June 29th, 2008
Elliot and I took a whirlwind one-day tour of Paris yesterday. Here are the highlights.
* 7:15am Eurostar train to Paris.
* Glimpse of Sacre Coeur from the train.
* Taxi to Eiffel tower held up by a parade of children dressed up as flowers.
* Elliot’s smile as he posed below the tower.
* Delight when we found the grumpy old men in Musee d’Orsay, after touring half the museum looking for them *and* calling Mom for help.
* Elliot devouring quiche for lunch and flirting with our table-neighbors. Quiche’ll probably never happen again and was only due to incredible hunger after eating nothing all morning but some cereal at home and a large pink milk on the train.
* Elliot took a great picture of me on Pont Neuf overlooking the Seine.
* The toy department, dome ceiling, and chilling out in the bar at Galleries Lafayette. (Elliot was fascinated that a store would have a bar in it.)
* Dinner. No, **dinner**! Chartier made me so happy, and Elliot is such a restaurant champ. No kids menu but he happily ate grown-up salad, trout muniere almandine, and dame blanche. The restaurant was oozing traditional Parisian style, the food was cheap, yummy and French. And we had a great time.
* Elliot falling asleep on the Eurostar home, despite every intention not to.
* Talking with Mom about the day for 30 minutes before going to bed even though it was 11pm.
* Sleeping until 9am, which Elliot and I *never* do, and waking up to find Mom and Quinton already awake, which *never* happens.
It was difficult a couple times. Exhausting as the day went on and we realized we’d walked too much. But wonderful.
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June 14th, 2008
Sometimes I put things here just to increase their Google page rank in the hopes that lots of others will start to take notice.
> A simple cure is to draw all districts with the shortest splitline algorithm involving approximately-bisecting a state’s population with the shortest eligible splitting line, and then continuing recursively on the resulting hemi-states.
[Link](http://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExec.html)
Read about it at [Jon Taplin](http://jtaplin.wordpress.com)
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June 7th, 2008
I saw some good bike racing tonight, and enjoyed the London cycling scene. Not supposed to “poormouth” but sure do wish I could afford more Rapha gear.
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June 7th, 2008
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May 26th, 2008
See you next Wednesday. Off to Crete with my lovely wife of **8 years** and our boys, both of whom are anticipating the trip more than Christmas.
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May 18th, 2008
Saturday I attended and really enjoyed the conference [ Fixing the Broken World](http://geekyoto.com), found via [Ben Hammersley's blog](https://benhammersley.com), which I have been reading since 2001 and always contains an interesting (to me) mix of information & observation & personal story. Had a good time hanging out with and learning from people who agree the world is foobar, but unlike me are doing something about it.
* [Christian Nold](http://www.softhook.com/) makes emotional mpas of places to inform planning decisions. This is far more interesting than it sounds.
* I would hire Alex Haw to speak at almost anything. He’s an architect turned artist with a brilliantly unorthodox presenting style. He’s not too linkable that I could find, but [this installation](http://parth.wordpress.com/2007/05/25/lighthive-by-alex-haw/) featured in his talk.
* Richard Sanford from [futurelab](http://futurelab.org.uk) spoke about his work at [Beyond Current Horizons](http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/)
* People are trying to use the web to solve problems; e.g. [AMEE](http://www.amee.cc), [Bryony Worthington](http://sandbag.org.uk), [James](carbondiet.org) [Smith](dothegreenthing.com)
* Wish I’d had a chance to chat with [Ed Scotcher](http://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardscotcher), as it looks like he’s got a similar background to me.
* [Adrian Hon](http://mssv.net) & Naomi Alderman gave a so-so presentation on the personal and environmental impact of observing a sabbath. Later in the park Naomi answered my questions about how the sabbath rules influence the way Jewish communities develop. And in one of the afternoon sessions I sat next to Adrian and couldn’t get over his multi-tasking productivity.
* Enjoyed a long chat at the pub with Pix from [Foam](http://fo.am)
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May 5th, 2008
Jon Taplin’s got me worked up this morning with his latest post.
> I guess what has depressed me so much in the last few weeks is that from a global perspective, America is slipping behind, and yet we are contesting an election over American flag pins, egotistical preachers and assorted nonsense that has nothing to do with our massive failures both in Iraq and in every town in our great country. While the rest of the world is moving ahead we are cutting back. At USC, the National Science Foundation grants are harder to come by. Corporate chieftains like Jeff Immelt of GE get criticized for making long term bets on Green Tech. And everywhere we look our bridges, schools, pipelines and digital infrastructure are second class. If the American people are so short-sighted as to fall for the Clinton-McCain “Gas tax Holiday” to encourage consumption, when in fact we should be doing everything we can to reduce consumption–then they will get the panderer they deserve for a President.
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March 21st, 2008
The franken-claw got an “all-clear” from the specialist yesterday. He was as surprised as all of us that nothing worse came of being run over by a bus. To celebrate, I rode the IRO fixie to the office today. It was painful to grip hard, but for the most part no worse than how it felt first thing in the morning before a cocktail of Advil and Tylenol.
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March 16th, 2008
Yes the rumors are true. I got my hand run over by a red London bus, Thursday morning on my way from home to the office.
The good news is that I’m absolutely fine except for my left hand, I didn’t lose any range of motion, and the x-ray showed no broken bones. There is some risk of nerve damage or wrist problems that didn’t show up yet. I see a specialist this week to check that out.
Today I rode half a mile to Odd Bins for a bottle of Chardonnay and things weren’t too bad. I hope to start commuting the middle of this week. I can also type reasonably, tie shoes, and drink tea already.
I got a very interesting gash where the skin between my thumb and index finger popped open like a chicken breast when you pound it thin to make chicken scallopini. 5 stitches, the scar will be pretty cool.
I passed the bus on his right (outside) as we were moving through an intersection in a right turn. I was trying to move around a truck to move through stalled traffic. That truck braked, I brushed its back left corner with my right arm, which knocked me off balance. I fell left, arm sprawled out, felt fine but scared in traffic, then I felt the bus tire move onto my hand… Thankfully it was entirely below the wrist, and kept moving instead of stopping on my hand.
Don’t know about you but I can’t stand to think about it much more for tonight. Darcie is starting a pool for guessing how many different colors my franken-claw will turn, and bonus for how many fingernails I lose.
Posted in bike | 1 Comment »
March 15th, 2008
Had a fun night out last night with my cousin Jessie and her Cambridge-studying friend Megan. Met up at the Tate Modern, walked the Millenium Bridge, past “feed the birds square” in front of St Paul’s, through Smithfield Market, dinner at [St John](http://www.stjohnrestaurant.co.uk/), on to Upper St for cocktails at GU and a final beer at [The Hope & Anchor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_and_Anchor,_Islington), accompanied by the last few songs of a set by [Big Num](http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=23149511). Great way to celebrate being back in London!
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