AK 2735

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A dark hatchbacked car, possibly a Honda, license plate AK 2735, just crashed into the back of my housemate’s van 20 minutes ago, leaving a huge dent in the rear and scraping the whole side, and pushing the van clear forward into the two cars in front. I was awakened by the bang of impact, and managed to get the license plate as the driver sped off in a none too sober fashion, right side of the car completely totalled.

The police are downstairs now. Hopefully they’ll find this loon before s/he kills someone. I only wish I had gotten the exact make of the car and state on the license plate.

Update: Neighbor next door saw the driver: white female. Probably some loaded partygoer fresh out of Fells Point. The police have come and gone, and we are left with a dented van and a souvenir from the perp: a large hunk of plastic from the front of her car which was left on the road by the van.

I’m drinking some hot apple cider and reading up on vi basics to soothe my nerves before I settle back into bed. What a town. What. a. town.

I, Erasmus

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What theologian am I? Apparently I am Desiderius Erasmus: You have great love for others and will do just about anything to show it to them. You are tolerant and avoid confrontations, so people generally are drawn to you. You are more quiet and reserved in front of strangers, but around some people you open up. When things get tough, you like to meditate alone. Unfortunately you often get things like “what a pansy,” or “you’re such a liberal.”

I wouldn’t go so far down the path of “tolerance” as to be identified as a “pansy,” but the rest of it is me to a tee. Imagine that. Me, likened to that left-leaning scholarly monk of the medieval Roman Church who planted the seed that Luther watered.

So which Christian theologian are you?

Ripley’s Reeboks

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Just watched Aliens for the first time in a looong time. Definitely the best in the whole series. Did anyone notice in the cargo robot finale that Ripley’s shoes were Reeboks?

The Justice League

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This new Justice League cartoon is pretty darn good — but more than a bit dark; not for the little kiddies unless they’re significantly jaded. I’m a bit confused about geography, though: Superman works in Metropolis, and Batman in Gotham City, so where are these guys doing their stuff? And where do they find time to fight crime on their own?

And where’s Maritess?

iBook Woes Wectified

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The iBook failed again today, and is as dead as it was on arrival three weeks ago. This happened without cause, right in the middle of an extremely crucial DC photo shoot for a multimedia piece which is due Wednesday. Panic.

Okay, I’m posting from the Apple Store, and everything’s hunky-dory again. Apparently my hardcore outdoor photo spree (an activity which involved taking sequential kinetic photographs of DC memorials and museums, then transferring those photos at frequent intervals to my hard disk from my pencam) drove the battery to a critical low-power mode, out of which it could only be restored by pressing the Ctrl-Option-Apple-Power button combination.

The guy at the genius bar just told me how to use fsck from the command prompt in single-user mode to run a file system check, and I’ve backed up the important data to V’Ger, so things are running smoothly again.

See, I’m being tested. I had thought at first that I was being subjected to the Job treatment — sunud-sunod na kamalasan — but now I think I’m getting the Abraham test: where I’m Abraham and the iBook is Isaac. If I’m right, then the iBook has been graciously returned to me as the son whom I love, and I should expect to find a big ram caught by its horns outside the Apple Store, to sacrifice to God Almighty.

Except that I’ve already installed some RAM. Hyuk hyuk!

I’m kidding, of course. I do see this incident as a sign from the Father, a gentle tug from him, reminding me that He is the One I should be loving with all my heart and mind and body and soul. It’s so easy to forget that while surrounded by gizmos, gadgets, and a secular culture which prizes them so highly. In other words, Jesus > iBook.

Potatoland and Guinness

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That was fun. Mark Napier displayed a few of his net art pieces up on an overhead projector, including a couple of live interactive pieces: P-Soup, a dynamically updating java painter which could take multiple simultaneous user input; and net.flag, a collaborative user-generated graphic project using elements of flags from countries around the world.

In both cases, while he was demoing each piece, I discreetly whipped out my iBook, connected to MICA Wireless, and started fooling around with the project as he explained it to the audience. He was, of course, somewhat surprised to see another user painting onto the project live as he spoke, not knowing that it was someone in that very same auditorium. Heh heh!

But I came clean at the end of the talk and told him it was me. He wasn’t mad. Wireless totally rocks, man.

(Napier is probably best known for The Shredder, an “alternative browser” which takes the code of any given site and redisplays it in chaotically deconstructed form. Try it. It’s… um… interesting.)

Afterward, I joined my classmates for a jaunt over to Dougherty’s, an excellent little Irish Pub near the Rite Aid on Howard Street. I finally got to try some Guinness for the first time (under $4/pint at Dougherty’s!), and I must say, it’s good stuff. (I’m such a baaad Baptist.)