Need details.

Hey y'all. I think I have a schedule, so now we need locations.

Tuesday June 3rd - Boston meet-up; Cambridge Commons first to play catch. I'll bring a disc and HK will too. Food afterwards somewhere.

Sunday June 8th - Amhearst to see Capella and Northampton to stay with Asymptote Beagle. It isn't clear to me why you don't pronounce the "h" in Amhearst, but you do in Northampton. But that's what my Dad tells me.

Monday June 9th and Tuesday the 10th - New York city.
Monday 9th: Joint blog meet-up with the NY Unfogged crew. After work at Fresh Salt.
Tuesday 10th: I have lunch plans, but would love to meet you for tea time or showing me neat things during the day.

Wednesday June 11th and Thursday June 12th - Philadelphia to meet eDubin!'s handsome son and also you.

Friday June 13th and Sat June 14th - DC. I know imaginary people in DC but don't have plans yet. That is probably because three weeks out is like the next millenium or something. Plan things three weeks in advance. Hah. That's crazytalk.


Anyway, Boston is a week from today. Where shall we meet?

Plan my trip for me?

OK. Here's the rough outline of my trip:

Fly to Boston area Sunday June 1st or Monday the 2nd.

That Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday is my best chance to do things and meet people in the Boston area or around there. There might be a trip to Maine somewhere in there too.

Thursday-Sat, I'll be busy. Sunday the 8th, I could start to head south.

Perhaps I go to New York for a couple days, the 9th and 10th?

Then Philadelphia maybe for a day or so? Wednesday, then?

End up in D.C. for another couple days, perhaps the 12th and 13th or so.

Here's the thing. I would LOVE if this blog set my activities for me that second week*. I would love to go from meeting people to meeting people. If you guys were all insider-knowledge about your city and wanted to show me cool things, that would be the best. I'll go to where you are; I'm on vacation.

And, I'm not asking, because I do have people I can stay with, but if you want to put me up for a night, that could be fun too. I say this because I would (and have) happily host a reader or blogger I was familiar with and I know that for some of us, welcoming people into our homes is easy and obvious. I don't mean to be all bleg-y about that. I just want to say it is an option, because I don't think you are ax-murderers and it would seem natural to me, and then I could fit more people in and maybe you like the idea too.

So, Boston and north the first week of June. Places between Boston and D.C. the second week of June. Direct me, please. Don't tell me about things I should do in general. But if you want to, let me know where I can meet you and pick something fun. I'll have a frisbee for daytime and I might even bring a dress for evenings. (No promises about wearing it.) Let's!





*What I would really like to do sometime is to have an entirely blog-directed and supported trip (not money support, but hospitality support). Something long, maybe walking or biking across the country. I’d love to check in, write up a post and have the blog tell me where to go that day and who would be letting me camp on their property or putting me up. This is as close as I’ll get to that for a while, but I like the idea that I would see such different things, because my own expectations wouldn’t be setting my path.

You already knew, I'm sure.

Hey folks,

It is foolhardy to make any pronouncements about something as reversible as closing a blog, but as far as I can tell, I don't have any more enthusiasm for writing here. I've been trying to hold out for just a few more weeks, but I'm embarrassed by my recent half-hearted blogging and I can't seem to do better. In the past few weeks, I've clicked away from the first paragraphs of posts way more often than I've published finished posts, weak as they are.

If I write a post-mortem, it will only embarrass me if I return in two weeks. If I call this a hiatus, you might think I'll be back. If I don't say anything, I'll feel guilty that people might still be checking in. Don't keep checking in. I don't know what to call this, but I don't anticipate more here in the foreseeable future.

I had two reasons for putting this off. The first is that I'll be on the East Coast in June and want to meet you. Boston area the first week of June, heading southward to DC the second week of June. East Coast, we should get together and do fun things. The second reason I was postponing this is that I wanted to post a video of me doing pull-ups. But close as I am, I'm not there yet and I can't fill the days until then. You'll just have to imagine it.

There'll be a couple more planning posts for the East Coast trip, so that's not done. I can't swear I'm done. Who knows, maybe in a few months I'll fill up with stories and rants and you'll need to hear them. Maybe I'll slip back into blogland all quiet and sneaky, and find out what you can say when your friends aren't reading and your face isn't on the front. It'd be interesting to find out what happens when you don't get big links early on. Maybe I'll stay outdoors and play catch and ride my bike.

My hope, as it has been since the very first days of this blog, is that you guys would turn to real friends. I will still be here, and I'll still welcome all the friends who want to cross over into the real world with me. Email me. Let's meet and walk around somewhere neat. We'll find some tasty food, and you can tell me what you've been up to. Tell me over bread and olives and sangria, at a table under lanterns. Tell me face to face.

Wishing you the best,

Megan

Nothing stands in the way of Anand's blogging.

Megan: Hey, Anand, what does this mean?
Anand: Yeah, not entirely sure. It is not, as far as I know, an approach that anyone else is pursuing. [It also sounds like the guy who discovered this effect was surprised to hear HP doing it.]
From what I can tell, they rely on oxygen diffusion to modulate the resistance of TiO₂. The big obstacle would seem to be the programming speed – O atoms do not move nearly as fast at electrons.
I’ll have to read the technical publications to get a better idea of how they’re doing it. At this point, it’s hard to say if this is important or not.
Megan: Well I surely hope you aren't going to wait to read something "technical" before you blog about it.
Anand: Oh, of course not – I would never let my ignorance stand in the way of my blogging...