Transcriptions II

Some Comments on Books

2010-07-04T08:13:00.002-04:00

I listen to On The Media pretty regularly. This past week was on updated re-broadcast that was all about books -- publishers and authors commenting on e-books; literature professors commenting on reading paper books vs. e-books vs. iPad vs. iPhone vs. audio books; black urban literature; war books.

One of the guests told us that it was 50 years after the invention of the (western) printing press before people started using page numbers.

I read The Passage (excerpt), by Justin Cronin, a professor at Rice University. It's the first book of a trilogy. It's gotten a lot of publicity, and is a hot seller. I liked it a lot. The science is fun, and, as far as I could tell, correct; and his dystopian America is very interesting. Great characters.

This is probably because of his Houston connections, but Texas is important in the story.

I know that publishing companies don't really have editors anymore, but I was a little surprised that an instructor of college fiction writing would occasionally have an unclear pronoun reference. It was rare, and I only noticed because I had to trace back who was saying what a couple of times.

I like books that are in series. I just started The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Block Island

2008-06-04T11:22:00.017-04:00

Last week we took our annual spring trip to Rhode Island to help Abbie IV with the transition from residence hall life to summer sublet life.

We left on Sunday, May 25, drove to Waterbury, Connecticut, ate at Spartan's Restaurant then watched Recount (which we enjoyed a lot) on the hotel's HBO. The next morning we drove the remaining 2.5 hours to Providence where we hooked up with Abbie and Benedict, went out to lunch, loaded some stuff into the Hyundai and went to see the latest Indiana Jones movie at a big screen theater. We all liked it, especially the refrigerator scene. We went out to dinner and made plans for meeting up the following morning for breakfast and to travel to Point Judith to catch the ferry to Block Island.

On Tuesday morning, we went to breakfast at the Meeting Street Cafe where we all got the largest breakfasts of our lives. The drive from Providence to Point Judith is under an hour and we budgeted two hours, so arrived with plenty of time to park, walk to the ferry terminal, buy our tickets and look at the back of the ferry.

The ferry ride to Old Harbor on Block Island is 55 minutes. It was drizzly and slightly choppy -- just enough to make me queasy and poor Abbie seasick. Benedict and Frank were pretty much unfazed.

When we reached Block Island, it was cool, breezy and no longer drizzling. It was a short walk to the Spring House Hotel.

We checked in; Abbie took a seasickness recovery nap, and Frank & I walked off in search of caffeine. After our caffeine fortification, we went back to the hotel to start exploring the island.

Block Island is quite small, ~10 square miles, so walking and biking are the obvious and preferred forms of transportation. We started our island exploration on foot. The hotel is near one of the many beaches, so we found a trail down, looked at the ocean, the shore and watched Benedict fly his kite, then watched the kite dive into the ocean (it was gustier than optimum for kite flying). It was recovered and the line was un-knotted. We walked further along the perimeter of the island, around to the Southeast Lighthouse. The kite-flying conditions were much better here.

After Frank hit a golf ball into the ocean and Abbie & Benedict flew the kite and climbed the many stairs to and from the beach, we walked back to the hotel, then into Old Harbor and ate seafood for supper.

That evening Frank and I learned how to play Betrayal at House on the Hill. Lots of fun. Those Brown students are good company.

Wednesday was bike riding day. We rented bikes and started riding up the eastern side of the island. We stopped at some sites along the way -- a family graveyard, a plaque, a labyrinth. We made it to the end of the bike trail and continued along the walking trail, up to the North Lighthouse. Abbie and Benedict walked all the way to the most northerly point and came upon some island deer. Both deer and people were startled at the encounter.

We biked back down to Old Harbor and stopped into the Harbor Grill for some award-winning clam chowder and ciabatta bread; then back to the Spring House for a round of Settlers of Catan.

We finished off the afternoon with more hiking, exploring, and kite flying. We looked over a couple of restaurant menus and settled on eating dinner at Finn's Seafood Restaurant. Great food, great beer, great company.

Back to the hotel for more fun with Betrayal on our last night on Block Island.

Thursday morning was clear and calm. After breakfast and packing up, we walked down to the pier for the ferry ride back to the mainland. Fortified with Dramamine and blessed with smooth seas, the ride back was beautiful.

We loaded up the car, drove back to Providence, unloaded the kids, re-loaded the car with a different batch of stuff, ate a late lunch together then Frank and I hit the road. We spent the night in Waterbury, Connecticut (again) and ate at Spartan's Restaurant (again). Back home in Murrysville by Friday evening.

You can check out my Picasa web-album here; you'll find more pictures of kite flying, plaques, beaches, food, gulls, deer and lighthouses.

Wild Phages

2008-04-10T18:58:00.005-04:00

My virology class isolated coliphages from various soil and fecal samples. Here are some pictures. We also looked in Atlantic Ocean and Massachusetts bay water for cyanophages that infect Synechococcus. Here are some pictures of the fancy-tailed phages that we found. One of the fun things about isolating wild phages is getting to name them. I noted the strange names that were chosen for the cyanophages.

Abbie IV's Spring Classes

2008-01-31T17:20:00.000-05:00

3D Shape Perception
Reasoning and Problem Solving
Computer Science: An Integrated Introduction (part two)
Quantitative Methods in Probability and Statistics

Deer

2007-11-04T09:40:00.000-05:00

Murrysville is what is called a rural residential community. What that means is no sidewalks and very few streetlights (except on the main drags). It also means that we often have wildlife in our yard -- turkeys, deer, many types of birds; I'm sure that possums and raccoons are around, too, but we don't see them too often.

Lately we've been visited by an old Grandpa Buck -- just one spindly looking antler, gray muzzle. It will hang out under our apple tree and eat the apples on the ground. This morning there was a beautiful big doe visiting the apple tree. We watched her for about a minute, then she took off running... followed by a perfect 8 point buck from out of the pine trees.

Abbie IV's Fall Classes

2007-09-18T18:36:00.000-04:00

COLT0810s1 Comparative Literature: Arthurian Legend
CSCI0170 Computer Science: Functional Programming
COGS1380 Cognitive Science: Ecological Approach to Perception and Action
NEUR0010 Neuroscience: Introduction to Neuroscience

She's still working at BUDS and VENLAB. And is an officer (I can't remember which position, social chair, I think) at Tech House.

Windowsill Finale

2007-09-18T18:23:00.000-04:00

The windowsill work from the summer was finished sometime in August. Well, it's primed; I'll get around to painting this weekend. For a pretty scary, badly damaged repair project, it turned out okay. Once everything set and dried long enough that I was confident it was as set and dried as it was going to get, I sanded it as smooth as my patience allowed then primed. So far, nothing as shrunken down or pulled away from the rest of the window, nothing has cracked or bulged and everything feels solid. So I'm happy. And even though it clearly looks repaired, it looks a heckuva lot better than it did.

The Easy Way

2007-09-17T08:02:00.000-04:00

So rather than update Transcriptions and lose "many of my recent posts", I decided to just start a new one. We'll see if this really will be the easier way.