November Denouement

Brief posting yet again ...

Cyberposium was good, although left me still in need of modertaor and panelists for Tech@Tuck. Roger continued his search for our new car ... Honda Pilot or Honda CR-V?

Roger and I spent Thanksgiving out west again this year. A great, if brief time with the Canceko family and SoCal friends. Saw Harry Potter and did some quick shopping. Relatively painless travel, except when we were on a California highway.

More pictures to post very soon.

Techknowledge

I'm off to Boston today to attend Cyberposium 11, a technology and business event hosted by the Harvard School of Business. My mission: to meet and talk with Walt Mossberg, the personal technology guru of WSJ. Although it looks very unlikely that he'll be available to moderate our panel at Tech@Tuck this year, I'd still like to meet him and spread the word about our event. I'm also a big fan of his column.

Meeting him would sort of be like the time we met Ira Glass. I had been volunteering at WBEZ for Stories on Stage (the lady who ran it was a Michigan theatre alum) - there's a story in that experience that I have yet to write - and Jonathan Goldstein sat in the next cubicle. I told him I was a big fan of This American Life and he invited me to hear a taping. Roger came with me, along with a reporter for the Sun-Times. The show featured the Sarah Vowell story about an underground cafeteria in Carlsbad Caverns and Jonathan's story about a Chicago Russian Bath.

I looked it up and here is a link to that broadcast. Wow, that was before September 11. The show featured some really funny punning titles: It's Not the Heat, It's the Humility, You Can Have Your Cave and Eat It Too. We were a big fan of the show before we came to Chicago. I started listening to TAL in Ann Arbor, and really liked the format.

The way the taping went was that the guests (including Roger and me) sat in chairs in the recording room and watched Ira "DJ" the show. The actual stories were pre-recorded: what we did see live was Ira mixing the music and taping his intros and segues. We had to be very quiet during the segues. It was fun.

What was really neat was how this voice that we enjoyed, admired, and laughed to had materialized into a real person. We didn't really talk with Ira Glass so much as complimented him. But it was fun. And the experience didn't diminish his stature for us - his storytelling became more compelling, more special.

The year before, Roger had bought that Slate Diaries book, which included an essay by Ira, and I remembering reading it in Michigan.

I like meeting writers I read in person ... to see that the sounds and images I adore or am mystified by come from a living, human source.

So anyway, back to Mr. Mossberg. His columns are pretty funny, and he's a big fan of Apple, so his views fit very nicely in our household.

Here's another quirky thing ... in a recent WSJ special on "recommended blogs," Mossberg listed some technology blogs that he liked. The first blog he listed was Engadget.com - whose editor-in-chief I recently found out was my childhood neighbor, Peter Rojas!

I had been reading Engadget for a while, as research for work. It came highly recommended from our web guru, Todd Ragaza, and Tuck Computing. Then a few other center fellows also said they followed the blog and its podcasts. I hunted around to see who the authors were, and if I could interview them for the center, and in the masthead I saw a name that was very familiar! Small world!

More meeting-the-person-behind-the-writer stuff later ...

From Adam to Windsor

Florentine (Poppy) No. 2, 10" dinner plate

Roger was on call today, so I spent the day with a new friend, Janeece, who moved here from Cleveland with her husband, Dan, a neurology resident at DHMC. Janeece teaches French at Hartford High School, and was actually at Michigan getting her MEd the same time I was getting my MFA (1999-2001).

Janeece wanted to go antique shopping, something I had only done seriously once before, with my roommate Allison in Boston's North End. I had also known a bunch of people at Michigan who were into antiques, but never got around to going with them. It was cool shopping with Janeece because she collected a specific kind of antique: Depression-era glass, and, in particular, a green glass produced by Anchor Hocking in a pattern called Cameo which features a ballerina in the design. And she was willing to teach me a little about Depression glass, e.g., the history, the different patterns, how to tell a reproduction from an original.


Closeup of Cameo pattern, from Anchor Hocking

Depression glass was mass-produced machine-pressed and tinted glassware that was of relatively low quality, yet came in beautiful colors and patterns to suit every taste. Made from the mid-1920s into the 1940s, the glassware was popular and affordable. Different patterns were available at the the local dime store, and sometimes were handed out at movie theatres or department stores as a bonus for purchasing something else.

In Depression glass parlance "from Adam to Windsor" refers to the alphabetical order in which collectors' guides list all the patterns of the seven largest glass companies that produced this collectible glassware: Hazel-Atlas, Hocking, Indiana, Federal, U.S. Glass, MacBeth-Evans, and Jeanette. Here is a chart outlining all 92 patterns.

Janeece took me to the Antiques Mall in the Quechee Gorge Village. To get me into browsing, Janeece helped me pick a pattern and color that I could start to collect. I decided on Hazel Atlas' Florentine pattern, a lace-like poppy-filled pattern, in yellow. For some reason, this year "yellow" is my new "orange" (I was really into orange last year, orange raincoats, sneakers, etc.).


Closeup of Florence (Poppy) No. 2 pattern, Hazel Atlas

The Antiques Mall is quite big, with several booths and several rooms. Some booths have the glassware prominently displayed. and in complete sets. Some booths have single pieces mixed in with other kinds of antiques, making it more of a "find" if you do find something. At first, I was intrigued by a pair of cool-looking candlestick holders in the pattern I chose, but they were $30 each, and I wanted to start with a smaller purchase. I almost bought a cute sugar bowl, but was a little disappointed when I found out it was missing a lid (lids are often missing from sets) - I wanted my first piece to be a complete thing. Here is a picture of what a complete set, bowl and lid, would look like.

I settled on a dinner plate (see photo above), which was fairly scratch free and, at $7, Janeece proclaimed a great bargain. I certainly was happy with the price and the functionality of the piece. Janeece herself found a great Cameo vegetable dish for $25.

It was a great day ... I came away with good conversation, a little history lesson, and a keepsake!

Four days in New York

Anne and Connor, after brunch at the Barking Dog


Jolie and me in front of the Candle Cafe


Mariano Rivera and Chien Ming Wang, at the ESPN Zone booth at the Digital Life conference


Yankees closer Mariano Rivera and me at the Digital Life conference