(from 2003)

Mahlen Morris's weblog from 2003, in newer-items-at-the-top style. (All the links to places on the site are broken and just being kept for history.)

Probably reflecting my new employer (shopping.com), we went crazy with the online shopping this year, practically all of it from small speciality merchants like e-musicalgifts.com, but also from Amazon.com. So yesterday four seperate boxes arrived at my desk, and there should be plenty more next week. It's like Christmas at work; well, except that these aren't things for me.

My work is now running a TV campaign, and you can watch the ad. I like it, and so does Diane. I have a piece of the "candy glass" the actor goes through as a souvenier.

As i was pulling off the curb to go to work this morning, I noticed that the odometer on the 1989 Camry I drive was at 129,999 miles, and by the next block, it was at 130,000. So, for it's birthday, I took it to Jiffy-Lube.

Also, mahlen.org has now been online for four whole years. Hey, that's longer than Webvan lasted. Clearly my strategy of a site with almost no content created by free labor is a winner; let the VC frenzy commence!

We're at an event for our friend Janette Kim, who owns the cafe we go to but also is a fledgling writer, having just had two of her Buddhist-inspired pieces published. However almost all the speakers are speakers Korean, so almost everything is making no sense to us. This mainly then an exercise in looking alert, one I'm likely failing as I type this.

My workplace changed its name to Shopping.com, and local NBC affiliate KNTV11 did a little piece about it, which, thanks to my Mom taping it and Clark digitizing it, you can now watch. And see me fold shirts (after 14 years of being an engineer!) But these aren't streaming videos, so you'll have a bit of a wait before you can see it.

MPEG version (19.6 Meg)

.MOV version (18.8 Meg)

We are in the midst of several renovations around the house; painting the exterior, replacing windows, replacing the door to the garden. Part of painting the exterior invloves removing the front door to have it sanded down and refinished. All of this is happening under the wise and watchful eye of Diane, of course.

So, yesterday the workmen took our front door and replaced it a sheet of plywood nailed to the frame. Not only does it give the house a condemned crack house look, but since I now enter the house through the garage, I get that sneaking into the house feeling.

We worked out in the gym at the Biltmore with it's small but quite unusual underground pool in the morning, although my workout was cut short because the treadmill i was using quit early (I think of it as winning the game; whoohoo!). I went around the corner to buy us new Thomas Guides for L.A. and California, and then we went to a store in North Hollywood called Arte de Mexico, a great shop for designers and such. After nearby Mexican food, we went to a cool used book store called The Iliad, tempted in by the cool mural on the exterior wall.

Then around 4pm, we finally worked up the will to leave Los Angeles, and drove back up I-5 (stopping in Santa Nella for some pea soup), fianlly getting home around 11:30pm. Phew, what a fun weekend!

Forgot to mention that at last night's opening I was standing just a few feet from one of actors on CSI, Eric Szmanda.

Anyway, today we got up late and were having breakfast downstairs when who should be there but Shepard Fairey again, recovering from the opening. Then we went to the L.A. County Museum of Art to see the Pushkin Museum exhibit of French artworks. Very fortunately, Diane found someone who was selling her tickets, because they only let people in once an hour, and we would have had to wait a couple hours otherwise. It was a bit crowded inside, but wow, some of that work was jaw-droppingly beautiful, and how often do you Matissse's and Gaughin's and Renoir's and Bonnard's and Degas' in one room, Sadly, we've not run into any of them at the hotel. We also saw a small exhibit of Halloween costumes at the Craft and Folk Art Museum.

After a long nap at the hotel, we wandered around the block and found Water Grill restaurant, which was awfully good and not even remotely cheap. Then we rushed back to watch the new Alias, cause we are fools for the idiotic action thing.

We got a fairly late start, not leaving until 12:40pm, but had a pretty smooth drive down to Los Angeles, where we are staying at the Millenium Biltmore Hotel in downtown L.A. We quickly changed and headed over to the sixspace gallery in the dowtown L.A.light industrial area to see the new Shepard Fairey (Obey Giant) show, including some huge pieces. Ran into the woman who helped us out at the Obey Giant space at the Wiltern building the last time we were here, and Shepard himself, both of whom were surprised that we drove down to see the show. Didn't buy anything this time, although Diane had a great idea that I can't tell you yet, cause it night not happen.

Then we ate at the hotel restaurant, which was nothing special. Tomorrow, off to the LACMA!

Nothing really drastic for me personally, but DealTime has renamed itself Shopping.com, so that's officially where I now work. The new site sure is nicer looking, too, plus I have a little Shoppy (the smiling shopping bag logo) plush toy on top of my monitor. At least maybe this will be easier for people to remember.

Ha! Artworks that look like weapons and robots made from 1950's vacuum cleaner parts, for that retro-futuristic look. Be sure and check out this most excellent film about one of their laser weapon pieces. I wish i had a few of these babies around the house.

We've been eager to get a new car for quite some time, as our 1989 Camry has been plagued with more and more expensive problems. So we (along with my friend Rom) test drove a Mini Cooper today, and it's a pretty decent car all right. Handles well, a bit more sporty and road aware than we're used to, but, oh, what a joy to park. Haven't ordered one yet (it'll take at least three months to get one), but we're piecing together the various options we want.

We packed our stuff into the car and picked up coffee and food for a morning with Kalpa and Nila, who works as a script supervisor to numerous Hollywood productions. Then we drove home, pretty uneventfully, and thankfully not as hot as on the way (or maybe i've gotten used to the heat). Miraculously, we did all our unpacking that night. We had a great time in L.A. I'm already missing being on vacation, and we only get back 5 hours ago!

After a late breakfast at Blue Corn Cafe in Culver City, we went to Pasadena to the Norton Simon Museum. While the painting collection was pretty good and the sculpture garden quite nice, the Asian collection of Hindu and Buddhist just blew us away; just plain beautiful, and large enough to be almost overwhelming.

We met Kalpa and her adult son Mesquite for dinner at Emerald Thai on Venice Blvd, which was not bad at all, afterwards we helped decorate Kalpa's cow mask for her role in a Hare Krishna play she doing at this weekend's Rathayatra,

Today we started with coffee at Continental Cafe, which is across the street from the Sony studios building. While we were in there (I learned later) actress Heather Graham and an actor Diane hasn't placed yet were in line in front of us. I didn't even notice because I was trying to figure out if the nerdy-looking book that some guy was reading was one I had (it wasnt). And of course, because I have eyes for no one but my Diane. :) Then in the afternoon we went to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which I've long wanted to see. It had some great exhibits on how celluloid dice decay (courtesy of magician and actor Ricky Jay), illustrations of odd superstitions, and several sculptures so small you need a microscope to view them. Even more delightfully odd than I had expected, and even Diane enjoyed more than she thought she would. Then we went to the Wilshire area to find the gallery associated with Shepard Fairey (of Obey Giant fame) in the gorgeous Art Deco Biltmore building. The gallery show was being taken down, but I met the people there, including Shepard (which was making me feel all fanboy, since I own six posters, the Paul Frank bag, and other Giant stuff), and looked around a lot. Grace, who runs the Giant site and used to live in S.F., was kind enough to show us the current unsold posters and Shepard's little-known fine art work (he mantioned that if he puts anything on the site costing more than $30 he gets angry emails accusing him of selling out). Diane encouraged me to start giving his fine art work a look, so we ended up buying one of his modified album covers, this one for Jam Master Jay's memorial record. Of course, the tricky thing will be deciding where to put it... We had dinner at Govinda's again, and then we hung out outside the Hare Krishna temple waiting to pick up Kalpa, where we met a young monk visiting from the tiny Portland temple, who after a while started rushing through his spiel (a bit too unthinkingly, I fear). But a decent guy amongst all the youngsters partying outside the temple (which owns the whole block, hence the lack of neighbor complaints).

Drove Kalpa to work at her law office, then went to a cafe and then to Diane's friend Katya, an accomplished artist and sometimes art dealer. Leafed through a bunch of her new work, then went to lunch with her and her friend Pablo Campos, also a very accomplished painter. We had Iranian food at Javan; I had really good chicken on rice with lentils and dates.

Then the three of us went to the Will Rogers Park, and hiked around a trail to a creek. We also saw a film crew (SO L.A.) filming something at the park about 1920's style football, it looked like. Then Diane and I went back to Kalpa's to change and rest, then back and had a fabulous meal from Katya, later joined by her daughters Ilena and Tanya and Katya's former husband Vladamir.

We got up early this morning to drive to Los Angeles for a last fun vacation thing before I go back to work next week. We drove down I-5 with no hassles and missed most of the traffic. First went to superhip Giant Robot and sister store GR2 on Sawtelle, and bought a nifty sweatshirt, a strange multi-exposure camera and two graphic novels.

Then went to the Hare Krishna temple to meet our friend Kulpa and eat at Govinda's. Kulpa had to rehearse for a ceremony, so we went to Venice beach and walked around for a while. Now at Kulpa's house where we are crashing, but it is so flaming hot that I find hard to believe I'll ever sleep tonight.

An expanded version of the Harper's article that provides the genesis for these events, this is McManus's tale of his unexpected success at the World Series of Poker and a concurrent sensational Las Vegas murder trial, punctuated by excursions into the history of poker, Las Vegas, and what McManus regards as the bickering between two sides to himself, "Good Jim", and "Bad Jim". Perhaps not as focused as the article, but still very entertaining and intriguing (hmmm, do i have any friends who still play poker?)

A friend at Harmonic loaned this to me a while back. A more detailed version of the film plot. Clever (almost too) most of the way through. None of the memorable lines from the film are here, though. A decent simple read, nothing too grand or strenuous here.

The gang from Trainspotting ten years later, centered around an attempt to make some money by making a porno film. Funny and corrupt as hell, and the plot winds through the many different characters quite deftly. Plus, Begbie, the poster boy for "poor impulse control", is back. One of Welsh's best.

After interviewing at seven different companies, today I agreed to sign on to a job at DealTime. I'll start after another week of vacation. Phew! I have to say that I'm relieved that the search is over.

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a relatively recent addition to the Extreme Programming/Agile Development styles of software development process. This book successfully reproduces the experience of watching someone do TDD on real problems, and so illustrates the methods, rationale, and mindset needed for doing it. I found Beck's arguments quite convincing, and so I'm trying TDD for a home project I'm working on. One great thing about the process is that an individual coder can use it without having to change all of the process around them, unlike XP, which requires lots of people to do XP for it to work (in other words, you can do TDD without telling anyone). Highly recommended to anyone coding for a living.

A collection of short stories wherein the same characters act out dramas of the animal world in the fashion of various literary styles; for example, the story about scorpions reads like a tale of a reluctant gunslinger forced to take on all comers. Boffa is a biologist, so the writing isn't anything to interesting, but this slight volume is still funny and you may pick up a bit of animal biology as well.

Last week on Wednesday night I was sitting in the office when I heard a screech and 20 seconds later Wanfu stumbles into the office, eyes closed, drooling, and absolutely reeking of skunk smell, so overpowering my ability to smell that often in didn't smell like a skunk. So Diane and I corraled him into the bathroom, and I drove around looking for skunk smell remedies before finally getting the ingredients for one (which we now keep prepared in a bottle. By then it was 1AM and the whole house smelled bad, so we moved the bed into the living room on that hot night, just to avoid the worst of the smell. I'll note that this is the third time that he has been skunked, and refrain from drawing conclusions about his intelligence.

That night I noticed that the small door to the crawl space under our house was knocked off, so I put it back into place. Within a few days, it was off again. So currently, we figure that either there are skunks living under our house, or else Wanfu pulled off the door to look for skunks.

Then earlier this week I was walking around the block in the evening and twice saw skunks snuffling around. I'm hoping that neither of these are tenants of ours.

My Dad's been in a convalescant home in Orinda since he was released from the hospital some months ago. He needs a lot of oxygen to keep his blood oxygen levels normal, like a big metal canister's worth every day. But understandably, while he understands that he gets better care at the home, he misses the house, so today Diane and I tried packing Dad into the car and driving him to his house, with a little portable tank of O2. It went pretty smoothly, and Mom seemed thrilled to have him there, even if only in the driveway for 20 minutes. Sometime probably later this week, we'll try a multi-hour visit so that Dad can hang out in the garden.

Interestingly to me, while driving to the house, i'd thought that Dad would be marvelling at the beauty of the area that he hasn't seen for a couple months; instead he was telling a story about his roommate's ability to make the personnel at the home feel miserable.

Goodbye lunch for Dave Haney, held at a yummy Thai place on Brannon @ 4th St. called Koh Samui & The Monkey.

I'm learning Visual Basic (shudder) for work now, and compared to Java and the many other languages I've used, it's just plain nasty. It's so convoluted and gone through so many changes over it's life that it makes MSVC C seem elegant and simple. Plus the rule of thumb for VB documentation writers seems to be, "Make it much longer." The book in the picture is 1300 pages. Writing code in VB makes me feel dirty.

There was a big crane truck outside my window at work today, lifting a sign onto the side of the building. I wish for my nephew Kyle's sake, that these pictures were bigger, but you'll just have to imagine how cool this was.

Not my usual cup of tea, but Diane and I went to a lecture given by Carl Crossman at the Legion of Honor building on the topic of Chinese export porcelain in pre-Civil War America. Then we went to a reception for him at a house that we walk by all the time on our way to our cafe. Not the absolutely most thrilling of events, but it was different from our usual Sunday routine.

A well-executed telling of the origin, rise, spread, and mutation of "fighting robots" as entertainment. At the core is a chilling tale of the dangers of inflexible people who have equal control of a company (the original Robot Wars producers). I'm not a huge robot fan (I've never actually seen any of the fighting robot shows, since we don't have cable), but it was good sick-in-bed reading.

I was sick with a cold for several days a few weeks ago, and about the only thing enjoyable about it was that I could read a lot. I can't describe it well enough to do it justice, so I'll just say that The Corrections is a fantastic novel that you should go read as soon as possible. Franzen has a remarkably sharp eye for the telling detail and inner emotion.

I loved Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon and Interface, so i was curious about Stephenson's first novel, which I'd heard that Stephenson had distanced himself from. Now i see why he was not so wild about it; while the first half is some very funny campus satire (with Stephenson's nerdy obsessions already visible), the second half careens off the track and into a lake (metaphorically speaking). This book is really only for the Stephenson completist.

Rob D. loaned me this, and it's excellent. A well written collections of essays about the DNA that define us, with some information (like that the X and Y chromosome in some species can become quite hostile to each other) that I was surprised I hadn't heard before. I can't really give you any examples off the top of my head, but it's a great book, trust me.

I've only been getting geekier as I get older, a fact that I can hardly say bothers me. But I don't really assume that this site is read by people as nerdy as me (I still think of my relatives as being the main audience), so I've just created a Links of Geekness on the menu bar, in case anyone reading this is interested in similar topics.

A personal site with lots of answers to questions you didn't know you were curious about. Like, how much bread does one jar of Vegemite cover? How big of a pool would all the blood inside you make? What's it like getting a speeding ticket in Sacramento? And so on; very entertaining.

For my 39th birthday last week, Diane took me for a nice relaxing weekend in Sebastopol, in Sonoma County. It was really really nice there. We went to a nursery that had a carnivorous plants wing, the delicous Kozlowski Farms tasting room and store, Hardcore Expresso on the side of 116, bought some smoked salmon at a roadside cart, and got enzyme baths and massages at our favorite bodywork place, Osmosis. Ahhhhh... Thanks again babe!

A couple unexplained graffitis on the streets of San Francisco.

I interviewed at Google yesterday, and couldn't resist taking this photo. The people there were very nice, and I especially liked the fact that I was in buildings known as 'pi' and 'e'. Those were the toughest interview questions I've ever faced, though, they don't think small there. I didn't totally crash and burn, but I doubt I totally wowed them either, so time will tell...

I liked this book because it wasn't what i expected. In no way is this a guide to finding one's true passion, with lots of self tests and exercises. It's a much more direct approach to the question; ask people who've considered this question for themselves, and see what happened to them. The book does do a good job of shattering the cliches of major career changes; usually the new direction was something that was a tiny glimmer of an idea before they were able to try it. But for something as amorphous as finding a path in life, narrative may be the only useful tool.

While reading this, i kept searching myself for some hint of some thing I'd rather be doing, but no dice. Guess I get to stay a big nerd; phew!

Just barely not quite as good as her previous Arranged Marriage, but much better than her novel Sister of My Heart, another collection of short stories about Indian life and the life of Indian immigrants to the Bay Area, probing the frictions and conflicts of immigrant life.

An exploration of how the Web or Internet is so different from everyday experience that the metaphors we use to describe it still aren't right (e.g., we talk of web sites as places you can go to, yet unlike real geography, all web sites are equally close to one another, as if Oakland and Paris were just as far from my library as the front door). Pretty interesting stuff, although the anti-AI section seemed both out of place and not very convincing, and i'm pretty sure I didn't come away with any sort of Unified Theory.

Dad's been at Summit hospital in Oakland for the past week. Yesterday he was moved out of the Cardio unit to a rehab place where they can work on his strength and living skills. Clearly we are at a turning point in my parents lives, as Dad has, for the past several months, been getting weaker. I think this is partly due to his not eating as much as he needs to, and partly the fact that he is 77. But Mom needs paid help to assist in taking care of him. The open questions are how much help, where will it be, and how will they pay for it. Diane, because of her experience dealing with these questions with her Aunt Minnie, has been immeasurably helpful in getting the various balls rolling in the right directions. And it's been great that Clark has been up here for the past week. But it's been rough on everyone nonetheless, and in retrospect I wish I had noticed the severity of the situation sooner, so that these changes could have been handled more gracefully.

I just went one block in 17 minutes while trying to get onto the Bay Bridge. Sucks.

Whoa! Clark's in town, but it's the evil Clark from the alternative universe.

Just got a dual-head card for my machine at work, all connected to same computer and using one mouse. Nutty goodness!

I saw this banged up ferris wheel horse in the back of a truck at the Safeway at the beach.

Diane and I took a walk in Sutro Heights Park after work, where it was seriously windy, but sure had a nice view.

Cory reading from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom on Haight Street a couple months ago.

Mmmm. House-brewed root beer from Magnolia on Haight.

I'm now the sole Java engineer at my job. It's pretty lonely here. Pictures are of two of my favorite past coworkers, Muffy, with her split-keyboard-chair and Marcel, taken at a party at his newly bought house.

I'm not certain how well you can see it in this photo, but this is a pedestrian crossing sign with a sticker on it that makes it appear that the figure is using a hula hoop. The idea that someone would go to the trouble of preprinting these stickers for such whimsy fills me with glee.

On Saturday night Diane and I went to a robot-themed party at Fort Mason, the event being a book release party for a book called Gearheads, a history of the backstage legal madness behind the robots-destroy-each-other-on-TV shows. Naturally many people brought their robots with them, including a drivable couch and a cool little flying robot, among others. Ran into Danger CEO Andy Rubin there (who I'd met at a Danger developer shindig at Blue Chalk in Palo Alto), one of three (!) people demonstrating their Segway's, along with his own robotic work. Before the show we ran into James, who was having dinner at Greens.

Diane and I are right now visiting Diane's Aunt Minnie at the care facility in Daly City that she lives in. Here is Aunt Minnie and one of her fellow residents, Wilber Muir.

That's me sitting in a cafe, and my Dad and Mom at their house in the East Bay on a recent visit.

Some of the Badtz-Maru, Obey Giant, and other stuff I've collected on display at my office.

I was walking back from lunch a couple weeks ago and noticed, behind the forbidding Wonder Bread factory where the massive delivery trucks gather, a 4 foot-wide clump of these flowers around a tree, trying to assert that life flourishes in all sorts of unlikely places, apparently all on its own.

A picture of the Golden Gate Bridge from on it, and the bison in Golden Gate Park, near our house.

Calla lillies (sp?) and Wanfu the younger.

Diane and I went for a walk in San Francisco's little-used Lincoln Park yesterday. It's amazing to have this stunning view just a few blocks from our house. We hope, with the days getting longer, to walk more in the evenings, before the evening sloth and distractions take over.

I've now made a system for me to add entries here by sending emails from my Hiptop. So there will be a flurry of entries in a few minutes, assuming it works :)

Since we don't have children of our own, we don't go to child events often. OK, ever. But a friend of Diane's has a 10-year-old daughter who is in an elementary school production of Mary Poppins, so we went to go see it. Since it was in Tiburon, is was amazingly elaborate, to a ludicrous degree; it was like a get-involved-in-your-child's-school program for the parents, with several adults involved in each of makeup, costumes, set production, the band, direction, and so on. The big production numbers were lots of fun (with more kids onstage, they loosened up). While watching it, i remembered that when i was doing theatre stuff in junior high and high school, most of my onstage time was spent standing in place and trying to remember lines.

It's official; I'm looking for a new job. While things are fine and still going at Harmonic (for which I am very glad, it should be said), there's just not that much challenging, interesting work for me to do there anymore. For those interested, this is my current resume.

On Wednesday night I went to a dinner at Blue Chalk in Palo Alto with many of the personnel from Danger, makers of my Hiptop, as well as other people who are writing programs for it. It was a predictably nerdy event, and a lot of fun. I got to play with a color Hiptop, which was more compelling than I had expected. I would certainly love to work for them, even though they are in Palo Alto, but they don't seem to have any relevant openings. So I'll keep working on my Hiptop Kitchen Timer application on my own.

Diane and I try to celebrate our anniversary every month on the 4th, usually in some small way, like by saying "Happy Anniversary" to each other a lot during the day. But last Friday, I was napping on the couch in our office after a pretty long week for both of us, Diane said, hey, let's go for a drive. I knew something was up, and that's always fine with me. So she took us to The Beach Chalet, where we had our rehearsal dinner when we got married. It turned out that she had made dinner reservations there for us. Wasn't that nice of her?

She had the lobster (I'm personally not fond of food I have to disassemble, but she tucked right into it), and i had the Mahi-Mahi and a couple Cuban Mojito's, possibly my new favorite drink (my previous favorite was a Russian Quaalude; my recipe is equal parts Vodka, Kahlua, and Bailey's, chilled, straight up). What a wonderful wife; thanks babady!

Well, I'm at a few places on the Web, actually. So there's now a page of links to the other places I write on the web. For example, did you know that i run a site devoted to erotic turnip sculptures? Well, I don't. Now when you read that page, you'll know that, and that will, um, prepare you for the harsh realities of the bleak, bleak world. OK, no, it won't. I really shouldn't post at 1:24 AM...

Since the Hiptop SDK has now been released (though it's not quite complete yet), I've set up a Hiptop Development Wiki, which I'm hoping will be a useful persistant resource for those writing code for it. I'm working on a Kitchen Timer application right now, which is coming along nicely.

A cracking great book about the implications of mobile computational devices that can communicate with each other. From text messages leading to the downfall of a presidency to mesh networks and SETI@Home, this is an inspiring set of runimations on how, for good or ill, these new technologies are leading to new ways for people to cooperate. Reading this inspired me to get the Hiptop that i still adore.

I'm continuing to read the Lord of the Rings books after seeing the movie. This one i enjoyed more than Fellowship, mainly because the film is different enough from the book that there's quite a bit of material that isn't covered in the film. So this was pretty cool. I can now start to see why so many people have been so obsessed with this world.

One thing I love about working at Harmonic Communications is that when survey companies call me to take a survey, pretty soon they ask if you work in Advertising, and since I do, that always kicks me out of the survey. So i don't get asked to take them, and I don't have to lie to get out of it.

I totally love the Hiptop I got last week. It is so well done and so enjoyable to use. I gave my previous cellphone (A StarTac) back to the company I work at, and I no longer carry my Palm IIIxe, so it's nicer just to carry the one thing. But having my email and Web and all that available all the time is just great. While the phone coverage is not as good as my StarTac (we went to the light house at Point Bonita on Saturday, and the Hiptop was offline through much of Marin), it works great in the urban areas that i spend the vast bulk of my time in. Even when I'm sitting at a desktop computer, i'll Hiptop to sites or check my email just because it's so amazing to me that I can. It's really an amazing device with some great software on it. And since the two other members of my team at work also got Hiptop recently, we've been trading a lot of tips and discoveries and other stuff.

Now that I've made the leap, I can't imagine wanting to go without it.

An interesting book of ideas, with several different intersecting plot lines, one of them told in a series of letters about a place where chess and game board pieces live a strange life indeed. A very unusual novel, it took a while for me to grasp the rhythm of the book, but the ending was very satisfying. I'm not quite sure I "got" the book, but it was entertaining. Loaned to me by Rob D.

If i had children, and a web site that I knew for certain Diane would never read, and that none of her friends would ever read, and i was a lot funnier, this would be it. For example, "Oh, and about that 'special bond' breastfeeding helps you develop. Come on. If you clenched a spiral-cut ham to your chest for eight hours a day, you'd develop a 'special bond' with it too." Good stuff.

I'm giving up my old work-supplied cell phone number (637-2991) in favor of my new Hiptop number, 415-465-2166. That's the one to use.

I'm typing this in via my new Hiptop from work. Let's see how it does. So far, it's a very impressive machine.

Since Amazon.com is selling Danger Hiptops for FREE, i ordered one to replace the StarTAC cell phone from work i currently use. Oh, yes, I will be Mr. Wireless Web Surfer Dude. This and a Mini have been my Things Mahlen Craves of late.

I was thinking about the Hollywood film i was an extra in back in 1984, No Small Affair, and looking at the link i realized that one of the goofy teenagers in the film (who I do remember from being on the set) was Tim Robbins. Just now i looked up his Kevin Bacon number, and since he's a one, I'm a two. I'm so Mr. Hollywood now; talk to my agent, babe.

Went to the T-Mobile store in downtown S.F. today, and played with a live and working Danger Hiptop, a small device that is a phone, and IM client and email sender and web browser. With a teeny but fully useable keyboard. I really liked it. Diane is threatening to make me wait until my birthday in May to get it. Since this will be my 40 - 1, I'm sorry, my 39th birthday, some sweet toy would certainly be nice to get.

A thin but interesting book about the beginnings of the Oxford English Dictionary and one of it's early major contributors, an American convicted of murder and sentenced to a British insane asylum. With that plot to hold the book together, the interesting parts are the history and difficulty in creating the OED, and the history of dictionaries.

A very funny and well told story about what if the biblical apocalypse doesn't quite go as it is described in Revelations. So good i read it twice.

A great treasure trove of San Francisco trivia, facts, photos, and more. I could probably read it for hours.