Today was an absolutely beautiful day. Clear blue skies, mid-70's temperature, low smog, completely perfect. So, like any other sane human being, I decided to take a walk. Specifically, I hiked up to the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park, which is a nice little place a few miles north of campus. On the way there, I was really struck by life in California. Here I was, walking along on one of the most beautiful days of the year, and I didn't see more than a half-dozen other pedestrians on the two-and-a-half mile walk up to the park. Of course, I saw several hundred cars, trucks, and SUVs. I saw people driving from their homes on Mills down the street to Vons and back again. It's so weird here -- on the one hand, a lot of people seem to be "fitness freaks" and very concerned with "wellness", but on the other hand there's this overbearing car culture...

Well, break's over. I'm back at Mudd. Hopefully, I'll keep updating as the semester goes on.

Ciao.

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 …

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. :-(

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.