i was torn. to ride or not to ride? i'd been monitoring the weather forecast since wednesday and it didn't look good: a potentially large rainstorm was sweeping through the area, starting on friday, ending saturday. the problem was i had to get into boston this afternoon and couldn't decide whether i should take the motorcycle or not. i finally decided to take the T, didn't want to risk getting drenched in a downpour although it wouldn't be the first time. after having an italian sausage on onion bagel for lunch, i got dressed and headed into boston. it started raining, but not the torrential downpour i was lead to believe. nevertheless, i was definitely drier than if i rode the motorcycle into the city.

i was going to my second EMAWD meeting. brian told me michael was going back to SRM but i already knew, and had suspected for months even. the turnout was low, which just meant more cookies for me in the conference room. matt gave a demonstration where he built a flex application within an hour. it was a rebus generation, parsing RSS feeds and replacing words with search result images.

why i really wanted to take the bike was because i wanted to get some food in chinatown. the motorcycle would allow me to get back home and eat before my food got cold. but since i had such a big lunch, i wasn't very hungry. instead, after the meeting, i wandered the financial district a little bit. i deposited a check at the bank of america headquarter. outside i was taking photos of building across the street, 75 federal, an amazingly intricate example of art deco architecture. a bank security guard actually questioned me, asked what i was doing, and then said something i interpreted as slightly threatening: "so if i ever see these photos in a magazine, i'll know who took them."

i kept wandering, walked up milk street. did you know: benjamin franklin is so a part of philadelphia, but actually he was born right here in boston. in downtown crossing, i saw that the old filene's building was being demolished. looking around, i noticed a lot of empty store fronts. gone are the heydays when downtown crossing used to be a great place to go shopping. nowadays, i guess everything's being done online.

finally finished hellgate with my cabalist character. there was a bug in the ending though: after killing off 5 bosses and then dispatching the uberboss, i still couldn't get the payoff movie. i need to take a break from hellgate for a while, wean myself off of that addiction with another (hopefully more productive) addiction.

for dinner i made some noodles and added it to the leftover beef stew my parents left for my last night. i watched battlestar while i ate. the show seems to be getting better, but maybe because things are starting to happen now. the cylons are behaving even more humanlike now. i heard a rumor that scifi might split this final season into two halves just to milk it even more.

tonight i was doing a lot of research on captive portals. that is, enabling an open wifi connection but when somebody connects to my network it redirects them to a specific portal page first. i can then either make them provide a username and password or let them in for free. there's many different choices, from m0n0wall and pfSense (using an old pc modified to be a smart router) to wifidog (hack the router's firmware in combination with an authorization server). i have to get my hands on an old computer first though, so it looks like i'm back to craig's list trolling.