Susan Olsen, who you may know as Cindy Brady, from The Brady Bunch, also makes Fluff art. Her work is currently showing at Bloc 11 Cafe in Union Square, Somerville. Union Square is the home of this weekend's Fluff Fest. I know all of this because that's me on the Cooking Contest Judge page right under the astronaut and State Representative. No offense, Mr. Astronaut and Ms. State Representative.

My street floods fairly regularly because we're below the hills of Somerville so it's no surprise, with Hurricane Irene and all, that my street would flood this weekend, too. That said, I expected it'd actually wait for the hurricane to get here to start. Irene is supposed to get here sometime tomorrow...

Linking to this story about a dude getting jacked up by a hawk while he was walking down the street minding his own business (the dude was walking, not the hawk) because I have a fascination with the hawks that hang out in Boston. I can think of at least 3 posts I've written about them over the years, including the 2nd or 3rd post I wrote when I started blogging again in 2004. HOLY SHIT that was a long time ago.

My city in the NY Times! I remember noticing this question on the City's census form a couple months ago, but I didn't realize it was among the first in the nation...

Officials here want this Boston suburb to become the first city in the United States to systematically track people’s happiness. Like leaders in Britain, France and a few other places, they want to move beyond the traditional measures of success — economic growth — to promote policies that produce more than just material well-being.

To draw up its questions, Somerville turned to a neighbor, Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychology professor who wrote the 2006 best seller “Stumbling on Happiness.” Dr. Gilbert, who donated his time, is also helping the city do a more detailed telephone survey, using a randomized sample of Somerville’s 76,000 residents.

My latest @eatBoston event is today and tomorrow. Ice Cream Showdown! The best ice cream shops from the Boston area setting up in a parking lot to support deserving local organizations. This year is 2 days in 2 different parts of town. Full info including participants, T Shirts, etc at the link above.

I live on Lake St and every couple years you find out why. We were away this weekend when our entire neighborhood flooded, stranding cars and trains. Here's an awesome video by Paper Fortress Films showing the situation Saturday afternoon.



A couple years ago, I made this much less awesome video to show a flood.

Somerville residents have grown accustomed to Tom Champion's awesome robocalls for city events. Snow emergencies were what he was best known for, but he was also good for water mane breaks and city firework events. It is with sadness I read last week that he's stepping down.

A couple weeks ago, I noticed that whenever I mistyped a domain name, instead of getting a "Server not found" message or being redirected to Google, I was being redirected to a RCN search page. Not the end of the world, obviously, but still annoying.

I had heard about other ISPs utilizing DNS redirection or DNS hijacking on user accounts "as a service", otherwise, I don't know if I would have realized what had happened. I especially don't remember RCN in Boston/Somerville informing me of this added benefit or telling me how to get rid of it. Google let me know that other folks have gotten their ISPs to remove the service by opting out, so I gave it a shot.

I looked everywhere in my account for an opt out before sending an email to RCN Customer Service. I would have called, but this post made me think I'd be better off emailing them and waiting for a reply instead of frustratingly trying to explain the problem up a chain of customer service representatives. RCN refers to this service as PaxFire, but I didn't want to confuse things by using proper nouns. I sent the following email to around 10 in the evening:

It appears that DNS redirection was recently turned on on my account so that when entering text in the browser address bar if the text was not a website the page that loads is a RCN search page as opposed to Google. I would like to opt out of this service please.

By 11 the next morning, I had a response and solution:

...I reviewed your account and it needs to be updated. The PaxFire opt-out has been added to the account and in order to pull a non-PaxFire IP address, a good thing to try would be to power cycle the modem...Once complete, the PaxFire service should not be active on the Internet connection.

Another Somerville RCN user was also able to get the redirect removed by sending the above note to them, so it seems to work.

I had also mentioned my displeasure on Twitter and got a response there the next morning as well. The lesson? If you want good, quick customer service from RCN, email or Tweet at them instead of calling. Though, if they won't fix your problem, it's not going to be fun either way.

I hope I don't get throttled for this.

I'm helping to put on a fun event this weekend in Union Square. Going Nutty! features nuts from Superior Nut being used by chefs from all over Boston (Flour Bakery, Kickass Cupcakes, Channel Cafe, Rocca, OM Restaurant, Bloc 11, and how2heroes) in some of their favorite dishes.

If you want to get nuts this weekend, come to Bloc 11 and Grand from 2-4 PM on Sunday the 4th. All proceeds benefit the newly founded Juniper Fund, which was formed to honor John S. Hall, bass player for local band Addison Groove Project, who passed away in 2004. To RSVP or for more info, check out the Facebook Page.

Another hawk sighting in the city. Along with imagining seeing that giant out on the fire escape and being freaked out that he'd eat me, I'm compelled to blog about hawks in Boston so I can link to one of my first blog posts after starting to blog again in 2004. I was sitting at my desk in Davis Sq when there was a flutter and thump outside the window and a hawk had caught a pigeon in mid-air and then smothered it right on the sidewalk... I went out to check it out, and it flew off thinking I was trying to steal his pigeon. I didn't realize that happened in the city, but it does. And they attack people at Fenway, too.