A Long Time Gone

I know I've been quite negligent in blogging---so many things have happened these past months. Here's a brief recap:

1. Ben gets a Mac. A good friend of mine, Dean, works for Apple. (He designed the little antenna in your iPod which lets you connect to the internet.) As such, he gets a pretty ridiculous employee discount, which made the MacBook affordable. Now, I typically hate it when people gush about how much better the Mac operating system (OS) is than Windows. And, believe me, it's not that much better. In some ways it's actually worse---for example, you have very little control over the places where you save things, and the power manager is pretty sub par. iPhoto and iTunes are easy to use, but you can only store music and photos where Steve Jobs says you can store music and photos. The "sleep mode" isn't very good, and it runs the battery down pretty quickly. There are several pluses, however. OSX (the Mac operating system) is just a front end for Unix, which means that executing stuff from the command prompt and ssh-ing into other computers is pretty easy. The apps that people have built are also very nice. For example, there's a program called Papers, which builds a database of all of my scientific papers for easy browsing. All in all, it's better than your average laptop. The operating system is good, the components are good, and it's easy to replace simple things, like hard drives and RAM.
2. The Trip Home from California. Bryanne and I drove from Palo Alto to Columbus in April, making a stop at the Grand Canyon for a spectacular sunrise and a plethora of Japanese tourists. The vistas were, of course, breathtaking: We also found other things of interest, including some dinosaur footprints in New Mexico:
3. Bryanne and I Celebrate 1 Year. ...by going to the zoo! (It's been a good year, in my opinion.) The Columbus Zoo is great, and they have some very good exhibits. These fruit bats look kind of like my dog Lefty: I made a new friend, with a goat: I really like the moose exhibit, although the mooses were pretty inactive: Bryanne's favorite are the frogs:
4. A Chorus Line comes to town. Bryanne's good friend Matt is the company manager for the national tour of "A Chorus Line". We'd seen the show in Detroit in January, but this time they came to Columbus. The production is very good. Typically the whole point of the chorus is to blend in, and be completely faceless, yet the show is about giving the chorus dancers some actual face. Some are looking for their first break, and some are looking to keep living their dream as a dancer, however low the pay, and however small their chances. Anyway, Matt and his husband Sandro were in town for the weekend, (which was our anniversary, too), and they joined us for drinks:
5. Ben Dundee World Tour 2009. Currently, I am sitting in the Columbus airport, about to embark on a European Adventure. I am attending a conference in Hamburg, and it was actually cheaper for me to spend two weeks in Europe, than to spend just 5 days in Hamburg. I fly into Hamburg today, and fly out on the 15th. The conference runs from the 6-10, so I'll have a few days before hand to spend exploring the city, as well as a few days after the conference ends to take a side trip to Amsterdam. I will be sure and keep the blog updated with pictures and accounts of my exploits.