In the last week, Spring has finally arrived in Amherst. The season suddenly changed from cold and gray to incredibly warm and sunny. We’ve had several days in the high 70s now, and it looks like the forecast will remain that way for the time being. I was very ready for winter to end this year, and even though I am very busy working on a paper which is due in a few weeks, life just seems so much more pleasant now that I can sit by an open window and feel the warm sun on me.
Sorry this is not a very exciting post, but it will probably be useful for somebody…
For some reason the people at Apple think that the Home and End keys should scroll you to the top or bottom of a document rather than the start or end of a line. After searching far and wide, I have finally found how to get back what I consider the normal functionality in a bunch of applications I regularly use: the terminal, Firefox, Emacs, and Eclipse. Read more »
I recently found the travel diary from the trip I took with my dad to Singapore back in 1999 (when I was still in high school). This was my first trip out of the country, and an amazing experience. To help preserve it, I’m going to repost bits of it here along with some of the pictures I have. I’ve added some annotations which are in italics. Enjoy!
We arrived in Singapore at around 6:30AM after a very long flight (about 24 hours). Singapore is beautiful. The bus ride from the airport was spectacular, exotic trees lining the road, beautiful flowers, etc. Once you get into the city the trees start to disappear although that does depend on where you go.
While we were walking around we came to a Hindu temple where an elaborate ritual was going on. Drums, chanting, all that stuff. Next door was a Chinese temple which was also bustling – perhaps because it was Friday the 13th?
Our second day we continued to explore Singapore. We visited a “theme park” designed to teach Chinese mythology which was pretty interesting. However, it was pretty much empty, so I guess people aren’t too interested in learning that kind of thing. Afterwards we went to the Singapore Cruise center and then toured an old cargo ship. For dinner we went to the “Malay Village” which was disappointing because of both the rain and the lack of things there. We did have some good satay though. Read more »
Time to chronicle more delicious meals.
Last weekend we hosted the Virginia Tech women’s fencing team at my house (Megan is a former fencer). They were up here for a national tournament at Smith College. I had never seen “real” fencing before, so it was interesting to lean a bit about the sport’s rules. Plus it was fun to see people waving swords around dressed in outfits that looked like space age full body diapers. We took a bunch of pictures and managed to get a few good action shots.
Now that I’m in the quarter-century-plus club, I think it’s my job to complain about how much trouble undergrads are these days. A week or so ago our neighbors (who are attached to us and share a driveway) had a big party. This happens a few times a semester, but I guess this time they were loud and rowdy enough that one of our other neighbors called the cops. I was about to head to bed when I heard the cops banging on their door. After that the kids (very slowly) dispersed, but like a good paparazzi I took some pictures of them loitering around and urinating on someone else’s house…
