originally posted september 07, 2003

a summer lost

Labor Day has come and gone. The Pirates have sold off all their good players. The Steelers are once again the only team that matters to Pittsburgh sports fans. Summer is unofficially done.

vermont: a whole lot of nothing

My one-week vacation in Vermont was a good escape from the drudgery of work. My second 600-mile road trip of the year took me to Cedarbrook, a lodge not far from Killington, to meet up with my family.

Vermont is the second-smallest state in the U.S. by population. This wasn't evident to me until I took a look around on the map. If my home town of Syosset, New York (population 19,000) were in Vermont, it would be the second-largest city in the state and it would have a regional airport. Signs of civilization were defined by the occasional CVS or traffic light. Small towns were marked by an excess of antiques shops, general stores touting their stock of maple syrup, and the occasional gas station. A local real estate guide included several cottages that had no electricity and, as one ad put it, an "adorable outhouse" in lieu of indoor plumbing.

My parents were battling light colds throughout the week, so we didn't get to bike around Vermont. Ski resorts offered mini golf, lame "alpine slide" rides, hiking, and mountain biking to squeeze a small amount of tourist cash from the mountains in the summer time. We didn't go to the Ben & Jerry's factory; it lost what little was left of its homey charm when the company sold out to multinational conglomerate Unilever in 2000.

In deference to my parents' illness, we spent a fair amount of time back at the hotel room. I brought my Atari 10-in-1 joystick for some low-tech video gaming. We discovered "I Love the '70s" on VH1 for retro entertainment. I was surprised to learn that my brothers had started playing The Settlers of Catan, a strategy board game that has been a long-time favorite of some engineers at my office.

All in all, the week was most about relaxation and spending time together as a family. Now that my younger brother Adam is going to school in Rochester and I'm living in Pittsburgh, vacations will start to include fewer and fewer family members. My youngest brother David and my parents will be in town in two weeks, but Adam will remain four hours away in Rochester without a car to meet us here.

school's back in session

Shortly after returning from Vermont, I met up with many of my friends who are returning to Carnegie Mellon to finish up their undergraduate work or start graduate studies. I saw the new University Center expansion, complete with the long-awaited Dance Dance Revolution Extreme arcade machine -- $1 per play, but by far the most convenient machine to Pittsburgh.

It has been nearly eight months since I officially moved to Pittsburgh, so this is the second semester that I've been out of school. Regardless, there was a certain surreality as I helped transport a carload of furniture onto campus and saw the class of 2007. These extremely young-looking kids are now college students, I continue to feel old, and I'm glad that I'm out of school.

That said, there's still this whole idea of "free time" that is alien to me. My weekends are filled with little other than shopping, TV, video games, and time with friends. There's almost no weekend projects any more. I can live with the boredom that comes with such unproductive Saturdays and Sundays. Yesterday, I called a friend of mine on campus and said I had nothing to do. I ended up going to a birthday party with about 25 other people. As summer turns to fall turns to winter, I'm glad that I know plenty of people in town to get together with on a moment's notice.

As always, no news is good news.

Back to September 2003, or to the year 2003.

Where am I?

This is Weill Aspects, the official news archive of Jason Weill Web Productions. All articles posted to the front page end up here. This page was generated automatically by a series of Perl scripts.

Articles in Weill Aspects are organized solely by date. You may find the Google search in the left column to be useful if you are looking for an article but do not know the date on which it was posted.

Weill Aspects is composed of static web pages generated as appropriate when a new article is posted. It was developed in May 2001 as a way of managing the content on this site. I also used it extensively while in Japan, during which time I did not have continuous access to the Internet. I was able to write daily updates during July and August 2002, pack the files onto a CD-R or memory device, and upload them from the Internet-connected computers at school.

These scripts are all hacked together in less than elegant fashion, and I don't plan to release them. Some of the design that went into Aspects also was used to develop Livestat, a suite of Perl scripts to process statistics for academic competition tournaments. Livestat is available freely.