Postal Experiments. See what happens if you ever need to mail a helium-filled balloon. Or a single ski. Or a brick. Or a dollar bill wrapped in clear plastic. Or a toy monkey in a box yelling “Help! Let me out of here!” Just a tip: don’t mail individual bottles of mineral water. (Link via BoingBoing.)
Morning at Baltimore Penn Station
Concourse at Baltimore Penn Station by the light of the early morning sun.
Looking out from the Baltimore Penn Station north windows over the Light Rail tracks. The still-unfinished Charles St. Bridge is in the background.
Looking up from the Baltimore Penn Station train platform.
Photo taken with an Aiptek Mini Pencam 1.3MP SD.
Graves, Coburn, Nolte, Busey, and Lileks
Lileks on ST:Nemesis. (Scroll down a bit.) I agree with him right up until the words “loved it.” More input some other time in the far future. Brain is too lazy now.
Embarassing pop culture confession: I am constantly mistaking Peter Graves and James Coburn for each other. Also Nick Nolte and Gary Busey. Don’t laugh. Sometimes they look exactly alike.
Postscript to an Iniquity
“True enough, there’s something monstrously outrageous about that Marcos bust, which looms up on you when you take the, well, Marcos Highway up to Baguio. The sensation is not unlike being fried in your own fat.”
De Quiros on the Marcos Bust Blowup. He makes excellent observations as to how the bombing of the bust relates to “quick-fix” religious fetishism within popular Filipino culture.
Speaking of which (“which” meaning Marcos AND religious fetishism), check out Ernesto “Ambassador of God” Maceda’s latest spiritual epiphany.
Snowy Sunday
After trudging through the snow to attend a heartwarming communion service at Old Otterbein, it has been a perfect afternoon to sit in my room, recoding the travel logs with a plate of cookies, a cup of Earl Grey, and J.S. Bach’s keyboard concerti, while the snowflakes outside coat the world in soft, white silence.
I direct your attention to the poetry of Archibald Lampman.
Old Otterbein
Old Otterbein UMC, Downtown Baltimore. Oldest church building still in use in America.
Looking out at a cold, gray, wintry day from the Old Otterbein sanctuary.
Photo taken with an Aiptek Mini Pencam 1.3MP SD.
Fallen Forgiveness
Fallen human beings can only offer a kind of fallen forgiveness. Seems to me that forgiveness has to be a process, something that we grow into as we grow in our likeness to Christ. I hope there is a day when I can look at Alison and offer her love and grace and good-will from my heart. But a long march lays between that place and this. May God be merciful to me.
Amen, Craig. Amen.
MT Comment URL’s open in same window
MT 1.x-2.x users who hate seeing target=”_blank” in the comment URL’s, a tip from the support forum: open lib/MT/Template/Context.pm, then search for and delete all occurrences of the offending text. For popup comment windows, replace it with target=”_parent”. It might be wise to add an onclick=”window.close();” too.
Handheld Hunt
The old Palm IIIxe I got last Christmas has been running quite well, but there’s a small problem: its USB cradle is 9-pin serial, and the iBook has only USB and Firewire ports. It took some searching, but I eventually found the Belkin Serial-to-USB PDA adapter at Circuit City. Major shortcoming: it needs drivers to run properly, and Belkin provides none for OS X. So, for some months now, I’ve had to reboot into OS 9 to infrequently Hot Sync my Palm: an inconvenience I was willing to tolerate at the time. But now I want a change.
I had initially considered replacing both my Palm and cellphone with a Treo 180, especially after reading Dan Bricklin’s review, but it turns out that the Treo is only relatively affordable when purchased with an accompanying GPRS plan — which, though tempting, is well beyond my financial capacity to endure. (The only other alternative for “wireless internet” on the Treo is to have it dial in to your existing ISP — which is slow and costs minutes.) Considering that, plus the lack of any bundled IM software (for the moblog!), and the lack of an SD expansion slot, the Treo doesn’t seem right for me just yet.
Martin wowed me at his wedding with beautiful hi-res color photos on his Clié. That would be nice for my photography, if only the Clié had a slot for SD cards rather than just the proprietary Sony Memory Sticks. That, plus the prohibitive price, made the Clié a non-viable option.
The Treo 90 was looking good for a bit, with its small size, SD card slot, and color screen, but the $299 price tag gave me pause, even with a free DVD player thrown in. Not worth it to me.
Dell Axim X5? Uh, no.
As far as I can tell, the lower-end Palm m130 is the only decent compromise for me on price and features. It’s not tiny, and it’s not a PDA-phone, but it does have an SD expansion slot, good color screen, and long battery life. Plus, it’s relatively new and well-supported, unlike my current IIIxe, which was already antiquated when I got it.
All things considered, it looks like the m130 is gonna be it, unless some extra cash falls out of the sky. Maybe I can go for a better, cheaper PDA-phone sometime next year, after Palm buys Handspring and telcos let me keep my number.
Any other recommendations? Most important to me is either or both of these feature combinations: (1) GSM PDA-phone with instant messaging and SMS, or (2) color-screen with SD card slot. MP3 would be nice, too, but not required. Oh, and all for below $200. With free flying pigs.
Nuke the Moon
(Hey, the US has considered it before.)
More from IMAO. You’ll like him, Jason. Just read his biases.
Darn it. I forgot to get sauerkraut at the grocery. It was sitting right there in plain sight, too.