Early Thursday

I had to make it an early day today, so I am a little less with it than usual. The train in the morning is very different from the later trains. First of all there are fewer people which makes sense. The people are also very territorial about there seats and tend to sit on the aisle even in the three seaters. Of course when I got here everything was okay with the main process, but the parallel process didn't work out so well. We are working on getting it fixed so we can finally move to Oracle.

Last night was the first night of BoyCottaNO, which proved to be pretty successful. I went home and cooked myself a nice dinner of penne and red sauce. I have such a hard time judging how much pasta I will end up with from just dropping in the dry pasta, so halfway through cooking it I through in more (bad idea) so some of the pasta wasn't exactly al dente. Overall it was good and I continued to multi task at home which involves updating my iPod with more music. It is taking forever and I think I can put all of my cd's on it without a problem, but I don't know if I want to just dump everything on there and have some crappy stuff OR do I want to start putting some of my live DMB CD's which would prove to be of lesser quality but better music than my Titanic Soundtrack, Britney Spears and Chicago (the band) CD's.

Only time will tell.

iPod statistics so far
268 songs
1.5 GB
8 artists
23 albums

Another Rainy Day

I took some pictures yesterday in the Common yesterday and have put them into a nice little slide show for all of you lovely people out there. Not many trees have changed but the few that have looked great. It is so ironic how the leaves down here are better than the leaves up in Maine when I drove all the way up there last weekend. Hey if you can't go to the foliage just wait until the foliage comes to you.

It is raining again, but it isn't putting a damper on my spirits at all. The strange thing about the rain is how it can be so frustrating when you look out in the morning and know the commute will be just a little more difficult and wet. I usually dread standing at the train station waiting in the pouring rain while my pants get soaked because of the run off from my waterproof jacket. Next there is the dreaded activity of sitting in between two similarly wet people on the train for a nice musty smelling half hour trip into Boston. Finally you walk out of North Station and see the rain just pouring down on to the North End and realize being the constant goal seeker you are that you will forgo the relatively dry and painless subway trip and instead march down the flooded streets of the Hub. Only once I started walking down Canal Street with some music playing in my ears did I realize how much I enjoy walking in the rain. Yes you read correctly I actually enjoy the rain, but only if I am on foot.

Today I was reminded of a warm rainy night a few years ago when I was still in college. It was a typical late spring evening in Orono, I had been to class and went for dinner at the Union before I put on my rain jacket and made my way out into the showers which had been falling all day long. The walk from the Union to Somerset Hall takes about ten minutes and involves several winding paths which lead to my dorm atop the highest hill on campus. I zipped up my coat turned on my CD player and began my journey into the wet wonderland. I remember I was listening to an acoustic Dave Matthews disc, because it is all I listened to while walking around campus that year. The music combined with the rain put a huge smile on my face, it was perhaps one of the happiest moments of my life, but I couldn't exactly tell you why. Perhaps it the feeling you get once you are completely soaked and know you are going to be wet for a while and just don't care anymore. Whatever it was, the strange combination of my mood, the weather, the music and the lighting created some sort of wave of happiness which overtook me and I couldn't help but smile. It is certainly a brief moment in time I will remember for the rest of my life and somehow oddly ranks up there in my long list of happy times.

So while you are out there in the rain today or any day for that matter, just remember while the rain can sometimes be annoying and a nuisance, it can also bring out some very odd feelings of joy, just accept your new saturated state and enjoy the little packages of joy from above.

Calling All Santas

I was reading through my Boston Metro this morning while riding on the train and listening to the musical stylings of Howie Day and came across this at and could barely contain the laughter. I hope they have a lot of open positions, because I know a bunch of Santas that could fill the position.


Well this one goes out to Britt. You missed out on a great opportunity to personally meet real live Boston Celtics players. Yes its true this morning between 7:30 and 8:30 two players were signing calendars at both the Government Center and Park Street stations. I stopped by to take some pictures for you, but didn't want to stand in line and besides the fact I wouldn't know which players they were I also wouldn't know what to say when I got to them. However I knew I had to take pictures for you so you could see what you missed. I almost called you, but I knew you would be sound asleep so I refrained. Oh man its sometimes good to be the early bird.

I am considering starting a scientific study on the commuting situation at Salem station. I leave my house at the same time everyday, but the parking lot and number of people waiting for the train varies daily. I want to write down some environmental factors, such as the temperature, the weather, and the day of the week to see if they cause the parking lot to fill up sooner. I thought the rain yesterday would fill the parking lot, but it still had spaces left when I got there at 7:20, and today with relatively nice weather the lot was completely full at 7:20. Can anybody shed some light on this?

Wow what a weekend!!!

Friday night in the North End with B-Rok, Beans and Essa
Friday night at Border Cafe
Foliage and ocean slideshow
Family day in Boston
Pumpkin Carving Party

Weekend by the Numbers
160 miles driven in my car
16 people I hung out with over the course of the weekend (B, B, V, L, F, B, C, J, R, M, K, A, M, S, J, C)
9 meals eaten
700 dollars spent (580 on computer stuff)
6 hours of taped television I watched
206 pictures takend
2.50 price of one rose not a package of two
5 times we played the predator game
20 minutes for Beans to finish her fajita
2 hawks/eagles in Boston Common feasting on squirrels
6 pictures of the eagle I took with other people's cameras
125 minutes to go shopping for computer stuff
45 minutes until I finally listened to a song on my new iPod
8 hours spent with the Morin's this weekend (Thanks for dinner, twice!!)
0 times I was bored this weekend

Me = NO iPod

Last night I rushed home from work, jumped in my car and drove over to the North Shore Mall. I walked into the Apple Store and told the guy, "Could I have a 20 Gb iPod." Here is the conversation that followed:
"You can't have one, but you can buy one," said the fat Apple worker.
"Oh well I tried," I replied.
The other worker said, "I'll go out back and get one, hold on a minute."
"Thank you," I said gratefully.
I then remembered I had one more question to ask, which I had forgotten from last time. So I asked the fat guy, "Can I ask you a question?"
"Winston Churchill, Winston Churchill is the answer to your question," he cleverly snapped back.
"Okay, I don't think so, but anyway, I only have a 10 Gb hard drive and was wondering if I would be able to put music on it, move the songs to the iPod, delete the music and then put more music on until the iPod is full," I asked.
He answered, "No way, if your hard drive became erased you'd have to put all your files back on to your hard drive."
"Is there anything I can do?" I enquired.
"You would have to buy a new hard drive," he quickly snorted back.
I quietly uttered back, "Okay, well I guess I'm not getting an iPod then, thanks."

The guy who went to get my iPod came back and I had to tell him I couldn't buy it and told him why. In a nicer tone and demeanor he confirmed my worst fears and said the manual sync wouldn't work how I thought it would. If anybody has insight into this for me I would love to hear it from them. It looks like I might end up investing in a new hard drive, at least that way I can download some of my ski movies and finally put something together.

We'll see what the weekend brings.

Personality Test

I took a personality test today. Tell me what you think, it seems to be pretty close darn dead on.

Keegan's Personality Test Report

Take the Test Yourself

First Snow, okay it was more like the first flurry

Despite the fact that you can't see the flurries in the picture we definitely had some today. Apparently out in western Massachusetts they received up to an inch of snow, which is strange because on this day last year we also received snow. It is kind of exciting to think that winter is right around the corner, but at the same time I am not taking this cold raw weather very well. I have a request, in an effort to make life easier and better for everybody when you go to the slideshow could you please sign up for an Ofoto account. It won't cost you anything and even if you don't plan on storing pictures you will have access to all of the slideshows you view that have been shared by me or anybody else. It keeps track of all shared albums you have accessed under your username. After today I will set up any slideshows to require sign in.

Last night we had BoCaNO at the Sevens and it was good, pretty par for the course; I might need to miss a couple of weeks to make it fresher. I got home and watched Fraternity Life on MTV, which just had me glued to the TV. One of the pledges started the night making out with this one girl(Sharie) and then saw another girl (Lauren) and quickly moved to her. However, Sharie was a PSYCHO and kept pestering him while he was trying to hook up with Lauren. He ended up sleeping with Lauren, but not after Sharie came in while they were in bed together and told him to go to hell. Sharie came back again in the morning and gave Slater a hard time again and he told her she was banned from the house. Ha, classic TV. The next show on was called Room Raiders, where a guy goes into three girls rooms and looks everything over, including underwear drawers, hampers, closets and anything else in their room. He then decides which one he wants to date based on her room. It's quite amusing and thankfully the guy was a comedian and made it extremely funny. My one issue was how one of the girls was 18 and he was 24, strangely enough he picked her.

We had a fire drill at work yesterday and I decided to document it with my camera. Hey you have to spice things up somehow, once we got back inside I made a little slideshow and lucky for you I have put it out onto the internet. Fire Drill Pictures with captions