Those humans who have tried to send me electronic mail of any sort over the weekend may have encountered a woeful lack of success: but not to worry, mail is back up and would be just as pleased as punch to deliver your messages straight to me.

Ernie discusses the dangers of tattoos in languages you can’t read, and points out this article on goofy Japanese character tattoos. This was my personal favorite: “Tim Bass used a Japanese dictionary to choose these characters to represent his first name. That’s a bad idea if you don’t know Japanese. Bass was too scared to ask what his tattoo really meant until I interviewed him. It looks like it says ‘unreliable delivery service.’”

I was washing my hands in a fifth-floor women’s room when the lights flickered and went out on Thursday. I went out into the hall and noticed that power seemed to be out through the whole floor - although it wasn’t completely dark. I work for a colocation company, so we’ve got our own generator and there were a few lights on here and there. I went with the rest of my department to a conference room with big windows overlooking the street, and we saw people walking out of the dark stores and restaurants across the street and looking around. People started calling their friends in other parts of the city and figuring out which boroughs had been affected - when we found out it was not only all five but also Long Island, I hopped on the phone and called my parents in Massachusetts. They turned on the news and told me it was a massive power grid failure affecting cities as far away as Canada.

At work, non-essential employees were allowed to leave - although most of us didn’t, since the subway wasn’t running. We hung around our cubes for a while, hoping the outage would only be a few minutes, but soon made our way down to the floors that still had air conditioning for the sake of the servers. As it got dark, I ended up settling into the NOC, where some of the wall monitors were tuned to CNN and other news stations, although the endless disaster news broadcasting got a little dull after a while.

The view from our big lobby windows was the strangest thing - the street was so dark that even though the sidewalks were crowded, we couldn’t see anyone until they walked or ran directly in front of the building. The whole thing was very 28 Days Later - the city felt abandoned even though it was full of people. All in all, though, we didn’t have it too badly - it wasn’t too dark and it wasn’t too hot, and I had my GBA. Probably the most unpleasant part of the night was trying to catch a few hours of sleep at a desk - Aeron chairs are comfortable for sitting, but definitely not for sleeping.

I went outside around 5:15 the next morning and walked around while the sun rose. It was a very eerie feeling - Broadway was completely abandoned, and almost absolutely silent. Later, a coworker’s wife drove down to the building to pick him up, and they offered me a ride uptown to Chris’s house, which I gladly accepted. We noticed pockets of power on the ride, as far up as 150th street. Chris’s neighborhood was still out when I got there, but electricity returned before I’d been there half an hour. Now I just have to be careful about buying milk for the next few days.

1. A two-player starter set for the Harry Potter TCG. I bought this at a game store in Seattle a couple years back when I was visiting the boys. I’ve still never played the game, although I think I read the instructions almost immediately. Maybe with my recent Pokémon and Magic dorkery, though, now’s the time.

2. A 7-inch single containing Temple of Love by the Sisters of Mercy. Given to me years ago by a friend, and I have no idea how it ended up in my desk.

3. Three separate unidentified email addresses on, respectively, the back of a receipt, the back of an envelope, and the back of a phone bill that isn’t mine. I’m tempted to email these people and ask how they know me, but they probably wouldn’t remember either.

4. A bunch of super-awesome Diesel Sweeties stickers sent by my interweb ex-husband.

5. My birth certificate!

In a recent Slashdot thread discussing my review of Mac OS X Power Tools, a reader posed an interesting question: what are your favorite OS X tools? This could be read in a couple of different ways, but in terms of third-party utilities (or software not otherwise preinstalled), here’s a few that aren’t to be missed:

1. Key Xing (shareware, $7) allows you to specify your own keyboard shortcuts for applications, documents, and tasks like copying full file paths for items in Finder windows. Some of their other suggestions: control iTunes volume and track selection without having to bring iTunes to the front; pop up a Google window for searching the web, images, groups, directory, and news; and paste text into other programs. Not bad for seven bucks.

2. CodeTek Virtual Desktop (shareware, $30) is one I found out about in Mac OS X Hacks, and while it’s not the cheapest of the virtual desktop options for OS X, it’s leaps and bounds beyond the handful of free options that are out there. Even the demo is worth a try - it just doesn’t allow you more than two desktops.

3. Metallifizer (freeware) is one I’ve mentioned before. It does only one thing, but does it well: you can use it to strip (or add, if you’re crazy) the brushed metal interface from a Cocoa application of your choice. You can also do this by popping open the relevant plist using devtools, of course, but since Metallifizer is free, you can’t really go wrong by saving yourself the trouble.

So my brother Isaac (who recently guestblogged over at Fox Sports New England) moved into NYC this weekend, although I didn’t catch up with him until today. Johan recommended Ginger Man, a slick little pub on 36th with an excellent beer selection, so we all escaped Manhattan’s freakish sunny-afternoon downpour and had a couple pints. Their bar food wasn’t bad at all, in terms of bar food - they boasted not only an intriguing Guinness stew but also a selection of truly gigantic salads. And speaking of eating in the city, check out this NYC restaurant and food weblog. I’ve spotted a few of my favorite spots there so far, but there’s definitely a few I’ll have to check out as well.

Incidentally, the site’s all cozily snuggled into its new host at The Hanford Consortium. You might notice that the site’s an eensy bit faster, but other than that things should be as they were. Thanks to Scott and mysterious others for helping with the move.

In a continuing effort to never grow up (although I’m not a Toys R Us kid, exactly), I spent my Saturday morning eating Count Chocula and watching cartoons. I have to say that Yu-Gi-Oh is probably the weirdest show I’ve ever seen - I’m aware that it’s either based on the trading card game of the same name, or the game is based on it, but it’s still very strange hearing characters saying things like “NOW I WILL DESTROY YOU WITH THIS MONSTER CARD OF INFINITE ATTACK POWER!!” It’s like suddenly I’m back at the Federation Comics in Peabody playing Magic against uppity pre-teens.

I’ve mentioned before that I live Way The Fuck Out In Brooklyn - as it happens, that’s right next to Coney Island. (Although, truth be told, I haven’t been over there in quite a while, since my parents came to visit for the first time and we did Astroland like you wouldn’t believe.) While living Way The Fuck Out Here has its drawbacks, not the least of which is the local Q on weekends, there are a couple of perks as well - in the summer it tends to be slightly cooler than Manhattan, and even better than that, there’s fireworks over the boardwalk every Friday night. Every summer since I moved here I’ve been able to hear them, but this year they must have shifted the location slightly because for the first time I’m also able to see them from my apartment window. At around 9:30 or 10 on Friday evenings, I just open my blinds and watch a surprisingly impressive display from the comfort of my desk chair.

While I’m sufficiently averse to crowds that I’ve never gone to see the Macy’s fireworks display on the 4th of July, fireworks over the beach are another matter entirely. When I was growing up, at least a couple times a summer we’d gather our blankets and sweatshirts to go and see fireworks over one of the beaches in Gloucester, usually during St Peter’s Fiesta (which was probably my favorite weekend of the entire summer).

I’ll probably head over to the boardwalk for a better view of the fireworks here within the next couple weeks - I’m not sure when they stop doing them on a weekly basis, but I’d like to catch one display before next year.

Dooce has some lovely photos up that make me want to get out of the god damned city for a little while and scamper around like a wild thing in the woods. Luckily, my parents are ideally situated for woods-scampering, and luckier still I’m planning on visiting them in a couple of weeks for their big anniversary to-do.

The Invisible Adjunct’s post from yesterday offers a delectable selection of possible academically-themed reality show concepts, including such gems as PhD Island: “Ten or so (somewhat attractive) men and women in their early twenties, maybe with a token older contestant, endure a numbingly drawn-out series of trials and humiliations. These include hostile dissertation-committee meetings, labyrinthine statistical methodologies, and ramen. Some contestants are eliminated along the way — we watch their tearful exits with the comforting knowledge that by the end of the show, it is the survivors who will envy the escapees…There will be romances and sexual liasons. Alliances, rivalries, sacrifices, even a betrayal or two — and we’ll see it all! In the end, the contestants who survive the early trials must compete with each other for the ultimate prize: a tenure-track assistant professorship at a pretty-good college in a not-bad city.”

Although it’s still only the first week of August, it’s also less than a month before fall classes start at NYU. I’m looking forward to it, despite the now-familiar ambivalence about finally graduating - part of me wishes I could just do the undergrad thing perpetually, because I’m fully aware that right now I’ve got it pretty easy. My Tuesday/Thursday schedule doesn’t involve arriving in Manhattan before 3pm (although I’ll probably hold office hours on one of those days, since my Mondays and Wednesdays are awful). Incidentally, and speaking of both the Invisible Adjunct and undergrad TAs, here’s an old post suggesting the practice is nothing more than exploitation. Of course, that’s in the case of unpaid undergrads - of which group I’m luckily not a member.