The Winter of Dave is officially over.  While I’ve got no stories from my time in Florida - I just laid by the pool - there are a few more Winter of Dave posts coming up, some cool articles, the last Reading Recap, and maybe a final rundown.  Now that I’m back to work full time, normal posting will resume.  Or slow down.  We’ll see.

Categories: Ephemera, Winter of Dave
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Is the Central Time Zone now the coolest one on the planet? My move to Chicago, completed today, would seem to indicate so. Some advantages of Central time:

1. The Daily Show is now on at 10:00, rather than 11, allowing for earlier bedtimes or trips to the bar.
2. I live in it.
3. It looks like I’m going to bed later to people in Eastern time.
4. Less Jet Lag when traveling to Vegas, not that sleep schedules really matter in vegas anyways.

Those interested in Chicago-style hangouts should get in touch, david@dworin.net, especially people I’ve lost touch with who stumble onto this blog.

Categories: Ephemera, Travel, Winter of Dave
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My photos from Boston are online, but don’t have any meta-data yet. I’m going to leave them open to everyone for the next week, then probably make them members only.

Pictures from my other random adventures are online in the gallery too, though almost nothing for the past year has any meta-data.

Categories: Photos, Travel, Winter of Dave
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Just got back from Boston tonight. A quick recap of the weekend’s adventures and my impressions of the city:

• For a city its size, Boston is very flat. Yes, there are tall office towers downtown, but there isn’t the high-rise condo development you see in other large cities. Most of the city is three story apartments.
• It was very difficult for me to tell what areas were independent of the city of Boston and what areas were districts of the city. My impression was that the city of Boston itself is very small, but that it somehow encompasses many outlying cities. I could probably figure out the real answer with more research.
• Buildings are very old. The city is filled with “ambient history” - streetcars are still a normal means of transportation, even expensive buildings look built forever ago, and everything downtown is across from a colonial church or a founding father’s grave.
• Looking at the way the roads and trains were built, you can tell the city grew much larger than anyone ever anticipated. Transportation infrastructure has to be built underground, streets are layered from boulevards to carriageways with train tracks in the middle.
• I got to drive through the Big Dig, the largest civil engineering project in the world and the last project funded by the Eisenhower interstate highway act!
• The culture of Boston, at least for 20somethings, is defined in large part by the number of top-tier universities in the city. According to OldRoommateJeff, this meant I couldn’t pick up a girl by telling her I was a nuclear physicist, because odds were she would know one. Jeff was wrong.
• I was only there for a few days, so I can’t really judge, but it doesn’t seem like Boston is a major restaurant city, especially relative to its size and affluence.
• After a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, I am convinced that every art museum in the country has a “Watson and the Shark.” I have so far seen it in Boston, at the National Gallery in DC, and at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Is there an art expert out there who can explain this to me? Did the same artist paint the same scene many times? Are curators all lying to me?
• The MFA also had two Thomas Cole paintings, my favorite artist, an extensive and well arranged East-Asian and Indian collection, and more renaissance works than I actually care for. It deserved more than the few hours I gave it.
• Coors Light girls are lying dirty whores who promise you T-Shirts and then don’t deliver. Jack Daniel’s girls not only deliver on the T-Shirt, but they are friendly and down to earth. I’m glad I didn’t actually buy a Coors Light.

Photos will be up later tonight, for members to peruse. ThailandMarc got a hold of the camera and went on a photo-spree, so the Friday Night was well documented.

Categories: Travel, Winter of Dave
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The character’s hair is generally mousy and flat, and the lettuce lends it no body. Her wardrobe is mannish, and she’s disdainful of the traditional female sexuality. You sense that Liz Lemon would push Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw under a bus, claim she did it on principle, and cackle about it for ages. In this sense, Jenna—whose heart is in her cleavage, whose deepest conviction is that her sexuality is a weapon—is something of a foil. As is Liz’s assistant, Cerie, a clueless little nymph who cannot comprehend her boss’s suggestion that she not wear short shorts to the office. On the occasions that Liz dolls herself up, Fey lays the snark on thicker yet: In the third episode, “Blind Date,” she put on a cocktail dress, and her producer, admiring, said, “You look like a fancy prostitute.” Liz made a flattered little bounce.

A Slate Review of 30 Rock.

30 Rock, The Office, and the under-rated How I Met Your Mother all compete for the title of Best Comedy on Television.

Categories: Entertainment Media, Television, Winter of Dave
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I’ll be traveling to Chicago this weekend to look at apartments and hang out with friends.  If you’ll be around, let me know and we can meet up.

Categories: Travel, Winter of Dave
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FuturTech Panels are today.  Everybody come!

Categories: Business and Economics, Futurtech, Graduate School, Information Economics, Science, Social Software, Technology, Winter of Dave
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Blogging has dropped off due to the successful purchase of a Wii this past weekend (Task #1 Complete). If you want to be Wii friends, my number is 2885 7009 2914 6714. Send me yours and I’ll add you. Maybe our Mii’s can hang out a little, play some Wii Tennis at the club, or go bowling. I hear The Mii Parade is a happening place. Wow, my Mii goes more places than I do.

Categories: Social Software, Technology, Video Games, Winter of Dave
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Good science fiction provides a vision of the future that gives us a window into the present.  Unfortunately, for each Orwell there’s a dozen others who create a vivid future, but populate it with shallow characters, an empty plot, and either lack social commentary, or even worse, don’t even bother to make it subtle.  In an era when the V for Vendetta movie is lauded for not butchering the brilliant comic too badly.  Children of Men (read better reviews than mine here), which I saw earlier tonight, executed perfectly the way SciFi should, rather than how it usually does.

I was going to write a longer post, but it’s getting late, so here’s the gist of it:

• The sets are so detailed that during nearly every seen, you dart around trying to pick up on minor things by reading signs, newspapers, pictures, and anything you can.  For a lot of scenes, I wished I could pause the theater.  In the same vein, the future technology is in the realm of possibility.  The movie feels like it’s one step in the future, not a giant leap, so that you feel like their world is ours, just with slight differences.
• It had one of the best portrayals of violence I’ve seen in a movie.  Not because it was necessarily real (I wouldn’t know to judge), but because it didn’t feel cartoonish or excessive, and it was placed perfectly.  The violence made you hate violence - this was a fight you didn’t want to be a part of.   At the end (I’m trying to avoid spoilers), the combat made you hate war - and wish there wasn’t a similar one going on.
• Because it was tangential to the plot, and the world felt slightly different enough that you knew it wasn’t our own, Children of Men could criticize things like military occupation, attitudes towards immigration, political activism, police state, art, class differences, and so much more.  It made you think about them, it didn’t preach about them, and it was so subtle that you could enjoy the movie without noticing any of it.

There are other things that I know I’m missing, but I can’t stress enough how awesome this movie was.  So far, it’s the best movie I’ve seen in 2007, and probably better than any movie I saw in 2006.

Categories: Entertainment Media, Movies, Winter of Dave
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I originally planned on using the Winter of Dave to catch up on my pleasure-reading, but that’s currently on hiatus while my roommate and I continue to dominate Guitar Hero II, which is on loan from my little brother. Throw on the new episodes of my shows, and the books can wait until I’m laying by a pool.

Revised goal list, Guitar Hero II Edition:

Cream SG: Get 5 stars on 20 songs in Co-Op
Gibson Grabber: Beat 20 Songs in Co-Op Mode
Gibson Les Paul with the Cherry Sunburst Classic skin: Beat 40 Songs in Co-Op
mode
Gibson SG Bass: Beat 10 Songs in Co-Op mode
Gibson Thunderbird: Beat 30 Songs in Co-Op mode
Hofner Bass: Beat every song on Co-Op mode
Lava Pearl Musicman Stingray: Get 5 stars on 10 songs in Co-Op
Natural Maple Gibson Grabber Bass: Get 4 stars on all co-op songs.
Natural Sunburst Gibson Thunderbird Bass: Get 5 stars on every song in Co-Op

(via this GameFaq)

Categories: Video Games, Winter of Dave
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To kick off the Winter of Dave Read-a-thon, I just finished the latest Pirates! adventure and a Philip Roth short story. Your after action reports:

Pirates! in Adventures with Communists by Gideon Defoe

In the third volume of the Pirates! series, the Pirate Captain is confused with Karl Marx, the hairy philosopher behind the growing communist party in Europe. The Adventure seeking pirates end up tasked with ferrying the wanted Marx to France, where he continues to be threatened by large blonde women intent on framing the communists for crimes they didn’t commit. Naturally, chases, battles, and the Pirates brilliant wit and wisdom all come out. While I was disappointed to see the libertarian Pirates! helping the Communists, rather than fighting them, I did like the way the Pirate Captain handled growing proletariat dissent among his crew - play stick swords in the agitator. I rate this the best Pirates! adventure since Pirates! in Adventures with Scientists, certainly better than their Adventure with Ahab, and a definite must read.

Special thanks to my dad, who bought the book for me as a Chanukkah present before I even knew it existed.

The Conversion of the Jews by Philip Roth

While sitting around my apartment, I picked up my roommate’s copy of Goodbye Columbus and began reading one of the short stories. “The Conversion of the Jews” follows Ozzie Freedman, a Jewish pre-teen who asks too many questions in Hebrew School. Ozzie resists hypocrisy and inconsistencies in the Rabbi’s answers to his questions, ultimately leading to an altercation where he escapes to the roof and forces the conversion of all those around him to Christianity. A quick read, and still insightful nearly a half-century after it was originally published. The Jewish Community is still grappling with the same issues Roth attacked, now as Roth’s generation struggles to pass its ties to Jewish tradition onto the next. You can find the story in Goodbye Columbus or in a number of short fiction collections.

Categories: Books, Winter of Dave
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