Monthly Archives: August 2011

Played a bit of “name that tune” with my roommate, who proved to have far more extensive and up-to-date knowledge of American pop culture than I do despite having spent the past two years living in a rural Moroccan village.

Apart from a 10-second power outage (just long enough to reset the clocks and reboot the computers), the hurricane has been a total letdown. My roommates and I started to feel stir-crazy by late morning, so we went out and … Continue reading →

My two new roommates for this year met in the Peace Corps in Morocco, and both speak Darija, the Moroccan dialect of Arabic. This morning I woke up to find a message on the kitchen whiteboard with words like “3akra” … Continue reading →

Thank you for resolving your internal screwup that put my bill in an invalid state. In the future, it would be nice if you could do this without disabling my access for 24 hours without any warning, on a day … Continue reading →

I need more magnet time. The latest incarnation of my experiment is unavoidably finicky, with enough independent failure modes that the probability that all the pieces work right on any given day is less than favorable. On Sunday, for example, … Continue reading →

This weekend I reserved the MRI scanner for Saturday and Sunday. That might not seem like an improvement … but at least this way I shouldn’t have to be in the basement of the hospital ’til the wee hours of … Continue reading →

At the gym today the weight room was jammed, but the climbing gym was open, so I tried some “rock” climbing. I spent maybe half an hour trying to climb a route labeled “B+” … a nonstandard designator that apparently … Continue reading →

For the sake of statistical validity, I just ran the most elaborate version of my experiment, and also a corresponding control, 10 times in a row. It’s 1 AM now, and after 11 hours I am finally finally done. Edit: … Continue reading →

As I biked through the Harvard Square crosswalk this afternoon I passed a pretty girl standing on the sidewalk. She was chatting with her friends, and wearing a white pleated skirt that showed off her legs, the left shapely and … Continue reading →

I saw the Shakespeare on the Common production of All’s Well that Ends Well today. As per usual, it was well delivered and thoughtfully staged, although like most of Shakespeare the plot would be distinctly troubling today. The set features … Continue reading →