So I had three major goals in mind for today.

First was to get ahold of some whizbang technogadgetry capable of backing up my now defunct laptop. A brief stop at Fry’s got me that, in the form of a nice 2.5″ HD enclosure. It’s a particularly neat little enclosure in that it has a battery and a mode to back up attached storage without being connected to a computer. My camera’s 4GB CF card suddenly seems bigger.

Continuing with the whole meeting-folks-I-haven’t-seen-since-prehistory thing, I went to Palo Alto and had lunch with T-. On the surface, neither Palo Alto nor T- seem substantially changed since last August, which is mildly comforting. Maybe I can keep up with the world after all? Either way, the mint-flavored hot chocolate was an inspired moment of lunacy, which I hope to repeat soon.

The final step of my evil plan consisted of getting into the vaults of Stanford’s Green Library for a little R&R err… a book that NYU does not possess. Clearly, I failed to properly appreciate it when I had easy access. Mission accomplished with a minimum of hassle (hey, the alumni card is worth something), though it was a bit of a shock running across a former classmate who is now (as of 2 months ago) a father. True, he’s a doctoral student, but he’s not _that_ much older than me. Question: which is more stressful, oral comprehensives or a 2 month old? Answer: I don’t intend to find out.

And now bedtime for bonzo. Or resurrecting said stupid Compaq laptop.

I am not, as most folks who know me can attest, particularly good at making new friends. As a result, I tend to make a reasonable amount of effort to keep in touch with old ones, at least until I’ve suitably buried myself in late coursework that even a phone-call seems to require time I don’t have. Christmas vacation is particularly useful to this end because everybody tends to return home to their folks for a bit, so almost all of the ex-Coastsiders I know wind up back in the area at some point or another around Dec. 25.

While a few are notoriously good at slipping away without detection (namely U-, who has extended her run of evasion to the tune of four years straight now), most I end up locating sooner or later. Today was the turn for V- and W-. First, however, the car had to be deposited with the mechanic, who was helpfully able to diagnose the vehicle as in need of front brake pads. As the problem in question is a high-pitched screech from the rear wheel, it is not clear if we can consider this progress or not. In any case, I met up with V- for breakfast, along with V-‘s friend. Hence the experience became less about reconnecting, than about connecting in the first place. Queue above comment about my friend-making abilities.

A bit later, W- and I went up to our former high school. It’s curious how small the place feels now. While I could (easily) pass for a high school student, I felt quite alien to the folks their. They could almost have been from another country. The mannerisms, the lingo and the outlook (what little of it I overheard) recalled no memories. Meanwhile the number of teachers whom I’d had that are still teaching there has shrunk to perhaps 7 or 8 (out of an original 20+). They too seem different. Less imposing or authoritative, while more quirky and easier to relate to. For instance, we had a lengthy conversation with a former teacher (and newly appointed administration) on the efficacy of teaching kindergartners how to cut down trees.

Is it we or they who have changed? I’m not sure. Suddenly, though, high school seems part of another lifetime.

The rest of the day centered around a battle royale between me, rsync, and rpm and has no impact on the price of tea in China, or really much else for that matter. I think I conquered, but hopefully, I’ll never have to learn for sure. The best data backups are the ones you don’t end up needing.

So, once again my journal seems to have been passed by events. Or as a (the only?) reader said, “I keep going there for updates, but all I see is that silly pirate.” Well, umm… yes. Jack Sparrow is indeed a silly pirate, and I am indeed, behind on my writing, having consistently failed to post updates since the September 29, 2006 posting that features master Sparrow so prominently. Still, here’s a proposal of sorts for 2007 (this is in fact somewhat after the fact, since this entry is actually being composed on Jan. 21):

– More frequent updates
– Better writing
– Fewer words

In short, less of the quotidian and more of the variety, or at least less emphasis on the fact that I always go to bed late, get up late, and am invariably somewhat behind in one class or another. We can take these as givens, and move on to the other stuff.

The motivation for this change stems from two things actually. Firstly, writing consistently boring stuff is depressing, and in any case, I get plenty of practice doing that with my classes. Secondly, my two favorite bloggers have quit (Billmon of Whiskey Bar and Michael Berube of his blog by the same name), so the quality of potential distractions has taken quite a hit. Long story short: expect either great things here, or an overpopulation of giant North Korean rabbits. Either one should be an improvement.

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The New Year is one of the many holidays I am ambivalent about, mostly because the weather precludes my preferred holiday pursuits (hiking in the Sierras, traveling to underpopulated areas, intergalactic snooker), but also somewhat because me and my folks never do anything all that exciting. In fact, I’m pretty sure that up until the point that I was 15 or 16, I regularly slept through the New Year without thinking anything of it.

In that grand tradition, 2007 actually began quite well, with me not merely conscious, but engaged in heated disagreement. It was the sort of argument that one can only really have after about 11PM at night, provided that one has gotten into the habit of going to bed before 10. Consequently, I think we (me and The Parents) didn’t actually notice the ’06-’07 changeover until at least two or three minutes after the fact. Quel dommage. A few minutes later, I returned to cursing my seemingly newly dead iPod (revived upon subsequent reformatting) and ditched 2007 for a world of immediately forgettable and forgotten dreams. Such is life.

The real day in fact began sometime around 8 hours later and probably meandered on for another 15 or 16 until it collided with Jan. 2, at which point it was rudely retired to some place farther west. As for me and The Parents, we wound up spending the daylight hours disrupting banana slugs and staff-length sticks at the Purisima Open Space preserve. It’s amazing how much more exciting a place can become when visibility can be measured in miles, not feet, and everything isn’t tinted gray. I’m also a big fan of the color, which has an unfortunate tendency to leave these parts between, oh, about July and December. Me like springtime. Even if in January.

Following shortstanding tradition, we also had a sort of special dinner/gift exchange doohickey in the evening. Consider it the poor atheist’s version of Christmas. No tree. Few decorations. Just a big dinner, and some gifts not sporting red and green wrap. Helps to spread holiday spirit and whatnot. I may have to rethink my policy on fireplaces though, as the living room was positively hot by the end of dinner. There is such a thing as too-effective heating. Even around Half Moon Bay.

Having manifestly gone beyond the limits of brevity imposed at the outset of this post, that, my friends, was how we welcomed 2007.