Tuesday, November 26, 2002

3650 Fu Continues

Well, even though I have discovered all manner of disturbing WAP services testing this GPRS color phone -- I can now check my POP3, Yahoo, and AOL accounts and various messengers -- I still prefer my laptop for all my wireless on-the-go needs. So I checked all the data plans and decided my old Verizon 11Kbps CDPD is still the best way to go. I have a new card, a Sierra 300 from eBay, and it scares me, because I paid 33 bucks for it, and new it costs around, oh, say, ten times as much minimum and other CDPD cards on eBay run 120 bucks.

It is a rugged and strong antenna, and quality drivers, unlike the previous Merlin and Spider cards. I cannot help but think that I am working with hardware that "fell off the back of a truck". Still, I'd better leave some good feedback.

(And I am posting over CDPD as a test. Since I am home, after this it is right back to standard 802.11b)

Thursday, November 14, 2002

Social FJ!!

Tuesday was the meetup of the socio-political comment board Plastic.com. We've had one national meetup before, where members in towns all over the world met up in their cities, and I was in the first one in Boston. It was such fun, three strangers, Xiamin and sydneyschafer and me. We hung out for hours and we just talked and we seemed to connect and it was fun.

So Tuesday Plastic and us did it again. I got to the Someday cafe in Davis Square first, the kind of place I like, with steamed everythings, no alcohol, some Toscanini's ice-cream, and all the chairs are mismatched comfy chairs. There was nowhere to sit close to where we agreed on meetup.com, but my old instincts of a thousand tiny gay coffeeshops in Amsterdam kicked in, my stalking instinct, my I'll-just-sit-here-on-this-stool-tillyou-leave skills. In a crowded cafe I had a table in ten minutes. Xiamin and sydneyschaefer came in, one by one, and we just easily connected again.

With an interruption. Four guys were very busy setting stuff up, but we didn'y understand what, and there it was: a big loudspeaker connected to a taperecorder, a full big drum kit, and a base guitar. So the two guys in black -- the base player even wore a baret and small dark sunglasses -- would play their drums and guitar, somewhat abstractly melody- and rhyth-wise over a backdrop of spoken word records from the fifties and sixties. The first one was a smoking-cessation record by a voice sounding so earnest it sounded like Dick Nixon, telling us that we will allow positive suggestions to enter our mind, and we will be free of the need to smoke, hypnotically, over and over. The other was a record of two sexologists ostensibly talking about preparing your children for sex but mostly about the evils of dancing.

The band was so completly earnest about this irony-laden sophistry that it became completly post-ironic. We ended up actually being able to evaluate it without giggling too much, just because they and the audience knew it was such a ludicrous idea.

I am not making this up. Any of it.

Saturday, November 09, 2002

So Much For Stable Backup

The CD-R that contains all that I have of my work at Children's and my best mail from when I just joined motss and all my writings I wanted to keep -- most supremely embarrassing -- developed a scratch. In the foil. I can see through it.

I believe in leaving stuff behind, and detaching from cruft, but I'd like to do it on my own time instead of Gladys'. I'm mostly pissed about my Children's stuff -- I wanted to show it as part of a portfolio, antique as it was.