Amphigouri: varnished nonsense

Hard to believe it’s already been five years since we said our vows, but here it is!

Happy Anniversary, honey.

Three weeks ago, as we returned from the lawyer’s office and 10 minutes of paper-signing, Phil groaned. “Please don’t tell me,” he said, “that this makes us into that type of people.” And by “that type” I knew he meant the kind David Sedaris describes in his book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, to which we had recently been re-listening in the car. You know, the type that say things such as:

“I’d love to stay a while longer and explore, but my home — well, one of my homes, is on the garden tour and I have to get back to Williamsburg.”

“Hah,” I replied. “Not unless one takes a very [and I mean very] broad definition of the word ‘home.’”

In the late 1960s, my great-great aunt sold a piece of her land on the coast of Maine to some friends while retaining her own lot (which is still in the family, is where we got married, and <shamelessPlug> is available for rent – a couple weeks in October of this year, all of June ‘08 and a few other ‘08 weeks as well </shamelessPlug>). Included in the sale was a deeded right-of-way across her other property to the beach, as well as to her drinking water/well.

Recently, the current owner had approached our family to let us know they were thinking of selling; they rarely spend time there and none of their children were in the area or interested in holding onto the property. In light of the fact that any other owner would be given the same right-of-way access to both shorefront and well water (something nobody in our family was keen on, particularly given the fact that we do rent out our existing cottage, and what renters would be keen on paying $ for a week or more of quiet only to have strangers tromping past and hanging out in front on the beach, OR sucking dry the well water?), Phil and I decided to purchase the land ourselves. With it comes a structure that on tax documents is apparently listed as a “shed” — a one-room building with no plumbing and no electricity (though with a small wood stove, table/chairs, propane-powered oven) — and an outhouse.

The Shed:

If you look closely, there really is a water view (fsvo ‘view’):

As I mentioned, a very broad definition of second “home” — but the surrounding area is lovely.

One of the guys in IT is big into fantasy leagues — particularly fantasy sports like football, baseball, etc. I’ve never really had much interest in those, not being a huge sports follower, but can certainly see the appeal for some. I even thought the Fantasy Congress league had some interesting potential (sounds like a neat way to teach kids more about politics — and lookee, they even have a FAQ about FC in Education). This latest variation, though… I’m not so sure. Fantasy.. Journals?? And no, that’s not the online diary-type journals they’re talking about, and not, as one commenter from that site speculated, the genre of more titillating magazines.

In a short paper [PDF] posted to his Web site, Bergstrom proposes creating the rules and Web infrastructure for a game of ”fantasy journals.”

“Players can select papers from across a field or even from across all of science for their own ‘fantasy journal,’ and then see how that journal performs according to the appropriate bibliometric measures.” (He suggests some function of the number of citations on Google Scholar after a period of time.)

(via Chronicle of Higher Ed Footnotes)

Uh. I just don’t know about that. Though I suppose it could be one way of teaching students about the various journals and publications they should be following within their discipline, but… huh.

After a couple of weeks of disgustingly hot weather, particularly for Maine — exacerbated by working in a building with no AC and an office suite that’s directly over the boiler room and is at least 10-15 degrees warmer than the hallway just outside the suite — we’re finally experiencing weather that I wish would run from June through August every year. Beautiful!

Company coming tomorrow for a weekend visit, so thankfully we won’t be rained in the whole time. Will be nice to have a diversion from crazy-busy project at work that we’re pushing to roll out w/in the next couple of weeks.

This unsolicited note in my inbox this afternoon:

Beth,

According to my research, it looks like you and your organization are in a great position to leverage web-based collaboration solutions. Business benefits you can expect include reducing travel costs and increasing revenue, profitability and productivity.

Do you have a moment to set up a brief discussion about your business needs? Please reply with a date and time.

Kind regards,

[name deleted to protect guilty]
Director, Customer Success

I’m sorry, name, but your research appears to be faulty, as I (and generally my colleagues) actually wouldn’t really be appropriate customers for your product. Unless by “research” you really meant “harvesting of emails from ppl who have ever been required to enter email/name data while attending a conference using your product and aren’t currently customers.”