medianick

My girlfriend recently caught me asking a question in a completely inadvertent Boston accent. I wish I now remembered the word I used, but to her Connecticut ears it was distinctly non-rhotic.

Thirteen years of Jerry Remy must be taking its toll.

From the company that once offered Occasional Stools, you can now purchase Sustainable Throws.

(I am a little disappointed that their website does not use the same terminology as their print catalog -- a "Bamboo Chenille Throw" is nowhere near as wonderful a concept.)

Someday we'll live on Venus
And men will walk on Mars
But we will still be monkeys
Down deep inside.

From "The Facts of Life" by Talking Heads

I just signed up for an Amazon Web Services account, and was investigating the different services they offer. One of them, the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), offers a la carte online storage of whatever you choose, at pennies per megabyte.

Wondering about the reliability of such a thing, I clicked on the link labeled "Reliability backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement." I immediately received this response:

Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

When your own service level agreement is inaccessible, what does that say? And more importantly, is it a form of true irony or the black fly kind?

My latest download of NPR's "All Songs Considered" podcast was titled "Problems with the Podcast?" The complete transcript of this podcast is:

"From NPR Music it's All Songs Considered, I'm Robin Hilton, with a special programming note. If you're having trouble downloading the All Songs Considered podcast, either the regular show or-

"Support for NPR Podcasts comes from Acura, featuring the Acura TL, with BlueTooth phone connectivity. Learn more at Acura.com."

Without question, it is a bad day when Nine Inch Nails is not sufficiently dark, angry, or bleak. Enter Rage Against the Machine.

Ahhhhhhhhh. That's good catharsis.

Q: What is the difference between a kitchen and a paramecium?

A: The paramecium would, like, totally expel the microwave.

Researchers at Stanford University have figured out a way to make a lithium-ion battery hold ten times more charge. CNET's News.com has the story.

This could be HUGE. The biggest issue with electric cars -- like the proposed Chevy Volt -- is the battery life and consequently the range. The acclaimed (but oft delayed) Tesla Roadster uses nearly 7000 standard lithium-ion laptop batteries to achieve its ~200 mile range. Imagine the possibilities.

Very exciting.

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Update: here's another story about it.

Two increasingly common words I hate: webinar and mobisode

I think the aspect that makes them particularly annoying, as opposed to some other neologisms (like "podcast") is that the replaced portions from the original words -- "sem" and "ep" -- are meaningless by themselves, or at least were not the root of the meaning of the original word. The result is that the new construction doesn't make any structural sense.

Plus, "mobisode" resists my attempts to parse it correctly. I keep seeing it and thinking it must have something to do with television shows watched by large, undifferentiated, occasionally unruly masses.

Although I try to avoid it as much as the next person, I am exposed to enough spam in my email inboxes that I have a certain sense of the topics. And as this country slides further into its credit/foreclosure malaise, it seems that all the typical mortgage-related spam has ceased, and is replaced almost entirely with Viagra spam.

Which means we're all screwed.

In my country, your private life blogs about you!

Here's hoping this goes well.

I have to say for the record that I just adore Radiohead's latest album, In Rainbows. Their trademark paranoia and gloom are not completely gone, but there is now a certain wistful romanticism to be found. Since downloading the album for the self-chosen price of 5 pounds (a bit more than 10 dollars, depressingly, but that's another story), I have felt a need to listen to it nearly every day. That is not an entirely unusual pattern, in my music buying and listening experience, but the album is holding up very well. I recommend it highly.

Why is it that Charles Mingus swings so damn hard?

As I noted a while back, my bird feeder had gradually become a sparrow feeder. Giant, unruly mobs of fat, uninteresting sparrows. Well, I finally took matters into my own hands and bought a finch feeder, putting that up instead.

The result?

No more sparrows. But also no more of any kinds of birds until today (a week later), as three very high-energy chickadees tried to figure out how to use the new feeder. Finch feeders have little tiny holes for the thistle seeds they normally contain, and this one also has the holes below the perches, since that's how goldfinches in particular apparently prefer to feed (upside down). The chickadees seemingly could not figure out this trick, or were too terrified by the human lurking behind the window, and gave up.

I have thwarted the chickadees.

The latest Pottery Barn catalog contains an entry for "Faux Crows," which are described as "equal to the real bird in scale and authenticity." Scale I can understand, but unless these items can fly around, caw loudly, and lay eggs, I'm not so sure about the rest. A genuine fake? A real facsimile?

There seem to be hundreds of emoticons now in existence, but one I've recently wished existed was one that indicated sincerity, earnesty, a lack of sarcasm. I guess it's not an easily recognized -- or easily caricatured -- facial expression, which is part of the problem. I don't really have any good proposals, but how about this?

!;)

OK, maybe that's a bit too meta. It would probably just be understood as a smiling, winking face with a shoe on its head (whatever that would mean; I'm sure Trillian already has a little graphic for it).

One of these days I'm going to put the salsa jar somewhere other than next to the peanut butter jar and the jelly jar, since it looks remarkably like the jelly jar, and this is the umpteenth time I've gotten out the salsa for my sandwich. I suspect I would notice before spreading it on the bread, but it's a good thing this is lunch instead of breakfast, when I might not.

I just watched the Red Sox trounce the Braves, 11-0. Now I'm hoping the Rockies can hang onto their 2-1 lead over the Bronx Bombers so we can go back to a double-digit lead in the AL East standings.

Oops, make that 3-1. Go Colorado.

Oops, make that 5-1. I guess Andy Pettitte isn't having the greatest 7th inning.

Oops, make that 6-1. Vizcaino isn't having a great 7th inning either.

LiveJournal tells me "You've only made 3 friends."

What comes next? "You don't exercise enough"? "You should really do something about that haircut"? "Everyone is laughing at you behind your back"?

I guess I shouldn't take it personnally.

Natalie Portman's character in Garden State famously said that listening to the Shins would "change your life." She was seemingly referring to their 2001 album Oh, Inverted World, and specifically to the song "New Slang" (which was playing in her headphones at the time). In listening to their latest album, Wincing the Night Away, I've started to see what she meant, at least in an overexuberant, hyperbolic, music-loving sense. They're just effortless, kind of Beach Boys for the new millennium.