Wednesday, September 27, 2006  

but you can't reap what you don't sow
and you can't plant in fallow ground
so let us fill this empty earth with hope
until the rains come down

Which is (a) true, (b) stuck in my head, and (c) Janis Ian. So there you are.

I tried "Which came first, the chicken or the matterbaby?" on the kids tonight. The little daughter just looked suspicious, and the little boy said "What's that?".

Kids these days: sheesh! *8)

(The little daughter, by the way, can now solve a Rubik's Cube; she picked up the moves that me and the physics majors (mostly the physics majors) worked out back twenty-odd years ago (with some help from a passing grad student) in no time flat. He said modestly.)

Boring computer question o' the day: does any of y'all readers know of a way to get a few pictures from a digital camera to a Mac without loading every single picture the way iPhoto seems to insist on?

A reader writes:

OK. Here's the deal. Retail stores are doomed. I put in a FreshDirect order tonight (to be delivered tomorrow), then I ran off to the supermarket for the few items that I couldn't get from FreshDirect. While I was shopping, I ran across salsa and thought, "Oh, yeah, we could use some of that." I picked up the jar and was about to put it into my cart when I thought, "Why bother? I'll just add it to my FreshDirect order when I get home."

How very odd. You can probably order that salsa from Amazon, too, for that matter. (They should stick to books, I say.)

Relatedly, there was a story on NPR today about the growth of self-checkout machines at groceries and hardware stores.

I had a dream, many years ago, about a store where you just checked your own stuff out with some machine. I remember thinking, after I woke up, that it was a neat idea but of course you couldn't actually do it because people could just walk out with stuff. (Another valuable patent overlooked.)

Turns out, the radio story said, that customers don't steal very much stuff. It's the employees mostly who steal stuff.

(Hey look: two weblog postings in the very same week! We are proud!)

Tuesday, September 26, 2006  

Ha, and now it's Tuesday again.

In what turned out to be an aptly-titled input box last week, a treasured reader writes:

I'm still here. Where are you? I miss you.

Sorry about that. Things have just been infinitely busy, and I've been wrestling with some personal demons; you know how it is. I really ought to come back here and talk more often, though; it always feels good.

(Talking to people is good; we should all talk to people. Luxuriating in the vast fields of inner space is also good, but it has, I'm finding, its limitations, its plusses and minusses.)

A million years ago in my youth (on a completely different subject) there was this local radio station, WRKL (Rockland), that we all listened to. We went, my Dad and I, to the station itself once (and this is an old memory and may be completely wrong), which was at the time a trailer parked in a swamp with a big antenna out back. And I looked in the window and the guy at the boards and the mic looked out and saw me, and said on the air that there was this red-headed kid looking in the window at him.

My first appearance on Major Media!

I googled on WRKL the other day, from that memory. It apparently closed late last century, but there are websites that talk about it (like anything else anyone has ever liked, or disliked). I told my story there, just for grins (apologies if that site is now trying to sell you prescription drugs or something).

I'm not sure how I got here (oh yeah, I was googling on "hoochie woman" because my iPod played the Tori Amos number of that name), but the books look (hm) memorable. I think I've ordered one from somewhere (just what I need, more books!).

And apologies in advance if it's another week before I post again. (I really should write some Perl scripts to automate the process more; there's all too much overhead still in hand-editing these files, although it's sometimes soothing.) Not to worry, things are good, the Goddess still smiles. She's just sometimes challenging... *8)