Dan, John and Nick visited this weekend. If you don’t know who I’m talking about, you probably did not go to Bates College and/or in all likelyhood you didn’t know me either while I was at Bates. I took a couple of pictures:

<p><a href="http://users.starpower.net/mboudreau/images/01-12/da-boys.jpg">Here&#8217;s one.</a> Yeah, my neck didn&#8217;t seem to hold my head up in this one.</p>

<p><a href="http://users.starpower.net/mboudreau/images/01-12/spooky.jpg">Here&#8217;s a neat shot of the guys last night.</a></p>

<p>We had a ton of fun this weekend. We saw <a href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0216651">Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust</a> last night. The animation was quite good and the dialog wasn&#8217;t bad either. If you liked the 1985 edition of Vampire Hunter D, you&#8217;ll like this one as well. New story, same lead character, and some wonderful fight scenes.</p>

<p>I now need a weekend to recover from my weekend though. But it&#8217;s all good.</p> 

ferns grass

<p>hide a hide</p>

<p>box tur tle</p>

<p>or snake in</p>

<p>User wishes for fixed width.  User never stops learning about life.  User thinks in the close-your-eyes game that it&#8217;s not fun to play with someone who interprets the rules funny.  User doesn&#8217;t presume that he/she interprets the rules funny, but user is growing less fun all the time, whatever&#8217;s causing it.</p> 

lani and i were supposed to have headed off to the airport to leave for berlin by now. unfortunately, it’s snowing in milan (where we transfer) so the flight’s been delayed about 5 hours. grrr.

<p>so we&#8217;re going to hang out and watch anime and a documentary on communist musicals in the meantime (&#8220;ooh! singing, dancing soviets!&#8221; &#8211; lani)&#8230;</p> 

“CCNMTL 2002 product development team”

<p>these are some of my coworkers. crack is occasionally smoked in our office. (be sure to click the images to move through the slideshow)</p> 

here’s an idea for someone with more free time than me who wants something to do: the “death blog”. start a weblog that highlights the deaths of famous people. maybe branch out into bizarre deaths and other death related stuff on “slow news days”. the research part could probably be automated pretty easily with a perl script or two to scour the RSS feeds of various news sites looking for death/obituary related keywords.

<p>i remember kamden  once mentioning that a friend of his had started a collage of all the people who died while he was in college and quickly became overwhelmed by how frequently famous and semi-famous people kick it. </p>

<p>i wouldn&#8217;t be surprised if someone has already done this although google didn&#8217;t turn up anything for me.</p> 

everybody else probably had it off anyway, but i didn’t so dance of joy for me. and i didn’t even have to start the letter writing campaign.

<p><a href="http://www.opm.gov/oca/compmemo/2001/2001-13.htm">more info</a></p> 

I haven’t been here in a while because a) I couldn’t find a text box to post a comment and b) the setup at the moment has text overlying text and I couldn’t discern one article from another.

<p>Anyway, before anything gets screwed-up-er, I want to extend the invitation for the annual New Year bash&#8230;.  in Norfolk, MA again this year.  I hope to see you!!! : )  (Are smiley faces OK in computer-ese, anders? &#8212; I am ashamed to admit that I&#8217;m one of those TAs you hate, putting smiley faces on student papers &#8212; my excuse was that it was attempt to &#8220;lower the affective filter&#8221; &#8212; always important in foreign language classes! : ) )</p> 

i just took the hottest shower of my life, to the point of painful. and low and behold, i was given a question to answer. are people more inclined to do harm to those who have harmed them than to reciprocate kindness? do we lean more towards vengance than the propagation of happiness?

<p>what if it&#8217;s true? what does that say about people?</p>

<p>i detest vengance. what does that say about me? perhaps it&#8217;s a metric of some sort. not like i&#8217;m within a fucking mile of mr perfect, but maybe figuring out the split on those two goals is a basic indicator of what i like to pretend are &#8220;good people&#8221;. </p>

<p>is there any difference between doing good or evil and doing right or wrong?</p> 

i accidentally double posted and i cant delete it. so this is something else

made abbot on perlmonks today. only another 2000 XPs till i reach “saint”. perlmonks is definately my favorite computer game.