Assorted updates
Spent all day Thursday flying to Boston. Read SWAPA (an APA I'm in) most of the way, plus a little napping and a little reading of back issues of Asimov's (on my Treo) and a little computering (a groggy pass through the folkdance story; I think it's in fairly good shape--just a couple hours more and I may be ready to call it done).
In the San José airport, saw a security guard on a Segway. Thought only in San José, but I'm told a bunch of police and security departments have them now.
Trip largely uneventful. Sat behind crying infant for most of second (longer) leg; felt sorry for kid and for kid's mom. Seemed like no fun for either of them. (Not thrilled myself, especially as had a bit of a headache, but I know there's nothing to be done. I took an Advil, which helped with the headache. And I could have put in earplugs or listened to music if I'd needed to.) About 2/3 of the way through the flight, the mother found another seat that wasn't as warm, which she hoped would quiet the baby down, but we could still hear the crying intermittently through the rest of the flight. Poor kid. And poor mom--she clearly knew that people were unhappy about the noise, even though nobody said anything negative, and she did her best to help quiet the kid down.
Michael picked me up at the Boston airport--thank you, Michael! On the drive back to his place, there were half a dozen reminders of why I don't drive in Boston--anywhere else I would have rented a car for this trip, but not here. (Here's another article about aggressive driving in Boston, btw.)
Expected to be up very late, since I'm often up 'til 2 a.m. at home, which is 5 a.m. Boston time. Instead, was totally exhausted by 2 a.m. Boston time. Sent a few quick relatively urgent but half-asleep email responses, then went to sleep.
Didn't wake up 'til about 11 or 11:30 a.m. local time. Probably needed the sleep, but still surprising.
Hung out at Michael & Lisa's all day. Admired their new deck. Met Lisa's parents. Petted Luke (their greyhound). Very belatedly finished editing an SH story. Made assorted last-minute plan adjustments for seeing other Bostonians. I think at this point nearly every hour of my time through next Wednesday night is accounted for.
Midafternoon, I attempted to help with an issue with Mary Anne's journal. I was typing SQL commands in the database, and I got distracted for half a second while in the middle of typing a command, and I accidentally assigned the same timestamp to all 3000+ entries in her journal. I am extremely careful every time I type database commands to avoid exactly this problem--I almost invariably type the "limit 1" part of the command (to make sure that only one entry will be affected) before typing the rest of the command. But just this once, I slipped up. Spent the next 45 minutes or more recovering from the mistake--got Pair to restore from backup, but their backup was a week old (and my latest backup of that database was a week and a half old), so had to restore half a dozen recent entries by hand. Sigh. Could have been much worse, though, and the Pair support guy was very nice about it even though the problem was totally my fault. I really ought to set up automated tools to back up all the databases I work with once a week or even more often. Lesson to me (and anyone else who wants to learn from it): always back up DB before making changes, even if only minor changes.
Went to dinner tonight at Scutra. Yummy salad (a green salad, but warm instead of cold), yummy chicken piccata, stunningly good chocolate ganache for dessert. (The cakey part in the middle wasn't quite as good, but the thick layer of pure dark Belgian chocolate that made up most of the item was astonishingly good.) Very friendly staff--M and L are regulars there, so they were very nice to us, but I got the impression they're nice to everyone. Nice ambience--fairly quiet, cozy. (They're hoping to expand a little soon.) Recommended. Entrees in the $20-$25 range, I think.
In other news, the baby items at the Cascadilla Press CafePress store are adorable. I especially like the teddy bear wearing the cute little shirt that says:
When I grow up, I want to be a:
( ) Firefighter
( ) Doctor
(x) Syntactician
( ) Astronaut
If you know any linguists who are parents of small children (or who are small children themselves), you may want to buy them one of these. (Unless the kid wants to grow up to be a phonologist or semanticist, of course.) You can also get the same text on a baby creeper. Or you might prefer a bib that says "Language is like a good applesauce. It's best when you're immersed in it."
