17 months

Why do so many parents insist on giving out their children's ages in months? It always creates this dissonant pause in my head, while I quickly try to extract a remainder from the ensuing mental long division (in base 12 no less). See - it took you a while just to parse that sentence! That is what "Oh - she'll be 17 months in 2 weeks" does to me. They have units for a reason, people. Seriously, what is so hard about saying 1 year and 5 months? Gads ...

it's no rushmore, but ...

the darjeeling limited is still an entertaining movie. a little disjointed, and a little euro-centric in its depiction of india, perhaps, but still worth a dekho as they say in the desh.

i was a little confused by the signature track (where do you go to my lovely - peter sarstedt), but i just discovered that mr. sarstedt was born in india, as were his two brothers, and suddenly it makes perfect sense.

in the mail

my new toy

WTF?

Umm - why have I had the pantsless leprechaun story headlining my blog for so long?

In other news, I'm back from Chile.

Leprechaun Opens Car Door for Pantsless Man

On BoingBoing:

Posted by David Pescovitz, October 17, 2007 4:01 PM | permalink

This gentleman, Kim Leblanc, was arrested in Cincinnati, Ohio on Tuesday morning sitting in someone else's car and not wearing any pants. According to an article on WLWT.com, Leblanc told police that "he had done drugs and believed that a leprechaun had let him into the car." [Link]




... and some featured comments ...
Comment #4
All right, sir. A leprechaun led you here."
"Yes, officer. That's correct. A leprechaun!"
"Okay, sir, now what about the pants?"
"The pants?"
"You're not wearing any pants."
"CURSE YOU MAGICAL IRISH BASTARD!!!"

Comment #12
I appreciate the guy's honesty. "Listen, officer. I was tripping balls and this leprechaun told me to drop trou and get in the car. What the hell was I supposed to do? Say NO!??"

configure; make

i've been hearting technology lately.

i just discovered google's street level 3d view. holy crap - it is pretty fantastic. some scary ramifications w.r.t. the whole surveillance society thing, but it makes for a pretty nice navigation tool.

yay for subversion!

trying to scrobble my xmms playlists to last.fm has been a pain in the ass. and building the regular last.fm player has been an adventure in dependency hell. i think i finally have something working though. oh - wait no ... i hate linux. wait - i didn't mean that. linux is awesome. linux is like sliced bread. like butter. like butter on sliced bread. like ... forget it.

the real issue is that my playlists seem to get pushed out, but then end up somewhere in the void. the idea of the internet void is an interesting one - a place where forgotten bits end up. packets without a recipient. the informational equivalent of the dryer sock fairy. or entropy. hmm - should explore that idea sometime.

new radiohead - drm free, sliding scale and completely downloadable. this is the future. it is really special that the biggest band in the world is offering up a great big fuck you to the riaa. nice.

update:
i almost missed the nextbus (hurrr for the pun). yes - this is truly the way to ride. now i know exactly when to time my mad sprint for the bus stop to minimize rain soakage. what's YOUR bus?

Less Than Zero

I must have gotten on a list somewhere, because I've now been part of two telephonic polls in the span of a week. The first one was survey on radio listening habits. The other one was a political survey of some sort, possibly related to MoveOn. In both polls I got to hand out zeroes - a zero for a certain new-country selection that made me want to rip my ears out, and a zero for one Mr. Bush that makes me want to rip out every other part of my body.

Speaking of opinion polls. It seems that these have effectively replaced the actual electoral process when big decisions get made by big people in between elections i.e. the other 363 days of the year. This makes its one's duty to take as many surveys and opinion polls as possible, since opinion polls seem to carry just as much weight as actual elections these days. Gotta represent!

got_it

must. eat. camera.
Originally uploaded by shreddd

Kiddoes are unpredictable. One week it seems like they just fit into everything that you want to do ... you're eating out, seeing the occasional show, going to parties, yadda yadda yadda (My first yadda yadda yadda in writing btw). And then suddenly they are fussy and needy and catch colds, and even watching an hour of TV becomes impossible (or something you have to break down into 10 minute increments). Such is the life. She is pretty damn cute though.

twittering

I am playing with Twitter in an attempt to completely sell out to the Web 2.0 revolution. You can now follow my every single mundane micro moment (now conveniently located right *here*) as I twitter my way towards post-humanism. Once the web becomes sentient, my persona will exist into eternity. Whoa!

ugh

yesterday was a really crap morning. we were already spooked about having to take the babezorz in for a kidney test and didn't sleep much the previous night. then, on our way out the door to the hospital, i tripped over the stairs - HARD. as in badly twisted my ankle, rolled over twice and bumped my head hard. as in, passed out in pain while trying to get back in the house (and bumping my head again) hard.

which meant that poor e had to take the baby in by herself for the test. which meant that she had to try and console a 5 month old as they poked at her with an iv for half an hour. watching a strapped down, screaming infant will pretty much break your heart. e - i am so incredibly sorry that you had to go through that, and that i wasn't able to make it.

and now we have to deal with the very real possibility of surgery in the coming months. like i said - not a good morning.

os x-pert

so i'm getting a little better at moving around and manipulating things on the new macbook. adding a three button mouse was a life saver - i can right click again!

seriously though - i'm still looking for tips to create a more zen like state of flow in my computering. any specific tools / applications / hints are very welcome ...

nostalgia

I'm writing this from my brand new MacBook Pro. It is very very sexy. Everything seems prettier on a Mac. Things just work. Magic seems to happen every time I push a button. Ah - the allure of design ...

And yet - I know, this will sound absurd but - I miss Linux.

As nice as the new BSD based Apples are, something feels a little odd and klunky when you try to operate from the command line. Aqua is totally awesome, but it was never meant to (with good reason) interface with the shell. I guess Linux makes me feel more godlike, while the Apple makes me feel more like a spectator. Still enjoying though ...

jens + left banke

jens lekman does this great song called "black cab", where he samples the left banke's "i've got something on my mind" - also a brilliant number. both artistes are definitely worth checking out. the left banke is probably one of the most underrated bands from the 60s, and jens lekman is basically e's new swedish husband, in a manner of speaking. i had to share.

daydream nation

wow - somehow, surreptitiously, mysteriously my social life has crept up on me. as in, i suddenly have one. in the course of the past 10 days, we've ended up going to a movie, hanging out and drinking with peeps in cafe/bar like situations (twice), doing trivia night and finally going to a sonic youth show.

s.y. show was our first non-baby social experience ever, which was both terrifying and liberating.

speaking of trivia - did you realize that hyphy doesn't have any of the standard vowels (a-e-i-o-u)? weird!

diesel sweeties vs. the riaa

we were so hype. or was it fly??!!!

• slightly askance trucker hat - check
  
• fanny pack - check
  
• wispy stache - check
• moppy hair - check
  
• disaffected stare - check

not sure if this was five years behind the times, or fifteen years ahead.
if only i hadn't tucked that shirt in ...

yes - that is indeed me!
"back in the days when i was a teenager /
before i had status and before i had a pager"

Trying Not to Sweat the Details

Since when did I become such a pedant? Why, not so long ago, I was talking about wanting to lead a less regimented, more organic existence [see old slackers site, 2003.03.19 entry ... hmm - i guess that was a while ago]. These days I seem obsessed with internal consistency, to the point of, well, pedantry. I almost sound like the spelling bee kid sometimes:



Mmm ... my first YouTube link. I am now officially entrenched in Blogosphere 2.0.

Can I just say this again?

I really don't like The White Stripes.

Bike2Work

Well - after years of agonizing, I finally rode my bike to work.

While I'm super excited about the personal and environmental benefits of this choice, it brought to light some interesting societal divisions among bicyclists. On the one hand you have your gear heads (we'll just call them hedz, shamelessly borrowing from RPM culture). The hedz are your hardcore bike nuts - they will often own several bikes (where several can span double digits), will pretty much *only* ride in spandex, and have several miscellaneous bike parts just floating around their garage to fuel what is now an obsession that easily costs them a few thousand dollars a year. Oh - and they're predominantly male. To these people I say, more power to you. Why, some of my best friends are ... ok - forget it. I will almost certainly never be one of them. There are things I get obsessive about - bike gear is just not one of them.

Which places me in the other camp. Utilitarian commuters that understand the ecological and economic benefits of riding, along with the loads of sexy indie cred it carries. Not sure if I've mentioned this before, but I've always found hipsters on bicycles terribly attractive. So yes - I'm riding to boost my cred. This is actually not dissimilar to vegetarianism - it just felt like a good idea on a number of different levels, even if there was a girl involved in the initiation.