Much better now

Since pinkfish was very concerned about my mental health yesterday, I just wanted to let you all know that the sun started shining in time to preserve my sanity. It looks like it will be a very pleasant, if somewhat breezy day. I need to get out of the house so Kelly can write her paper, so I'm probably going to check out Fort Point Open Studios after I go to the gym.

We went to see Serenity yesterday. It was fun. Kelly only hated it a little and has decided to make me see Prime for revenge, which I'm allowing because Uma Thurman is in it. While we're watching movies, which is a rare event, we need to get our tickets for the upcoming Boston Jewish Film Festival.

We really love days when it doesn't rain...

So my project for today was to be out of the house so Kelly could write her paper. I did a great job of it, but for some reason she's still writing her paper.

I did make it to Fort Point Open Studios for the first time. Unfortunately, this particular open studios is mainly about stairs because the studios are located in old buildings and most of them are on the 4th, 5th or 6th floors. After visiting a few buildings, my back started sending "hey, you already went to the gym today, I can't do this" signals and I decided to give up before it really hurt. I did see some cool artwork before I bailed though. Some of my favorites were Andrew Neumann's industrial panels (including a Pink Floyd-themed one that brought on a brief wave of nostalgia for the long-lost friend who introduced me to their music) and Robert Souther's photographs, particularly some black-and-white images of Boston that didn't make it onto his web site. Going to visit studios without Kelly wasn't quite the same. Meanwhile, she was over in Brookline picking up some shoes she had ordered (very cool purple suede shoes) and getting falafel for lunch (she has a slight addiction to Rami's lately) and called to tell me that Brookline on a Sunday was also not quite the same on one's own. We didn't used to be so codependent, you know.

After picking up my car in Davis Square, I went to True Grounds to get a latte and ostensibly work on my learning-to-program-in-Ruby project. Ruby is a programming language that is getting lots of attention right now. It is supposed to be amazingly easy and make you a bajillion times more productive. danger_chick will die laughing and then de-friend me when she reads this, but I am having trouble getting the hang of writing for loops. As a toy project, I am writing a checkers game, which means you do a bunch of stuff with a grid and you kind of need for loops. Ruby is great at iterating over collections or doing things specific numbers of times, but in the particular code that I'm writing I keep having a sinking feeling that I am missing out on the idiom that will make it look clean and simple. I am nonetheless learning and getting some stuff to work, but it's unusually slow going. It is fun, though. Recent conversations with the employer of one of my readers did not lead to a job opportunity but did have the very beneficial side effect of getting me motivated to try writing code that's not for an enterprise Java app. I also got in some quality IRC time while I was at True Grounds.

I like True Grounds for the coffee, comfortable chairs and free wireless, but not so much for the food so it's a good place to go when not particularly hungry. If all coffee shop patrons were like me (by which I mean incapable of sitting in a cafe for more than 2 hours at a time), places like Diesel (where I briefly contemplated going instead because I was parked right there) would have no need to charge for wireless access. However, many coffee shop patrons like to hang out alone with their computers for far longer than I do, so it makes sense that Diesel charges for wireless, but as a result I don't go there alone very often.

I got home in time to turn on the TV and watch the Patriots make a valiant comeback attempt after going down 28 to 3. Unfortunately, it was too little too late and they lost to the Broncos. However, they lost in just enough time for me to flip to the baseball game and watch Houston turn one of the most beautiful clutch double plays I've ever seen to win the game and take a 3-1 lead over St. Louis in the NLCS. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I made an excellent noodle kugel with spinach for dinner. I am on a roll with the cooking lately. I should really arrange a dinner party or two before Kelly gives up food again in January.