Deconstruct
Back in the day, when I was choosing majors at UVM, I was torn between English, of which my grandfather was a professor, and physics, of which my great-grandfather was a professor. I ended up picking physics partly because I figured that I had a fighting chance of becoming Literate on my own, and that I hadn't a snowball's chance in hell of figuring out thermodynamics or electricity and magnetism, to say nothing of calculus and chaos theory and whatnot, unless I got myself some formal training. So imagine my delight when I discovered on Slashdot the following first-person account of a lowly computer engineer like myself tackling the postmodern literary criticism: How To Deconstruct Almost Anything---My Postmodern Adventure. This sounded quite a bit like the joke a couple of physicists played on a postmodernist (gawd, is that even a word?) literary journal a couple of years ago, and I discovered to my further delight that the very first comment in the Slashdot thread above linked right to it. That I enjoy this may compensate for my being the first Daghlian male since the late 19th century not to get his Ph. D. and become a university professor. Ah well.
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iChat
So the baby and I were in the basement looking at a web browser and the iTunes Visualizer, respectively---it's a great setup, with each of us totally enthralled by half of the computer screen, equally nonverbal---when it occurred to me that we could instead be chatting with Dad or Lib, fellow iChat users three hours away. Never having used the audio chat feature before, I fumbled for the green telephone icon next to their screennames and just like that we were talking via free, long-distance speakerphone. Of course, Lib's computer didn't have a functional microphone so it was a one-way conversation for a minute or two. Then there's the fact that several thousand dollars worth of computers, all connected with non-cheap cable modem service, were required. But it's still pretty damn cool. Free phone calls, kids!
This cute baby loved the talking computer even better than the singing computer.
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Well
Yes. It's cold. Walking between work and the T is very much like the way I remember walking to and from school. I didn't like being bitterly cold then, either. Too cold to ski.
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