An open letter to Air Canada:
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unique_name_123 gave me: computer, spirituality, laurel,
rules, games, travel, artichoke.
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metahacker( Read more... )
kyleri( Read more... )
magid and I will be leaving FPU probably around 10:30-11AM; I don't remember what travel time is, but we can head to some place in Brookline. I think goldsquare and Robin, 530nm330hz, and mabfan (and gnomi?) are available for lunch; anyone else? I have phone numbers for all of you, so how about if I call when we think we're an hour away? If you have food constraints other than kosher, please speak up -- otherwise magid and I will pick something.mbarr has graciously provided a workaround for my ssh problem. Thanks! (Intermediary on a non-standard port.) Thanks to everyone who offered advice.magid and I will probably be leaving Franklin Pierce University around 11AM Sunday. My flight leaves Logan at 4:30. magid and I have to part ways by 2 (she has another obligation).magid will drop me there at 2.) There's gas-and-hassle money in it for you; I just don't want to shlep luggage on the T.magid kindly picked me up at the airport (yikes, Logan makes the Pittsburgh airport look like Hicksville -- glad I didn't have to navigate out of there), and after lunch at Ta'am China and a missed connection with someone else, we headed up to the NHC summer institute. Programming relevant to me started at 4 with a newcomers' orientation, which was more of a meet-and-greet than what I expected. This was followed by an opening session for everyone during which it became very, very clear that most of these people know each other (or at least know the movers and shakers). I felt very much the outsider; I'm glad I had magid, tigerbright, and family to lean on a little. There are 370 people here, their biggest in a while.magid and I were both feeling undecided when we were recruited to set up chairs for one of them and decided to stay. It was a one-man play, about which I might write more later.jducoeur nails what's really important in choosing a candidate. (PA doesn't vote until late April. It's possible we won't actually be irrelevant this time, but we'll see how today turns out.)
Last night after Shabbat magid came to visit and went to
JP Lick's for conversation and ice cream. (This seems to be canonical;
I've gone for ice cream and conversation several times this week.)
We sat at a table outside (the weather was good, not too hot nor sticky)
until an employee kicked us out and we noticed that it was 12:30.
Oops. :-) I don't mind; I hope magid didn't have any
early-morning plans.
Several times over the week when classmates have asked me what I was planning to do that night (or what I'd done the previous night), I've said things like "have dinner with friends". People have commented on my having local friends as if it's unusual; they always want to ask where I know them from. Usually I've said something vague like "college" (technically true of some of my SCA friends, though we didn't necessarily attend the same schools) or "mailing lists". In the age of the internet, is this still that unusual? While it's not true that I know someone in every city, the last several times I've taken a trip, I've had a connection to at least one person on the other end -- even though that hasn't been the purpose of the trip. But, all that said, I found I wasn't ready to broach the SCA or LiveJournal with my classmates.
To continue the theme, when we finished up today around 12:30, I gambled
and called goldsquare (who I'd failed to connect with
earlier in the week). I had a 4:00 flight and was calling from
Newton, so this was dicey and boiled down to "are you free right
now?". Which he and his sweetie were, and we had time to have
a bite in Brookline before they kindly dropped me off at the airport.
I enjoyed meeting her and catching up with both of them. (Though I
hadn't met her, I felt like I knew her at least a little via
goldsquare's writing.)
6:04 and my 6:15 flight is just starting to board. More later.
Later: left 45 minutes late, arrived on time. Either they pad the schedule drastically or we caught one heck of a tailwind. :-)
Thursday night about half of the students (and one of the faculty members) went out for dinner. I had hoped everyone would come, but most of the students are local and thus have other obligations (spouses, kids, etc). It was a nice dinner with those who did make it.
That's turning out to be a key difference between this program and my experience of Sh'liach K'hilah. In SK, no one was local: almost everyone stayed in the dorm on campus, the days started early in the morning and ended late at night, we were with each other most of that time, and there were basically no outside distractions. The group had a real chance to get cohesive. Here, two-thirds of the students disappear soon after classes end at 4 or 4:30, only a few of us are staying in the dorm, and while I'm enjoying my interactions with most of my classmates as individuals, the group isn't really gelling strongly. That's not better or worse, just different. On the plus side, it's giving me time to spend with local friends. :-)
After the dinner tonight I met up with siderea (yay!). We
walked around the area near the Hynes T stop, including 15 minutes
in the Boston Library (it was near closing time). It's a neat place
-- a library with a strong secondary identity as a gallery. Tonight
they had a nifty exhibit of miniature books (I mean really
tiny; they used coins as size indicators in some cases). Some of
the miniature books came with miniature magnifying glasses, which was
a nice touch. Some of the books were a little larger and I could
imagine one actually holding them and reading rather than just
showing off. After we got kicked out of the library we walked
around the area some and then spent a while sitting in a cafe
talking geekery. :-)
Part of the T is out of service, so for the last few stops heading back to the school we got kicked off the train and transferred to a bus. For all that the trains do a good job of communicating upcoming stops, the bus I was on sucked. There was a banner-style digital sign up front that was dutifully scrolling date and time past us twice a minute. Once I saw a request that people give up seats to the elderly. But it was not used to name upcoming stops -- and since it was stopping at the T stops, not on every corner, that would not have been burdensome. It irked me because I had not memorized the map (hadn't anticipated the problem) and I would not recognize my stop at night from inside the bus. The bus was packed, so walking to the front to ask the driver wasn't going to happen. I had to ask other passengers (characteristically, most did not know what stops we were passing), which was frustrating. I wonder if this was a failure of the system or a failure of that particular driver.
Tuesday night we had planned a group outing to a local beit midrash (a monthly gathering that happened to be this week), but we learned that in the summer they scale way back and it was just going to be a discussion (with no guest or prominent speaker) of the weekly parsha. I can do that at home and I'd been invited to a group dinner before that came up and I'd declined, so I decided to un-decline and go do that.
( socializing )
I am travelling to Israel and want to take some of my US electronics with me. I've found "international power converters" that claim to cover "just about everybody" but when they list countries/regions, Israel is never on the list. What kind of power do they use? What are the magic keywords that will let me not fry my laptop? As far as plugs are concerned, is "if it fits it's right" a safe approach, or dangerous?
Thanks.
I hope they're continuing to work on this. There are lots of features that would make it even better for me (and I hope others, but this post is all about me :-) ). Some that I've thought of in the last week:
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