We made it!

It was a long, painful (at times) and wet, wet ride but we're here.
Details to follow.

Don't look down!

Some handrails aren't designed to keep you in

Taken inside the sidewalk canopy out front of our building. They've
been doing a lot of crane lifting this week.

Blogging the future: Race to Mackinac

The sailboat race to Mackinac begins this Saturday (July 19, 2008). If you want to follow our progress, here's how:

	14-Jul-08 - 12:18pm Dear Sailors and Friends: For the first time in the history of the Chicago Yacht Club Race to Mackinac, all boats in the fleet will carry position transponders, which will allow spectators around the world to follow the Race. This state-of-the-art tracking system allows anyone following the race receive hourly updates on individual boats, entire sections, or even the entire 439 boat fleet as the race moves up Lake Michigan. Race tracking services are being provided by iBoattrack, a division of Horizon Marine. There are two methods to access the tracking site maintained by iBoattrack. The first way is to go to the Race to Mackinac web site CLICK HERE) then click on multimedia and race tracking. You can also bookmark the site directly at http://charthorizon.com/races/2008_chicago_mackinac/htdocs/ (the site will become active shortly before the race begins). In order to familiarize yourself with how the tracking works, we urge you to take a moment to look at iBoattrack's last race tracked—the Newport Bermuda race—CLICK HERE . Though the race is now complete, you can see how the system worked. You can easily select individual sections to track (the 'class' drop down box). You can also use the movie mode to animate the race. Note that you can mouse over any boat’s current position (except when in movie mode) and get the vessel’s boat speed and other information. If you would like more detailed data on any boat, select either the 'Boat Mapper' or the 'Google Mapper' from the links at the top of the page. These will take you to a separate page that allows you to focus on an individual boat or boats. It allows you to animate the race too. In addition, there are a couple of extras for users of the site to explore. First, iBoattrack will maintain and monitor discussion boards. We encourage you to visit the boards and discuss the race with other friends, family and fans of the Race. Should you have questions about the tracking system, how to use it, or how it works, iBoatrack will do their best to answer you on the boards. Second, in order to learn about the weather than the sailors are experiencing on the Race course, you may visit AccuWeather.com, which will provide regularly updated weather information during the race. A link to the AccuWeather.com site will be available on the tracking home page. In case you encounter difficulties with the website, there is a 'help' button in the top right of each page of the tracker. Please forward this e-mail to anyone who may be interested in following the Race, and encourage them to track your progress as you race north. We hope that this project will make the Race more exciting for your family and friends. Regards, Greg J. Miarecki Chair 2008 ChicagoYacht Club Race to Mackinac Greg Freeman Vice-Chair 2008 Chicago Yacht ClubRace to Mackinac Winn Soldani Technology Chair 2008 ChicagoYacht Club Race to Mackinac

I seem to have started something

Last night, I think I started a dissertation. The problem was (is?) that I don't really know exactly what I'm writing about, and so rather than get through this exam with a whole bunch of post-it flags sticking out of books that I've read (and an extreme inability to recall what each color stood for), I'm going back to the basics: index cards. Yup, index cards.

I've done this before--not with index cards precisely, but with the same idea. The most successful papers I've written have been the result of recording in a word processing document all of my observations and important points of fact and interpretation--anything that interests me, really--and then printing it all out, cutting the individual notes, facts, pieces of evidence, ideas, clever turns of phrase, anything that occurred to me as I was reading, and laying them all out on the living room floor in logical hierarchy:


Main Point.
Subpoint
piece of evidence one
pieces of evidence two and three, which need to be understood together
Subpoint two
----uh oh! I have no evidence for this; better reconsider!----

You get the idea: it's a very concrete way of determining whether or not you've proved what you set out to. And to get an idea of what is provable within the scope of your paper.

This time, it's a little bigger, but I'm organizing the index cards as I go. Category cards get written up in portrait rather than landscape format so that they can act as dividers--but if the category proves unuseful, then that card gets set behind the 'no longer useful' category card.

It's flexible, and it allows me to take all the things that I find interesting and see what I can make of them. And it will, I hope, mean that at the end of taking this exam, I'll be well on the way to proposing rather than just knowing more but having no idea what I'm going to write on.

(Wish me luck.)

I've always liked Kool-Aid. Really.

We're getting new phones--Dr. Fledermaus should have an email-capable one for work (they'll pay) and so I'll be piggybacking on her acquisition, likely, with a family plan.

And so it's a good excuse to finally cave into my brother's recommendations and get a picture/email/web capable phone. (Photos he sent from the Mariners game last week, and the announcement of the CTA Bus Tracking web site, were the other two things that put me over the edge.)

So I've been doing a bunch of research, and come to the pleasant surprise that the reason the iPhone is selling so damn well is because it's cheaper than its competition.

For comparably-capable phones (no other has the music capacity of the iPhone, but all of these have qwerty keyboards) and plans (including email and web access, about the same number of minutes), here's the two-year cost of ownership (equipment purchase, activation fees, monthly charges including an estimated 25% taxes and fees).

8Gb iPhone: $2080
US Cellular HTC PPC6800: $2142
T-Mobile Wing: $2327
Verizon LG Voyager: $2480 (actually, it's probably higher; this doesn't include activation since we're currently VZW customers)
AT&T Tilt: $2558

The iPhone doesn't include insurance, but look at it this way: over two years, I could drop one in Lake Michigan and replace it at retail, and it still comes out to the same cost as the Voyager and the Tilt, which are the other two that come anywhere close to iPhone is slickness (yes, that's slightly different from coolness).

Now the only problem is that the web is vibrating with anticipation of a new iPhone release sometime in the next month or two. What's a consumer to do?

Two kinds of sex

We went to an elementary-school graduation party for a friend of ours on Friday. He's a methodical kid, loves assembling things from Legos, loves Star Wars (has since the age of one!), loves order and pattern and words and numbers, and really doesn't understand instinctively the social cues that most of us take for granted. It's been a struggle for him to get as far as he has, and so the celebration was well-merited. But that's all a little beside the point--there's wisdom to be shared here.

A couple of weeks ago, C. and his mom were in the car, and C. said, "There are two kinds of sex." His mom (from whom he inherits this trait of speaking his mind!) said, "Oh, really? Tell me more." So he explained, "Well, there's the biological kind, where you have kids. And then there's the other kind, which involves alcohol."