| Thursday, March 6, 2008 |
20:41 - Do Danish cops eat Danishes?
http://rottenindenmark.vox.com/library/post/somethine-about-cops.html
|
(top) |
This was forwarded to me weeks ago, but I only just now got around to reading it. Good thing I didn't just let it rot; it's brilliant.
I'm picturing a replay of the scene from Zoolander:
IT Tech: The files in the computer prove he did not steal the credit card.
Police officer: *Smashes iMac on the ground to get at the files*
That's just one of the comments. After reading the story it seems spookily appropriate.
|
|
11:46 - SDKin' it to 'em
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080306-live-coverage-of-the-iphone-software-r
|
(top) |
This is quite a set of announcements. Spore? Exchange? AppStore? Spore?
And they're gonna do all this on existing iPhone hardware, huh? Sounds too good to be true; I guess that must explain how marvelously their stock has been doing lately.
|
|
09:00 - A few first impressions
|
(top) |
Things I miss already about California:
• Left-turn signals (here they have right-turn signals, which seems a less effective use of a phase)
• Mountains you can see from the road
• Polite drivers
• 24-hour grocery stores
• Aesthetics and décor in the infrastructure
• Being able to park myself, anywhere, like in a garage or something, and not have to worry about getting my car back all dented up and pay through the nose for the privilege
• The ability to use my debit card for pretty much everything, and never touch cash except to give tips (and sometimes not even then)
• Sourdough bread (that isn't treated as some novelty to be had only on occasion at specialty stores)
• Not having to drive twenty minutes to get to the basic necessities
• Lunchtime repartée
• My house, and its denizens
Things I don't miss:
• $500 power bills (though the gain is neatly cancelled out here by bridge and parking fees)
• $3.90 gas (it's only $3.80 here)
• Um... I'll think of more, but I'm still wallowing at the moment.
I'll bet my spirits will pick up once my furniture arrives and I can start putting the silly material bits of my life together again.
UPDATE: One thing I will not miss: BMWs. With a couple of notable exceptions, BMWs in Silicon Valley—particularly the omnipresent M3, but just as frequently other 3-series, 5-series, or Z3/Z4s—are ridiculously overapt to be seen dipping abruptly from lane to lane, cutting across gore points, tailgating, and otherwise acting like they're driven by first-time marketing-management-promotion recipients who fancy themselves racecar drivers. Oddly, here there's hardly a BMW of any kind to be seen, and the ones that there are drive like sane, normal people. Astonishing.
UPDATE 3/7/08: Okay, I take that back. Just this morning I nearly had my door blown sailing into the Hudson by some graying-templed clown in a new 330i coupe. No sooner had I identified the telltale rapidly-dodging-left-to-right-across-my-field-of-view kidney-shaped grille hovering in my mirror entangled with a couple of other cars behind me, than said grille and the car it was attached to darted its way in between those two cars, jammed its way ahead, and then blasted southward on the empty tarmac ahead at full scream. There was a cop waiting for just such things not half a mile further down the road, but I saw no evidence of pursuit or apprehension, so his sense of invincibility is surely unchastened. Good to know some things never change.
|
| Wednesday, March 5, 2008 |
12:53 - Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow
http://dimer.tamu.edu/simplog/archive.php?blogid=3&pid=6111
|
(top) |
This won't make the Steve very happy.
Via Jim H.
|
| Tuesday, March 4, 2008 |
08:40 - Beatboxing Basset
http://www.beatbox.tele2.se/
|
(top) |
It's... wonderful what they can do nowadays.
|
| Monday, March 3, 2008 |
22:55 - Holy hell
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/ireports/2008/03/03/irpt.gering.rough.landing.cnn
|
(top) |
Sleep tight, everyone who has upcoming plane tickets.
That is one skillful pilot. Another video here (slightly better quality). Via Lance.
|
|
22:27 - Fortune's wheel
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0802/gallery.mostadmired_top20.fortune/i
|
(top) |
Guess who's at the top of Fortune's list of the Top 20 Most Admired Companies of 2008?
It is a tribute to its CEO that Apple, which ten years ago seemed headed for the slag heap, is No. 1 on this list. Steve Jobs has always had a knack for weaving magic out of silicon and software. But who knew he could build a $24 billion (in sales) company on the strength of a portable jukebox and a computer with a single-digit market share?
Hey, remember when Apple was beleaguered?
Via Lance.
|
|
22:15 - Wait. What?
|
(top) |
Yeah, New York. No, I'm not kidding.
There are a variety of reasons, some of which are coherent, some of which are publicly airable, and some of which are neither. But foremost in the rationale center of my brain is the fact that I'm 32 years old and have still never lived anywhere but California. I want to try something different, preferably while I'm still young and unattached enough to be able to make the most of it. Above all I don't want to wake up one day and be fifty and think, "Well, damn, now I guess I'll never know what it could have been like."
There are things that bug me about California, to be sure—and a big part of this move is predicated on the desire to get away from some of the grating, aching, downright maddening qualities of life in such an epicenter of endemic social solipsism and intellectual incest, such an unabashed cliché of all that drives the political beast in me freaking batty, as the Bay Area. I'd like to try living in a place where registering cars is a trifle less of a hassle, where the 9/11 Truther protestors are regularly balanced by counterprotestors on the opposite streetcorner, where the monthly power bill spends the majority of its time closer to two digits than four. I'd like to find out what it's like to live in a place that seems designed for doing business, in a no-nonsense and grown-up sort of way, with all the rough edges exposed and no time spared for elegance or aesthetic appeal—rather than in the theme-park world of Silicon Valley, where you stroll through manicured lawns and glide through smoothly concrete-sheathed freeway underpasses and cruise down glassy boulevards flanked by perfectly regular crepe myrtles in the immaculately formed median landscaping on the way to spotless chain restaurants and manicured Tuscan-esque supermarket bakery sections on highways that sweep their way around the feet of ridiculously pretty mountains that afford you a panoramic view of a hundred miles of land that could have been a National Park if it weren't for the Gold Rush. These things spoil a guy. And they'll instill a certain sense of unhurried, unruffled somnambulism, just at the time of life when one needs all the stimuli that one's creative spirit can absorb.
But I'll also admit that these things about California that I allegedly want to get away from are the things that I simply want to learn to appreciate better. I want to have something to compare them to. Just as driving to Alaska—even in the summer—gave me a sense of what it would be like to live in some remote and rural part of the world where it gets very cold for part of the year and the nearest Apple Store is a long plane trip away, New York will give me to realize just how much I've come to treat as indispensable in the California lifestyle: whether it's skyline drives in the Santa Cruz Mountains, or granite-walled skiing in 10,000-foot mountains, or Round Table Pizza, or not having to invest in a 4-wheel-drive vehicle just to stay on the driveway in the winter, or an abundance of sourdough bread in the neighborhood grocery store. Or, indeed, the people—the very people from whose vacuous political groupthink I need a break, but whose humor and wordplay and sense of fun and general easygoingness lacks an analog in the East Coast lifestyle. I need to be reminded of these things first-hand. Otherwise I'll find myself in precisely the spot I hope like hell to avoid: stuck in California at 50, simmering in an unfocused sensation of ambient unease, knowing I've got it good yet unable to appreciate the good that I've got. Chris McCandless, after all, knew and proclaimed in the scrawls that became his epitaph that "the West is the Best"—but he said that as an Easterner who knew both coasts from experience.
So I've severed no bridges, I'm happy to say—I still have my house in the Valley, replete with deck and hot tub and custom-rejiggered secondary master suite. I still have my job. I still have my friends. And I fully intend to be back someday.
But, to quote the final scene of Gladiator, set against the Hans Zimmer soundtrack piece titled "Now We Are Free": Not yet.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
