This NBA court database that Kottke linked to is amazing. It literally catalogues minor design changes to the floor at the Hartford Civic Center, where the Celtics played a few games a year up until the mid-90s. 🏀
This NBA court database that Kottke linked to is amazing. It literally catalogues minor design changes to the floor at the Hartford Civic Center, where the Celtics played a few games a year up until the mid-90s. 🏀
Like any responsible person embroiled in a complex home sale and multi-state move while without a consistent source of income, I impulse purchased a HomePod today. It’s exceeding my expectations so far.
In the last 24 hours, we’ve managed to go from “oh crap, we not going to have a house to live in at the end of April” to “oh crap, we’re gonna have two homes to pay for at the end of April”.
G-pa made the rookie mistake of offering to buy him whatever he wanted for dinner.
That feeling when you have the bacon, chocolate, and bubble tea food groups covered.
I think my local Nissan dealer is in denial about how electric cars work.
Invoice #0000001 has been sent. It feels good to have something besides expenses in FreshBooks.
Self-employment week one milestone: working at midnight because I want too instead of working at midnight because I’m too terrified to stop.
It’s been a crazy couple of months. I’ve been working simultaneously on the sale of the startup I was working at and getting my own freelance business off the ground. I’m really excited (also also slightly terrified) to be jumping to the ranks of the self-employed this week!
My wife and I have home offices directly across the hall from one another. Our offices usually complete for the title of biggest disaster area in the house. But we had a hard-fought race to tidy things up in preparation for our home sale process.
Who do you think won?
A final push on home sale preparations and lousy weather kept me from spending much quality time in the real world this week. But my son’s school project led to an unexpected side trip to ”Pokémon World” this weekend.
I was impressed by what a good job he did designing a game from scratch.
The southernmost point in my town is a place called Gooseberry Island (or Gooseberry Neck if you’re one of those people). It’s connected to the mainland by a small causeway and is as far south as you can get by car in Massachusetts without rolling onto a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket. Before the construction of the causeway, which occurred in several iterations between 1913 and 1924, the island was only accessible by walking across a sandbar that would surface at low tide. Even this could be daunting. The island sits right where Buzzards Bay meets Rhode Island Sound, so waves come from two directions.
There were once plans to develop the island into a resort community, but the Great Depression and the Great New England Hurricane derailed them, thankfully.
During World War II, German U-boats wreaked near-daily havoc in Atlantic shipping lanes. In response, the Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with constructing a series of coastal defense sites, including a stealthy one on Gooseberry Island. It didn’t house any major artillery. Instead, the site was home to several fire control towers with observation instruments called depression position finders. Spotters would use the devices the triangulate the location of enemy ships and phone in firing instructions to artillery locations protecting Buzzards Bay to the east and Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay to the west.
The local network didn’t see much action during the war, but the whole setup was kind of wild. The tower pictured above is actually just the skeleton. Along with its two nearby neighbors, it was camouflaged to look like a coastal farm structure during the war. Many of its peer locations along the coast were also disguised to look like water towers, lighthouses, and other non-military structures.
Life is simpler on Gooseberry Island these days. It’s now part of the Horseneck Beach State Reservation. But unlike the main beach area, it’s more of a place to walk around and explore. In addition to its unique history, the island has a lovely coastline and is a favorite stopover point for migrating birds.
I was just looking at the “following” list of a Micro.blog user I don’t know and found my sister on there! A hearty Micro Monday welcome to @fancythatamanda. No more secrets between us, OK? 🤣
I have South Korea on the brain this weekend. It was there, four years ago yesterday, that we became a family of four. Our second international adoption process was longer and more emotionally taxing than the first. But the two trips we took to Seoul in December 2013 and February 2014 are cherished memories.
The emotional bookends, of course, were meeting our youngest son during the first trip and welcoming him into our family for good during the second trip. But it was also a great joy to bring our oldest son, then five, back to the country of his birth. Making two trips wasn’t the original plan, but the upside was more time to explore Seoul while waiting for things to happen (a recurring theme with international adoption). We even spent Christmas there.
While we didn’t make it back to South Korea for the 2018 Winter Olympics, as I had once daydreamed about, it’s been wonderful to see the spotlight on the Korean peninsula for something positive this weekend.
We spent today at Brown University, which hosts a Korean adoptee mentoring program that we’ve been participating in for several years. Korean and Korean-American student mentors are paired up with Korean adoptees for cultural activities and more than a little goofing around. We work hard to make Korean culture part of our family on an ongoing basis, but sometimes there is no substitute for being showered with attention by a bunch of people who look like you.
We capped off the weekend with a dinner of homemade tteokguk soup, a Korean New Year tradition. We’re five days early, but the Asian market was on the way home, and our nine-year-old is short on patience.
This is the oldest commercial building in Boston. Yeah, it’s a Chipotle now. But it was almost demolished in the 60s to make room for a parking garage. So, it could be worse.
You could argue that American literature was born at this Chipotle. Well, it wasn’t a Chipotle then. It was Ticknor and Fields, a 19th century publishing house. They had the dream team. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Thoreau and Twain coming off the bench.
Along with the publishing offices, there was a corner bookstore in the building. It became a popular meeting spot for many of the major authors of the time.
It was still a bookstore when I was a college student in the 90s. I didn’t know the history at the time. It was just the old-timey building with all of the cool travel books and maps.
Now, it’s a study in compromise. That sweet Chipotle money allows the building to be preserved on a very valuable piece of real estate. There’s even a little extra left over to throw at other preservation efforts around the city. And the non-profit that owns the building even commissioned an augmented reality app to help people pretend that it’s not a Chipotle.
Successfully matched my Apple Watch band to my new backpack. Serendipitously hit my move goal while snapping a photo to brag about it. Everything’s coming up Doug today.
Even though the Celtics came up short, I really enjoyed the NBA Finals preview tonight. 🏀
I’m working on something new that brought me to Wayland Square in Providence, R.I. multiple times during the week. It’s a cool little corner of Providence. Sure, there’s a Starbucks and CVS Pharmacy. But you can still find some an authentic spots like the barber shop, tailor, and bakery if you look hard enough.
When I was a kid, I didn’t need to build an imaginary fort. My neighborhood came with a real one.
If you’ve studied American history, you’re probably aware that the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War occurred in the Boston suburbs of Lexington and Concord. Less than a month later, on May 14, 1775, the first naval battle of the war occurred within sight of the shoreline less than a mile from my childhood home in Fairhaven, Mass.
In the weeks following the battles around Boston, British General Thomas Gage dispatched the HMS Falcon to the islands off of the Massachusetts coast to find supplies. When the local militia spotted a couple of the Falcon’s tenders off the coast of Fairhaven, they set out in a whaling sloop and engaged. After some small arms fire, crashing of boats, and brawling, the militia captured both British tenders and took 25 British seamen back to Fairhaven as prisoners.
But General Gage got the last laugh a few years later in September of 1778 when he mounted a successful retaliatory attack and burned the fort at Fairhaven to the ground.
The fort was quickly rebuilt as soon as the British left. This “rising from the ashes” earned it the name “Fort Phoenix”. It was manned through the Civil War, but these days it’s part of a state park.
For me, it was the best childhood playground ever. My neighborhood friends and I would ride our bikes to the fort nearly every day after school. We could climb the natural rock formations on the site, look for anything interesting that may have washed up on shore, and hang out on the iron cannons. And it was a great spot to watch fireworks on the Fourth of July and shoot off a few bottle rockets of our own.
Feedbin’s new capability to follow Twitter accounts is very well done. It’s the first approach I’ve tried that doesn’t require constantly clicking through to the Twitter site or app. Bonus: the developer just added share to Micro.blog as well.