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5 star:
* Unconditional I (Lookout Kid) (Arcade Fire)
If you want to get (at least!) a little bit verklempt about the relationship between grownups and kids this morning, this song is it. Great video as well

4 star:
* Portrait (Sasami Ashworth)
Lovely little heartstring tugger of a song from "Articles of Interest" podcast

3 star:
* Thunder Rumbles (The Cat Empire)
* Once I Had a Love (a.k.a.. The Disco Song) [Bonus Track] (Blondie)
* Dedicated to Hiroshi Yamauchi. 01 (Chip Tanaka/Acerola Beach )
* All the Small Things (blink-182)
* Mysteries We Understand (Sophie B. Hawkins)
* Limb By Limb (Phish)
* Chaal Baby (feat. Sunny Jain) (Red Baraat)
* Ya Mama (The Pharcyde)
* Dad's Yard (Catie Curtis)
* Eye of the Tiger (Walk Off the Earth)
* Vivaldi Winter Drill #2 (veneris)
* J.B. Shout (Fred Wesley and the J.B.'s)

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This Monday morning JP Honk and some other folks from the HONK community were asked to add some energy to Boston City Hall raising a Pride Flag - got to hear from Mayor Wu, a bunch of city council people, and activists in the area. (For the raising itself we played "This Little Light" with a new extra verse "Raise This Rainbow Flag, Raise It High With Pride")



Happy Pride! Celebrate being who you are and loving who you love! Despite being cold and misty and a bit rainy all day, had 2 great gigs with JP Honk at the Watertown Pride parade and the Haley House Block Party - some phenomenal energy at times, especially with the guys dancing at the Haley House.



(and in between I dipped into a School-Of-Honk-heavy fundraiser for Puppet Showplace Theater. But I snuck in a sweetgreen salad and car nap right after.)

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Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

Loved this prose poem in high school, hadn't thought of it for years.

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40% of Uvalde's City Budget went to the cops. The other summer when we were saying "defund the police"? This is some of why (not the same as 'abolish', more like 'demilitarize')



Actually I think "I support the Police, Blue Lives Matter" should lead right into "more gun control". In this country, the police have to treat every traffic stop like it might end in gun fire - cause it just might - much more likely here than anywhere else in the industrialized world. That's a crazy amount of stress that is a straight line to more police shootings - of and by police.

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I just finished Alison Bechdel's new comic "The Secret to Superhuman Strength", about the kind of intertwining of her work and history of physical exercise and psychological self-examination. I've always liked the insight into queer culture her "Dykes to Watch Out For" gave me, and her other autobiographical works have resonated for me as well.


This panel made me contrast my own psychological experience. Like, I don't have the same perfectionism, but I do have this sense that my value as a person isn't intrinsic - or at least not self-originating. My value ultimately is generated by interacting with the outside world. (But, maybe unlike Bechdel, I have a fundamentally secure ego that is pretty confident I'm pretty good, and so my struggles are with fixed mindset and how I avoid taking risks that would too clearly show my limits.)


This panel got me thinking about my much remarked-upon (by me) lack of intuition about personal growth. And like, any physical improvements I may have noted during times I've worked at it more have seemed... eh, not like significant, qualitative changes. But here's an insight that feels new: for me to admit to growth feels like a condemnation of my old self. Like it's hard to say "I'm stronger now" without thinking "well I was insufficiently strong then".

I was talking with Melissa a little about this. She gets annoyed at my trite "well I don't believe in personal growth" (So has our mutual colleges buddy David Hoberman at times). Like, I wasn't born talking, or playing tuba - clearly those were skills I grew and developed. I guess then it's more like... the potential people for growth is a mix of what they're born with and the environment they find themselves in. And for some reason, for me, that realization of finite potential overshadows what someone actually decides to do with that potential.


Another panel I liked for its bittersweetness nature.


Bechdel has some side passage ranging from Emerson to Margaret Fuller to Jack Kerouac. This panel on Fuller just made me think about "returning letters". What a weird antique form of cancel culture! Seems kind of alien to a nostalgic guy like me. And seemingly somewhat impossible in this day of electronic communication.


Finally this one gave me a chuckle, especially since I can empathize with the way she lost her father.

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In my country we have a saying--Mickey Mouse will see you dead.

(He's drunk delivering a speech to a hostile university audience in a fictional Central American nation but then admits there really isn't such a saying. But there should be!)

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Oh hey there was a slightly-more-upbeat extra sequel to "Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video"

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HUDS + GUIs picks up where
Typeset in the Future leaves off - studies of UI across science fiction movies and elsewhere. I love this stuff! I feel like "making future UI mockups" is a job right up there with the "LEGO engineer" I wanted to be when I was a kid... Recently walking with a friend I found a Sylvania 20" TV ("6420FE") waiting for trash pickup - I had been thinking of looking on FB Marketplace for a CRT TV for my Atari 2600...

Its excellent picture kind of revitalized my interest in the Atari. I had a Harmony Cartridge that lets you put as many ROMs as you want on an SD card and play them on the Atari, and nostalgia led me to recreate the collection of games I grew up with.

(My parents managed to get a lot of closeout games during the crash (a lot of overstock was being dumped to their Salvation Army employers) so I had a relatively huge collection, and that was my main system even as it all became pretty "retro")

I went through Wikipedia's List of Atari 2600 Games (Oh, look, technically I am on Wikipedia, via my homebrew JoustPong! Just not enough to have my own page yet, sigh) and assembled the list of games I had - amazing how easy it was to do that by memory, these games have really stuck with me.

I angtsted for a bit on how to sort the games on the cart - no one wants to scroll through a list of ~120 titles - and realized "by publisher" was what made the most sense - that's how I would organize them with physical carts (many of which I still have!) since each manufacturer had a distinct look and feel.

Atari: Adventure, Asteroids, Basketball, Battlezone, Berzerk, Breakout, Centipede, Combat, Crystal Castles, Defender, Dig Dug, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Galaxian, Haunted House, Indy 500, Joust, Jr. Pac-Man, Jungle Hunt, Kangaroo, Krull, Mario Bros., Missile Command, Moon Patrol, Ms. Pac-Man, Othello, Pac-Man, Pele's Soccer, Pengo, Phoenix, Pole Position, Space Invaders, Space War, Star Raiders, Stargate, Super Breakout, Vanguard, Video Olympics, Video Pinball, Warlords, Yars' Revenge

Activision: Boxing, Chopper Command, Commando, Crackpots, Dolphin, Dragster, Enduro, Fishing Derby, Grand Prix, H.E.R.O., Ice Hockey, Kaboom!, Keystone Kapers, Laser Blast, Pitfall II, Pitfall!, Pressure Cooker, River Raid II, River Raid, Robot Tank, Seaquest, Sky Jinks, Spider Fighter, Tennis

Parker Bros: Amidar, Frogger, Gyruss, Popeye, Q-bert, Reactor, Return of the Jedi - Death Star Battle, Spider-Man, Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back, Super Cobra, Tutankham

M-Network: Adventures of Tron, Armor Ambush, Bump n Jump, Burgertime, Dark Cavern, Frogs And Flies, Lock 'n' Chase, Super Challenge Baseball, Super Challenge Football, Tron - Deadly Discs

Imagic: Atlantis, Cosmic Ark, Demon Attack, Dragonfire, Fire Fighter, No Escape!, Riddle of the Sphinx, Star Voyager

CBS: Blue Print, Gorf, Mountain King, Wizard of Wor

Coleco: Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior, Front Line, Venture

Sega: Buck Rogers - Planet of Zoom, Spy Hunter, Star Trek - Strategic Operations Simulator, Tac Scan

US Games: Entombed, Gopher, Name This Game, Sneak 'n Peek, Space Box, Squeeze Box

20th Century Fox: Deadly Duck, M.A.S.H, Worm War I

Xonox: Ghost Manor, Spike's Peak

Apollo: Lost Luggage

Finally, I decided to complete the nostalgia trip by thinking on what games from this pile really mattered to me, and why:

SIGNIFICANT TO MY STORY GAMES

• Frogger - my first game - I remember a ritual I invented with my buddy Robert of standing and saying "plbbt plbbt" at the mind point and end of the song.
• Moon Patrol - I stole the 12 bar bassline of this, and call it "Space Cadet", and have played it with hundreds of different musicians
• Joust - Love the physics of this, and obvious influence for my own homebrew "JoustPong"
• Pengo - I remember storyboarding a commercial for this, with a song (something something something, something "full of ice / Pengo doesn't like it / but the Sno-Bees think it's nice"
• Reactor - I'd program a lot of "particles bouncing around" toys in BASIC, maybe influenced by this
• Adventure - finding out from a book how to get the easter egg, the first in a long series of not being afraid to use FAQs and Walkthroughs...
• Donkey Kong Junior - Between this and the cartoon, I was weirdly into this character and dressed for him as halloween. My mom assured me I needed the off-brand gorilla mask for it, otherwise I was just dressing "cute". (She was too polite to say "like a dork")

IMPRESSIVE GAMES GAMES OR WITH SOME DETAIL I LOVED

• Battlezone - a "true" 3D world model, with two enemies at once, and gorgeous - I remember begging my cousin John to score me a copy like he had and he came through
• Gyruss - the music was astounding, a rocking version of "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor"
• Tron: Deadly Discs - I love how you feel like the same kind of player as the 3 enemies
• Cosmic Ark - loved the little "beasties" running around, programmed Cosmikatamari Damacy with them...
• Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back - the "David vs Goliath" feel of taking down AT-ATs in a snowspeeder
• Crackpots - found this late, but the game design impresses
• Spider Fighter - fast action, and a cool "stop enemies from stealing" mechanic
• Entombed - there's a mystery about this game's maze generation...

GAMES I PLAYED A LOT OF IN COLLEGE

• Ice Hockey - endless rounds of this Activision game was the heart of the 3-member "Tufts Geek Club" in Hodgdon Hall
• Warlords - especially when I could get 4 players going... but the lower right corner always had this weird advantage of geometry...
• Pressure Cooker
• (Atari 7800 Games - especially One on One against my hallmate, Robotron, and Food Fight)

GAMES MY MOM GOT GOOD AT

• Burgertime
• Ms. Pac-Man
• Missile Command
• Pole Position
• (Also Pengo I think, at least a little)

REALLY GOOD HEAD TO HEAD GAMES

• Armor Ambush - loved how this was tank fighting better than Combat (which I didn't have growing up much, oddly)
• Frogs And Flies - great game for kids, both in the easy and hard modes. And with good AI!
• Super Challenge Baseball - I remember being able to beat my older cousin Scott at this
• Boxing

GAMES I JUST REMEMBER PLAYING A LOT OF

• Laser Blast - loved getting into the fire, move, fire, move rhythm
• Dragonfire - I remember the Columbia Game of the Month club poster for this. Also great swooping action on the second screen.
• Grand Prix - I played this racer a LOT
• Mountain King - enjoyed the "mystery area" above the playfield
• Donkey Kong - my friend Robert and I liked making DK dance ("playing with monkey")
• Dig Dug
• Kangaroo
• River Raid
• Blue Print

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Last night some friends and I had a Zoom/NetflixParty to watch Michelle Obama's "Becoming" - it talked about her father - a man who never had opportunities to equal his intellect - and who was a lover of Jazz. Last night I line in a dream, something like "Most Jazz is like a 747, it will fly you there ok, but Bebop is like one of those F-17 Fighter Jets..."

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This is the real world, muchachos, and you are in it.

Somehow the line has stuck with me but without the "muchachos"

Sometimes I wonder if the Mayans were right and that this quote is less true after December 2012 or so.

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If you ever get a chance to work in mysterious ways I highly recommend it because you can get away with ANYTHING.

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I really do appreciate how Trump's new hairstyle is doubling down on "Future Biff from Back to the Future 2"

Speaking of the Trump and the UK, I wonder if Boris Johnson was an inspiration? The whole "lets have a wacky bad blond hair situation that distracts people from what god-awful idiots we are" Realized I hadn't done a "best of" photoset for 2016... (though the Malaysia trip had its own best of and second best of)

I suspect my dedication to "One Second Everyday" taps some of my still photography mojo.

Schmidt: "I don't know why I'm listening to you in the first place. You're TERRIBLE at talking to women. Case in point: you and Reagan."
<flashback>
[Reagan steps out of shower]
Nick: "Hey! Did you clean everywhere?"
Reagan: "Are you happy? Are you happy that you said that?"
Nick: "...I'd like to smell your towel [grimaces]"
</flashback>

(That's Reagan as in Megan Fox's character, not as in the ex-actor/president.)

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Creative writing teachers tell beginning writers to avoid adverbs because, on some level, bad imitations of Hemingway are easier to slog through than bad imitations of Proust.

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On my devblog I talk about some interesting Palm Pilot history I stumbled into on the web...

Time wakens a longing more poignant than all the longings caused by the division of lovers in space, for there is no road back into its country. Our bodies were not made for that journey; only the imagination can venture upon it; and the setting out, the road, and the arrival: all is imagination.

Our memories of a place, no matter how fond we were of it, are little more than a confusion of lights on a ground of darkness.

Check out "Coffee", if nothing else.

• Sexual Healing (Hot 8 Brass Band) New Orleans Cover, saw it in the movie "Chef"
• Tightrope (Wondamix) [feat. B.o.B and Lupe Fiasco] (Janelle Monáe) Cool duel version of a great song.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force Theme (Schooly D) I've always enjoyed the meatwad section of this theme song.
• It's a Miracle (Singing Nun) Very random song I remember from my childhood.
• Riot Rhythm (Sleigh Bells) With its shoutiness, hooks, and big beats, I think Sleigh Bells would be the kind of band I'd make, but they turn it up to 11 where I would be content with 8 or 9.
• Hanky Panky (Tommy James & The Shondells) Was reminded of the existence of this by "Coffee" below
• Modern Family Another TV theme -- one episode had an extended version I was hoping to find but I wasn't able to locate it.
• I Say It's Spinach Not the version I have. Kind of obsessed with this phrase since reading that New Yorker cartoon book.
• Semi-Charmed Life (Third Eye Blind) I'm kind of amazed how raw the lyrics to this song are in parts.
• Coffee (Sylvan Esso) A beautiful song and nice video.
• Tradition (London Festival Orchestra) Another song from my youth, my mom was in this musical. Hella fun to sing along to.
• Underground Theme (Nintendo) from an unreleased Super Mario Bros. 2 prototype. Not usually a huge chiptune fan, but this one is simple and good.
• Shake, Rattle and Roll (Big Joe Turner) This song has coma-ending powers.
• Wobble (V.I.C.) I just love this video, not the official one, just a hilarious scene from what looks like a camp.
• Round Here (Counting Crows) I don't know if it's shmaltzy but I appreciate the emotional space Counting Crows explores.
• Total Eclipse of the Heart (Bonnie Tyler) I've had some covers of this song, but the original has some power.
• Come Get It Bae (Pharrell Williams)

http://www.boston.com/yourtown/specials/starbucks_vs_dunkin_donuts/ Starbucks v. Dunkies; I'm always interested in the cultural implications of the divide, when both are available.

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Techies, anyone know a great html5-ish library for displaying graphs written in DOT, GML, TGF, etc? Mostly straight forward node/edge stuff.

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This is why I like AAA titles: insane and over-the-top vehicle, weapon, and super-human empowerment fantasies in an environment that feels real-ish.

(2019 update not sure what the original video actually was but that might be close)

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Just startled at how good Windows 8 isn't... opening a PDF in a desktop mode browser fires up a Metro app "Reader" with no visible way to exit-- 1990 era alt-f4 or 2012 era move mouse to upper left hand corner are the secret magic cookie to know. (esc key doesn't work either) Oh and ctrl-P to print, that's more arcane knowledge. Stuff I know well but it's annoying my Aunt has so much to track.... and I don't know why the HP printer scan button churns, then decides USB isn't connected (it is) so Windows Fax and Scan is a functional if mid-90s looking trip to "what's a PDF I just know graphic files" land.

Gah. I kind of want to like Windows, have it as a reasonable consumer-friendly bastion against OSX monoculture, but no. It is a flat colored pile of failure.
--John Cage's 4'33" (that length of time of silence, or rather of the ambient noise of a performance) recreated as assembled Nicolas Cage film clips.

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http://www.r2-d2.de/ - a man and his (replica) droid... still looking for information on R2D2's distinctive industrial design, the "stripes"
--I had no idea bullfrogs could make a noise like that until the other day an Intern at work pulled up one of these videos. Crazy, so human!

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3JCESdFNyw You know, the farce of contemporary art is that cyriak wasn't in any gallery I saw in Europe. (Still wish http://b3ta.com had an archive of their front page entries.)

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Rule number one: the most important thing about you is your date of birth. Which puts you inside history. Rule number two: sooner or later, each human life is a tragedy, sometimes sooner, always later.

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30 Days of Super Heroes Day 3: Weapon Here

Pistol Packin' Mona What with enjoying my new iPad as a doodle tablet and browser, hearing about Android "FroYo" and its tethering/portable wifi hotspot stuff and AT&T coming with new plans, along with the an expected announcement about the next version of the iPhone and its software, I've been thinking about this stuff a bit more than usual as of late.

Initially toying with the idea of switching to Android, I decided to try and enumerate the things I really use my iPhone for, stuff I'd need Android to do about as well or better to justify making the switch...

• the Appigo "Todo" app - I've been relying on similar gadgets for this since 1997...
• the Datebook app, with synching to google for the calendar I share with Amber (she thought "relationship 'saver'" was overstating the case, but still it's been good for us.
• a web browser anywhere - plus being able to put links directly from the homepage is great.
• music - figuring out how to do playlists right, and having all of the "good stuff" with me always reinvigorated my relationship with my music collection.
• phone (well, duh- though I dig how easy it is to do tricks like merge calls, and use the speakerphone...)
• SMS txting (maybe the next release of the phone will FINALLY get a character count in there)
• maps with GPS locating, local search, and routing -- admittedly this is mostly as a backup to other things that to do it a bit better
• memo pad
• pocketwatch w/ "wallpaper" - I like seeing that line art of Amber - it looks great on the iPhone.
• clock app with alarm, stopwatch, and timer... surprisingly handy, this
• "Shazam" app to identify music I hear around me-- this one is kind of magical.
• camera -- mostly this would be a backup, though the new "Uploader" app I got lets me do some photoblogging here. (Why the browser doesn't support direct upload is another story.)

Those were the most crucial things... other bits are

• quick weather check
• specialized Twitter app (currently "TweetDeck") along with a link to also put stuff on the "of the Moment" section here.
• the web-based gmail wrapper "iGmail"... a bit faster than always going to the site in mobile Safari
• a doodling program ("ArtStudio"), though admittedly the screen is a bit tiny for this. (Funny how few drawing apps there are that support "flood fill" for coloring.)
• random games, though none have really "stuck" for me.
• Flixster to see what movies are playing in the area
• Kindle reader, I've read a few books on this and it was pretty good-- and easy to hold on to while holding a subway strap.
• On occassion Pandora's music service, the ability to make a voice memo, and the calculator have proven handy

That's quite a bit! Seeing that the Palm only really did Todo, Datebook, Memos, a few games, doodling, and the pocket watch bit I feel a bit better about being as enamored of this gadget as I am. All in all it's kind of empowering! (On the other hand there was PocketC on the Palm, which let me do some casual programming wherever I was...)

Admittedly at the moment I'm leaning against switching to Droid, mostly because I'm pretty conservative about learning a new UI, and its taken me a while to find "best of class" apps for all of this stuff on the iPhone.

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It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2249562/entry/2255493/ - more from the Internet Sabbatical... how anticipation and synchronicity emerge when off that tap of instant gratification.
--Damien Walters Freerunning. (According to the BoingBoing Comments, Parkour fans are trying to reclaim the word as a practical study of escape, not this flashy stuff.)

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Glance after a shower at a pillow feather that had been stuck to my chest. Moment of alarm to think your nipple is sprouting a feather.

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8 Pointless Laws All Comic Book Movies Follow - oh right, comic book films DO tend to bring out the biggest villain in the first movie, so the followups tend to have multiples.

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Happy 25th Birthday Tetris! It's still rough but as you can see I've added a new thing on the sidebar that shows my latest twitter post.

Like I mentioned in May, I've started using Twitter's 140-character messages in the same way I used to use my Palm pilot, with a focus on capturing quirky thoughts as they occur to me (rather than Twitter's theoretical raison d'etre of letting everyone know what I'm doing at any given moment.)

I'm still debating if I should try to get the widget setup so it shows not just my posts but those of people I'm following on Twitter. Also, I'm debating what to do about the old sidebar. Sometimes I think I'd like to get it converted into a tool for people to review stuff they're reading and movies and videos they've watched, since the open-ended sidebar has kind of died down.

Thoughts or suggestions?

I'd encourage people to get into Twitter. It's had some server stumbles lately, but in general is pretty solid, and it's cool to be able to record thoughts via cellphone that would otherewise get lost to the ether. (If you're a twitter use and a kisrael regular, let me know your twitter name!)

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Science of the Moment
I remember this from a few years ago, but it looks like bananas are still very much endangered.

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Quote of the Moment

This is the real world, muchachos, and you are in it.

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solid day of planning meetings. item: find will to live task: read existential play estimated hours: 4 I was a little late to the whole "computers with built in memory card readers" thing but now that I have a desktop and a laptop that can just directly take the card my camera uses, it's a great shortcut.

The first 3-card reader I saw was at a DIY photo print device at a camera store... it seemed weird at the time, because each card format seemed rather proprietary, and all in all it was kind of a throwback to that brief time when computers were coming with built-in Zip drives. But now I just recognize it as a small but meaningful convenience, relative to digging up the appropriate cable.

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Link of the Moment
Slate had a good piece on How Do Spelling Contests Work in Other Countries? Especially the ones that don't draw from like 10 other languages so that there's some large measure of spelling consistency? Grammer dictation and dictionary lookups for pictographic languages were two of the surprising answers.

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Fact of the Moment

--from a 1931 Modern Mechanics article on Flat-Earthers. The magazine stated a "well-known fact" I hadn't heard before: the ratio of curve of the earth is about "eight inches to one mile".

"Cooler than the other side of the pillow" has to be one of the best phrases in the history of phrases. What a great way of tapping into the common human experience. Maybe not all humans, but a lot of them. I think it might have had its start on ESPN, but still.

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Art Toy of the Moment
The Jackson Pollock toy is great. (Originally ripped off of this work, but I think the Pollock toy improves the concept a lot.)

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Coworker Art of the Moment

--Scott at work made this nifty small Lego Dragon... he's got a knack for working on small scale lego, not to mention dealing with the limited assortment of Lego we have at work.

Line of the Moment

"How about a soy milkshake?"
"Do you know what a soy cow says?
  A soy cow says 'meh.'"

I know it's "so 2002", but 'meh' is such a good word.

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Thought of the Moment
A while back I was picking up Ksenia from Alewife station, and it struck me that there's something melancholy about all these people in cars waiting for their T-riders, and all these T-riders waiting for their person in a car to pick them up. Everyone has this kind of doleful look as they peer at each other..."are you the person I'm waiting for? -- no."

It seems like there should be some way of making a matchup service out of this, or something.

Movie Cliff Notes of the Moment
Already made the rounds, but when I finally came back to Troy in 15 Minutes, I realized it was really pretty funny, and stuck pretty close to the movie in some amusing ways.

In the for what it's worth department, "cousin" is one of those words that never looks like it is spelled quite correctly to me. I think my mental ear keeps hearing "cous-cous". Which is a totally wonderful name for a food, right up there with "fallafel".

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AAAAAARRRRRRRGH of the Moment
So I reach over to pick up a sandal this morning and BIP! There goes m'back. Lower center back, I'm literally on the floor in pain. So awesome. This is going to be the most fun weekend packing and finishing getting ready for the movers on Monday EVER.

I blame Peterman. And myself for listening to him. "Oh, you can use these bins of mine for all these books. They have handles." They have handles but they're the SIZE OF FRICKIN'...well...I don't know what's a good comparision for that size, bigger than a breadbox, more to the point significantly bigger than a "booksize box". I was hauling those around last week, just the tiniest bit of friendly warning strain, and then this.

Of course I can't be too bitter, between helping me with some books and then our trip to six flags, he's not doing any kind of lifting either. Still, what a marroon.

Doggone it to little pieces.

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Requiem for a Cellphone
In happier news, I finally got a new cellphone. (I also finally got off Sprint's "Screw You Five Ways From Sunday" plan and onto a much fairer plan...also by Sprint, the one their advertising with the elementary school teacher and the dodgeball and what not. Verizon's showroom was crowded, I never got to the top of the sales-help queue, and also their plans are a lot more expensive.) It so kicks my old one's butt...this picture here was taken by my new one, of my old one. I wouldn't have bothered with a cameraphone, but then they showed me one that takes little video clips...and I'm a sucker for anything that can take grainy little video clips. It also has all sort of nice sound and graphics options, seems to have pretty decent recepion, and has two color screens, the main one and then a little timekeeper one on the outside. (I even found out you can use the outer screen as a viewfinder when the cellphone is closed, though in that case the camera is pointed back at yourself.) Plus the screen make the menus much easier to use...

But, as is par for the course, I'll think nostalgically about my first cellphone. It was a cute little fella, unpretentious, and travelled easily in my pocket for the past 3 years. Kept me in touch with the world... I really have trouble remembering how difficult it was to modify plans on the fly without these things. Also, I'll miss how it came with a convenient snug cradle.

Both phones are by Samsung, and I really thing they have a great knack for these compact devices.

Incidentally, I got a pretty bad headache at the Verizon store...sometimes I wonder about all that EMF bouncing around especially, and this might be a little psychosomatic at this point, from cellular modems. They had a laptop set up there...and I remember when I was evaluating a clip-on one for the PalmPilot for work, I used to think I was getting headaches much more often... Travel Photo of the Moment

Being a big nutella fan (nut?) my joy at Veronika pointing me to Frankfurt's "nutelleria" was clearly unbounded.

• The tedium is the message

• NPR once had coverage of the Tuba Dent Eraser. Man, I coulda used one of these back in the day.
• Random Memory: Sixth Grade field trip to NYC, we went to Mama Leone's Restuarant, and the waiter with the ice water declared "I am the Hudson River" and I thought that was amusing. That trip was notable for a bit of rivalry for the position of Kirk's Best Friend between Dylan (of sidebar fame) and Todd, who I would sit next to on the way back. Also for the teacher thretening to send me to the back of the bus, to which I replied with an unintentionally offensive statement. Stupid kid.

• I'm so hungry I could eat!

  I say it when I'm hungry as well. Though now it makes me wonder if Olive Oyl was a borderline anorexic.

• Carkeys...carkeys are good.

  (when my dad came to him with an earache; the doctor had asked what he uses to clean his ears, and my dad told him...)

Happy Birthday to Mo! (E-mail mo "at" protogeek "dot" com if you want to send good wishes... )

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Link of the Moment
Ever want to see yourself as a Lego Mini-figure? Now you can, virtually. This is me to the right...not quite enough choice in shirts, or in things to hold, but overall pretty good!

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Funny of the Moment

When you pick something up with your toes and transfer it to your hand, don't you feel, just briefly, like a superior creature? Like you could probably survive alone in a forest for a long time? Just briefly.

Happy Birthday to Mo, Happy Birthday to Mo...and me with a blender to blend...

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Quote of the Moment

The best sickness excuse is, "You don't want to know the details."

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Quote of the Other Moment

A truly secure password algorithm also has to check for the Post-It Note (TM) on the monitor.