Brice Stacey

I began running this Summer in preparation for the Boston Marathon. A friend of mine runs it each year for Dana-Farber and I thought I might do the same. The Boston Marathon is the only marathon that only permits qualified runners so it seems the only other way for inexperienced runners is to get in is through a charity. I found out a couple weeks ago that the time for joining that team has passed. Disappointed, I came to terms and accepted that I may have to wait until next year.

It must be my lucky day. I was checking the UMass Boston website tonight and stumbled across a press release calling for runners to join the GoKids Boston team! All hope might not be lost after all. I'll have to see what they say...

If there is still space on the team... I need to start running again!

I struggled a great deal to accumulate enough courage to create this site and struggled even more to write a single word. I've always had a presence on the internet, but usually under some moniker so the consequences of my words were never fully felt. With my named emblazoned at the top of this site, I feel a twinge of humility and generally shy away. I'm a perfectionist, I'm not a writer, and I often prefer inaction over failure.

With that, I dared my friend, Jarred, to write in a blog of his own. He accepted and within a couple days I had bought a domain name and he was all set up. I was a bit disappointed to see it untouched for quite sometime, but he got around to downloading and installing a theme for himself and is writing... Having not written a post myself in over two and a half months, I'm a bit jealous.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

I finished reading Celebrating Time Alone by Lionel Fisher this morning. I don't spend much time at home reading books, but I'm starting to make a habit of completing books when I'm at home and somewhere near 50 pages from the end.

Everything was going as planned. It was like any other book on the subject of solitude, except Fisher dedicates an entire chapter to Curmudgeons. He likes them, considers himself one and it baffled me, but very quickly he had won me over. He claims that seeing ourselves plainly is a prerequisite to "befriending, understanding, and eventually loving that person we finally allow ourselves to be." That in seeing ourselves plainly, we begin to see others in an equal light, that "we no longer accept dishonest in ourselves, we no longer tolerate it in others," applying to all undesirables ad nauseam.

In this same chapter, he lets the curmudgeon side of him go, claims that Moses had it all wrong and that the Ten Commandments should have been whittled down to, "Be Kind." Then he follows up with a list of other suggestions the first of which is, "If it's not worth overdoing, don't bother." I like that and I couldn't agree more. After finishing the book, I got dressed and strolled down to the Charles and wound up in Harvard Square, all the while making sure to go slower than walking pace. It was glorious.

I finished reading Ham On Rye today. It was suggested to me by a friend and it just the book I wanted to read. It reminded me a lot of Henry Miller, but I don't know if it's just for the name of the main character, that I read both Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn this summer, that I'm an idiot, or that the persons suggesting these books were perhaps the last people I'd expect to suggest such books.

This was my first book by Bukowski. The sentences were vivid, brutish, and without the pomp and circumstance. Bukowski takes apart the engine and doesn't bother to put it back together. Henry's childhood is exposed for all its follies, every moment far removed yet it feels strangely like my own. When it was done, I wanted to buy a fifth of whiskey, a pack of cigarettes, and show up to work exactly thirty minutes late the next morning.

I'm a full-fledged dilettante. It's a paradoxical way of mind; rapid growth and success come naturally, but a deep understanding necessary to take that success to another level is often never achieved. As someone who works intimately with computers, where a near infinite number of problems occur, this attitude is practical and often necessary to stay on top of rapidly changing technologies. However, the largest successes on the internet dabbled not one bit.

The academic-reactor designer is a dilettante. He has not had to assume any real responsibility in connection with his projects. He is free to luxuriate in elegant ideas, the practical shortcomings of which can be relegated to the category of "mere technical details." The practical-reactor designer must live with these same technical details. Although recalcitrant and awkward, they must be solved and cannot be put off until tomorrow. Their solution requires manpower, time and money.

Hyman G. Rickover

This website is a new context, the practical-reactor designer context, in which elegant ideas are no longer a luxury, but stubborn and awkward challenges that must be met. This website is that manpower, that time, and that money.