This is a test of your attention span. This is only a test.

Saturday was spent on airplanes: waking up in Portland three hours after the alarm, calling Delta for a seat on the next flight, taxi to the airport, PDX to SLC, two hours on the ground to fix the pneumatics, SLC to BOS, arriving at midnight, where the hell is my car, shit of course it’s on the top floor of the garage, oh my god it’s fucking cold here, where the fuck is my coat, I must have left it on one of the flights, what an idiot, oh my god it’s cold: my fingers are like ice.

Sunday morning. Rising to find big flakes out the window. Compound flakes. Falling quietly. Layering the city in snow. Sound-proofing the streets. Muting the city.

Herein you will find a recapitulation of the past several weeks in which I inform you of amusing happenings since the last writing and before now, with some digressions into times previous and into events which have occurred with some regularity, events associated with habits or tastes, things that have happened again and again because they were sought or because they were occurrences that naturally repeat, patterns in space and time, like the ripples on the surface of a harbor — a trite metaphor, I know, but apt nonetheless — where as a small boy you threw hot stones, stones warmed by the sun into the cold water and they made a splunk noise and you thought, I am heating up the harbor with each rock I throw, even if only slightly, and if I throw enough rocks I will be able to swim without my toes turning blue, and it wasn’t till years later that you had the physics to compute exactly how many rocks of that size and temperature you’d have to have thrown, and it was too many, too many rocks.

But I’m not going to talk about software today.

I love dress-up.

Particularly hats.

If you’ve been to my house you’ve seen my hat collection. Straw hats, felt hats, regular cowboy hats, chef’s hats, glittery cowboy hats, big floppy women’s hats, ten-gallon foam cowboy hats, those conical Vietnamese rice-picker hats. Fedoras in the fridge.

Laura and Miguel

When people come over for the first time I always expect them to make some comment, like, “you’ve got a lot of hats,” or, “why do you have so many hats,” or “nice hats.”

But the truth is, no one ever says anything. Which, frankly, worries me.

Are my hats less impressive than I think? Or has my collection progressed too far beyond the limits of ordinary sartorial interest? Are they frightened by what they see? Have I betrayed the darkness within? Has the cloven hoof slipped out at last? Is that why they are glancing nervously at the door with pupils dilated, or is it just my imagination?

I guess it sort of started back in 2001. After 9/11. Remember, after the shock, after that wave of sadness, after the part where strangers in the street were really, you know, huggy… remember when you were just sick and tired of being scared and sad and solemn?

Sometime during that period we were sitting around the apartment, and someone said, to hell with this. We put on whatever clothes we found at the bottom of my closet and took to the streets.

It was cathartic, like what I imagine London was like during the bombings, which, …

… wait. No. That can’t have been it. I can find dozens of photos of me and my friends dressed like idiots well before 9/11.

I can’t believe I was going to blame this on the terrorists

Despite this natural penchant for bedizenment, I’ve never really been all that into Halloween; it’s more fun to dress up when nobody else is dressed up. So, usually I just sit the holiday out, or I’m the guy who shows up to your party without a costume. But this year I decided it was time to give it a try.

Toshok and I went to the costume store a couple weeks ahead of the big day.

We didn’t get the firefox costume, but they did have an amazing collection of Italian handmade leather masks, like in Eyes Wide Shut. We wore them constantly, for days.

Come Halloween weekend, the first party was Bryan Clark‘s on Friday night. I decided to dress as my childhood hero, Belgian boy-reporter Tintin.

See the resemblance?

Before the party Toshok and I broke into Joe‘s house and dragged him and his girlfriend Brette out of bed. To wake them up, Toshok kept yelling, “I am the ghost of Tom Cruise! WoooOooo! Tom Cruise is in your house!” I didn’t know what he was talking about, since he was wearing a jumpsuit from Rony‘s appearance on that Junkyard Wars reality TV show that I didn’t think Tom Cruise would go anywhere near, but to be honest it was kind of spooky, the idea of Tom Cruise being right there in the kitchen with me, inspecting Joe’s latest grocery delivery from Boston Organics.

Toshok as the ghost of Tom Cruise

Joe protested that he didn’t have a costume, but we helped him put together a pretty rocking last-minute ensemble.

Brette and Joe

Bryan and his roommates, one of whom runs the local adult kickball club, threw an excellent party and it didn’t break up until fairly late.

Saturday was Rony and Toshok’s party. Coincidentally, Rony had been advertizing it for days with panels from old Tintin cartoons I lent him.

Rony enjoying some Belgian genius

Here are the invitations, for your amusement:

Rony also laser-cut dozens of physical invitations out of wood chips using a laser cutter at the media lab. These were handed out to strangers on the street or people at other parties during the preceding week.

My contribution to the festivities was to setup the RetroScope in Rony’s apartment. He didn’t have a TV, so we used a borrowed projector and turned one of the walls into a window into the past.

It was remarkably cool (I’m the astronaut)

We drank absinthe with dry ice, which was fine until renowned kernel engineer Robert Love swallowed a small chip of the dry ice. We were sure it was going to burn a hole in his esophagus, or at least give him terrible gas, but Professor Love was spared to hack another day.

Absinthe

Love, forced to switch to beer

Miguel

Dan Goldwater of Squid Labs and his girlfriend (whose name I can’t remember — whoops)

We ended up visiting several parties and at the end of the night on the way home I ran into some people I knew wandering the streets wielding a giant steel machete. One member of the group was back from a tour of duty in Iraq, where, he wasn’t shy about saying, he’d killed three people, for a ten day holiday in Boston. How surreal must that be?

They were all dangerously drunk, and the machete looked pretty sharp. I couldn’t get them to hand it over, so I helped some girls herd them into a pizza restaurant across the river to de-drunk and then headed home, for my own safety.

One night in early fall a late-night fever gripped me and I posted on craigslist:

I'm looking for a talented artist to create some unusual pencil drawings of me and my friends. I'll supply you with photographs, and your job is to draw the people in the pictures, only, you should depict us in the clothes, hairstyles, and settings of the 1920s. In, say, New York.

The artistic style should be something like Chris van Allsburg, but I have some specific ideas of what the scenes will look like, and they're probably somewhat more sinister than what you find in Jumanji.

Many dozens of people responded, and I asked the ones whose portfolios looked promising to send in some rough sketches of my friends. This narrowed things down further, and I ended up with a handful of promising drawings. My favorite was this one, of Peach and Alex:

The artist was a local guy named Erin Flynn. Erin seemed to totally get what I was going for, and suggested all kinds of excellent variations on my ideas. “Oh yeah, I get it, Taylor is measuring the dog’s tail with a tape measure and Jimmy’s picking up pills off the floor in the middle of the night. But what if we have Joe walk in carrying a boar’s head on a platter, with an apple in its mouth, only, Joe’s not wearing any pants?”

The next week was Sunday and Toshok and I went for a bike ride in some of the beautiful countryside we’d seen on the way out to the corn maze the weekend before. Unfortunately Toshok had a blow-out after only seven miles. We walked a mile back to the nearest town and looked for an open bike store, but we only found alcoholic treatment clinics and bail bondsmen and a headstone carving shop.

Check out the chopper headstone!

Brrr, small Massachusetts towns.

Toshok stumbled on a Linux license plate

Eventually we gave up trying to get Toshok’s bike fixed and I sprinted the six miles back to the car. It was a good sprint, but then a little ways from the car my own tire popped! Man, what luck. At least the car wasn’t towed from the derelict pumping station where we’d parked it.

That week during lunch one day I took my bike to Ace Wheelworks to have them replace the tube. Ace is my favorite bike store in Boston, and I’ve been there a hundred times, but I’d never before noticed the marker in front of the store:

A SHARP FIGHT OCCURRED HERE BETWEEN THE PATRIOTS AND THE BRITISH APRIL 13, 1775 — THIS MARKS BRITISH SOLDIERS GRAVES

The next week was thanksgiving, and I flew home to Virginia to see my family.

While in Charlottesville I saw Aaron Weber’s brother, Joel, who lives in Le Paz, Bolivia, at 11,000 feet. He says that at that altitude, cigarettes stop burning if you don’t smoke them.

Also while home I interviewed Tor and my parents on videotape, so that we’d all be able to look at the videos ten years from now and see how everyone has changed. Peach wasn’t home, so I’ll have to get her at Christmas.

The four of us drove out to The Homestead for Thanksgiving.

On the way out there, we stopped at the Jefferson sulfur baths, where Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin and all those cats used to take the cure.

The Homestead has about a billion activities, and we did most of them, but my favorite was skeet shooting.

When we got back home, it was Tor’s 17th birthday.

And I took a Nia class at my mother’s amazing studio.

Last week, I went to the OSDL Desktop Summit in Portland. Many familiar faces were in attendance.

We even took this historic photo of KDE and GNOME developers standing together:

I will have more to say about this event in a forthcoming (shorter) entry.

While in Portland, also known, apparently, as “Ripcity,” I got to visit my cousins Jonathan and Elizabeth. I watched Jonathan’s high school basketball game and got to play with Elizabeth’s pet rat, Mr. Snuffaluffagus.

Did you know rats are fifty times smarter than hamsters?

On the way back from Portland, I caught some kind of horrible influenza virus, and all I’ve done today is sleep 17 hours and then write this blog entry.

But I’m still happy about the snow.