The usual excuses ... I'm busy, nothing to say, yadda yadda yadda. I promise to be by more often. No, really.

Our new Mac has hardly been the model of reliability that Apple would have you believe. It has died twice in the month and a half since our purchase. Both times, our helpful friends at the Apple Store looked at it, shrugged, and went in the back to get us a brand new one. Never mind that in both cases Veronica had just finished uploading and organizing all the data from her old computer, including her 13 gigabytes of mp3s. Now we use it, half wondering how long this one will hold up. The first one suffered a monitor failure, the second just wouldn't start at all. I spent a while wondering what we were doing wrong, now I'm convinced we're getting faulty machines. If the damn things would stay running, I may get a chance to make this website Mac-compatible. This is doing more than little to dampen my enthusiasm to get myself a 20 gigabyte iPod. On a positive technical note, I just got a new 2.4 gigahertz Pentium 4 desktop at work, with 1 gigabyte of RAM, a DVD-ROM drive, and a 40x CD burner. The monster rips MP3s at 20x! And I guess it does science-type things pretty well, too.

I'm currently working furiously to prepare for a big scientific conference my boss is organizing. It's a week from Saturday, here in Boston (no nifty travel for this meeting). I'm presenting two papers, one as a 15 minute talk and the other as a poster. This is the last time I submit two abstracts to a meeting. I thought I would be a go-getter and impress people, now I'm spending every waking minute trying to get these presentations together. Ack.

No hip new musical news. I saw Velvet Goldmine a few weeks ago, now I can't get Brian Eno's "Baby's On Fire" out of my head. Last night I was annoying Veronica by doing my best Jello Biafra impression, shouting "Let's Lynch The Landlord", so this morning I've got the Dead Kennedy's Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables playing on my Winamp. I'm getting a little antsy to see the Factory Records retrospective 24 Hour Party People, which is released this Friday (except in Los Angeles and New York, where the lucky buggers have been able to see it for a week now). My current musical moods have been centering on Bauhaus, Belle & Sebastian, Curve, Echo and the Bunnymen, 808 State, The Go-Betweens, The Orange Peels (SF ... gotta repra-zent), and Iggy Pop (another Velvet Goldmine-spurred interest). Fore some reason, my random Winamp playlist keeps coming back to U2's "All I Want Is You". Another song that makes me wonder about all those U2-haters. The video is great too.

Be back soon...