Ooopsie...

Chartres cathedral grounds, France

The State Department now says that the number of terrorist attacks last year wasn't the lowest since 1969 (as originally reported) after all, but rather the highest of all time. Well, we knew it was either the lowest or the highest. Can't be expected to get every little detail right.

Wasted Day

Chartres Cathedral, France

I guess I'm too lazy to put together any sort of gallery of photos from my trip to Paris, so I'm just going to post them at random until I figure something out.

Didn't get much accomplished today. Worked some on the code I've written for analyzing the National Climatic Data Center data, but didn't finish. It needs to be run with different parameters, and I've been modifying the program to do that, but I'm modifying it so that it takes command-line parameters instead, so that my non-programming partner on the project can use it too.

Workout log: walked 3.1 miles in 47 minutes on the treadmill, 4% upgrade. 547 fantasy calories. Music: Sticky Fingers (Stones)

Fathers' Day

Greek sculpture, Louvre, Paris

Took my father to dinner today for Fathers' Day and visited my Grandmother in the nursing home too. I'm a good boy.

Another treadmill workout today, interval. About 3.2 miles & 525 fantasy calories in 35 minutes. Workout music: Elephant (White Stripes)

Bush: Seldom Right but Never in Doubt

Has anything quite like this ever happened in U.S. history? I'm talking about the more than two dozen former military leaders and diplomats, all of them career civil servants, not politicians, many of them appointed by Republican presidents, who have taken the public stand that George Bush needs to be thrown out of office for sheer incompetence in foreign policy.

If it has, I'd like to know when.

Paris

I was in Paris a couple of weeks ago and have finally gotten back my photos. I'm still a film-based dinosaur. Worse, in fact: I shoot mostly slides. Overall I'm fairly happy with them, but it seems like I'm missing a roll. I got back the same number I sent in, but somewhere along the line I must have misplaced a roll. It's probably still sitting at the apartment where we stayed.

We were there for two weeks, and saw a ton of stuff, and got outside the city a couple of times to see Versailles, the cathedral at Chartres and the chateau Fontainebleau. As good as the sight-seeing was, the best thing about the trip was the food. Many times I felt like sticking my face right down in the plate to lick it clean. And my uncle kept buying really expensive bottles of wine and sharing it with everyone, so that was really nice.

At one point I went to a movie on the Champs Elysee. The movie was bad (Troy), but the theater was incredible. First of all it was probably the largest movie theater I've ever been in, with an enormous screen. The best part was that the floor was carpeted and it was clean! I could take off my shoes. Also, you could get beer, though, contrary to Vincent Vega, in a plastic cup, not a glass.

At one point, after a long day, I dragged myself and my aching feet out the Place de Concord and photographed the fountains there at night. Unfortunately those seem to be the photos that got lost. I'll be slowing scanning the photos I have and posting them in some sort of gallery.

The photo above is a van Gogh self-portrait hanging in the Musee D'Orsay. Actually it's a zoomed-in portion; the actual portait isn't so tightly composed.

WTF?

I just got a notification from yahoo saying that my email account now includes 2 GB of storage. For email. Seriously, I've got about 2000 old email messages lying around and my space is only 1% full.

My web hosting account (also with yahoo) is where I'd like to have the space, in case I get serious about posting my photos. Plus, I could just ftp files up there to back them up, or so that I could get to them from school or whatever. But my web hosting only has 50 MB and I pay $11.95 a month for it. The mail account is only $19.99 a year!

I think they're only offering so much space because they know nobody will use it.

Ronald Reagan, Optimist

Did anyone else get the impression from watching the Reagan coverage that he was just so gosh darn optimistic? Cripes, I think the commentators must have been paid based on the number of times they talked about it. I guess they were sort of right, though:

"I have a feeling that we are doing better in the war [in Vietnam] than the people have been told."
--Ronald Reagan, in the Los Angeles Times, October 16, 1967

Reagan's Funeral

One thing that struck me today watching Reagan's funeral at the National Cathedral was just how remarkably bad a public speaker Dumbya is, compared to everyone else who spoke. He reads off a few words and stops, then reads off a few more and stops, then reads off a few more. The stops have nothing whatsoever to do with phrasing -- they're just random, as if maybe he's reading one line off the page at a time.

photo test

Just posting a random photo, trying out how images look inline. I took this in New York in December 1999. It's the Strawberry Fields memorial for John Lennon in Central Park, across from the Dakota.

Hello world.

Hello world!