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A Three-Hour Tour

Circle Line CruisesMy dad is visiting from California for a few days. To keep him entertained, we took a cruise completely around Manhattan. It was actually and for real a three-hour tour, and it was a beautiful day to do it today too. I found out about it through Citysearch (which also, apparently just this minute, launched a redesigned interface), and at first I was a little wary of the overtly tourist-oriented air of the cruise’s operator, Circle Lines. While the guide on the boat was remarkably cheesy, he was also remarkably well-informed, and I found out a lot of things about Manhattan that I had never known before. Next time I find myself in a position of trying to entertain out-of-town guests, I’d happily take this cruise again.

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Post-Employment Life Is Groovey

GrooveNearly two weeks ago my job came to an end, for incredibly stupid reasons — not the least of which is the company had been mismanaged and downsized to near liflessness. Suffice it to say that I’m trying to put it all behind me, and my main focus now is the next stage of my life. I’ve been collaborating with some friends on a side project in the meantime, and in the course of it we’ve tried out Groove, a peer-to-peer collaborative platform geared towards businesses but available free to consumers. It’s amazingly robust and, aside from a few issues with speed, a pleasure to use.

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Open for Business

Khoi’s StoreI have my own store now. For real! Seriously. Amazon.com is now adding a new tab to its venerable pantheon of tabs — this one has your name on it. If you’re a registered Amazon.com customer, that is. The megaretailer is leveraging their formidable recommendation engine to push more customized recommendation items to all of us buying machines.

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The Ghost and Mr. Clowes

Ghost WorldForget the “X-Men” and even next year’s “Spiderman” movie. The best-ever cinematic adaptation of a comic book is Terry Zwigoff’s “Ghost World,” based on the work of the same name by Daniel Clowes. “Ghost World” was, admittedly, my least favorite of the serialized stories that appeared in Clowes’s brilliant “Eightball” comic book, but it remains head and shoulders above most anything drawn and written by hand. Zwigoff has turned it into a sublime and incisive feature film that’s likely to leave just about anyone laughing satsifactorily at its pathetic cast of characters and their prosaic circumstances — and there’s no simple, Hollywood-esque redemption at the end, no tidy comedic denouement, no happily ever after.

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Like, an Awesome Factory

AwesomeFactoryThe spam filter in Microsoft Entourage is useful beyond words, but once in a while it disqualifies emails that shouldn’t be. Which is how I nearly never got to look at Awesome Factory, Aaron Bergeron’s hilarious collection ofcomics. Bergeron draws like a kid but has the sharp, dry, faux-naive wit of an, er,adult. It’s gut-busting stuff. His casting of Batman as a vice-principal is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen onthe Internet.

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