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Explosion

About an hour ago, I was watching TV – I forget what, probably flipping through the channels, and contemplating going to Taco Bell for dinner. I noticed that my lights in the living room were flickering a bit, and I was sort of pissed that my fluorescent-LED replacement things that were supposed to last for ten million hours were crapping out after less than a year. All of a sudden, there was a fucking EXPLOSION! It was far louder than anything I’ve ever heard (and I’ve heard some impressive stuff) and it sounded like it was within a block of my place. I checked the phones and the ethernet to see if it was anything that would affect that, and then I went into that weird sort of adrenaline-fueled paranoia where you memorize the location of everything in the room in case the five stories above you collapse into the basement and you need to find a quick exit. I grabbed my coat and went outside, thinking it would be a fucking scud missile or car bomb, although it sounded far too “compressed” and not as omnidirectional as an exploding car.

By the time I went outside (I waited a second – read too many stories about IRA secondary bombing) and saw some fire trucks trying to put out a couple of cars that were basically twenty foot pyres of flame. There was also smouldering smoke coming out of every ConEd manhole within a block. I got enough half-truths from the pigs that were fencing off the neighborhood; I guess there was a fire and explosion of a switch or transformer underground, hence the flickering lights, and an exploding manhole set off the cars. So I went to Burger King, came back, and ate. A few minutes, there was a second explosion, but not as loud. And I think I heard a third, but it was much smaller, maybe a car gas tank or something. The lights are still flickering, and I’m worried that they will go out. (Shit – fourth explosion!) But the computer and ethernet are working fine. I hope they get the fire underway or the dropping temps help, and I hope ConEd has some redundant systems they can get online.

Nothing interesting is going on in life. I am really trying to think of another writing project, but I can’t find a spare moment or two a day to do any writing. And that’s not because of anything interesting going on. I basically go to work, come home, eat a couple of meals in there, and add some TV or the PlayStation, and that’s about it. I’ve been fighting a cold, which also makes it hard to get out of a slump. But I have managed some updates to the glossary in the last week or so. And I’m still planning for Hawaii, which is in five? weeks.

Speaking of just like yesterday, it’s been four years since I left Seattle. (Actually, the four-year mark is on Monday.) I’ve been thinking about Seattle a lot, even in my dreams, which is part of my depression lately. I have these dreams where I go back and somehow my apartment was still held for me, and a bunch of stuff of mine is in storage, stuff that I thought I lost years ago. The apartment is always different in the weird, surreal way that dreams distort reality, but it still has so many details that remind me so much of 600 7th Ave #520. This morning I had the dream, and when I woke up, a cool, clean breeze drifted through a window. For a moment, it felt like I was back, like my big window looking out over Harborview was cracked open, and I could wake up, run downstairs, and jump in the Escort for a quick run up I-5 and to the nearby Denny’s, or over the 520 to some record shopping in Bellvue. It’s always weird what I miss and what I look back on over time, but right now it’s really kicking me in the ass because I don’t feel like the present is offering that much. Of course, ten years from now, I could be anywhere in the world, wishing I was back in Astoria the night the manholes exploded.

Now I’m off to play some Playstation for a while.

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Spring

It was almost seventy degrees outside today. Since I am going to Hawaii in May and it seems like everything will be a two-mile walk, I have been trying to walk a bit more, so I put on the iPod and went out for a while today. I crossed through an area north of my house, north of the highway that consists of a lot of warehouses, small homes covered in barbed wire, and lots of half-disassembled and scavanged Crown Vic taxicabs on blocks. It’s all concrete, not much in the way of life, just a set of twisted railroad tracks on pylons and steel a few dozen feet in the air, snaking through the buildings a hundred years after they were put there, as an afterthought. I watched a trio of Conrail blue locomotives pushing steel across the horizon, and the random shuffle of the iPod (which I sometimes think is not that random, based on the songs it sometimes throws at me), and it hit me with a Peter Gabriel song – Secret World – from a ten-year-old album that made me think of ten years old. Back in 1993, when I used to take the same kind of walk once or twice a day, listening to the walkman, I’d walk underneath the trestles at 15th Street in Bloomington, and I’d sometimes look up at an engine assembling together boxcars into a freight train as I hustled toward class, toward work. And now here it was, ten years later, worlds away, watching trains as a killed an afternoon a step at a time.

It’s all stupid but symbolic that I think of my life ten years back, the relationship I was starting in 1993 and how great it feels to be in love in the spring, to start something new and know it’s mutual. And that carried through the summer and into the fall, and then it was over. I should have forgotten about all of this years ago. I’ve been through enough other, longer relationships to think this should have been bumped out of the cache long ago. But it’s funny how a nice round number can make things come up again. And for the rest of the walk, things felt so insignificant, in the sense that I felt like nothing had happened in the last ten years, that I was back to walking nowhere with a walkman on my hip instead of doing anything productive with my life. And that sounds stupid, given everything that has happened in the last decade. But it’s weird how things can go full-circle on you like that.

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Repressed memories about computer cases

A reply RE http://elemeta.com/retrocase/index.html

Oh man, you just brought back a horrible repressed memory with your case page…

When I was in college in 1991, I didn’t have the cash for a computer, and needed one bad. This guy sold me an XT clone motherboard for ten bucks, and I scoured the used junk shops looking for the rest of the pieces to get something together that would run Procomm and sit behind a 2400 baud modem so I didn’t have to leave the house to get my email.

So a local place that sold lamps and lighting equipment and had a side-line selling mail-order Commodore 64 parts also had a beaten up 5150 case, PS. and keyboard, and I talked the guy down to five bucks for all three. Great! I could just slap in that newer motherboard and get to work, right?

Um, no. Turns out, as you probably know, that not a damn thing lined up between the case and board. Every single mounting hole except one was off, and I had the whole thing supported by a suicidal mix of plastic standoffs and mix-and-match screws and bolts. My mobo had like 8 or 9 expansion slots, which didn’t jive with the 5-slot webbing on the back of the case. So I borrowed a friend’s dremel and went to work, tearing out all of the slots on the case until the whole thing looked like a Civil War field amputation done with a blunt butterknife. The worst of all was the keyboard connector. The damn thing did not line up at all, so at three in the morning one night, I got out a soldering iron, melted out the stupid thing, and reattached each wire with a few inches of lampcord or whatever I had laying around. I could then move the plug a few inches over.

The whole thing sortof worked for a semester. I fried that 55-watt power supply when I got one of those full-height, five Meg hard drives on usenet for about ten bucks. I went to a local place and got a 100-watt power supply for a few dollars, and managed to get the drive working, although when it spun up, I was afraid it would blow out every fuse in the house.

I had a lot of intermittent shorts and lockups, and I figured the case was flexing the board, or crossing some traces on the backside. So when I got my tax refund next spring, I went out and blew $100 on a really nice mini-tower that I ended up using for the next ten years. But the shorts continued. I would disassemble and reassemble the damn thing in rage every night, hitting the case, the PS, flexing the motherboard, doing everything to get it to come back on. Finally one night, I had the whole thing torn down to air, earth, fire, and water, and I found the problem – the damn CPU was replaced with a V20 before I got it, and it was seated in the socket crooked. When the system heated up, it would pull half of the pins from the socket. I re-seated it, and all was well until I got a real 486 a year later.

Anyway, your project made me nostalgic for the old days, and glad I have a nice case now.

-Jon

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Sidekick

The Sidekick is here! I thought it would take another week or more, but it showed up during lunch, and I plugged it into the charger right away. My old SIM card from my VisorPhone fit right in, and when I fired it up, it asked me to set up an email account right away. I got the name jkonrath (at the host tmail.com – feel free to drop a line) and everything worked right away! So I am very happy about it.

Everything about the Sidekick is pretty cool. The display flips open in a very cool way, and the LCD is very crisp and easy to read. The whole thing is very compact, and small – like the size of one of those hard-wired pocket videogames or something. The keyboard isn’t too bad to type with, although it takes some getting used to using the edges of your fingers as opposed to a full-size keyboard. The whole design in general feels more like an appliance, a usable tool than something like a pager or Palm pilot. It’s some pretty Star Trek bullshit.

The OS and applications are the icing on the cake, though. There’s a good email program that operates about like Eurodra or Outlook, and it’s integrated into an address book that also feeds into the portable phone application. AOL IM is built-in, as well as a calendar, notes, todo list, and a handful of games. The Web browser is pretty cool – unlike WAP phones, this goes through a proxy that crunches down sites and graphics so they are easily viewed and so you don’t download as much. You still get graphics though, enough to make it much more rich than a WAP phone. And there’s a detachable camera, about as big as a small keychain, so you can snap a photo (color, but very small) and then mail it as an attachment or access it on the web aside all of your mail and other stuff in their secure portal site.

The coolest part – UNLIMITED DATA FOR ONE PRICE! You only get 200/1000 minutes for $39 a month, but you get all the data you can download. Pretty cool.

By the way, I have a small web log that I can update on the go that is located at http://hiptop.com/hiplog/read/4/292/. I don’t know if I will actually update it regularly, but it lets me send in pictures I take, so it’s pretty cool to mess with.

I booked a vacation to Hawaii today. I am going in the second week of May, to Oahu. I got the airfare and four nights in a hotel right on the beach for $900. Now I need to do some research and actually figure out what to do there.

Gotta go watch wrestling and play the games on the Sidekick…

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Stupid Facts

  1. I like the new Coke can design. It’s cool.
  2. I’m trying to figure out how the impending Broadway musicians’ strike will actually affect me, since I’ve never been to a Broadway show and never really intend to.
  3. I almost bid on a 1976 Gremlin in Staten Island that was up to $300. I wanted to paint flames on it, with a roller and housepaint, and paint OFF THE PIGS on the back of it. And if I got pulled over by the cops, I would say I was a pork farmer.
  4. There seems to be some kind of national shortage of Levoxyl, a synthetic thyroid replacement. So I’ve been out of the shit for a few days now.
  5. Emil Goldfus (aka “Abel”), the NY-based Russian spy who was exchanged for Gary Powers, lived in the same apartment building as Norman Mailer when he was writing the spy novel Barbary Coast. They didn’t know each other, though.
  6. I have a chance to go to Hawaii for four days for $700. I am debating checking it out in April or May.
  7. It’s raining like a motherfucker out.
  8. I thought those Catherine Zeta Jones/T-Mobile ads were annoying, but now for some reason I find her incredibly hot. Maybe it’s because I keep going to their site every three minutes to see what is up with my Sidekick.
  9. The Cigar Corner, on the corner of 30th Ave and Steinway, sells Barely Legal magazine. No I did not buy it.
  10. There is a cheat in Grand Theft Auto – Vice City that changes all of the pedestrians into the cast of the Michael Jackson Thriller video: zombies, and an occasional red-leather MJ wannabe.
  11. After someone is killed in the gas chamber, their body has to be completely scrubbed with bleach before it can be handled.
  12. Only three US Presidents have cried in public while in office: William McKinley, William Taft, and George W. Bush.
  13. You can use vinyl dye (sold at car parts store for refinishing car interiors) to paint plastic parts like bezels of computer drives, keyboards, cases, etc.
  14. Diesel engines get better city mileage than highway, because heat makes diesel combustion more efficient.
  15. I have a beard again. I’ll try to take some pictures of it this time. [I’m glad I didn’t.]
  16. The acronym TWAIN (a scanner interface) stands for Technology Without An Interesting Name.
  17. The bible is the most shoplifted book in the USA. (Strange, considering how easy it is to get a free copy from the Gideons…)
  18. The first flushing toilet in a movie was in Psycho.
  19. I’m sick of writing these facts.
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Geiger counters on the subway

On Friday, while I was riding to work, the subway stopped at 57th and 7th like it usually does, and while the doors were open, I saw three NYPD cops with FUCKING GEIGER COUNTERS! WHAT THE FUCK!?!?

Not a lot is up here. I got a copy of Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA by Bob Woodward from an Amazon z-shop for only three bucks, in hardcover. I read about a fifth of it last night, and it’s not filled with ultra-crazy conspiracy shit, but the kind of thing that makes the CIA Director’s job look more like a conventional executive’s job, except way more competitive and full of political bullshit, and instead of ordering raincoats from China, you’re covertly sending weapons of mass destruction to central Asia. So that’s interesting, and I’m going to have to dig through sources of other books to find more stuff to buy used on Amazon.

I bought the Fear and Loathing Criterion edition this afternoon, but haven’t fully dug into the extras yet. I watched about half of the movie with HST’s commentary, and it’s both interesting and weird. It’s almost impossible to understand a word he’s saying, plus he’ll ramble on forever about something, and then when someone asks an intriguing question like, “did you like the way Benitio Del Toro played Oscar?” he will simply answer “Yep” and that’s it. I haven’t looked at the other stuff but there are like 58 sets of commentary and a bunch of other extra shit I will probably never have time to get to.

I was dicking around at the delta.com site today and found a hotel plus plane package to Hawaii for $700!! I’m going to have to look into that, because even a trip to New Orleans was like twice as expensive. Maybe there’s some kind of stupid catch, like you have to sleep on the beach or you have to fly in the cargo hold. My sister went to Hawaii and I would like to check it out some time, especially if I can do it without spending like five grand on it.

Where the hell is my food? I haven’t eaten all day, and I’m waiting for my sweet and sour pork from the local Chinese dump…