Could she be more beautiful???

Should have put these up a while ago

Some long awaited photos from the wedding....
Don't we look happy?

Lila and Parents walking down the aisle

The best picture of the ceremony

The Wedding Party

The 2005 bowdoin crew

The past and future bowdoin legacy

Spot the differences.....

How many differences can you find??



inspired by highlights magazine - respond with your answers!

Thank You To all my friends

Thank you to all my friends who gave Lila and I this wonderful gift. I really like it and I sit in it every day!



Thank you again!

Its been a long time

A lot has happened since my last post. New president, thanksgiving, bought a new sofa... I haven't been posting as many photos recently as I've been putting them on my picasa account. You can access it via the link in the sidebar. I'm trying to organize my photos by location, so far, I've got Alaska, Catskills, New York, and Maine sections... I think Bowdoin people will enjoy the early morning photography down by Simpson's Point.

Happy Thanksgiving all. I celebrated by helping my brothers get really good deals on stuff.

2 Main thoughts

Ok - I'm thinking about two things:

1. I accidentally sent my ipod through the washer and then the dryer. No damage. Plays perfectly. No problems. Can you believe it? I'm not joking. Reinforces my axiom, electronic devices are waterproof if there is no current flowing through them. Forget "I'm a pc," apple needs: "you can send this through the wash and it will still work."

2. I'm really not a political guy - I'm really not. I pay attention to it but I believe our future lies in science and technological progress, not political process. Elections, Presidents, Government, its all extremely important, but in terms of mankind as a whole, the next 1000 years, I truly believe that science has or will find the answers. All that being said.... Obama's infomerical (call it what you will) almost made me cry. I feel inspired. I want to call people and tell them to vote Obama, I want to blog Obama positive, I want to drive to Florida and go door to door, but....

I'm not going to. I'm going to read reviews of computers, watch videos on youtube, play world of warcraft, and generally to continue my semi-nerdy technical resistance. Oh, and teaching.

I was wrong

The new macbooks are sweet - the are lightweight, sleek, incredibly elegant, and more powerful than before. Steve Jobs is still godlike and order is restored in my world. I'm even starting to come around on the macbook air!

Worried

I've got to say... I love apple but I sort of think that they flopped with the new macbooks. They look amazing, and they're construction is great, but when you can buy a more powerful refurbished macbook pro from the refurb shop for less money, I really think apple has missed the mark. So, thats my verdict. It looks hot but it doesn't have as much under the hood as it should, especially compared to the old MBP.

Now for the good news -> The new MBP is sweet, the high end graphics card, the 9600GT is sick, especially in a laptop. Processor speeds at 2.8 ghz, hard drives at 7200 rpm, there are real reasons to buy this machine. But imo, the even bigger news:

Seriously? $899 for the new 24" screen is a bargain, that is a great quality screen and I'm going to have a real hard time not buying one to sit next to my imac.

To be fair, much of the upgrade was focused around design so you might find me recanting once I travel down to the cube and get my hands on the new models.... I think you really have to see these in person to decide if the refurb route is for you.

And finally, avery raises a great point, much of this upgrade has got to be setting the stage for Snow Leopard so until we know more about what that OS will bring, it is difficult to judge....

Microsoft Ads revisited

Turns out Microsoft made those Ads on macs using adobe CS3. check it out.

A great way to waste a minute....

And revisit a classic with a modern twist.

Ads

Microsoft has got new ads out - the Seinfeld & Gates ads and the spoof "I'm a PC" apple ads.

First off, I think that the Seinfeld & Gates ads are really funny. They aren't laugh out loud funny, they aren't stupid stuff happening on MTV funny, but they are funny. Probably they are closer to English Office funny. Hey, most americans don't like the English Office.



In the "I'm a PC" there are only two funny parts:
This guy:

and the guy who sells fish:


Obviously, the point of the ad is to show people that PC users are not all "boring suits." But I think that the ad is a little too high brow and it can't really stand up to the Apple Ads.

The ad that does out manuever apple is the I don't wear a suit ad: It is short, sweet, and its got a guy from NASA which obviously makes it legit:

Follow this link over to gizmodo to watch the ads.

Probably Microsoft should ask me next time they start an ad campaign.

Evolution

I've already mentioned that I think that the inclusion of magnetosphere as the new itunes visualizer is brilliant - but I've used itunes 8.0 a bit more and I've got some more comments.

Oftentimes apple's updates don't have a ton of visual implications for the user. Much of what is changed is "under the hood" so to speak and while there are new features, they don't compose the dominating bulk of the update.

Itunes 8.0 moves in a different direction. I feel that this is a true evolution of itunes, the genius feature is going to revolutionize music listening in the same way that the itunes store did. I've never felt that coverflow was really that great and I think the new implementation is also really nice.

I'm still exploring 8.0 but I'm finding listening to music with the new itunes to be a new experience compared to the old itunes, especially when you use the visualizer.

I've got a two screen setup and my left monitor is almost always set to show the visualizer now. Its just that good.

T-mobile?

Most of the geeks amongst us carry some sort of snazzy cellphone these days. Whether its an iphone, blackberry, an LG enV2, so on an so forth, we've all got one. But the true geeks amongst us now have a tough decision to consider. Even though T-Mobile sucks, maybe we should switch?

On Sept. 23, Google, in partnership with T-Mobile is going to release their new phone running on the Android system. We've heard a lot about Android, the Google phone, and we don't really know much about it. But it will be cool. Google is a company with a near spotless track record of only producing cool and well functioning software and I'm sure Android won't be any different.

When the iphone came out on AT&T the big detractor was the network. But AT&T has improved and I'm sure that is in no small part because of the iphone. T-Mobile isn't known to be a stellar network (apparently in Hawaii though they are the only choice), but perhaps it will start moving along.

All in all, I'm tired of a cellular marketplace dominated by Verizon. Maybe in a few weeks I'll have a sweet phone and a crappy network. And in a few months, maybe the network won't be so bad.

Productivity goes down

One of the great things about apple is that they are constantly innovating in the world of design. But thats not to say that when they see someone else putting something truly amazing together that they don't recognize it. The visualizer in iTunes 8 is one of those examples. It was developed by a software group called The Barbarian Group and although they no longer maintain it, apple has it.

If you select itunes visualizer in the visualizer menu, accessible through the view section in the toolbar you will be blown away by the seriously remarkable graphics. It was hard for me to even write this blog post. Combine the visualizer with the new genius function and prepared to be blown away.

First Day

So some would say this was my first day of school! While I've definately taught before, I've never been a full year long classroom teacher. Things went pretty well I think - we have a lot of support at Bank Street.

Check out the school. It really is a wonderful institution.

Vista

Lila got a new computer, an HP slimline, with an AMD 2.8ghz processor. Its got 4 gigs of RAM, a 500 gb hard drive, a decent graphics card and naturally it comes with Vista. Ignoring the possibility for a cheap joke here, the version of Vista it has is the best home version, not vista ultimate. We paired it with a 22" Acer LCD and picked up Office Student edition cheap, all from Newegg.

Got to give Newegg props, everything got here really really fast.

Vista is not so bad, I've decided. Running on a comp that is built for it, with a screen that is built for it, it runs quite nicely. Sure, I think we could squeeze a little more speed out of the system, but out of the box, it was ok. True, its not as easy a setup as a mac, nor as fast, but I found it acceptable.

I'm going to post anything I notice about it over the next few weeks or so. I figure a bunch of you people out there aren't ever going to switch (see the ad, Off the Air at the mac ads site) so you might be interested in what Vista's like from the perspective of a home user.

Seward and Talkeetna

Seward is a small fishing town on the Kenai Peninsula. There is a fairly large harbor to accommodate all sorts of boats including, small powerboats and sailboats as well as cruise ships and shipping ships.

Seward is also home to the Alaska Sea Life Center which is a superb aquarium. They also had a large enclosure for marine birds.

The main reason people go to Seward is to see the Exit Glacier, a glacier that is part of the Harding Ice Field. The Harding Ice Field is over 4000 feet thick in some places and is home to 30 plus glaciers. The Exit Glacier is only a short hike from the Kenai Fjords National Park Center.

After two days in Seward, we took the train to Talkeetna. Here we are standing in front of the Talkeetna River, a partly glacial river (which explains all the silt in the river).

We went salmon fishing and both of us caught a bunch of silver salmon. Lila caught more fish than I did and here she is with probably the nicest salmon of the day! (Which she caught, she also caught the second nicest of the day) The guy next to her is the fishing guide, Danny.

After fishing we got to raft down the river. In a few minutes we are going to leave for the train to take us to Fairbanks. It is an eight hour train ride that will take us through Denali National Park.

Glacier Bay

We spent a day on this fairly large sized boat going into Glacier Bay. We visited three glaciers, saw sea lions, bears, eagles, puffins, and great scenery.

This is an island that had a lot of birds flying on it. It was very fun to watch the puffins.

A great photo that lila took of the marjorie glacier. It was the largest of the three glaciers we visted. While we were looking at it, small parts of it were calving off. You could hear the ice cracking. Overall, it was really impressive.

Some sea lions we saw early on during the boat trip. Can you spot the bull?

Some people were nice enough to offer to take a picture of me and lila. We were really lucky to have blue skys the whole day.

A final view of the majorie glacier was we sailed away from it.

Glacier Bay was one of the most impressive places I've ever seen. Although the trip was a little touristy and kitchy, it was amazing.

Gustavus Part 2

We spent a day in Gustavus with no real plan. So we went golfing!

Yes Gustavus, town of about 400 people has a 9 hole golf course and a driving range. You just walk up to this unattended shed, put some money in, grab some clubs and go. Needless to say, Lila and I are terrible at golf, we did the driving range, and it was fun.

We spent a fair amount of time at the pier watching fishing boats come in. Does anyone notice that southeast alaska looks a lot like coastal maine?

Its a long pier....

Gustavus Part 1

Gustavus is a little town right outside of Glacier Bay National Park. It was about 400 year round residents and it reminds me a lot of small towns in Coastal Maine. The only way to get to Gustavus is to fly in, and the easier way is to fly on these little four seater planes. We went with a company called Air Excursions. The pilot was this young guy who never spoke to aircraft control (no need) and informed us that we were free to leave our cell phones on.

The Homestead Bed and Breakfast was one of our most favorite places we've ever stayed. They had bikes for us (a great way to get around a flat island). Here is Lila standing in front of their sign.

This is the "mall" in Gustavus, two businesses, one of which is the Homeshore Cafe. Homeshore is really the only restaurant in town, there are others attached to inns but they have set menus and are kind of pricey. Homeshore has sandwiches, salads, and pizzas and we ate there four times!

Catty Corner to the Homeshore cafe is THE gas station/museum. It looks cute from the outside but since it was never open while we were there, we can't comment on the inside.

This is a view of Lila and the dock in Gustavus. Everyday several fishing boats and whale watching boats go out. We came down to the beach a lot. Lila found lots of old fish guts but you don't have to see those pictures.

These last two pictures are from when we rented sea kayaking in Bartlett Cove, right at the southern end of the park. While kayaking we saw sea otters, sea lions, and a black bear. It was really nice to do some sort of outdoor activity.



We had great weather in Gustavus. The southerners on the island complained about the weather but clearly they hadn't been to New England in the winter, or any other time of year. Southeast Alaska really does look a lot like the Maine Coast, just there are mountains. I really liked it in Gustavus and so did Lila.

There are more gustavus photos coming, largely pictures from our day long cruise to the tidewater glaciers in glacier bay. I haven't offloaded those yet though.

Juneau

After a little excitement getting to Alaska (cancelled flights that we weren't notified about) we arrived in Juneau to a very nice little inn called the Beachside Villa. Here is lila standing in front of the hot tub!


We ate breakfast twice at this place:

The Sliverbow Bakery. It was really good. We had the reddest lox I've ever seen. It was delicious.


Lila and I hiking Mt. Roberts. Mt Roberts is one of the mountains that overlook the city of Juneau. It was a beautiful day, according to some locals it was like the third sunny day that summer. It was really fun to go up from sea level to about 3500 feet.


This is the view of Juneau from most of the way up Mt. Roberts. You can see the city of Juneau on the right side of the photo, the island on the left is Douglas. That is were we stayed, it was about a 20 minute walk into downtown from there - it was nice to be away from the cruise ships.

This is the place that we stayed in Juneau. Its the building to the right of the long aluminum barn thingy. It was a really great place to kick off our honeymoon.

A panoramic photo that Lila took of the mountains from Mt. Roberts.

More pictures will come, we've been having trouble uploading photos. Right now we are in Anchorage and have a solid wi-fi connection. More to come!

Married

Thank you to everyone who helped us have a successful wedding!

Lila's Mom's Garden

I've got to say, Lila's mom is a terrific gardener. Here is just one photo of some of the great flowers in her garden.

The wedding is soon.

Bronx Zoo

The Bronx Zoo is a pretty amazing place. I find it astounding that so many wild animals live within a stones throw of manhattan. Despite forecasts of thunderstorms today, Lila and I went to the zoo and enjoyed an afternoon of sunshine, reptiles, ungulates, large cats, apes, and the less well refined, nyc camp groups.

A Visit From England

Shaun, one of our english friends who we worked with at Killington, came to visit yesterday and today. The itineary included the Museum of Natural History, The Staten Island Ferry, and the Central Park Zoo.