Very exciting! This spring will see Habitat for Humanity’s first-ever project in China.

Oh, I wish I go on this trip (timing’s bad, though). I’d love to see how China’s changed since the last time I was there, in 2001.

Philadelphia Daily News: Was that so hahd?

Boston.com compiles Red Sox championship front pages from newspapers around New England.

And New York.

Still pretty speechless.

Looking forward to sleeping again, though.

For the first time in five years, I actually came in dead last in my strictly-for-entertainment-purposes-only football guessing game this week.

I used to be good. What happened?

What a nasty cold/flu. I’m finally back to a reasonable facsimile of health, and my brain has almost re-engaged. I hope to be an actual productive developer tomorrow.

We’ll see.

So, I’ve been out for the past couple of days with a horrible cold and fever. I’m guessing that the lack of sleep over the past two weeks has not helped much.

Pennant fever. Catch it!

Dirty tricks in local elections

About 30% of my readership lives in my hometown of Holliston, so I thought this would be interesting, especially if you got one of the mail pieces.

In the last two weeks, 300,000 voters in Framingham, Natick, Ashland, Holliston, Medway, Hopkinton, and Franklin have received four different post cards from the state GOP accusing Spilka of voting to protect sexual predators in the schools. It would be a shocking revelation about any public official. It would be especially alarming news about a lawyer and a mother of three who began her professional life as a social worker investigating child abuse and neglect cases, about a lawmaker honored last spring with a “Friend of Children” award by the state Department of Social Services.

It would be, if it were true. It is not.

The mailings, featuring disturbing black-and-white photographs of menacing men and crying children, are as dishonest as they are cynical.

Oh yeah.

Our doctors kick [butt]. Our universities kick [butt]. Our football team kicks [butt]. Our fried clams kick [butt]. And now our baseball team is kicking [gosh darn] [butt]. I think I’m going to implode.

(Thanks to Jess for the pointer)

Here is a far-too-true description of what life would be like if architects had to work like web designers. Pretty funny, if you’re in the biz.

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Of course, I’m on both sides of the conversation with the new business. I have no one to yell at but myself…

Bring on Game 7!

That was a little closer than I’d like….

At one point last night after Jeter’s double, a certain wife of mine likened our plight to being stuck endlessly in The Empire Strikes Back.

To which I replied, “Yub yub! Ortiz! Yub yub!” And soon thereafter celebration broke out throughout the galaxy.

We’ll see what happens in half an hour when Schilling takes the mound.

Random side-thought: Pedro is now like George Lucas. They’ve both lost enough off their fastball that, while you hope they came come through big, you’re really just hoping they won’t embarrass themselves.

ESPN’s Bill Simmons does a great job describing A.’s and my creeping dread followed by joyous exultation.

These weren’t just baseball games. They were life experiences. They broke you down in sections. They made you question God, the meaning of life, whether sports should possibly mean this much. On Sunday night, I stewed in my seat vowing never to raise my kids as Sox fans. On Monday night, I skipped out of Fenway wondering if any other team could possibly mean this much to a group of people.

More people have watched the Stewart/Crossfire clip on the Internet than watched it on CNN. Math.

Here is a Quicktime movie of Stewart’s Daily Show monologue from last night.

Make sure to listen until the end. Fun with Churchill!

One of the more subtle issues at play in this election is the fate of the Supreme Court. The next president will likely be able to make three nominations, deciding the direction of the court for the next twenty to thirty years.

President Bush ducked the question in the debates, but some worry about what will happen if he picks more justices like Scalia and Thomas.

Justices Scalia and Thomas have urged their colleagues to reverse Roe and “get out of this area, where we have no right to be.”

If Roe is lost, the Center for Reproductive Rights warns, there’s a good chance that 30 states, home to more than 70 million women, will outlaw abortions within a year; some states may take only weeks. Criminalization will sweep well beyond the Bible Belt: Ohio could be among the first to drive young women to back-alley abortions and prosecute doctors.

If Justices Scalia and Thomas become the Constitution’s final arbiters, the rights of racial minorities, gay people and the poor will be rolled back considerably. Both men dissented from the Supreme Court’s narrow ruling upholding the University of Michigan’s affirmative-action program, and appear eager to dismantle a wide array of diversity programs. When the court struck down Texas’ “Homosexual Conduct” law last year, holding that the police violated John Lawrence’s right to liberty when they raided his home and arrested him for having sex there, Justices Scalia and Thomas sided with the police.

We just got home from our 6-hour game.

We are mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted. But happy, oh so happy.

We’re off to Fenway to see Game 5.

I only hope that when we get back there’s still baseball to be played.

It’s kinda hard to do software development on a remote server when your DSL line keeps going down.

Grr.

For those of you viewing this on the site, you can see my new banner image at the top of the page. This was taken in Jasper, Alberta a couple of months ago.

If you’re reading this in an aggregator, you’ll need to click through to see it.

Love the trees.