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Some friends of mine and I decided to go to the inauguration.  It was pretty expensive, and I was told at the gate that Barack Obama had declared that his economic stimulus package required that everyone pay in cash.

I happened to have enough money so I gave it to the cashier.  She looked through my stack of twenties and said, “I can’t take this, it’s foreign currency.”

It turned out that paper bills had pictures of the different states on them like quarters do.  She was holding a “Puerto Rican” twenty.  “This isn’t a state,” she insisted.

“It’s a territory!”

“This currency isn’t real.”

“Look,” I said, “if I were trying to make counterfeit money, I wouldn’t print Spanish all over it, would I?”  Then I offered to show her a Wikipedia entry that would prove I was right.

“Whatever,” she said.  “Go in.”  But the inauguration was already over.

President Obama, you owe me.

Dan and I got married.  It was a pretty awesome party. I’m sorry we couldn’t invite all of our friends and family, but I’m thrilled that those who did come made it a great night.

I didn’t take enough photos so please post yours if you get the chance.  Some of these are more blurry than I would normally share (it was really dark in there) but I didn’t have a lot to choose from.

More tagged as dfalywedding on Flickr.

Today I got a package from O’Reilly containing Essential SQLAlchemy, for which I did a technical edit.  I remembered that much, because I got a nice check from them, but I forgot that I’d also been asked to provide a quote for the back of the book.  Too bad that was before I started my own gig:

The officers and all of the directors of the corporation:

1. Just because I bought something from you online or in person does not mean I wish to receive marketing materials by email.
2. If you do send me marketing materials by email, include a single URL to let me unsubscribe. Do not make me send you an email saying “unsubscribe.”
3. Do not force me to type in my email address — I can’t be bothered, and you may have an older address that forwards to my current address.
4. Do not make me tell you why I am unsubscribing.
5. Do not ask me to select which marketing newsletter to unsubscribe from. I have no idea which one I’m getting because I didn’t opt-in in the first place.
6. For God’s sake, do not send me an email confirming that I have been unsubscribed. I am unsubscribing because I don’t want to receive email from you.

If you fail to follow steps #2-5, I won’t bother unsubscribing. I will simply mark you as “spam” in Gmail.

Note that this increases the likelihood that other people receiving your marketing materials will instead have them delivered to their spam folder.

This afternoon while walking the dog a man started yelling at me in Davis Square:

“I know what you like, honey. I can tell. You like girls. Girls and big dogs. You don’t like guys.”

Then he turned a corner, singing the theme from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.