off to the woods

this is camping weekend, at french creek state park in pennsylvania.

although i’m sick as a dog, i’m looking forward to sleeping in a tent, in the cold and possibly the rain. for some odd reason.

being outside feels better than being inside, and this weekend, there’ll be lots of outside. a few miles of hiking should set me right.

right?

protecting valuables in checked luggage

gotta link to this–it’s a great example of playing by the rules, and thus gaming the system to your advantage.

put a firearm in with your valuables, and declare the firearm.

it doesn’t have to be a real firearm–a starter’s pistol will do. the article refers to expensive camera equipment, but it seems to me that this would work for anything valuable in baggage that you are required to check.

from the article:

A “weapons” is defined as a rifle, shotgun, pistol, airgun, and STARTER PISTOL. Yes, starter pistols – those little guns that fire blanks at track and swim meets – are considered weapons…and do NOT have to be registered in any state in the United States.

I have a starter pistol for all my cases. All I have to do upon check-in is tell the airline ticket agent that I have a weapon to declare…I’m given a little card to sign, the card is put in the case, the case is given to a TSA official who takes my key and locks the case, and gives my key back to me.

That’s the procedure. The case is extra-tracked…TSA does not want to lose a weapons case. This reduces the chance of the case being lost to virtually zero.

It’s a great way to travel with camera gear…I’ve been doing this since Dec 2001 and have had no problems whatsoever.

their rules. just play by them.

baseball update

kirk and i get tickets to the last home game at shea every year, and this year is no exception. so we were there last night, although we left after the 4th inning. to be honest, i hate when people leave the game early (it’s one of my biggest baseball pet peeves), but it was cold and i’m coming down with something, i think, and the game was going nowhere (the mets lost), so there you are.

call me a fair weather fan. literally, last night.

i’m not very optimistic about the mets’ post-season chances. the pitching is suspect, and they are on a bit of a losing streak, and as a team they are not hitting very well at all. hopefully they’ll turn it up a notch when the post-season starts. the first series will be five games, and it’s easy to get knocked out of a short series quickly.

we’ll see.

of far greater baseball interest is this story about a 110 year old negro leaguer. the story is in the ny times today.

seems that no one knew he was alive until last summer (who’d have thought that there would be a 110 year old baseball player hanging out somewhere?), but he’s turning out to be a treasure trove of baseball lore and information.

this quote from the story will put things in perspective:

Simmons, known as Si, was born on Oct. 14, 1895 — the same year as Babe Ruth and Rudolph Valentino, and before F. Scott Fitzgerald and Amelia Earhart. He played at the highest level of black baseball while a boy named Satchel Paige was still in grade school.

amazing. his first professional baseball was played in 1912.

the story is well worth the click through.

shortbus in the ny times

frank bruni did a long piece about “shortbus” in the ny times this weekend.

i’ve written about “shortbus” before–it’s the new movie from john cameron mitchell of hedwig fame.

bruni’s article is not to be missed–it’s a great explanation and a great exploration. very very well done.

and of course, the movie is not to be missed either. it starts october 4 at the landmark sunshine cinema in nyc, rolls out to la and san francisco two days later, and opens wide (so to speak) beginning october 13.

track down a showing of this movie. i have a feeling you won’t regret it.

random ipod thoughts

i’ve written before on the non-random nature of my ipod shuffle.

i have an 512mb ipod shuffle, and itunes loads songs randomly onto it. the shuffle has a small capacity (about 120 songs) and i have thousands of songs in itunes, so i should get a good variety of music. problem is, i’d swear that my ipod plays favorites, because certain songs get loaded onto the ipod all the time.

and, further, the ipod shuffle itself has a shuffle feature, so that the randomly loaded songs should be played in random order.

it doesn’t though, i swear. certain songs are loaded every time, and those same certain songs are randomly picked every time i switch the damn thing on.

back in july of 2005, when i first wrote about this, the earworm song was “money back guarantee” by the five man electrical band. it got so bad that i deleted the song from my itunes playlist.

my ipod shuffle’s current obsession is “hallelujah” by leonard cohen. a much better obsession, to be sure, but nevertheless one gets tired of a steady diet of mr. cohen.

i’ve taken steps to minimize the damage–i don’t put the ipod shuffle on shuffle. in other words, i don’t randomize the random loading of songs anymore.

all this is prompted by today’s wall street journal article about one man’s quest to get to the bottom of the randomness.

he’s a computer science lecturer and a random numbers expert, and he’s bought an ipod and promises to get to the bottom of all this.

good luck, dude.

i’m betting the ipod wins the battle.

waiting for an iphone

supposedly apple is working on their version of a cell phone–unofficial name: iphone. i’d love to have one. not just because i’m an apple fanatic, but because i’m sure it would just work.

unlike my current sony ericcson z520a phone, which i’ve quit carrying around because it constantly takes pictures of the inside of my pocket, thanks to the external camera button that you can’t disable. and same said button falls right where your finger naturally does when you hold the phone to talk, so in order to talk to someone and not simultaneously take random photos, i had to retrain myself in how to hold a cell phone.

very usable. thanks sony.

anyway, while i’m waiting on steve jobs to bless me with an iphone and solve my problem, here’s an absolutely hysterical review of an sprint/lg phone with a built-in mp3 player, via daring fireball. evidently sony ericcson fired the designer of my phone, and he went to work for sprint or lg, or maybe both.

here’s a sample, from the article:

Turn on the phone. Go into the MP3 player again. There’s no signal, and, guess what? You can’t get into to the MP3 player unless you can establish a network connection to the Sprint Music Store. Even to play your own MP3s!

OK, so this is an MP3 player that doesn’t really work on the subway and won’t work on a plane, the two places I’m most likely to listen to MP3s. Not very appealing.

A little bit more exploring and I discovered that there’s another entirely separate MP3 player on this device. It’s hard to find. You have to go to Tools, then Memory Card, then to the Music folder, and another MP3 player starts up which you can use to listen to your MP3s. For this player, you don’t have to be on the network, so it works in the subway, but—get this—the minute you close the clamshell, the music stops! I am literally not making this up. There are two bad MP3 players on this device, neither one of which remembers where you’re up to, neither one of which can be used on the subway with the phone folded in my pocket, neither one of which has a fast-forward feature.

I have literally never seen such a useless MP3 player.

great piece of writing. and the funniest part is that sprint gave the guy the phone for free, so he’d use it and blog about it.

i have no idea how any of these companies stay in business.

not exactly the mile high club

chilling story about two affectionate men on an airplane, who are confronted by a homophobic flight attendant.

evidently she took exception to their “behavior”, and when deservedly challenged by the pair, escalated the episode to terrorist-level to cover her ass, complete with a pilot’s threat to divert the flight.

one man had rested his head on his partner’s shoulder. and had blown him an air kiss.

shocking.

and of course, if you are in that situation, there’s nothing you can say or do. if the personnel on the plane say that you are a threat, even if they are incorrect and doing so only to legally protect themselves, then you truly have no recourse. who’s going to believe you when you protest that you were only air-kissing?

on planes, i’ve seen straight people fucking in their seats under a blanket. in tiny adjoining coach seats, no less. i’ve seen straight people go into the bathroom together and reemerge flushed a few minutes later.

i don’t condone that. i’m not much for pda. but you just know that if two straight people air-kissed, or even really kissed, or even tongued each other for a while, nothing would have been said. and i saw flight attendants actively ignoring the aforementioned fornicators.

this is the danger we face when we allow our freedoms to erode as we have over the past few years. this is exactly what’s wrong with the patriot act, and the like. rules that skirt the edge of what’s legal and appropriate and sensible may just barely pass muster if applied correctly.

but those same rules, if applied capriciously, ensure that people will be falsely accused, and maliciously prosecuted, and inappropriately sentenced.

and you can’t ever count on the rules being uniformly applied by always-reasonable people. some people will always use the rules to further their agenda, or to introduce their prejudices.

and this happened on american airlines, my carrier of choice, who has an excellent record when it comes to these issues.

i’ll have to see how this turns out.

tickets, i get tickets

new york is a great place to live, because there are nearly no limits to the fun and cool things you can do.

new york is a horrible place to live, because there are nearly no limits to the fun and cool things you can do.

both are true, of course. i usually resist the temptation to do everything i want to do in this city, because you would go seriously broke doing so.

but today i broke down and got two pairs of tickets to upcoming events.

the first is tomorrow night–the charles aznavour concert at radio city music hall. the guy’s 82, so this will undoubtedly be the last chance anyone ever has to see him, and who could pass that up? i went to get a pair of the cheapest tickets i could find, and the very helpful woman in the ticket booth clued me in to a pair of obstructed view tickets–front row, second mezzanine. very nice tickets, and the only obstruction is that you are next to the sound board, so you can’t see the people on the other side of the sound board.

big deal–i’m pretty sure i wouldn’t have liked those people anyway. thanks, cool ticket booth woman, for hooking me up.

the second set of tickets was for grey gardens, which i’ve written about many times before. i saw it off broadway and didn’t want to miss it when it moved to broadway–it was my favorite musical last year, and christine ebersole gives one of the most amazing performances you will ever see.

i’d gotten ticket offers but neglected to follow up, and then they expired and i thought i would have to (shudder) pay full price. i would have, though.

and then today the ny times had an article about the nederlanders’ new venture, audiencerewards.com, which is supposed to be a ticket buying hub that gives you points for buying tickets, much like frequent flyer miles or whatever. and since i’m a big fan of double and triple dipping my points/miles, i checked it out.

and lo and behold, they had an exclusive deal on grey gardens tickets.

sold. nice seats, center orchestra row h, nearly half price. good for them, and good for me. except that the website was a bit balky, and there’s no mention anywhere of any points that i got for buying tickets, and the whole thing ended up being a front end for telecharge.

oh well. at least i got my tickets.

i’ll let you know how charles aznavour (tickets: tomorrow night) was.

i know how grey gardens (tickets: end of october) is going to be.

i want my itv

well, apple did it. they showed me the gadget that was guaranteed to get my wallet out.

next year. damnit.

today was the stevenote–the day when steve jobs calls the media and announces the new apple products. it’s a highly anticipated event which rarely disappoints, and today’s event was no exception. i like following the apple announcements, though i rarely actually purchase any of the stuff. my only apple products are a mac mini, an apple wireless keyboard, and an ipod shuffle.

and the shuffle really doesn’t count, because kirk got it for free for filling out surveys.

i’m a pretty lousy apple fanboy.

but the one thing i really wanted was a way to wirelessly hook up my computer and my tv. that way, i can watch video content on the tv from the computer in one room, while kirk is in the other room actually on the computer, surfing the net or whatever.

we could buy a second computer, but that’s expensive and wasteful. enter itv.

engadget has a pretty good writeup of it. basically, it’s a little box that plugs into your tv, in my case an hdtv, and then you can watch the content from your computer on your tv.

content that you’ve bought from the apple store, or gotten from wherever. how cool is that?

problem is, it’s not shipping yet. it won’t ship until 1q07. that’s months from now, so the wallet will stay in the pocket. i have a feeling he announced this new gizmo to put pressure on the movie studios to get on board his new movie download service, which has disney movies only at this point.

and the movies aren’t hd quality, though i’d bet they will be by the time the little itv thingy is on the market.

the other stuff he talked about, mainly new ipods, are cool things, but mainly just the same old ipods with more capacity for less money. i like my shuffle just fine–it does what i need for it to do, which is play music while i’m on a machine at the gym.

so apple will get some more of my money.

just not yet.

my first time

using a computer.

yeah right. don’t hold out much hope for that story, bub. i know what you are thinking. i’m saving that one for the memoirs.

anyway, i was thinking about this the other day. or, more accurately, i was thinking about how little i remembered about it, and how i wished i could remember more.

because i truly was a pretty early adopter. even though i was only about 15 at the time, i used my first computer in 1978.

i had a job in a fruit stand at the time. the kind where you sell vegetables on the side of the road, except that the guy who owned it had recently moved us from the side of the road into a proper retail space.

the guy’s name was robert ogden. i’ve googled and come up empty, but this guy was really interesting. i think the fruit stand must have been a tax dodge, or some way to keep his wife, gerri odgen, otherwise occupied, because his real job involved computers.

apparently, if i’m remembering this correctly, he was some kind of consultant, and he took his computers up in airplanes, and used them to survey large areas of land. he was the first to do this, from what i understood.

and one of the large areas of land he said he surveyed was the amazon jungle, for the brazilian government. not too shabby a dude, for 1978.

and the computers he used to survey from airplanes were kept in the back of the retail space, once he’d gotten off the side of the road with his business.

he didn’t have tons of business, really, so i had hours of time to spend in the back, playing with the computers. he didn’t mind a bit–in fact he encouraged it. how lucky was i to have a computer at my disposal, in 1978? pretty damn lucky.

i wish i could remember more about the computer. i’d love to know what kind of computer it was, but i can’t even remember what it looked like. i do remember that he had an enormous floppy drive–either 10″ or 12″–which was a rarity in the days when people used (at best) cassette tapes to store data and programs.

i played a lot of games. i remember a star trek game, which involved typing in coordinates and going to places in the galaxy, and when you got there, if there were klingons or whatever, you typed in more coordinates and shot them, and then went somewhere else. it was all text based, but i think there may have been some ascii graphics involved as well.

and the main thing i remember was that all the software came not on the disks, but in books.

printed. on paper.

so to run a program you first had to type the entire thing in, in the programming language called basic, and save it onto the floppy. and the programs were very, very long, for the most part. i remember typing for days on end in order to be able to play star trek. and you couldn’t get even one character wrong, or in the wrong place, in the dozens of pages you typed, because then the whole thing might not work.

it was a great lesson for me, at fifteen, about focusing and the importance of accuracy, and the rewards of doing things correctly, and the perils of shortcuts and sloppy work. they are lessons i carry with me to this day.

and, while i never learned to program very much, i did learn enough to get extra credit in my first college math class. the flagler college math professor, dr. kearney, met my mom on parent’s weekend, and she told him about my computer experience. so he gave me an extra credit assignment to write a program in basic that did something or other. i don’t think he expected me to be able to do it, because when i wrote the answer down and gave it to him, he was pretty amazed.

and the credit i got made the difference between a “b” and an “a” for the class, which was cool and not the outcome he either desired or expected.

anyway, robert ogden was one of those people who cross your path, and you don’t realize at the time how important they are going to be. it’s not like i became a programmer or anything.

but all that typing of programs must have sunk in, or made some brain cells grow, or something, because i’ve never stopped using computers since. and i’m pretty damn good with them, too.

thanks, mr. ogden.

why brad pitt is hot

sure, physically.

but the dude has a beautiful mind as well.

consider this:

“Angie and I will consider tying the knot when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able,” the 42-year-old actor reveals in Esquire magazine’s October issue, on newsstands Sept. 19.

the story was on the yahoo main page.

i knew i liked him for a reason.

kirk and i consider our commitment ceremony every bit as legal as a heterosexual marriage: we were married by an ordained minister from a legally recognized organized church, we have a new york city domestic partnership certificate, and we anxiously await the day when that document is recognized in the state of new york and in the united states as a whole.

come on, congress. do something about this issue.

brad pitt would greatly appreciate it.

as would i.

how to [not] buy a dell

how hard could it be to give dell your money?

harder than you’d imagine. i’d forgotten how senseless and confusing the dell website was, until i stumbled across this blog post.

surely this is exaggerated, right? it can’t be that hard?

well, i’ll be damned if he isn’t right. i went back to browse the dell site, having not been there for a while, and the dell site is a logistical nightmare. one more reason (as if you needed more) to buy a mac. the apple website is clear, as is the pricing. when i bought from dell, i was never sure i was getting the best deal, and i always just assumed that even though the price was decent, someone else was getting a better deal.

i hate all that coupon crap–even though dell says they are moving away from that, i’m still suspicious.

i’m going to keep at you, dear reader, until you switch. you’ll be glad you did.

weekend wishes

the weekend can’t come quickly enough.

is that sad? i’m on the third day of a four day work week, because of labor day. and i’ve been spoiled with summer fridays since june. next week is a five day week…i’ll have to mentally buckle down. thank god i have a great job with a good company and an outstanding boss.

so it’s not like i’m wishing it was the weekend because i hate work. i’m just looking forward to the stuff we have planned.

during the day on saturday, we’re going to see the mets play the dodgers. and it’s sports bag day, so i get a freebie to use when i go to the gym. emblazoned with the mets logo, of course.

saturday night we’re seeing the orfeo duo at church. from their site:

We are a sister and brother violin and piano duo known for our close rapport with each other and with our audiences and for our power of communication. Our mission is to encourage and inspire people of all ages through music-making that expresses the breath of life. We’ve performed throughout the Americas as well as in Europe and made numerous recordings. Our repertoire ranges from Bach to music by young composers from our neighborhood, including the complete sonatas of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Bartok, many beautiful early twentieth-century pieces, and short pieces, including our own arrangements of songs and arias. We perform from memory, and our performances are colored by exploration of historical performance practices and kindled by a spirit of improvisation.

sounds good to me–i’m in the mood for some culture. stop by (Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Inwood, call 212-222-2101 for more information) if you get the chance–i think it’ll be a great show.

and sunday is the first birthday party for our godson. kirk and i are godparents…how cool is that?

now, if you had that weekend, wouldn’t you look forward to it?

“shortbus” is rolling

“shortbus” is the new film from john cameron mitchell, of hedwig fame, and it’s coming to new york.

it’s been a long wait, and i’m psyched as all hell to finally see it. it’s jcm’s attempt to reclaim sex in film from the clutches of pornography. here’s an interview with john about the film.

“Sex,” says john in the article, “has been cheapened by porn.” i think this is a great idea for a film, and i think it’s going to push all the right buttons (so to speak), just when some damn buttons really need to be pushed.

and in addition, it looks like a lot of fun. see the trailer for yourself, either censored or uncensored.

kirk is still on john’s mailing list from back in hedwig days, so we’ve gotten updates on this project from the beginning. i remember him soliciting stories from people, with the promise that the most interesting people and stories would be worked into the film. it looks like he kept his promise–a quick check of imdb turns up justin bond (from kiki and herb) along with lots of first-time performers. looks like he kept his promise to search out the best people and performances, bar none.

good for him.

here’s the schedule of dates, from john’s email:

Sept 10 – North American Premiere, Toronto Film Festival, followed by a big concert party (see our site for tickets).
Oct. 4 – New York release at the Landmark Sunshine
Oct 6 – LA and SF release
Oct. 13 through Nov – we expand across N. America

as he says, plan on going for opening weekend–lots of people for opening weekend means the movie will stay around, and expand.

people in ny, la, and sf need to show up in numbers, so that this movie moves as much as possible into the heartland. they need this movie out there!

i’ll be recruiting. you should, too!

further site updates

i know…the site updates are the most boring posts ever. but i’m going to post them anyway, so put up with me. it’s a long holiday weekend and hurricane ernesto is plowing through, so i’m trapped inside the apartment and should have time to write something trenchant at some point.

i’ve categorized all of the posts, to help you find things that interest you, and to, i suppose, give you a glimpse into the organizational workings of my mind. that’s how i think. scary.

and i’ve edited my .htaccess file to redirect old site pages to new site pages, so you may never see the old site again. and if you do, you’ll find your way here quickly enough. a lot of the old pages aren’t being ported over, and eventually after google catches up to the new site structure, they’ll be deleted anyway.

do you really care about my javascript tic tac toe game? i don’t think you do, really. buh-bye to it, and its ilk.

and i added descriptions to each page’s meta tags via a plugin, so that google and other search engines see what’s on each page. i can’t tell you how much easier it is to do this stuff with wordpress. changing greymatter meant hand-coding every last thing, often in multiple places and on multiple pages. and while that gives you maximum flexibility, it is so much easier to drop a plugin into your wordpress folder on the server, and have the changes roll out across the site.

but i’m glad i used greymatter all those years, because it gave me knowledge of the guts of how things work. and that’s invaluable.

so click around and have a great time…this place will just get more and more better.

and i’ll get more and more bitter. i promise.