Monday

Today started off with guest-teaching Andy's Scand 100 class -- I did about an hour on some recent Swedish authors. I did the powerpoint presentation in Office 2007beta, which Lee was amazed to hear -- he finds PowerPoint really too slow to be usable in this release. (I just thought it was my 3-year-old laptop).

After recovering from that, I spent some time digitizing Romila Thapar's Katz lecture from a few years ago, moving boxes of files, and debugging a Dell projector. The last was pretty embarrassing -- I suspected our nice bright lightweight LCD projector was on the fritz, but it turned out I was mis-interpreting the ports. The VGA port is a VGA out -- god knows why -- and the only way to get analog VGA in is to use the special VGA > Analog DVI cable. Good thing we hadn't thrown that away.

Josh sent out a desperate plea for Pub Quiz volunteers, so a few of us headed to the Irish Immigrant. I stopped along the way at the storied Thai Tom, the Ave's four-square-foot Thai restaurant. The blaze of the sizzling wok led to the cook's interpretation of my order as "five star spicy" -- it was probably the hottest thing I've ever eaten. And very good.