Fallingwater

I went to see Fallingwater today for the first time. It's only 20 miles from my parents' place, and I can't believe I didn't go before. The house is just amazingly beautiful, and the serene surroundings and cool weather really made my day. It was nice to be able to go on a weekday afternoon too; I'm guessing it gets pretty crowded on weekends. Anyway, check it out if you're in the area, and drop by my place if I'm here :)

Changing Things Up

I changed the template on the blog and shifted things around a little bit, pretty much a waste of time since I post so infrequently these days. I'm killing some time at home until next week, when I head up to Microsoft Research in Redmond for the summer. I'm pretty psyched about the summer; I'm going to have great friends and roommates, and it looks like there will be lots of fun stuff to do in Seattle, including the Seattle International Film Festival, the Seattle Symphony (Rite of Spring and Mahler 5), and the Seattle Opera (Lohengrin in August). I'll also be making weekend trips to Berkeley, Vegas, and possibly Boston. And of course, hopefully there will be movies, drinking, basketball, outdoors stuff...oh, and a fun research project too :).

My bro is off to join Peace Corps in a couple weeks. He'll be spending two years in El Salvador. It sounds like tough work, but I'm sure he's up for it, and that it will be a fantastic experience.

There's only one episode of Sopranos left before another long hiatus. Overall, it's been a great season I think. Livia was such a fantastic character and a driving force in the show in Seasons 1 and 2 that I doubt it will ever reach that level again. But, there's still enough goodness left that I'll miss the slow a lot once the season ends. A new season of Six Feet Under will start afterward, but it's just not as good.

Well-Tempered Clavier

Damn cool site on Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (via Crooked Timber). Only bummer is I need to use IE to get it to work. If only I had this site when I was slogging through these pieces in high school...

A fun time-waster: guess people's ages (via Metafilter). The last thing that I need right now.

Check out this interesting article on Bush's anti-intellectuality (via The Washington Monthly). I think this really captures why voting for Kerry primarily because he's "not Bush" is absolutely valid; it's hard to imagine how any serious candidate for president could be less qualified than Bush to lead. Who is this guy?

You can watch a bunch of Frontline programs online...cool stuff (thanks to Shobha for telling me). Seems like they are a little short on bandwidth (I couldn't get anything to work just now), and I guess I'm not helping by pointing more people to it, but hopefully they'll work out the kinks soon. Actually, now that I take a closer look, this has been up for a few years, so perhaps the bandwidth shortages won't be addressed soon.