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so i got 7 hours of sleep last night, woke up very much refreshed, with no symptoms of disease. maybe it was just a 24 hour thing, or maybe it was my overall lack of sleep that very briefly compromised my immune system. regardless, i still think there's some virus coursing through my system, but my body seems to be fighting off the attack fairly well. i used the bathroom, took a shower, and left for work 30 minutes later.

yesterday the train was empty since it was president's day (unfortunately, i had to work). the people who were riding were mostly parents holding hands with young children or pushing babies in strollers. there were also a lot of teenagers, suburban kids getting all dressed up and going into the city, kind of a right of passage, i did the same thing growing up in belmont. i didn't connect the dots until i got to work, but i guess apparently it's winter vacation for a lot of them, that's why they're flooding boston in bulk. anyway, it wasn't the same case today, everything back to normal, the usual amount of commuters crowding the subway. i managed to get a seat between two skinny women so i was squeezed to death like i am sometimes (especially during winter, when people where those large puffy coats).

i had some hardware fun at the office today, wrote some lingo to control the push button light box alex spent all of yesterday wiring. it's for a game i'll be coding sometime soon, and the box was never meant to light up the way i was doing it, but it sure was pretty, random blinking dots of colored lights, like being at an amusement park. i'd love to get something like this for my place, for no particular reason other than it looks cool, there just something mesmerising about randomly blinking colored lights.

i went to super 88 to do some light grocery shopping during lunch. what a godsend it is to work right next to chinatown, especially for an epicurean like myself. fresh ingredients readily available (including those hard to find asian items) not to mention all the restaurants. i will definitely have a hard time staying thin. i wanted to wander into south boston some more, but i was compelled to get back to the office. there will be plenty of time when the weather warms up to explore, plenty of days when i won't have so much work to do. coming back, i stopped off at chinatown cafe and get the exact same thing i got yesterday, the pork ribs. my hands were freezing and the bags of groceries were digging into my fingers by the time i got to the office.

apart from the hardware fun, i also got to work my software kick as well, installing mysql on my os x mac, so we could test one of our interactives that required some communication with an online database. the application we used to easily inspect and build the tables was cocoa mysql, a pretty good open source mysql admin tool for the mac, except i can't use it for my own website because my webhost won't allow anyone to connect to the database except the localhost, due to security concerns.

after work i quickly raced to harvard square to meet julie for a free screening of osama at the harvard loews theatre. by the time i got there, there was a long line snaking around the whole block, all the way down to passim. i got in line as more and more people piled in behind me. people slowly started to advance forward, and when i was almost at the entrance of the theatre, julie arrived just in time. we were probably 5-7 people behind when someone from the theatre told everyone that osama was "sold out" and if we leave our name and address on the invitation (which was just a printed e-mail), they'd reimburse us with a free movie pass for 2. not bad! i was particularly interested in the movie, about an afghan girl who pretends to be a boy in order to survive and help her family, but somehow it all worked out.

julie and i wandered harvard square a little bit (body shop, the coop), before walking back to my place. because we missed the movie, it'd mean we'd get to catch the primary coverage, wisconsin holding it's election tonight. julie was also eager to get back to the house so she could monitor her two ebay bids, bowling ball bags. i heated the lasagna from last night and we had some of that, and i also made bubble ice tea with the leftover tapioca balls and red tea, since julie expressed a yearning for said beverage.

we watched some electra woman & dyna girl on tvland, i'd never seen the show before, but it was so outrageously retro i couldn't stop watching, especially after julie noticed, "they're not even wearing bras!" julie ended up winning her first bid for a bowling bag on ebay, then realized she didn't want to win other second bid. once the voting was over in wisconsin we were expecting to see a projected winner on one of the news networks but the race was surprisingly too close to call between kerry and edwards. finally kerry did pull ahead, but just barely. we didn't even bother watching 24 tonight, we don't think it's a good show anymore. instead, we watched an animal planet show on parasites, just plain nasty. finally, after a long wait, a new episode of queer eye, the one with the deejay who works at strip clubs. kylie minogue makes a cameo appearance at the end of the show, and when i professed my love for the diminutive aussie starlet, my sexuality was called into question. we ordered books on amazon.com after julie laughed at my wish list. she had to get "a really super book about squirrel", a book we saw at the coop which i told her she could get cheaper online but turned out wasn't the case as amazon was selling it at the same price. she also picked up "in me own words: the autobiography of bigfoot", while i ordered "a field guide to eastern forests : north america" which put us over the $25 minimum so we could qualify for free shipping. i tried to persuade her to switch from her $8/month 150mb godaddy.com webhost to the $8/month 1000gb mww.net webhost. she showed me photos of shoes. since she didn't drive here, by evening's end she had to walk home in the cold. she wasn't as concerned about the temperature as she was about her safety. i said she could take one of my kitchen knives but she declined the offer.