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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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general

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…

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Linux upgrades, conspiracies, Danger

Okay, it just took me about an hour and a half of dicking around to get started, but here I am. It seems Red Hat Linux 8.0 has a brain tumor in the program that I use to resize images, and I had to go through a lengthy procedure to get the fucking thing all right. But it is, and here’s a treat for you: Photos of the Blizzard! This is mostly a series of shots when I was walking to work on the Tuesday after, and it features lots of buried cars. [These are long gone, sorry.]

Another project I am working on now – I am writing another glossary, but it is a conspiracy theory glossary now. It is here, but I have barely started working on it. It takes a lot longer to research each entry than the last glossary, but it is loads of fun. So give me a week or two, and I should have enough entries for it to be interesting.

In other news, I bought a Danger Hiptop yesterday. It is a combination cell phone, small computer, PDA, web browser, and pager, with a small keyboard, a neat flip-open screen, and very cool integration. You can view the web with it, use it to read mail, do PDA-type stuff, and play games on it. All of your data actually lives on servers, and their back-end strips down and re-renders web pages for speed and simplicity. And the cool part is that the data network is all-you-can use for one price, at least for the first year. I don’t actually have it yet – I ordered on the phone, so I am very ancy about getting the thing. But I’m hoping it will let me send mail and maybe put up some tiny web journal while on the road with it. We’ll see.

Not much else is going on here, just busy with other crap and reading about 22 different books on the JFK assassination at the same time for the glossary. When you read this much shit about it, you can pretty much make up any story about that day and have it make sense. Anyway…

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New Best Buy

Yes, I’m still here. I guess I’ve been hiding out, although I really don’t know what I’ve been doing for the last week or so. After the snow ended, everything started melting, flooding, raining, and the walk to work became these waist-high mountains of snow, with giant lakes on the other side. The weekend’s been nothing but rain, and yet I was vaguely productive in the sense of getting out of the house and not sitting in bed until 3PM and then eating one daily meal of delivery pizza in front of the TV.

I got out into the city yesterday, fought the rain and got some DVD shopping at the new Best Buy in Chelsea. There are a lot of new stores going in down there, and I’m not entirely sure why, because I’m not familiar with the area. Maybe everyone’s getting the fuck out; maybe Bloomberg gave some kind of tax cut to big chain stores who wanted to move in. Anyway, I saw an Outback Steakhouse going in there. I am not entirely in love with the place, but it’s at the head of the A list for Ray, for some reason. So at least when he’s here next, I can bring him there in addition to other New York places.

Today I went to Rite-Aid to get fucked over on a prescription again. I don’t think they’ve ever been able to get one right yet. Also went grocery shopping, which as I’ve mentioned before involves grabbing about $50 of stuff that doesn’t even constitute a meal. I guess I really should eat before I go to the store. At least the iPod makes it a bit more tolerable. The muzak at this particular store is usually horrific, electronic horn and synth versions of bad 80s pop tunes blasted out of tinny speakers in the ceiling. You’d think they do it to get people the fuck out of the store, instead of somehow finding music that made people want to buy more meat or something.

I’m barely picking at some short stories for a book, and that’s what I must go do now.

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hiding from snow

Yes, I survived the snow. I went shopping on Sunday, so I hid out indoors, watched TV, and did nothing else while it managed to pour down about two FEET of white stuff. I went out at about seven to get my laundry, but found the laundromat and everything else closed. So I got the camcorder and walked around for a while. Cars were entirely buried in drifts, and roads were mostly plowed to single-lane width, with some of the sidewalks partially shoveled, but most of them completely hidden under dunes of white. Absolutely nobody was outside, with no cars, people, or sounds for blocks. It felt like the whole city had vanished from a neutron bomb, aside from the occasional building super digging out their sidewalk.

I got to work okay today, although it took about twice as long as usual. The walk to the train took some patience, as only half of the sidewalks were clear, and each street crossing at a curb involved scaling a wall of snow left by the plows. Trains were slow, crowded, and infrequent, so that took a great deal of waiting. Only about half of our people made it here today, so it will be somewhat quiet in the office this afternoon.

Not much else to report, except that I’m getting frustrated over a lack of writing lately, and that’s compounded by a general feeling that I’m not sure what I should be writing next. I have a couple of ideas on projects, but I also have this overwhelming feeling that I’m barely treading water these days, and I need to find that “big” project to somehow advance myself. I guess for years I thought that Rumored would be that project, and now that it’s done and I’m still here at the same level, it makes me wonder what I need to do next. Does that make any sense?

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iPod, CD binging

This iPod is incredible. It’s a great experience to have a big plurality of your music collection with you at all times, in a tiny little box as big as a deck of cards. And it’s great to listen to everything on shuffle, hearing old favorites next to new CDs next to things I cherished ten years ago but haven’t heard in ages because they were on a compilation CD buried somewhere in my apartment. I’ve been ripping CDs nonstop, and I’m barely filling up the 20 gigs of space. I’ve got about six gigs on there, and another gig or so of stuff I’ve ripped today.

I went to Best Buy today, the new one in Chelsea. It was a minor pain in the ass because there wasn’t an N/W train running to Manhattan, so I had to get on the 7. Then I got on an F, and it took me right to the door of this new place. The whole store is actually underground, and it’s big for a store in Chelsea, although it’s probably one of the smallest Best Buys I’ve been in. I went on a CD rampage, and here’s what I got:

  • CKY – Infiltrate, Destroy, Rebuild
  • CKY – Volume 1
  • Twisted Forever – A Tribute to the Legendary Twisted Sister
  • Iron Maiden – Powerslave
  • Iron Maiden – Piece of Mind
  • Iron Maiden – Somewhere in Time
  • Iron Maiden – Iron Maiden
  • Orgy – Vapor Transmission
  • NWA – Greatest Hits
  • Green Day – Kerplunk
  • Dead Kennedys – Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death

The Iron Maiden CDs are all the new “full cover” versions, with shitty bonus tracks available as multimedia only. I should’ve bought them all five years ago when they were in the cool Castle reissues with a bonus CD in a brilliant box, but I’m an idiot. I don’t have any of them on CD – all of my old Maiden stuff was on vinyl. The CKY is new to me, but I really like them a lot – I first heard them in the Jackass movie. The rest of the list were impulse purchases or stuff that was at a good price, so there you go.

I also picked up a copy of The Sims for PS/2, not really knowing much about it except that a lot of people like it. I played it for an hour or so this afternoon, and it is a total pain in the ass. You have to tell your dude what to do: eat, crap, bathe, watch TV, learn stuff, pick up the house, etc etc. If you don’t do stuff, your meters go down. For example, if you don’t talk to other family members, your social meter goes down. If you don’t watch TV or listen to the radio, your fun meter goes down. And you never, ever have time to do everything. So basically, it’s like real life. And I can’t manage to keep my own house clean or eat three square meals a day, so there’s not a chance I can do it on the computer. Despite this, it’s hard to put down. Go figure.

OK, gotta get out of here and get some stuff done.

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general

iPod

The iPod is here. I got it on Wednesday, and I’ve been happily adding songs to it and toting it around to work and back, and I’m pretty impressed with it sofar. I’ve only used it with Windows so far; I bought the Windows model (which is formatted for Windows and not HFS+ for the Mac) and it came with a copy of MusicMatch that’s been modified for the iPod. So when I plug in the iPod with a firewire cord, MusicMatch opens and asks me if I want to sync up my music. I can also look at the iPod as if it was my E: drive, and even stash files there, in case I want to put them on another computer later. You can’t do anything with the files, although now the iPod has some rudimentary organizer capability if you put vcard or vcal files on it.

Overall, I have a lot of good things to say about the device. The UI is pretty slick, a very quality product that one would expect from Apple. The unit itself looks great, very futuristic yet refined, unlike the cheap plastic cases on most MP3 players. It’s also very small, only 7 ounces and smaller than I’d expect a 20 Gig drive plus player to be. The display is incredibly crisp and readable, with a great font. It sounds good, it holds a lot, and it’s very easy to update. Plus it has some long-range batteries that are automatically charged when you plug in the firewire cord.

There are a few minor issues, but nothing huge. First, the chrome back of the case looks great but instantly became a huge smudge and is impossible to clean. And I already scratched it. Also, the clip on the remote control is very tiny and a bit impractical. And the stock earbud headphones didn’t work for me, so I went for a pair of Sony vertical in-ear phones. And I wish it had more games on it – there is a breakout game, but nothing more. Other than that, very happy with everything on it.

Not much else is going on here, except that I am relatively brain dead from the temps outside and the minor cold I am nursing right now. I think I am going to the grocery store after work to buy a bunch of comfort-type food and then I’ll lock myself in the apartment and sleep through the weekend. There are three days, so hopefully I will get to mess with the computer all weekend, and watch the backlog of movies I have sitting around the house.

Oh yeah, it is valentine’s day. I would go on a small tirade about this day and the expectations of people and how I don’t like to deal with it when I am single and alone, but it’s not really worth the effort. My only consolation is that I will probably go to Rite-Aid tomorrow and buy a bunch of candy for 50% off.

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Computer upgrade disasters

I think most of the computer upgrade disaster is over. I now have a new monitor, a new video card, and a new Linux installation. It took me about six hours to get everything installed with Linux and Windows 2000, most of that being Linux. I had to back up 9 gigs of personal info and work onto CD-R, then install RH8 three times, then I was stuck for an hour because networking didn’t work, and it turns out it was because I entered the wrong thing for the fucking gateway. Now, all is mostly well, except I have to undo all of the stupid Red Hat bells and whistles and get back to an actual functional operating environment. And as I say this, emacs looks deranged with all of these stupid banners and widgets and extra bullshit they have affixed to every side of my text window. They should put Richard Stallman on a hidden government installation hidden in the middle of the Nevada desert somewhere and do the world a load of good.

So now I have this monstrous screen – 21.1″ actual viewable size, with a resolution of 1600×1200. It’s big enough that I can have a browser window opened to the maximum size and still have a fuckload of space. Text is very tiny, but I am too greedy to set it to a larger size. We’ll see how it works when I get some real writing underway.

Anyway, the monitor is cool. Also, the router fuckup let me figure out what was wrong with the Navy Seals game, and I got to play that online for a bit tonight. I totally got my ass kicked, but it’s pretty fun. And my iPod is on the way – it should be here tomorrow. It was back-ordered, so I slapped down another $200 to upgrade to the 20 Gig version, and it is in stock. So I’ll be all set there.

Very tired, and feeling a bit sick. Computer upgrades always stress me out, but at least it’s a short week next week…

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Taking the iPod plunge

My MiniDisc player broke! AGAIN! I just bought the fucking thing last April or something. And it’s a Japanese model, so I can’t return it, I can only put it on the slow boat and pay more than it originally cost to get it back in a year or two.

So I decided to buy an iPod. It looks like the best solution, and it is more compact and easier to work with. The only problem is getting it to work with Linux, but it appears there are hacks out there. The other option is to burn all of my CDs on my Windows partition and then install iTunes or whatever the Windows version of the software is on there. I’ll figure that out after I get it. I ordered the standard 5Gb model – I figure that should work for now.

I also decided to blow even more money and get a new monitor and video card. I got a Matrox G550 Millenium card – I was tempted to get a Radeon with twice as much memory, but the Matrox has Linux support, and that means more than billions of polygons a second or whatever. I also got a ViewSonic 20.1″ LCD monitor. It’s very cool looking, black, has built-in speakers and microphone, and does 1600×1200. So I should be very happy once that bitch is on my desk.

I almost forgot – the books got here yesterday. They look good, and I’m happy with them. If you’re reading this and you want a copy, send me an email with your address and I’ll send you one for free. I only have ten of them, but I’m sure less than ten people read this regularly, so there you go.

It snowed like a motherfucker last night, and everything’s white outside. I wish I could get out there with the camcorder before it turns to grey sludge, but I’m here at work.