t
o
n
y
a
n
g
'
s
 
w
e
b
l
o
g


what else is new? just a bonus day of utility pole replacement work. apparently there was another pole that needed changing. the same crew from yesterday came back for an encore performance. after the new pole was put in place and the heavy machine crew left, the nstar trucks stayed behind and swapped the power lines onto the new poles. they only did this for the power though, leaving behind the telephone and cable wires.

for lunch i wanted to try this wandering central asian barbecue place i heard about a while back. instead of a fixed storefront, silk road BBQ just set up their barbecue stand on the side of the road, in keeping with the nomadic spirit of the cuisine. they used to frequent belmont but have branched out recently, setting up temporary camp in other towns. their schedule can be found on their website. today they were in kendall square, in the relatively new genzyme courtyard. i made my way to east cambridge, a place i know relatively well from having worked there before. i wanted to try the lamb meal but they didn't have that so instead i got the lamb burger ($6.75) with tzatsiki dressing (yogurt & cucumber). the food's a little pricey; true roadside barbecue stands offer cheap and quick eats. it is however probably the few places in the boston area that serves central asian cuisine. the fact that it moves around and you have to chase after it makes eating that much more interesting. i'd never been to the genzyme courtyard either (i hardly recognize that area, there's been a lot of recent development), what a beautiful place to have lunch, with umbrellaed tables and a well-manicured garden. where was this when i was working there? however, i had my lamb burger to go.

i went to the cafe to eat and to drop off my mother's shoe order that somehow got delivered to my house. afterwards i went with my father on a costco supply run before returning home. i rummaged through the books lying on the sidewalk and picked up a centennial edition of atlas shrugged and a yellowed copy of tom brown's field guide to wilderness survival.

bruce dropped by in the afternoon to give me a gift of a framed photo of a red meadowhawk dragonfly he captured during our trip to the new england wildflower society (NEWFS) last week. the rest of the day i tried to stay cool, turning on my air conditioner intermittently. i hardly noticed that the temperature was slowly dropping and by evening it was 70 degrees. i turned off the AC but i still felt uncomfortable. must be the humidity. later there was a brief downpour.

i've been trying to fix my father's dead 60gb IBM deskstar drive. this is the second drive that has died on him recently (the other one was a 500gb storage drive - ouch). it's his boot drive so it has all his e-mails and bookmarks (and no, he never backed up). at least the drive was starting up before, only to freeze up after a few minutes of use. but now it's just completely dead, won't even spin anymore. i tried the "freezing the drive in the fridge" trick but that didn't do anything. i found a way to possibly fix it but it involves buying a replacement logic board from canada ($60 including shipping) and there's still no guarantee that will revive the drive.