going to take to get places or getting around large obstacles like airports or finding out where the bridges over the rivers are, it’s not necessary, since the grid road structure seems to extend forever. It is, however, completely necessary when driving to new places in New England. Grid doesn’t exist out there, except in small pockets of residential suburbia or inner-city areas that happen to be uninterrupted by a river or a coastline or a humongous hill. Most roads go diagonally at some time or another, very few are straight for more than a mile at a time. If GPS is unavailable, a printed out set of directions from a map service is ok, if you have a decent navigator to read them to you. Getting directions from locals works in a pinch, but be prepared for landmarks that don’t really exist anymore (“bear left where The Fair used to be, then go up past the old closed Texaco and turn left at the building that used to be the high school. When you pass the parking lot that used to be the Ford Dealership you’re almost there, you just have to take what was the third exit of the rotary at that big intersection where they installed a light. Then it’s on your right, after the where the mill used to be…”). Of course, if you live out there, you just know which roads go where. I used to have mental pictures of where each road ended and which important roads it might intersect with along the way. Maybe I can start clearing out all the brainspace for other things, now.

- My little laptop could might be able to get me through a weekend or maybe even a week of regular use. It’s pretty beat up and kinda sad, in that it has no CD-Rom and has to have either wireless network or USB ports, since it’s internal USB port fell out. But it gets me to my mail and the rest of the web. It does just fine with that GPS stuff, when it doesn’t do that 25-minute blank screen before booting thing.

I wish the rest of the computers here had such minor problems. Frank’s is due for another upgrade, to be able to play Call of Duty 4. He thinks it’s the graphics card, it probably is, but that’s gonna require a Power supply upgrade … and since we left it in the crazy Gateway case, it’s gonna be easier and cheaper to do a case transfer. Not a huge problem, but still a big project. The fish tank computer was due to have the Reserator added to it, but after successfully fishing out the molex power lead that tells the reserator when to turn on, the machine won’t boot. It seems like a power issue, and the power supply was just the crappy stock Gateway… possibly not the best candidate for oil submersion. Maybe, after the upgrade, I’ll submerge Frank’s equally crappy power supply, instead. removing that tray from the oil seems like a really messy project that I’m not especially looking forward to. And then Sarah’s uncle Paul left his laptop here on Christmas… it was ridiculously infested with spyware and malware and adware, but it also can’t see its audio card… or, more accurately, it can see it, and install drivers for it, but only the line-in gets installed. For output, it says “no audio device.” It’s annoying. It also has a power jack issue, which, I believe i saw something about needing a re-solder in a quick google search. I’ve never been good at soldering.