Monthly Archives: November 2009

Sunday night – ars gratis artis

Folks,
  It was such a wonderfully quiet weekend that I have little to report.. so I’ll fill in tonight by showing some of the artwork I saw on our trip down to Brooklyn for Thanksgiving. The following are pieces done by Max’s roommates that adorns their apartment walls.  Pretty amazing stuff.


Here are some other forms of public art.. all bumperstickers I saw in the parking lot of a Mobil station on Rt 15 in Connecticut..   Not your usual sentiments… eh ?

Finally, rounding out the artistic bent of today’s post, Gabe and I spent the afternoon taping for this @#$%$ rap video I’m making for work (yes, for work) .   It was so much fun working on this with Gabe. He has a good eye for video !. Here he is videoing me almot getting zapped by the big teslacoil..

He also shot me running around on my go cart.. he took a spin too…

Then he helped me shoot a ‘ghost riding’ scene for the rap… he layed way far back in the car and drove while I walked beside it.. Its a crazy new fad.. I guess… and his first experience driving (I think ) .. He’s a natural.. and can do it lying down !

I’ll show you all the rap vid when it’s closer to being done. I could use soem critique.

Finally, here’s the tea cup I left in my office all last week while I was out on vacation..

But.. is it art ?!?!

I hope you all have an artistic evening !
Nite folks, Nite Sam
-me

Saturday morning – three years of blogging..

Folks,
    I mentioned 2a couple of posts back that I now have passed the three year mark with this blog. As many of you know,  I’m a numbers junky. I wanted to know what three years of blogging ‘looked’ like. so I stayed up way too late and wrote soem more code (I love programing in Python !) .. and extracted all the text I’ve written here in these last three years . For those interested.. here’s the stats..

– I 3,417,863 characters ( 2,789,693 without spaces)
– That made  627,021 words
– and 3357 paragraphs (seems I’m a little light here.. need moreparagrap  breaks !)
– In 1118 entries
– it’s been read here (meaning at myspace) 313,484 times.. but that doesn’t cout reads from elsewhere such as my homepage, work, twitter, etc.
What I find more interesting is the word cloud I created using http::/www.wordle.net.  The size of the word reflects its frequency in the glog..

Sam’s name is by far the biggest.. no surprise there.. some of the other stuff is interesting.. ‘cool’, ‘great’ . ‘like’ ,good’ .. I like seeing those !

What do you see in there ?


I’ve done this the last two years.. I’ll dig those up later.. to see what they looked like
More later.. TTYL folks.. TTYL Sam
-me

 

Thursday night – giving thanks

We’ve just pulled away from the table at a wonderful thanksgiving dinner at Max’s apartment in Brooklyn.   Present are  Diane, Max, Gabe. Will , Alex and me…  It was a really peaceful day here.. Diane and I went for an early-ish walk down for bagels.. It’s fun sampling city life…

The city looked cool and beautiful this morning.. lots of cool surprises.. We came across this one place offering New Orleans style  fried turkeys.. there was a line all the way down the street !

and signs of a prehistoric bird party.. turkeys ?

.. and many reminders..

One thing I love about this neighborhood is hte mix of cultures.. THere’s a big Chassidic community here wiht all the store signs in Yiddish…

and next store some of the coolest named small store front churches..    I saw many more than these.. just didn’t have my camera with me most of the day..

At dinner was a

feast of many cooks..

  Gabe made the apple pie, Diane made lots of

stuff,

Max made the fake turkey,

Will carved the real turkey. Most of the meal was vegetarian

..//. and I

basically sat on the couch and watched (and I got most of the dishes. )

Dinner was about 7.. it was perfect..casual, interesting food, great company..

I substituted hot sauce for cranberry sauce..

It was wonderful hanging out with my family and our friends,

We toasted Sam, our families, and absent friends (and a shout out to my friends at the Colony… as promised)..   We truly appreciate what we have.. and think about it every day.   I think I was always thankful .. but have been so much more mindful these past three years.

Which reminds me.. I forgot to mention that yesterday marks the third anniversary of this blog. My first entry was Nov 25, 2006.. just 4 days after Sam’s passing . and I’ve written every day since.. except for the days I was offline for the Colony.. Diane helped out there.. .. so I think there are only about 15 days missing. I sometimes o back and start reading form the beginning.. .
This has been such a source of healing for me.. and made such a connection for us to our firends and family during this tough period of our lives..   I remember last year at this time I was thinking of giving up writing.. but someohow.. I feel more energized about writing now than ever.. I guess I’ll keep at it daily for the forseable future…. I still find it helps..

Well.. we want to wish you all a peaceful and meaningful Thaqnksgiving..
Nite folks.. nite Sam.. we’re missing you Sam..
-me

Late Wednesday night – Brooklyn

Greetings from Max’s apartment in Brooklyn.. Diane Gabe and I drove down this morning to be with max for thanksgiving. It was a great and lazy day.. even with the driving.
Most of Max’s roomates are home for the holiday.. so there’s plenty of space for us We’re hanging out here with Max (and our)’s friend Alex who’s visiting from VT and Max’s roommate Will.. who’s a great guy.
    Diane, Gabe, Alex, Max and I went to our favorite restaurant in NY.. Red Bamboo tonight. The place is amazing ..  It’s all vegetarian (as are we).. but the menu is loaded with fake meat-like things as in ‘fish sticks’ … and ‘chiicken wings’.. the ”s mean that the stuff is made out of some sort of wierd veggie stuff.. but it tastes great.. ..  Just call it our part of observing hunting season 🙂

Afterwars, we came back home and did the quentesntial college hang out thing.. Gabe, Max and Alex hung out and played a Zombie shooting game (looking like zombies on my cheap phone cam)

Meanwhile, I worked with Max to get the EEG thingy working on his MAC.. none of the code for the thing runs on a mac so we had to cobble some things together in 2 languages to get them to work.. but.. ultimately we were triumphant.. at least to the point of getting brainwaves on the screen.. Here they are again for our viewing entertainment. For the record.. the periods of fast wiggles correspond to gritting your teeth.. so they’r enot brainwaves per sec. they’re neuro muscular activity..

Yikes It’s almost 2.. gotta get to bed.. More tomorrow.. Nite folks !
Nite Sam..   we’re thinking of you..
-me