11/17/2001, 1:00 pm

There was just a big car accident outside of my apartment. A car and a van hit in the intersection and the van ended up on it's side in front of my building. I called 911, and I'm sure others did too. Police and fire personnel were on the scene within minutes. Thankfully, before they even got there, people emerged in one piece from both vehicles, with some passersby helping three guys climb out of the van vertically from the driver's side window. After a couple of minutes, one of the guys was trying to climb back into the van, a move people tried to prevent until he explained that he wanted to shut off the engine. Yeah. Good idea. Anyway, the FDNY & NYPD worked efficiently, spreading an anti-fire agent (sand? -- Rich calls it "dry sand", an absorptive compound) on the leaking gasoline, hooking up chains to the van and righting it. As of now, the van (it says "Rent A Van" on the side) is still there, guarded by a lone cop car, and traffic is back to normal. Glad no one was hurt badly. It makes it easier to be impressed with how everyone handled it.

11/15/2001, 9:15 am

It's for real. I booked my tickets to Southeast Asia. Flying into Singapore and out of Bangkok. I'll be backpacking for nearly a month. I am so stoked.

Backpacking sites have come a long way since the last time I traveled. I've been spending time on PassPlanet, BootsnAll.com, and of course, the Lonely Planet planning my trip. Right now, I think I'm going to do a week solo in Laos and then meet up with Elbert for two weeks in Thailand.

Melissa took me shopping last night at Whole Foods. It was fun. She wheeled a big cart around while I swung about on my crutches throwing stuff into the cart. Got lots of stuff. Then had it delivered. Gratitude to Achi and to Whole Foods.

Had a nice talk with Jessica last night. She got into her study abroad program in Bolivia for the spring. Very exciting. Our talk rambled far and near from relationship topics to imagining our parents still together and in love in the macrobiotic hippie days of the Boston 1960s. I couldn't picture it at first, but Jessie painted a nice picture and some images crystallized. She's a sweetheart.

Got to get ready for work. Another busy day ahead. Not going to stop until I leave for vacation, I suspect. You have a good day, now, you hear? Live with passion!

11/13/2001, 10:45 am

Went to the the podiatrist yesterday. Really nice guy. He used to play a lot of volleyball, so he couuld relate to my injury. He checked my x-rays, couldn't find anything on them, but said that it's pretty likely a minor fracture. Then he griped to me about the healthcare system, how patients don't take enough personal responsibility for their health, wrapped my foot up and told me to stay off it. Looks like I'll be fine for Thailand and may even make it back for volleyball this season.

Whoops, interrupted. Laundry delivery. Weird... reminds me of the dhobi in Bangalore.

Anyway, I did great at the doctor again yesterday. A little nervous and jittery, but never too close to woozy. This is great!

More guitar, lots of work, showering with a bag on my right foot. Dinner with Lisa tonight at Spice. Can't wait to find out what she's up to and where she'll be heading next!

11/13/01, 2:35 am

I'd like to dream my troubles all away
On a bed of California stars
Jump up from my starbed and make another day
Underneath my California stars.

Woody Guthrie

11/11/2001, 8:22 pm

Nothing like not being able to do anything to get you to chill out. My primary m.o. this weekend was to stay off my foot.

A brief update: Foot is feeling a bit better. Ice and elevation is helping. Hoping it's just sprained. Would really *love* to get back in the volleyball season before it's over. Podiatrist tomorrow for the verdict.

Played a bunch of guitar. Alec and I are going to trade programming lessons for guitar lessons next weekend. His idea and brilliant. David might come over to try jamming on Friday. I'm at the stage where I can keep a decent rythym, I can change chords pretty well, I can fingerpick a little, I can sing fine. The problems start when I try to combine any two of the above. Practice, I 'spose...

Totally geeked out on my mac. I'm having more fun with OS X than I have on any computer since I was in high school. (If you're not into this stuff, you'll probably want to skip down to the next paragraph...) I mosied around with some perl modules, compiling and installing expat and then installing XML::Parser, XML::Simple via CPAN. I followed that with an install of LWP (libwww-perl). I used LWP to write a script that checks my LinkSys router to find out my current IP (it's dynamically assigned by my ISP). Then I wrote a script that it could talk to for my website. Then I hooked them together and now have a cron job on my home machine that tells my website what IP it can be reached at every 5 minutes. My motivation for doing this is to be eventually be able to stream my mp3 collection on-demand to myself at work or to friends as needed. So I installed shoutcast server, played around with that until I got frustrated and installed icecast, an open-source mp3 streamer. I had better results with icecast, but now have my eye on an Apache module called mod_mp3. Unfortunately, the developer's server seems to be down right about now. Somewhere in the midst of all this, I came across a nifty AppleScript to serve as a sleep timer for iTunes. I modified it to restore the original volume setting when it finished, and sent that to the script's author. AppleScript, perl, Apache, BBEdit, Quicken, iTunes, IE, Eudora, a terminal that I can easily change the color of... so much fun!

Watered my plants. That took a while.

Had lunch at Spice with April yesterday. Had nice talks today with my mom, dad and Melissa. Lots of email including cross-country mail with Meeta.

Still on my to-do list for the evening: order in for dinner, figure out my vacation schedule for Thailand, compile a belated reimbursement expense report for work, shop for a digital camera online (got to have one for the trip!)