Ton, whom you should be familiar with from such websites as this one, is most of the time a PhD candidate at one of the better universities in California. From what I understand, he spends a fair amount of time playing frisbee. I would make fun but, as it's Ton, the time spent holding the frisbee is most probably accompianied by calculation of eigenvalues and basis vectors to describe a frisbee-shaped space. This space would have a high volume to surface area ratio, resulting in more efficient space usage which could be used to lower the cost of housing, if only we could figure out how to warp space in the requisite disc-shaped manner (this would have been something he figured out during an Ultimate game in early 2002, but forgot about because it was quite a while ago). I have to assume this because, being an incredibly modest person, Ton wouldn't tell us unless we asked. And by asked, I mean asked "Hey Ton, did you spend the day designing a new way to design the space-time continuum that would be more efficient than what we've got now?" because "How'd the game go?" just wouldn't suffice.

But Ton is taking some time off from his studies (and presumably his cogitations towards his flying disk-ertation) to spend the summer on our couch. Well, I guess he's more spending the summer as an intern at Google New York, and is taking the evenings off to sleep on our couch. Which is nice. I'd like to take this opportunity to assure the individuals at Google who are taked with the arduous job of watching this website for any more gross violations of their intellectual property that Ton is taking his NDA seriously. He won't even tell us what you guys serve for lunch, and we have to find out by close examination of his T-shirt for crumbs.

Our friend Neil, who just graduated from law school down in Louisiana, has moved into the city as well. I'm not sure Neil has come up in these missives before, but he's a very good friend of the triumverate, and actually knew Ben and Ton long before I did (I'm not jealous of this fact per se, but I will admit to being jealous of the fact that hanging out with those two guys during their first two years of college means that Neil is a passable bridge player, and can play euchre fairly well). Neil, for a little while, is spending his evenings at the All Too Flat as well, and it's been a few nights now that I've woken up to head to the office and found him sleeping on the futon. This makes a total of four boys in our apartment, all really good friends from college. This is of a piece to say that I'm fairly sure that this is the first time in at least two weeks that I haven't had a beer in my hand, and to make sure that happened I had to wake up at 6AM on a Sunday hoping that Neil didn't hear me (lest he make some Bloody Marys).

It's the fourth of July weekend right now, and I'm spending it at the Berkshires for some reason. It's a seriously good time, and involves a fair amount of sitting, looking at stars, swimming, and eating hamburgers. Pretty much, asll you can ask for from a long weekend away from the city. Of course, getting here was a complete travesty, and had me leaving the office really early so I could go to LI, get in a car, realize that the car doesn't start, head back into the city and getting on a train in Poughkeepsie whereupon Neil and I were picked up by a car going up to MA from Jersey. I was pretty pissed at one point when I noticed that I had been travelling for a while, and was actually passing under the office which I had left five hours earlier. Luckily by then I had had a glass of whiskey in the bar at Grand Central, and was well into a Coors Light. Made the entire thing a lot easier to deal with.

Today, I expect a fair amount more of sitting, and possibly a lot of saying 'huge.'