on the train this morning was an idiot savant (is that the politically correct term?). a girl sat next to him and he flinched away violently. she was very kind however and struck up a conversation with him, and he slowly started to open up. at first i thought it was kind of amusing that he knew a lot about trains (he elaborated on the disney monorail), but he started to amaze when he was able to tell you the day of the week just from the date, totally rain man. after she got off, he rocked back and forth in his seat, whispering random dates under his breath and their historical significance.

i finally got that coding done, so now i'm in a better place. there are still bugs here and there, but they're minor inconveniences now that i have the overall functionality in place and working. three touchscreen monitors, two machines, two RFID readers, a dual head video card, a video capture board, saving on a shared server across the network, communicating with the mysql database, and an untested mpeg player device that will be controlled via serial connection to be projected on some screen somewhere. looking at it now, it's a complicated exhibit, that's why it took so long.

i heard back from sharpweb concerning my account. he (the sharpweb guy i was instant messaging) told me that it was cancelled a few days ago, but i didn't get the message because it got bounced back to their e-mail server. he asked what was my reason for leaving. though there were many reasons (the fact that the server kept on going down was a big one), i told him the sugarcoated excuse, which was because my new place gives me 1gb of storage for $8/month. he said if he gave me the same amount for $7/month, would i be interested in coming back. i told him, "let me try me new place first, if i don't like it, i'll come back," which was pretty much like saying "let's just be friends."

kristine went running during lunch, and i would've gone too except i didn't bring my clothes because i figured it'd be too cold (even though it was 40 degrees) and nobody else would be interested in going. when she came back, she discovered the cannoli i had stashed in the fridge and i shared it with the people of the office (all four of us, most of the others were at an offsite meeting). i went with adam to wendy's for lunch, after eating all my biggie sized fries, i almost didn't want to eat my sandwich anymore.

after work, i went over to lynn's place to fix her ibook. she'd been trying to get in touch with my for several weeks and i finally called her back today. she wanted to pay me for my time but i would have none it that. we installed new ram into her machine, upgraded her system to 9.2.2 (i burned a cd full of the latest installers, she only has a modem, it would've taken a long time to download everything), then installed quicken 2004 (it's system requirements was what originally got her to upgrade her ibook). we did a lot of chatting, about her 5 year old grandson, about going into the mac technical assistance business for myself, the difference between dsl and cablemodem, whether she should go wireless, life in china and taiwan compared to the US, the people you meet living in cambridge, and american foreign policies in latin america. sensing i was a fan of current events, she let me borrow two books, "mountains beyond mountains: the quest of dr. paul farmer, a man who would cure the world" by tracy kidder ("it's inspiring, i cried after i read it," lynn told me), and "the uses of haiti" by paul farmer. 2 hours later (i had told her it'd only take 15-30 minutes when i spoke to her earlier on the phone), 9pm, i came home.

a dinner of soup from a can, a hot shower, and then to bed with some new books. one more day of work then the weekend. i have a fistful of nothing planned.