For today’s bike ride I took Wednesday Hill Road into the center of Lee, NH then back via Lee Hook Road and NH 155. This was a very intense 14 mile ride! Wednesday Hill Road starts out with gradual rolling hills. About half way down there is an elk farm with elk lounging out and a small vineyard.. after this point is the first short but very steep hill. From there on out until the center of Lee it is just up and down and up and down, all very steep.

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... Freeze warning in effect from 1 am to 7 am EDT Saturday...

The National Weather Service in gray has issued a freeze
warning... which is in effect from 1 am to 7 am EDT Saturday.

Cold air has settled in over the region... as high pressure builds
over the New England coast tonight. This combination will produce
clear and calm conditions along the southern coast of Maine... and
in southeastern New Hampshire... allowing temperatures in many
locations to fall to near freezing or below overnight. In those
areas where temperatures may not drop below freezing... frost is
likely to occur.

A freeze warning means sub-freezing temperatures are imminent or
highly likely. These conditions will kill crops and other
sensitive vegetation.

The Philadelphia Orchestra has just introduced an online music store. They’ll be selling DRM-free (thats Digital Rights Management - the crap that keeps you from doing what you are legally permitted to do with your purchases) recordings in high-bitrate MP3 and lossless FLAC format. Plus, since it is DRM free the downloads should work on any platform (Win/Mac/Linux/etc) and essentially any player.

As a free trial you can download Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in MP3 format. Check it out!

A friend of mine, xkcd, recently created bestthing.info, a site designed to figure out what some of the best things are. Tonight I created the artwork and the design so it looks nice too. Check it out!

Via BoingBoing comes this gem about how the ABC TV President of Advertising would really, really like it if DVR manufacturers would disable fast forward on their products. The purpose of this is to prevent viewers from potentially skipping commercials. My favorite part is this:

“Shaw also threw cold water on the idea that neutering the fast-forward option would result in a consumer backlash. He suggested that consumers prefer DVRs for their ability to facilitate on-demand viewing and not ad-zapping–and consumers might warm to the idea that anytime viewing brings with it a tradeoff in the form of unavoidable commercial viewing.”

So he claims that consumers don’t want to ad-zap with their DVRs, so they won’t care if they are unable to fast foward. But at the same time he is proposing this restriction for the express purpose of preventing users from skipping commercials (which, of course, he says he thinks they don’t want to do). Huh?

As some of you know, I’ve been working off-and-on on having my own piece of webspace again. Not that I don’t love Dan and all, but I’ve never really quite felt at home posting on the isomerica.net frontpage. Our styles are too different.

Thus, I hereby announce the existence of ThunderSnow.us. It’s currently rather sparse on content and rough around the edges, but sandpaper is being applied, and content will trickle in. And thus I will not be posting over here so much (not that I post that much in the first place), but will instead be posting over there.

Switzerland’s soon-to-exist new banknotes are now officially THE coolest money I’ve ever seen. They’re all shiny and science-y. and just generally awesome.

Snowing (lightly), dark outside at 4pm, and I have Christmas present materials strewn all over the living room (and the cats aren’t eating them!). It’s definitely December.

Also, I am so proud of myself over the above Christmas presents, cause this was a crafty thing that I came up with all on my own and figured out how to make, and the first one is more-or-less finished, and it’s evident that it’s really going to work!

• I was far far too excited about playing frisbee on Real Grass last weekend, even if it was somewhat, ah, quirky polo fields. But our fields at UNH are soooo trashed right now, since it’s rained so much, that any dry grassy field was just amazing.
• The IRC-on-a-whiteboard from Saturday is still on our fridge.
• I’m discovering the limit to how much stuff I can stay on top of. Right now I have four (admittedly light) classes, work 10 hours/wk in Jill’s lab, work 3+ hours a week at the science center, am playing frisbee, and have rehearsal every evening. It’s a lot going on. But it’s (just barely) okay, and it feels really good to be on top of this much stuff. I’m all “go me!”
• Speaking of rehearsal. Mask and Dagger is putting on Twelfth Night the weekend before Thanksgiving. I’m an ASM, and it’s going to be a good show. </plug>
• That party on Saturday? Three different people came over and made food of some sort. It was amazing. I love my friends. And those triple-chocolate doom cookies are even more amazing when warmed up and eaten w/ ice cream. (And the pie was good too. And the quesadillas. Twas all good. Yay people.)

As some of you already know, we are now in posession of two black-and-white kittens. Squee!

Still alive, in Kenya, at the Samburu Serena Safari Lodge. Classy place. Yesterday and today were our first real drive-around-and-look-for-animals safari days. Before this we were staying in some parts of Kenya that really aren’t tourist destinations (Kitui and Mwingi areas), walking around, seeing some households and farms (and lots of schools), and generally getting a feel for the real country. The running joke is that Journeys calls this the Million Animal Safari, and we may very well be approaching that total merely in donkeys and goats.

Shortly we are off to look for lions, as there was a long consultation this morning between our guide and some others, and apparently we now know where they’re hanging out for the day.

We’re at my parents. We arrived yesterday afternoon, all our packing done, ready to relax from the stress and panic that the last couple of days had been. Ha. Nobody here was packed (except for Gennie, she would like to remind you), and none of the family gear had been piled into its big duffel bags. So, having done all our own packing, now we got to pitch in with everyone else’s.

This morning, the packing is done. It looks like a small mountain of gear in the living room (the pic doesn’t really give much sense of just how much stuff that is), and feels completely ridiculous, until you a) divide it by seven and b) remember that this is for a month, for a trip that includes a 19000 ft mountain, swimming in the tropics, and spending two weeks on safari. I think we done pretty good.

(And just to brag, D and I got all our clothes and equipment (except for sleeping bags, thermarests, and trekking poles) into our ETBD bags. None of the rest of my folks managed that.)

Today was my first day of LSA classes. Two are awesome, one is good, one was kinda meh. I think I’ll drop that one, find something else interesting to sit in on during that block.

Nifty mix of people. I was not expecting the sheer number of non-native English speakers - there’s a lot of them here. French, Dutch, Japanese, Chinese, Nepali, etc. I also was not expecting how few of the people in these classes would be undergraduates - it’s a little bit intimidating.

Taking classes in (and generally wandering around) the Stata Center makes me very jealous. I must confess to liking the building… I can see how some people wouldn’t, both cause it’s flashy and attention-grabbing, and, as G says, “It makes my brain hurt”. But I like it, and I like the interior and the classrooms. Makes me wonder what it’s like to be at a school that actually has money to spend on things like buildings. It’s not just the architecture, either. It’s comfortable chairs in classrooms and lecture halls. Every single room has a projector, controlled by a little touch screen on the wall. The touchscreen also controls the lights, the screen raising/lowering, everything. And the whole building’s air conditioned. I’m just so envious.

My mother is apparently a walrus.

Things that are exciting:

I get to be a Research Assistant next semester, with Jill McGaughy, studying the role of certain neurotransmitters, on memory formation. I’m not getting paid, but I get credit, which is sort of as good.

I have a show going up in a couple of weeks. Faskarsnopra is presenting Barrymore, starring Chuck Galle, at the Mill Pond Center for the Arts in Durham.

Frisbee = wicked awesome. The women’s team won 5 and lost 2 of the games they played at the Lemony Fresh Spring Tourney this past weekend, which is about one game better than we were seeded, I believe. We played some seriously sexy frisbee.

The semester’s almost over. This is both exciting and terrifying. More of the latter than the former, I think, at least at the moment.

This summer the Linguistics Society of America is holding their biannual summer institute at MIT. That is, somewhere local enough that I can take some classes. Whee!

Many of y’all probably saw yesterday’s Get Fuzzy. Moderately amusing, yes, but not nearly as much so as Darby Conley’s original version.

Free Tolkien term papers.

(The above is for Google, mostly, although I encourage y’all to check it out. Especially the article from the London Sunday Times.)

Miscellaneous items that you should know about:

1. When we arrived home last week, after our various travels, there was a blue towel in the back of our car. So if you are one of the people (Pam, John, Alex, and Peter are the ones I can think of) who had stuff in our car last week and you are missing a blue towel, let me know.

2. As far as I care, this school year can finish any time it feels like it. I’m ready.

3. The women’s frisbee team (Ultimate Mayhem, yes we know it’s cheesy) has our absolute first ever tournament tomorrow. We’re seeded dead last at Nor’easterns. *grin* Alicia (our captain) is like “Whatever. It puts us in the easy pool. They’ll realize their mistake soon enough.” You’ll be hearing more about frisbee soon.. I think I’m playing in a tourney for five out of the next six weekends. Squee!

4. A quick and easy test/demonstration for number-color synaesthesia: Look at this picture. All but a few of the symbols are black, and the colored ones jump out at you. You can’t not notice them, and you don’t need to search for them. They “pop” (and yes, that’s the technical term). Now, if you’re number-color synaesthetic, this image which shows mostly one number and a few of a different one, has the exact same popping effect. The different number just jumps out at you, the same way the different color in the first picture did. Doesn’t work for me; I have minimal color associations with some numbers, but not true perceive-with-both-senses synaesthesia.

5. Also, if you think this is nifty, this guy has done out the alphabet and a few words so you can get a sense of the colors he perceives these to be. (Both of these links from the Mind Hacks blog, btw. Crispy functional-neuroscience goodness. Yum.)

I just called Verizon and asked them to disconnect our service. I think this was the first time I’ve interacted with a customer service rep who introduced himself as “Mr.” whatever. He asked me why we were dropping the service and I told him that we’re going to just the cell phones. He “quite understands, and thank you for calling Verizon.” So it’s gone, and we’ve officially joined the no-landline-phone demographic. I feel so young/hip/tech-savvy/etc.

In my syntax class we’ve started talking about more spohisticated theories that use more abstract structural units to account for quirky-seeming linguistic properties. The details aren’t important. These units are usually written as S’ or N’ or P’ or whatever, and the theory that introduces them is called X’-Theory. Now, how do pronounce these? My math background really really really wants to read that as X-prime Theory, but that’s wrong! In the linguistics world, you say X-bar. I’m not sure I can deal with this… *grin*