Last night, in the subway station under the Boston Common, I heard either the world’s worst busker, or the world’s most brilliant fluxus artist.

I cannot tell which. Part of me hopes it’s both.

Between the exit to the subway and the entrance to my office building there are two places to grab a cup of coffee and a bite to eat in the morning. One is a Starbucks, the other, a branch of a local chain of delis. This one is “Susan’s Deli of Course,” though I have seen other Delis of Course about town.

Starbucks is, well, Starbucks. This particular one is better than most, with a friendly crew working there. They have better than average coffee and passable muffins and bagels. Susan’s Deli serves mediocre coffee, but has excellent bagels and muffins, in addition to hot egg dishes. I go to both frequently, though tend to frequent Susan’s more often.

Susan’s is housed in my building, a thirteen story building from close to the turn of the century. It’s rustic. The Starbucks is at the foot of a monstrously tall skyscraper; I don’t recall how many floors it is, but it is easily four times taller.

In Starbucks, the morning crowd are suits. Dark suits, well groomed. Investment bankers and the like. Very important. Very busy. Cellphone conversations as common as face conversations. The morning in Starbucks is a dynamo of energy and importance.

Across the street at Susan’s, the crowd is mostly construction workers, and more “office casual” workers such as myself. The woman who runs the counter knows almost every construction worker by name, and what they want. Quietness and politeness rules the morning at Susan’s, I suppose because of these fellows gathering strength for the rest of the day’s labor.

For the entire day, I have been listening to and enjoying the album “Last Night” by the Michigan-based group His Name is Alive. For the curious, they’ve put the entire thing up for download. It is raw acoustic music, melancholic and poignant. Certainly not to everyone’s tastes, but I suggest a listen.

A mixed grill of a weekend. Here are the highlights.

The Gods Must Be Luddites

The gods are apparently displeased with me, in that the frequency of technological problems increased dramatically. After a good three hours of nursing the iBook back to health, the next evening I was greeted with a befuddled wife with a non-functional, foul-smelling PC. A quick test revealed the power supply had joined the choir angelic. She’s now using my PC until I can get parts to repair. A minor problem, perhaps, but I spent the rest of the week waiting for the next tech disaster. Beyond a small invasion of zombie processes on OS X, I was fortunately unscathed.

Next to Godliness

Saturday was a cleaning day. With the threat of houseguests imminent, I set to cleaning the remaining strongholds of unpleasantness with the strength of ten. Both was satisfying and productive, it was nevertheless a drain on my energy.

I’ve got the Jitters

Most of Sunday was split between fidgety work on Dramatis Personae and Jitter programming. I used Jitter to write a small web cam application that takes input from my camcorder and periodically uploads a still image to this page.

But there is so much more that Jitter can do. I’m finding that some things are very very easy, and others which I’d expect to be simple are quite difficult. For example, it was trivial to add text to the video image, but it was quite complex to then capture that composite image to disc. Fascinating work, and quite enjoyable.

I’ve been nursing my iBook, Nadia, back to health for the past three hours. She gave up the ghost in the midst of a web page load, and while it would boot, it would never make it past a simple blue screen with a mouse. Doing it the Apple way, I attempted to refresh the operating system, but the problem persisted.

Having problems like this with Linux were more than common, but this is the first time that Mac OS X has really led me down the path to the single user mode. Consulting the oracle of Google, I learned how to boot into the command line, and then set to finding out what was wrong.

After a few unneeded restarts, I found out that for some reason a bunch of gibberish had been written to the global preferences file. Removing it caused the machine to return to her normal behavior.

I don’t think that the solution was a user-friendly one (by Apple standards), but I am very grateful that I was able to bring my Linux/UNIX experience to bear on the problem, and make the fix.

The patient will live. Time for some well deserved rest.

Last night, I could have sold my purple wife to Captain Kirk for a tricorder and some dilithium crystals.

The plot is mundane. Hair dye gone wrong; purple everywhere.

The experience is vivid. The woman, purple hair, purple from head to toe, ankle deep in purple water, staring at me, eyes hungry for consolation. A bathroom, splotched and splattered with deep purple. An emergency trip to the store. The smell of rubbing alcohol, the burn of bleach on my hands as I labor to disempurple both woman and room. A flurry of activity, then exhaustion. Reassurance and comfort, staining and cleansing.

The stains will remain for some time, but in time will fade, leaving only memories of the incident.

Striding out of the subway station this morning, I noticed how at ease I was walking in a totally different tempo from that of the music playing on my iPod. I audiated the of my steps onto the music, and found it created a delightful result.

Casting my eyes out on upon the sea of Bostonians scurrying to work, I wondered what sort of fantastic polyrhythm would be created if everyone’s feet produced sound. I imagined how the rhythm and tempo would ebb and flow throughout the day, building up to a climax at 5 pm as people poured from their offices, frantic to get home, and how it would every so slowly dissolve to the shuffle of a few late-nighters and the homeless.

For hours afterward, my mind was dancing with complexity, lost in a dense pattern of imaginary footsteps.

Today marks the six month anniversary of this journal. Huzzah!

This morning I awoke to the expected aftermath of the evening’s snow. It was certainly enough to be demoralizing, but not enough to cause me to stay home. Reluctantly, I layered on clothes, and pushed myself out the door to the bus stop.

Between the bus stop and the subway station, I saw no fewer than three dozen people, shovels in hand, moving snow from one place to the other. Some were clearing paths on the sidewalk, but most were desperately shoveling in an attempt to free their cars from the snowbanks that had been caused by the street plows.

The trip was very quiet, and the passengers more introverted than normal. Perhaps we were, in our minds, back in our warm houses, hot drink in hand. Lulled by the hum of the subway engine, my mind drifted back to a snowstorm I experienced in Vienna, many years ago.

Snow was not uncommon, and I was always impressed at how little snow was on the streets, given how much fell. It was a small mystery compared to others I was contemplating at the time, and I attributed it to old world charm. However, one night after a particularly heavy snow, I awoke at 3 am to the sound of a quiet “scritch scritch” sound outside. From my window on the Mariahilfer Straße I looked down, and was amazed to see hundreds of soldiers from the Army, shovels in hand, silently shoveling snow into trucks for it to be carted away.

As with most of New England, we’re in the midst of quite a blizzard. It’s put a stop to most normal activity outside, and I haven’t set foot past my threshold since last afternoon, when I returned with a large supply of soup and bread, my favorite winter rations.

Every once and a while I peek outside on the off chance that the snows have stopped, but I’ve been disappointed so far. There doesn’t seem to be any hope of the storm relenting anytime soon, according to the weather reports.

In times like this I especially appreciate a warm home and a hot drink. Through the insulating panes of my window, the world seems quiet and peaceful. Let it snow, as they say in the songs, so long as I don’t have to go outside.

It’s been quite a while since I hopped out of bed, tossed on some clothes, and assaulted a score with a cup of coffee and the promise of a fresh day.

Real life constraints have limited my composition time as of late to be in the evening or late at night. While I’m not going to say I’m less productive then, I think that the thoughts and deeds of the day do tend to creep into my process. I feel less fettered in morning composition.

Valentine’s Day is silly. Even with my limited exposure to the media barrage, I feel the guilt pressing down on me. There are voices, loud and blunt, telling me “if you love her, buy her things! Take her out! Prove that you care with consumables! She will love you better, believe it!”

I don’t believe it. I honestly don’t think that what I did or did not do one day in the year could save my love life, if it were in jeopardy. It smacks of buying indulgences in the Middle Ages, except for protection against loneliness instead of hell. A box of chocolates and a rose or two each year, and all problems are solved. Romance is a continual process. If it’s important, it’s something that should happen on a daily basis, in actions big and small.

If Valentine’s day were a real festival reaffirming the presence and importance of the romantic, I would feel much more amiable toward it, but I get no feeling of that. Instead, I’m left with a feeling of pressure. If there’s any affirmation, it’s to affirm that you’re not a unromantic person by “doing something.” Perhaps we modern folk are too out of touch, unable to manage festivals like the ancients.

Indeed, I have no need for Valentine’s Day this year. I probably have more romance in my life than ever. If the greeting card producers and chocolatiers of the world are in cahoots to guilt me into buying their tokens of affection, they’re in for disappointment. I’ve already made my stop at the altars of Eros and Aphrodite; Saint Valentine will have to find someone else to light a candle at his shrine today.

There is a family legend that as a child, I would spend more time watching commercials than the actual programming.

If I still watched television, I would probably do this now, but not out of choice. The last few times I’ve caught up on my tube at someone else’s home I’ve been shocked at the huge number of commercials. In my daily life, I am mildly bombarded with ads on the subway (which I can easily ignore) or on the internet, which my browser does a fine job of blocking for me. My ad saturation level is very low.

Occasionally a piece of clever advertising will slide its way to me, but this takes quite a bit of effort; I missed the ubiquitous “Dell Dude” and the apparently dreadful “Can You Hear Me Now?” man, though I certainly heard the deeds of these two popular heroes. Generally, I will hear about an ad, file it away, and be done with it.

Yesterday, however, I took the time to catch up on what for me is the cleverest advertisement scheme in recent memory: Terry Tate: Office Linebacker. The ads are clever, funny, and well-executed, and remind me more of a company-sponsored television program than an actual commercial. Reebok should be proud of having the courage to support this. I’m not entirely sure if it will lead me to shoe purchases or think better of their corporate practices, but it’s certainly bought my respect in regards to their patronage of creative work.

While I am flattered that Chrisalaba Alaba, Williams Mako, Mac Williams, and Ibrahim Guei have just today set aside a sizable portion of Nigeria’s (or Zimbabwe’s or the Ivory Coast’s) treasury for my personal gain, I don’t think I can take them up on their offer with a clean conscious. I would be dreadful about depriving the citizens of Nigeria (or Zimbabwe or the Ivory Coast) of these funds, and would surely only ending up wasting the money anyway.

I do wonder about the economic stability of these countries, as it seems there are an awful lot of people with very large sums of money sittin around. Perhaps starting some sort of public works program would be better than bringing the money out of the local economy.s