Guess and Check

On my way home Saturday evening on the 1 train, there was an old man sitting on the right side of the car sketching a man sitting across from him. This isn’t the first time I’d seen someone doing this, and while we watched him, my friend Kenny commented that he’d seen it before too. I also noticed that the entire half of the car in view of the man was watching him sketch, almost like a tennis match, looking at his sketch, looking at the man, back and forth, back and forth. For a while I debated whether or not the drawee was aware of the drawer, but later on it became apparent he was. The drawee eventually arrived at his stop and hurried off, quickly pausing to let the man rip off the drawing and hand it to him.

At this point, due to people exiting the train and seat shuffling, the seat three to the left of the man was vacant and I took it, so now it was left to right: woman, me, Aimée (another friend), vacant seat, and then the drawing man. I was talking to (still-standing) Kenny, trying not to draw obvious attention to myself, but also knowing it would be cool to be chosen as a subject of the man’s next drawing. I soon became aware that I was in fact chosen and tried to act normal, failing only every so often as the man would catch me glancing at him and both of us would grin sheepishly.

Eventually, the man finished and handed me the very nice drawing. I was prepared and gave him ten bucks in return. He then gave me a blank sheet of paper to cover it so it didn’t get messed up on the rest of the way home. He then drew Aimée before she got off. Then he packed up his things and got off at Houston St.

I’ve included appropriate photos below, including a reference photo I took when I got home so you’d know what he was trying to capture in the sketch. And there’s nothing I could have done about it, but I’m a little bit angry that I got my hair cut that very morning, otherwise we’d be looking at a bit cooler and poofier sketch.

I recently finished my latest cross-stitch project. It was a gift for my old boss Patrick (you may remember him having a sense of humor) regarding a joke a comedian once made regarding what we did (work in a university housing office).

I made the pattern myself using KXStitch. It’s inspired by patterns from Julie Jackson’s amazing Subversive Cross Stitch. The font is Jason Kottke’s always useful Silkscreen.

See? I’m cool.

I made some cookies yesterday using the Original Nestlé Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe (without the nuts) and with the slight modification of refrigerating the dough for forty-eight hours before baking per the recent New York Times article that suggested as much.

They were very well received.

I signed up for Facebook on October 31st, 2004. I last edited my profile on November 1st, 2004. The information I included at that time, while not much, was carefully calculated to withstand the test of time.

Facebook used to have a feature that listed on each profile a “Last Update” date. So for a long time, I had the furthest back date of all the people I knew. In March 2006, they had some problems with their “Recently Updated Profiles” list, so they were forced to reset everyone’s “Last Update” to March 23, 2006. Shortly thereafter, Facebook did away with listing the date at all, taking away from me what I saw as a cool little bit of status.

Since the outward sign that I hadn’t updated my profile in a really long time was removed, I had to resort to telling people in conversation. Not as cool, let me tell you.

Now, not updating has pretty much just become a personal weird thing. I would say things to myself like “I haven’t done it in such a long time, let’s see how long I can go.” However, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I’d need to update something or other eventually, so I should probably figure out a significant day to make that update.

So today, three years seven months and twenty-nine days after my last edit, I updated my Facebook profile. Don’t look for any significant change in the data there, it’s the update itself that’s significant.

So I have a lot of t-shirts. Each one has a story; if you see me wearing one, feel free to ask me about its story.

Left to right, top to bottom (stacks ordered reverse-chronologically by date of laundry load):

First stack

1. Pace University Wellness Week 2007 #1
2. The River Project green
3. V-Day Until the Violence Stops
4. L.L.Bean Visa Credit Card Outdoor Advantage
5. Pace University white
6. Pace University Women’s and Gender Studies
7. The River Project blue
8. ShopRite Ronetco Supermarkets Walk America 2002
9. Pace University PaceOne Card

Second stack
(more…)

There’s a storm rolling in.

So I met my nephew Andrew yesterday. My brother and sister-in-law brought him down for the weekend to visit.

Here’s some video my father put together of me and him:

He’s a cute little guy.

See Apatosaurus and Normal human body temperature for more info.

So I pulled the “filling up the office with packing peanuts (but not really)” prank on my boss.

Here are some photos and videos of the setup and his reaction:

Joan Acocella gives her opinions on how New Yorkers are both seemingly rude but also helpful in public.

My mother, who lives in California, doesn’t like to be kept waiting, so when she goes into the bank, she says to the people in the line, “Oh, I have just one little thing to ask the teller. Do you mind?” Then she scoots to the front of the line, takes the next teller and transacts her business, which is typically no briefer than anyone else’s. People let her do this because she is an old lady. In New York, she wouldn’t get away with it for a second.

But also:

In the subway or on the sidewalk, when someone asks a passerby for directions, other people, overhearing, may hover nearby, disappointed that they were not the ones asked, and waiting to see if maybe they can get a word in.

Her main point on this is that we (New Yorkers) live so much of their lives in public (eating outside in parks, using the subway, etc.) that we act in public like we do in private. Very interesting.

Via Kottke.

Finally saw the Cash Cab last night.

Ben Bailey gave us the thumbs up. And a producer shushed us for getting too excited as he had a passenger read from a script.

So today is the first day of ROFLCon. I’m here in Boston/Cambridge mainly to cover The Brothers Chaps appearance tomorrow for the wiki, but there’s plenty of other interesting stuff going on I’ll be sure to post about and take pictures of.

I saw a cool idea for decorating a kids room, this pirate decal.

Judging from the price, I’d probably just try to paint something myself instead. And of course, the next kid would have to have a ninja theme.

Via Boing Boing.

This morning as I woke up, my clock radio alarm was playing this jamming tune. That was, until it started to skip. Now, I knew my radio wasn’t skipping, since they don’t tend to do that. So I kind of just raised my eyebrow a little, even giving it a little *tap tap* just to make sure. Nope, it turns out Gary Walker was having some technical difficulty, as I then heard a clunking noise followed by him explaining how technology was wonderful. He got the track to start again, but I really wanted to know the name and artist and Gary only gave me a little hint by saying “Dr. Billy Taylor” after the skipping.

Enter WBGO’s nice play list feature: there it is, Billy Taylor with I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free from the Taylor Made at the Kennedy Center album.

I also managed to find a nice YouTube video of him playing it with his Trio, have a listen.

<Dot_com> Dolores Umbridge has plates with cats all over her walls
<Dot_com> I’d like to see lolcats made of these
<BazookaJoe> Nope, can’t find any DoLOLrescats.
<HeimAway> im in ur school. writin ur edukashenal dekrees.
<Dot_com> im in ur hogwarz
<HeimAway> inquisitor cat disapproves ur defence group
<Dot_com> hem hem
<DorianGray> holy shit it’s a centuar. Get on the broom!
<HeimAway> u will submit to minnistree. kthxbai.
<Dot_com> i wil not tel lais
<HeimAway> o hai. i help wif ur dissiplinning students.
<DorianGray> there will be no need to talk.
<stux|away> and they said that the internet would lead to a decline in grammar… how wrong they were.
<HeimAway> There’s probably a few contexts where “DO NOT WANT” would work, but those tend to rely on images, so a bit hard to do in here.

Via undisclosed IRC channel. (I wasn’t there at the time to be able to contribute.)

I think this idea has great potential. This image (from this post by Kristen Devoe) is the best I could find for the purpose. There’s plenty of cats in a variety of poses there that could be used.

Halloween 2007 pumpkin and costume photos can be found in this album.

I was setting up a computer the other day and came to the point where I wanted to setup the background image. I usually like to pick something new, but this time instead of looking around online I decided to use one of my own photos.

I came up with the following, a crop of this photo I took at the Exploratorium.

We recently acquired the Food Network in my building, and I’ve come to greatly enjoy the work of Alton Brown.

He’s my kind of cook. He cooks hand in hand with science (Wikipedia calls it molecular gastronomy) and that’s right up my alley.

I bought I’m Just Here for the Food: Version 2.0, Alton Brown’s Gear for Your Kitchen, and I’m Just Here for More Food: Food × Mixing + Heat = Baking and from what I’ve read so far, they are absolutely excellent.

I’ll soon be stocking up my kitchen with all sorts of fun things to help me make wonderful creations.

Earlier today I finished reading the Harry Potter series. You should read it, I think it’s quite excellent.

I went to the MoCCA Art Festival 2007 today. I met and got sketches from Jeph Jacques and Chris Hastings/Kent Archer and picked up a whole bunch of stuff from many of the six hundred plus exhibitors.

Be sure to check out the photo album.