Category Archives: Personal

Lost: 5,000 Songs

iPodWhat an exhausting week I had last week; I was burning the candle at both ends trying to get some work out the door, and it completely drained me by Friday night. In fact, when I was taking a cab home late that evening, I was even too tired to notice that my iPod had quietly fallen out of my jacket pocket, and now it’s lost to me forever. There’s a tiny candle of hope that I hold out for finding it, somehow, through the good graces of Mayor Bloomberg’s 311 information line, which, in theory, is working overtime to help me make a connection with the cab driver (luckily I got a receipt) through the city’s Taxi & Limousine Commission. The emphasis there is on tiny. I mean, would you try to find the owner of an iPod you found in a taxi cab?

The whole episode pains me to even think about it. I really don’t want to pay another few hundred dollars for what I still consider to be a grossly over-priced product, but I’ve become so attached to the thing, it seems untenable to consider doing without one. That’s a sign of a captive consumer, right? Anyhow, the iPod I lost was a 20 gigabyte, second-generation model from 2002 — so it kind of irks me too that, though the newer versions are slimmer and feature larger hard drives, they have basically the same feature set as mine, with few improvements. At least, not enough improvements to justify spending another large chunk of change on one when, just last week, I still had a perfectly good iPod in my possession. Feel me?

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Afterwards

I’m back from Sicily as of yesterday afternoon. I didn’t have internet access while I was away, or I would have written several posts about how amazing Italy is; I’m going to try and round up whatever thoughts I can recoup after ten days of sleeping in late, eating decadently tasty food and drinking lots of red wine, and write something here soon.

In the meantime, I’m feeling a little fuzzy-brained and jetlagged and a little deflated after returning to the reality of a non-vacation life. Mostly though, I’m feeling incredibly sad about Christopher Reeve’s death yesterday. There’s not an actor’s performance in any film that means more to me than Reeve’s in “Superman: The Movie.” It had a profound impact on the way I saw the world as a child, and it still chokes me up to watch it as an adult. It was acutely painful to see Reeve suffer that horrible accident in 1995, and now to see him go at the relatively young age of 52… I can’t possibly articulate the meaning of this loss in a way that would do it any kind of justice.

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The Italian Job

In a few hours, I’ll be leaving for vacation, headed to Italy for the next week and a half. My girlfriend and I have rented a nice little house in Sicily. Not without a bit of regret, I’ll miss most all of the debates and the start of baseball’s post-season, but I’m sure I’ll find some way to compensate for that. Here’s the plan: eat, relax, sleep, repeat. It’s going to be awesome. In all likelihood, I’ll have zero or very limited access to the world wide internet highway until I return the week of 11 Oct — and the first post to come sometime later, after I de-jetlag myself.

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The Shadow Knows

Shadow of GuiltSometimes, in the course of fulfilling obligations to friends or family, you do design work that you otherwise never would have done, never ever, not in a hundred years. Like, you might find yourself somehow agreeing to build a little Web site for your girlfriend’s uncle, who is a just-published novelist trying to promote the recent release of his first ever book, a small-press thriller about murders and arson and suspense and stuff. And that book might feature a cover design which you yourself never would have art directed, whose typography and illustration style might be pretty far afield from the visual style and design rules you yourself prefer. It happens, you know. But you make the best of it and try to deliver as competent and effective a product as you can, something that does its job well, even if it doesn’t necessarily serve your own particular interests. And then you just launch it, like I did today with ShadowofGuilt.com… and you take a little bit of pleasure in knowing that, at the very least, you helped out someone you know personally, rather than a huge megacorporation, for a change. What’s more, it’s nice knowing that the whole thing (all three pages of it!) validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict.

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Just Did It

Joy’s TriathlonI’m freakin’ exhausted after a weekend spent driving up and down the Jersey shoreline, and waking up at 04:00a this morning to slog all the way to Gateway National Park — but I shouldn᾿t be complaining. After all, it wasn’t me who swam, biked and ran the 2004 New York Metro Area edition of the Danskin Women’s Triathlon Series on the coldest day since spring broke. That was my girlfriend, who saw the culmination of 2+ months of early morning training come to a very satisfying end when she finished her first of this kind of event in a very respectable 1 hour and 31 minutes, ranking 124th out of all 701 competitors. She did great, and I’m very, very proud of her. I’m also happy that I get to go to sleep very soon.

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I Keep Going, and Going, and Going…

The ups and downs of this election are really wreaking havoc with my emotional health, and I’m almost at the point where I can no longer afford to devote this much attention reading a dozen weblogs and a dozen news sites every day. It’s the same way I feel about high-stakes sporting events: it takes a tremendous strain out of me to get too invested in something over which I have very little, if any, control. This weekend, at least, I’ll get a little bit of a break, as I’m heading out to the airport right now for a trip to see some of my family in Oakland, California. Internet access will be intermiitent, so there will be few if any posts until I’m back on Monday night or Tuesday morning — and maybe few if any chances to follow the race.

PowerBookGoing off on kind of a wild tangent: I’m on the train right now, and when I popped open my PowerBook and booted it up, I was reminded of a question to which I’ve long wanted to know the answer. That is, when embarking on a trip with a laptop, does it save more energy to shut down before unplugging and leaving home and then booting up, say, two hours later while on the road? Or, instead, is it more energy efficient to put the laptop to sleep first, and then simply wake it later while on the road? I would assume that booting up off the battery is more energy consuming than keeping a laptop in sleep mode for two hours, right? See, I’m already starting to focus on less weighty issues…

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Little Bit of Little Saigon

I would’t discourage anyone from trying any of the Vietnamese restaurants in New York, but even the most well-regarded of them pale next to what can be had in Westminster, California’s Little Saigon area. Being Vietnamese, I’m more critical of these establishments — and of how closely their cooking methods resemble my mother’s — than the average customer. But it’s not just a cultural thing, it’s a matter of dollar value, too. What you can get in Manhattan, in finer restaurants like Cyclo and Blue Velvet 1929 isn’t bad; it’s just disproportionately expensive given the inaccurate and uninspired dishes they bring to your table.

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Third Party Candidate

Mister President for PresidentUsing a fifteen dollar pack of Avery Ink Jet Transfers and some ten dollar Old Navy tees, my girlfriend and I turned out a couple of these “Mister President for President” shirts tonight. It was super-simple; we just ran the transfers through our cheap ink jet printer and then ironed the designs right to the tees, and we were done in fifteen minutes. Now we have something to wear to this Sunday’s march up to Madison Square Garden.

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Ooh, Ooh, It’s Magic

MagicMy girlfriend’s nephew — all of nine years old and a fount of irrepressible energy — came to stay with us for the weekend, and his new obsession is learning the magician’s trade: dice, disappearing cups of water, card tricks, magic wands, etc. He had a kids’ magic set that his grandmother bought for him, all plastic and barely serviceable enough even for a nine year-old, so on Saturday we thought we’d try to do a little better than that. We looked up “magic” in the phone book and headed to midtown to Tannen’s Magic, one of the oldest magicians’ shops in the city, and newly relocated to 45 West 34th Street.

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Flirtations with Fame

Two minor flirtations with fame today, one for me and one for my four-legged companion.

First, the prolific Mike Rundle has posted an interview with me at Business Logs, in which you can learn more about my secret origins, recent Web standards stirrings at Behavior and the future of weblogs as we know them (caveat emptor). Combined with a dollar bill, the answers I give to Mike’s questions may not get you more than a cup of coffee, but it’s still worth poking around the Business Logs Web site, where they’re trying to use weblogs to bring real business benefits to the organizations that are forward-thinking enough to capitalize on this still-evolving medium.

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