So, I'm currently in San Clemente for a couple of days before going back to Claremont. As usual, the trip cross-country was fun. Lots of hours in a tin can. Anyhow, something amusing happened at T.F. Green when I was leaving. TSA got confused by my backpack in the X-Ray machine (understandable, since it's got a zillion wires and such in it). So they start going through it and they find that I brought a copy of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The guy then ignores the rest of my bag, pulls out the book, and runs it through …

I just had a fun day. For some value of fun, at least. I spent most of the day fighting with CMSs for the Narrows Center for the Arts, which is considering moving away from their antiquated website that some guy hacked together for them. I mean, not that tables-based layouts aren't still cool and all. Oh wait, they're not. So I was playing with Joomla and Drupal to see if I could cobble together something slightly less ugly. I ended up spending most of the day withing with Drupal, the Drupal Content Construction Kit, and Contemplate. Joomla's admin …

Here's the rules, as I've seen them on the Internet:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

And my result is,

"But this concept of nature is confirmed by experience and must inevitably be presupposed if there is to be possible experience, which is coherent knowledge of the objects of sense in accordance with universal laws."

Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals …

As my profile mentions, I come from Fall River, MA. Sometimes, I get overly romantic ideas that it might be a place worth staying in. Then I see something like I saw today, and I remember why it is that I spend ten months out of every twelve 3000 miles away. :-(

Yesterday I went to the 2008 Newport JVC Jazz Festival, and I figured I'd review it a bit here.

We started off the morning with a set by the Mark Rapp band. Mark Rapp is a trumpet player, somewhat modern. He uses a wah about half of the time, and it's pretty cool. His band was good, too. The guitarist was a little over-the-top, but he was generally good, and the bassist was excellent. Oh, I almost forgot to mention, Rapp also played didgeridoo, which was cool.

So, after Rapp, I saw a bit of Lionel Loueke, who was an …

I've only got one more week left of summer research. This time next week, I'll be back on the East Coast. I've already sent my desktop off to a cozy garage, and am posting this from my laptop. It was a pretty involved process - I needed to move all of my RSS feeds from Liferea to Google Reader, copy over my .vimrc and .emacs files, get a list of all of my webcomics… But all of that's done now. So, yeah, now I'm even less likely to post to this blog. Woo hoo.