2005
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Year-Round Biking: The Cold
in BikingBiking in the cold is all about having just the right layers on—too few and you’ll be hating life for the entire ride, too many and you’ll be a sweaty mess by the time you get to whereever you’re going. My basic apparel on the coldest days: A Turtle Fur Fleece balaclava that pulls up…
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Year-Round Biking: A Series
in BikingEarlier this year, I decided to ride my bike year round, snow or shine, as a transportation experiment. I was inspired to take this step when I was home over Christmas and witnessed a true Fargoan biking downtown on a day when it was two below with a brisk wind–and he didn’t even have anything…
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Farmer Ken Takes a Job
My friend Ken emailed this morning to announce he’s taking a job as the Experimental Farm Manager for The Chef’s Garden, a family vegetable farm in Huron, Ohio that sells high end produce to chefs all around the country. His job will be to test "heirloom" vegetable seeds to determine which ones might be worth…
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Coffee, Wireless, and an Interview with Fox News
in NeighborhoodThis afternoon I was in the middle of writing up comments on Ella’s personal essay when I was interrupted by a reporter and cameraman from Fox News doing interviews for an upcoming segment on wireless security issues. They asked if I’d be willing to chat about the ways I use my laptop to access wireless…
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Green Web Design and Hosting
On the day that the Kyoto Protocol is going into affect, it seems fitting to mention a few web design and hosting companies dedicated to promoting environmental responsibility in cyberspace. With a tag lines "Connecting people and planet" and "websites powered by the wind," Earthsite’s mission is to offer "green marketing and design services with…
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BC Noon Hoops in the News–Again
in UniversityOur noon basketball games made it into the news again, this time in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last Saturday: After starring at UMass, Skinner played in the ABA, NBA and overseas from 1974-81. He was a teammate and roommate of Julius Erving on the New York Nets. Now 52, Skinner’s playing style and competitiveness are still…
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Wild Thoughts: An Online Journal of Environmental Writing
in WeblinksHank emailed to let me know about a new journal he and some of his colleagues put together this past month. Several of them are graduate students inthe University of Montana environmental writing. As they describe it, Wild Thoughts "provides high-quality nature-based art, poetry, photography, fiction, and essays from everywhere, to everyone online. We have…
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Just Another World Championship
I realized when I got to Kurt’s Super Bowl party in Cambridge tonight that the only reason I had come was so that I could bike home afterward. After all, it was already the fourth quarter and I had only watched about five minutes of the game so far–not the game, actually, but rather the…
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Beginning Lent, by way of Hotel Rwanda
Today it feels like Lent began a few days early. Monica and I walked over to Coolidge Corner just around midday to catch the 1:30 showing of “Hotel Rwanda.” It was a gorgeous, spring-like day, with 50 degree temperatures helping the city shed a few layers of snow, dissolving the improvised landscape of snowbanks and…
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A few images of the blizzard of 2005
It’s been a week since the Blizzard of 2005, but we’re still living with the effects. During the first few days, the snow gave the city a pristine white coating, but now it’s quickly turning into a sullied, crusty mess as the temperature rises. Last night, we ran into this ravine between piles of snow.…