The balance of the new eMacs didn't arrive on Thursday, as I had hoped they would. They had arrived on campus on Wednesday, but Thursday was a holiday (Evacuation Day -- it's a Massachusetts thing) and so they didn't get delivered to us until Friday morning. At first, the delivery guys thought they were one short, but luckily, in fact, all of them were there. They include the ethernet addresses of new macs on the labels (and most of them were even legible), so I could get that information off to the technical staff first thing. Then, with the help of a BCRC staffmember, who pulled them out of the boxes, set them up on the tables, and connected the cables, we spent the whole day setting them up. I had already built a loadset, based liberally on the BCRC configuration, so it was fairly straightforward: click through the Apple setup screens, install radmind, point it at the server, and let it go to town. By 4pm, we were taking the styrofoam and cardboard down to the loading dock and, by 5pm, the last machine had finished updating. This morning, I stopped over briefly to make sure they had actually updated themselves overnight and it appears that they did. I made a few more tweaks to the image and tomorrow morning I should stop over one more time to make sure that everything is ready for classes on Monday.
Ever since I moved here, I've wanted to get an Esperanto group going. I tried to set one up soon after I got here, but found I didn't have enough time to make it happen. Last year, I decided I was going to try again to make it happen. I set up the 
Amherst Esperanto website, picked a time and place to meet, and began trying to find ways to advertise the group. Last week, I got an email from a new employee at UMass who is interested in learning Esperanto -- he said the fact that there was Esperanto activity was part of the reason he was interested in coming to Amherst. And this morning, I got an email in Esperanto from a UMass student who says he started learning Esperanto a month ago. There were some spelling and grammatical errors, but his letter was perfectly understandable. We're going to start reading Gerda Malaperis at the weekly meetings, which should be a good way to get started.
I was stunned when I came to Amherst and found that there wasn't any Esperanto activity -- Esperanto seems like a perfect fit with the happy valley. Amherst culture has a strong social-justice component, which seems well served by Esperanto's role as a means to foster the rights of minority languages and linguistically oppressed peoples. It also is a bit eutopian and offbeat -- also in keeping with Amherst. I've long thought that Amherst could become a capital in the Esperanto movement, if it could simply get started. I'm delighted to see it happening.
This evening there was a community open house at the Harp. Alisa had to put in appearance at another party, but was coming to the open house a bit later. A neighbor called and when I said we were going there, she asked "So what is that, anyway?" I replied that I didn't know, but had been told that I was going, so I was just following directions. "Good man," she said.
StevenBrewer