Pat's Place

Subject: Rescheduling of the 2009 Men's Ice Hockey Champion Banner Ceremony
Sender: Patrick Madden
Recipient: jparker@bu.edu , mlynch@bu.edu
Copy: nrowan@bu.edu , hockey@bu.edu
Date: 16.09.2009 14:41

Dear Directors Parker and Lynch:

I just learned that BU Hockey has moved its banner raising ceremony from October 20, the first home game and traditional event for banner raisings, to October 10, a holiday weekend and exhibition game. While the article at goterriers.com explains the rationale behind this date change, the announcement comes at a late time and has not given Terriers fans enough notice for them to plan to be at the Agganis, rather than elsewhere, over a holiday weekend. I am one of the people adversely affected by this change.

Blade Runner is my all-time favorite movie. (In fact, it's about time to watch it again.) Roy Batty nails the interesting philosophical problem in his rooftop monologue, and I like the way the movie is built out from that point.

Is anybody else having troubles receiving WBCN now that it moved to 98.5 HD 2 ? My tuner is only getting 98.5 HD 1, and then the next HD station it seeks to is 100.7. Maybe they're still getting stuff moved around, so I'm not sure whether they want to hear from people who can't tune them in at the moment.

Black humor time.

This headline crossed my desk today:
U.S. sends arms to Somalia, rebels amputate limbs

Say what?

The whole article is at Reuters. While still unpleasant, the truth is a bit different than the headline!

Dear Sen. Kennedy:

Today I learned that the National Park Service/DOI is using eminent domain to procure land in Somerset County, PA, for a Flight 93 memorial, without having made a good faith negotiation with the landowners, merely because of impending paperwork deadlines.

The DOI has had the nearly 8 years since 9/11 to work on this. Yet it waited, and now the people of Somerset County are suffering the loss of their land and their homes so that a bureaucratic deadline could be met.

Yeah, the Big Red lost to Syracuse today. I watched the game on TV and was thrilled to watch as Cornell kept the lead away from Syracuse. With about 4 minutes left in the game, the score was 9-6 Cornell.

Then the final four minutes struck.

This article at the New York Times caught my eye today. Yesterday was the anniversary of Duke Ellington's birthday, and the Duke Ellington Orchestra, led by the musician's grandson, played "Take The A Train" while riding vintage NYC subway A Train cars to Queens. Pretty neat!

A few months ago, I set up a BlackBerry for a Curry College student so he could use it to get his email. This worked fine up until a few weeks ago, when BlackBerry informed the student that his account information needed to be revalidated. Revalidation failed, so I took a look at it.

All the settings looked reasonable and were as I'd left them. However, a quick look at the servers showed that they no longer accepted connections from email clients, including the POP3 service the BlackBerry had used. I thought that was odd, so I called Curry College IT to ask what was going on.

I'm noticing an unusual number of pro sports injuries. Does this suggest a crisis in training, in coaching, or in playing? Or is it just me...?

Discuss...

I didn't E-File my taxes this year. I've never done it. I'm really not interested in unrelated third parties handling my tax data. I simply don't care how much they swear up and down that they'll hold it in confidence forever, that they won't look at it, that they won't use it to market stuff I don't want to me, and that their promises will hold true when their companies are bought. I simply don't buy it.