03.16.03
Sara Photo Album
I have added a new album to the picture gallery for pictures of Sara. I think she is very beautiful and very photogenic.
03.15.03
Never give up, never surrender
Last night I walked past a pet shop on Woodstock Avenue. There was an aquarium cage full of rats displayed on the window. One of the rats was furiously digging at a corner of the cage trying to build a tunnel out of its entrapment. I stopped and watched the animal for a while. The effort was futile, but it attacked the corner floor and walls with relentless determination. The whole time I was there it did nothing but dig and dig. I am left wondering how long it had been at it, and how much longer it would try. Minutes? Hours? Days? Did it?s limited intellectual capacity prevent it from realizing it was not making any progress? Did it realize it and decide to keep digging anyway?
03.10.03
Adventures at Fry’s
This afternoon I went from work to Fry’s electronics to buy an Answering machine, look at the PDAs and get some Mini-Discs for Sara. While browsing storage media at Fry’s we saw, and I shit you not, three guys browsing computer hardware wearing capes, chain mail, swords and (this is the kicker) prosthetic elf ears. It was a truly surreal moment, I totally felt like I was witnessing characters that had escaped from Something Positive.
The Oil Moment
There is a fascinating analysis of the modern industrial age by Mike Floegel entitled “The Oil Moment” up at S O A P B O X Archives.
It is very much worth listening to. There is a transcript of the article up at ::vermont::indymedia::: newswire/292
Here is an excerpt:
The Bronze Age lasted 2,500 years; the Iron Age 1,100. As technology becomes more sophisticated one age is quickly overtaken by the next. What should we call the period dominated by petroleum products? “Age” seems too expansive a term for what will be an eyeblink of history; perhaps we should call it the “Oil Moment.”
Time to buy a new PDA
I have had a Palm V PDA for about four years now. The little guy has been a life saver for me, I call it my brain because it remembers everything I do not (where I am supposed to be and when, phone numbers, passwords, shopping lists, etc…). I have had a desire to replace it for some while now, mainly because I ran out of memory on the device about two years ago when I started syncing it against Outlook at work. When I first ran out of memory I dealt with it by deleting a couple of applications I had installed and did not use. Since then the memory situation ha gotten worse, forcing me to delete apps and utilities I was using. The system freezes every so often, the cover is broken so it barely hangs on and worst of all the device looses alignment with the stylus regularly forcing me to go back to the setup utility and re-calibrate. In short, it is time to buy a new PDA.
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03.04.03
Going Home
3/3/03 4:07 PM
Waiting at JFK for the flight that will take me home. I am pretty tired right now; once again hope to get some rest on the plane. The flight leaves at 5:30 and spends two hours sitting in Cincinnati. My friend Lisa is picking me up at the Portland airport, which should be around 11:15 tonight. By then it will be 3am local time. I may go into work a bit late tomorrow so I am not there totally exhausted.
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03.02.03
Museums, museums, museums
3/3/03 12:07 AM
The Academy of Design Museum was absolutely gorgeous. They had an exhibit that centered on hotels and included all sorts of interesting detail. There were beautiful hotel designs, futuristic hotels, a gallery of photos and diaries from a hotel maid who liked to go through the personal belonging of guests, even a couple of modular slot rooms from a Japanese coffin hotel that you could slide into. I was surprised to find that I actually fit in one of those rooms.
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Bar fights and good theater
3/2/03 11:06 AM
La Boheme was quite spectacular. I was afraid that being on Broadway they might not go for the full opera, but thankfully this was not so. The singers were full opera singers, with all the power and skill to manage the arias of La Boheme. What was simply spectacular was the sets. Luhrman being Luhrman could not be contented with building a simply spectacular set, but had to build a set of sets that were quickly re-dressed from one to the other by stage hands dressed in performance appropriate costume. The little secret that I do not tell many people is that I actually do not like La Boheme very much. Yes, I know the arias as beautiful and the story touching, but honestly there is not a single aria in that opera that I remember two days after hearing it. This performance of it was beautiful and worth repeating though.
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03.01.03
In Manhattan
3/1/03 10:54 AM
Flying is flying no matter if your airline is brand new or decades old. You still spend two hours waiting at the gate for the plane to arrive, file in when your seat is called, hope that your bags won?t get too squished in the bins and squeeze into an uncomfortably small seat for an hour?s worth of being hurled across the sky in an aluminum can with two hundred other people who don?t want to be there. The little kids wailed when the pressure changed, the girl next to the 400 pound guy looked miserable, the obnoxious passenger with the big gold chain held up the queue as he got things in and out of his bag before putting it in the overhead bin. The little DirectTV screen did help, once I had Rocky and Bullwinkle to entertain and divert my attention I did not pay much attention to our taxing out or getting ready to land. When the businessman in front of me pushed his seat back I had to look down at the little screen at a most uncomfortable angle, but I still appreciated it. No, jetBlue is really not that different from the other. The crew seemed friendlier, the seats nice leather and the price was definitely better, but flying is flying. I did notice one difference. The flight and ground crew was about half male and half female. The women had a lot of makeup and looked nice. The men were Gay. Not gay, but Gay with a capital G… All of them. I mean flaming, flirting, limp wristed, having fun and showing it off Gay as gay can be.
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