So I’ve been house hunting in the Saratoga Springs region of upstate NY. I made contact with a retiree couple who built their dream house on a mountain lake 20 minutes outside of Saratoga Springs. 4 bedrooms, 2 story cathedral cielings, full glass southern facing, passive solar heat, a hot tub, oil heat to supplement the solar, a giant fireplace, it abuts undeveloped state land with thousands of acres of trails….it sounds like absolute heaven. $800 a month. I should jump on it right? Except there is no high speed internet access - no cable, no dsl, no nothing. I’m so completely conflicted by this. Basically my entire personal and professional life revolves around the internet. This would be a radical life change for me. Mostly the prospect of trying this is freaking me out, but there’s a small part of me that thinks it would be interesting to try out a different lifestyle. This would force me to do it. I have to decide by the end of next week - partly I’m going to base the decision on my visit to the house, I’ll meet up with the couple in Saratoga the week July 5th. If it’s half as nice as it sounds I bet I will be convinced to go for it. Then I’ll need to figure out how to handle a bunch of stuff, including this website.

Anyway, what would you do? Glorious house on the lake but in digital isolation? Or something else not nearly as nice, but with cable and internet and more convenient to town, the store, and so on.

My brother hooked me up with a gmail account , and after using it for a while, gmail has offered me the chance to pass on accounts to my friends. So. Who wants one? Respond in the comments and it’s yours, first come, first serve. Why would you want one? First for geek cachet, a gmail account is all the rage in certain dorky circles these days. Second, if you get in early, you can secure your real name, I got david.hamilton@gmail.com for example, which will come in very handy with my impending move. It’s easy to remember. Also Google is trying a new metaphor for managing mail - instead of folders where you store email by category, it tries to build ‘threads’ out of related mail that’s most akin to some usenet reader interfaces. Apple’s mail.app also is capable of doing something similar, though so far Google’s seems a little better at correctly deriving what ‘thread’ a piece of mail belongs in. The interface is also pretty good, it’s got Google’s trademark simplicity, and it has some features that are rare in webmail clients, like address autocomplete and keyboard shortcuts. All in all, after a week or so I really like it, much better than Yahoo and more refined than speedymail.

Anyway, drop a comment and the gmail address of your dreams may be yours.

So the word is out. I accepted a position at Skidmore College on Friday, and today I submitted my resignation to Bowdoin College. I’ve been in Maine 12 years as of August 1 and this is a huge life change for me that I did not enter into easily. I’ll also be working to get my Master’s Degree in Educational Technology as part of this process, almost certainly at the University at Albany, and hopefully starting this coming March, though there’s the small possibility that I will begin this October.

Just wanted to get the word out now, there are probably more details to follow. In the immediate term, I desperately need help locating a house to rent within 15-20 minutes of Saratoga Springs. Anyone have any ideas? The realtors are not very hopeful.

I start August 13th at my new job by the way.

Why does it look so barren? A picture is worth some words, as they say:

Something big is in the works. I can’t talk about it just yet, but I’m making a bold and unexpected move. I’ll post in detail next week. Those of you who already know, please don’t spoil the surprise in the comments!

Several weeks ago Kirsten and Brian came for a visit and we went hiking in the Gulf Hagas area. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I moved to Maine so I was psyched. The trip up took us about 3 hours or so from Yarmouth. We discovered on the way back that we took the wrong route - if you’re travelling from southern maine, definitely take the Brownesville entrance to the land, not the Greenville one. The dirt road in is shorter and much better maintained - in fact unless you’re in some form of SUV/offroad vehicle with high ground clearance, definitely don’t take the Greenville route, your car will be bottoming out and you’ll be buying a new muffler.

Anyway click on the photo if you’d like to check out more pictures of the trip. Gulf Hagas is called the ‘Grand Canyon of Maine’ and while that’s rather grandiose, it is a beautiful area with several awesome waterfalls.

In my ongoing quest to perfect my approach to managing my health issues, my doctor and I agreed 2 months ago to try doubling the dosage of Niacin that I take daily. The goal was to further reduce my triglycerides. The good news is it worked, cutting them by a third and bringing them into a comfortable range. The bad news is, it also scoured my system of 1/4 of the HDL I had been getting the two previous tests, dropping me to 30 from 39 - I have been struggling desperately to get that number up over 40 so this was a major bummer. Back to 500mg Niacin twice daily instead of 1000mg, and possibly this means some form of statin for me in the coming months, something which I have been trying really hard to not do. Sigh. One step forward, one back.

Check out this extremely well constructed 3d representation of the NYC skyline over the ages. This is really well done flash app. Cool interface, awesome subject matter. Several years ago when it was looking like Bowdoin might be working with Columbia we talked in general terms of the possibility of doing something like this. I just wish this one also had good photography of the buildings. Well worth playing around with though, check it out.

Err, busy of course. First of all, despite more than almost a week of solid rain, the ‘good’ weather is here, and I’ve been spending my time doing outdoorsy things instead of spending all my hours glued to the computer. And I’ve been busy on the weekend - Kirsten and Brian came up last weekend and we hiked Gulf Hagas (pics and story to come) and this weekend I’m off to MA and NY. Hence the reduced number of posts. Sorry, it’s going to be slower over the summer as it usually is. That said, I’ll post a few things today before I take off to occupy your attention