This Halloween, Elmo passed away. He was my family’s dog, who had been living with my sister and brother-in-law in UK for the past three or so years. I knew him during my senior year of high school, summers during college, and the couple of years during which I lived my parents after college. He was a good friend and occasional enemy.
 

Pet owners tend to anthromorphize their pets to no end and assign “special” traits to them, which others quietly file away as apocryphal or ubiquitous. Everyone thinks their dog is special. The same is true of myself, at least to the extent that I feel that the following facts about his life should be available to the Internet so that they can be stumbled upon in someone’s 20th page of search results for something unrelated:

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Recruiters are just salesmen, but they usually stop short of sounding like Nigerian princes that would like to send you money. Not this guy!
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I thought of a bunch of stuff to post to Twitter this afternoon. Each time I came up with something, I thought of something else. Or, I’d be forced to interact with the real world. So, here’s some of them:

- Maple ice cream is impressive.

- I never noticed before that the garbage cans in Davis Square are actually solar-powered compactors. I think they should also beep and bloop expressively.

- The radio had some story on about reaching kids by rapping Shakespeare. They played audio of the kids saying, “Whoa, was that a freestyle?” Then, the teacher said, “No, it’s a Shakespeare sonnet!” I find that incredulous.

- Katt then started rapping Shakespeare. She quoted MacBeth, interjecting “peace!” every four lines or so.

- If my bumper sticker inference is correct, Brazilian Top Team shops at Target. They do have a lot of Underarmour there.

- Or perhaps they went there because Ricardo Arona wanted some “Throwback” Pepsi or Mountain Dew. I got one of each. I found it kind of sad that I was excited by carbonated beverages whose major claim was that they were made with sugar.

Katt was saying the other day how Craigslist buyers with bad grammar seemed scary. (She and I are selling off a bunch of our stuff in preparation for our move.) She forwarded me an email from a guy that wanted to buy a futon, and I agreed that there was a chance that something was up with this guy. So, I went to her apartment that night to provide some robbery deterrent.

This buyer turned out to be a cheerful hipster wearing some kind of beret, with absolutely no sign of criminal intent. He was pretty far from being a scammy troglodyte.
 

I just sold a desk to a guy that sent me this email:

Hello, I’m layed off and am hoping to get a desk like this for my niece’s birthday. Would you accept $10 bucks. Please forgive if an intrusion.

This guy didn’t seem threatening (possibly a liar, though). (more…)

So, I flew out to DC to see the inauguration. Today, we got up at 5 AM, left at about 6 AM after a missing ticket panic. (Tim accidentally picked up my ticket.) Dan and Alex headed to the Mall, and Tim and I got in the line for the purple section a little before 7.

It was a long line. It wound around a couple blocks and went through tunnel under the Capitol (which started near an I-395 on ramp) and came out the other side. It seemed to be about 2-3 miles long. There were no cops or other line guides down there, nor anyone announcing what was going on. It was just tens of thousands of people standing in a freezing tunnel.

It took four hours, but we got through the tunnel. There was a few more blocks, then we saw the signs for the purple section gate. We pushed forward slowly. Occasionally, there were people going against the stream, saying that they had closed the gate and weren’t letting more people in. Disturbing. Well, if I was going to be turned away after all this time, I was determined to be turned away by someone with a badge.

The gate had been shut for a time when Bush had taken the stage but opened up again later. The problem was that security was processing people very, very slowly. I had severe doubts that they’d be able to get us in before the constitutionally-scheduled noon swearing-in.

Sure enough, at 11:56 AM, there was still a crush of hundreds of people in front of us. We’d be lucky if they got us in forty minutes. We gave up and went to the train station.

At Union Station, there was a gift shop blasting the new president’s address from a portable stereo. Not surprisingly, it was a good address, and the shop was filled with people listening intently. Besides the expected call-to-arms, I liked that he explicitly mentioned us unbelievers and hyped science. It was a “fireside chat” kind of moment, and not a bad place at all to hear the speech.

In fact, the intimate sense of community that that gift store imparted made up for the long ordeal of the morning.

Heh, just kidding. Of course it didn’t.

That sucked. I really wanted to President Obama take the oath of office live. It would have meant a lot to me.

Unfortunately, because the Presidential Inaugural Committee couldn’t bother to do some simple thinking about how – roughly – long it takes to process a person through security, I didn’t get to see or hear it, not even on Jumbotron, TV, or YouTube. I mean, this wasn’t a matter of being off by a few hundred. There was an army’s worth of people behind me.

A lot of those people took days off of work and bought flights just to see that moment. One of my friends and her husband drove across the country, even though they have to work on Wednesday. That is costly for people, in terms of money and opportunity. Katt almost did this, and if she had, I would be livid with the Presidential Inaugural Committee. As it is, I’m just disappointed and surprised by PIC’s casual disregard for people’s time. Really, there’s no excuse for taking a couple days to figure out how many tickets they should pass out. Also, I’m relieved that this committee wasn’t running the campaign.

In the greater scheme of things, though, I got the president I wanted. As defeated as I felt as I walked away from the purple gate, I felt a certain peace when I heard the celebratory explosions signaling the completion of the swearing in.

Here’s more disgruntled purple ticket holders.

And even more.

Someone wanted to talk to me about Children International. A couple of blocks earlier, someone wanted to talk to me about Greenpeace. Instead of saying “nah,” I should have told them about each other so that they could have a good conversation about international children and the environment!

I regret not providing this solution, but I’ll remember for next time.

Like any activity, poker can involve any of the human emotions, but it typically features some more than others. I played a hand last night that feature a sampler of all of the prominent poker emotions.

It was at the end of the night (for me). The table was starting to get shorthanded. One guy was away from the table, and there were about six players active. Everyone limps, I limped in on the button with 7-6 offsuit.

So, at this point, I am bored.

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The crowd leaving the Obama rally.

Takin’ a break after Obama’s acceptance speech.