I woke up at 1:15 to the sound of the fire alarm blaring. Stumbling blearily out of bed, I grabbed a jacket, stuffed my laptop into the bag, and slipped on my boots. The alarm showed no sign of abating, so I took seven flights of stairs down to the ground.

Two fire engines were parked outside YMCA. A crowd of people in various stages of sleep milled around waiting for news. I remembered to bring my glasses this time, so I could see

Aside from a strange flickering on one of the floors, there seemed to be no sign of a fire. When one fire engine drove off, I knew things were all right.

I don't remember feeling annoyed about interrupted sleep. I was just glad that there wasn't a fire and that if there was, the response would be quick.

On Technorati: boston

I *love* having a huge window with lots of sunlight in the morning. I woke up this morning to brilliant sunlight, and it was just so much easier for me to feel refreshed. Okay, I still hit the snooze button all the way from 7:30 to 7:50, but that was more because I thought I might need a few more minutes of sleep and not because I really felt I needed it. =)

It's so much better than my Graduate House room. My room faces the courtyard, so I don't get enough sunlight during summer--and even less during winter! Waaah...

On Technorati: sun, house

Met lots of interesting people and learned about all sorts of cool projects. =) Can't blog about it externally, but will blog about them on my internal IBM blog soon.

I like sending snail mail. This Emacs Lisp snippet displays all the contacts for whom I have addresses, sorted according to country. This makes it easy for me to, say, jump to all the USA contacts whom I should mail before heading back over the border.

(defun sacha/bbdb-filter-records-for-address (records)
  "Filter records for addresses."
  (sort
   (delq nil
         (mapcar
          (lambda (rec) (and (bbdb-record-addresses rec) rec))
          records))
   (lambda (a b)
     (string< (bbdb-address-country (car (bbdb-record-addresses a)))
              (bbdb-address-country (car (bbdb-record-addresses b)))))))

;; Do the actual work here
(bbdb-display-records (sacha/bbdb-filter-records-for-address (bbdb-records)))

On Technorati: emacs, pimpmyemacs