Blog

  • Driving Alone

    Gone broke in my car and got nothin’ to listen to. I’m bored with two hours down and twenty to go on a plain old worn down road with a bump in the middle and no yellow line. The dust blows if I roll down the window, and my back sweats a sweaty hole in my seat if I roll it up. Doesn’t even seem like AC’s been invented yet with this old beater I’m rollin’ around in. It’s breathin’ too damn hard to worry about something so sophisticated as conditioning of the air.

    I squint ahead to see what I can see, and what I see is mostly a light grey line splitting two green fields and a stray black and white dairy cow mooing on the left. No big red barn ’cause that’d be asking too much of this dust bowl landscape I, for some reason, chose to cross in the July heat. That’s a July heat with an emphasis on the July, like you hear people say in movies about southerners. I’ve never met a true southerner with a true accent, so I guess I’m just speculating my memory on a motion picture. But that’s the best I got, and if you were here you’d get that I gotta speculate on anything I can to keep on the pencil line-road.

  • OneWord: Chase

    I’m chasing the sun to the west, home. I’m chasing my past down to make it the present – to jar it up so I can keep it on a shelf and look at it from time to time and remember how much I like it.

  • OneWord: Boogie

    Haha… this word made me laugh and smile when I saw it. I think it’s best to mention that. ‘Boogie Woogie,’ my brain thought. “Booooooogie wooooooogie,” my mouth said.

  • Cell Phone Improvement

    I want a cell phone company that allows me to access the content on my phone from the internet. For example, I want an online repository of my text message, phone numbers, photos, etc. I like to save some text messages, but it’s a pain in the ass to remember which ones and to copy them to a file on my computer, etc. And if I lose my phone, it would be nice to have an automatic backup copy that I could access.

    Basically, the cellphone market should (and probably is) do its best to copy the Web 2.0 trend and the move of vital application online. Considering that you can now email, share photos, IM, maintain a calendar, and create word documents, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations online, I think I’m not asking too much with phones.

  • Subway Systems to Scale

    This is really cool…subway systems of the world, presented on the same scale.

    The San Fransisco subway looks the biggest, but it isn’t very “dense.” London’s on the other hand is large and a lot “denser.” And it looks like Marseille is the smallest system. My favorite is the Beijing subway, which is just a straight line with a square that intersects it. I look forward to traveling on it this summer.

    It would be interesting if someone would animate the construction of each system against time and include some socio-economic data regarding whether the subway system drove development of suburban areas or if it responded to it.

    WMATA, the subway system that serves Washington D.C. and the surrounding area, is planning to extend the Orange Line further west as far as Dulles International Airport. I used to work beyond the reaches of the Orange Line, and I and my many co-workers who lived in D.C. would have used the metro everyday if it had reached our office in Herndon, VA. As it is now, the metro goes about half-way out. There is huge growth along the route of the proposed Orange Line, and the traffic was always horrendous both to and from work. So it seems the extension would supply vital demand for metro transport.

    Here’s another version.

    Some subways I’ve traveled on:

    * NYC – MTA
    * Chicago – CTA
    * Paris – RATP
    * Wash DC – WMATA
    * Los Angeles – MTA

  • Fun IP Exam

    Prof Fields:

    You can bring you’re mother to the exam if she’s not a patent attorney.

  • Movie: Spider Man 3

    I saw Spider-man 3 last night and was disappointed. Not because the movie wasn’t good, but because it failed to capture my imagination. I wasn’t drawn into a state of disbelief to a point where I actually thought a man in a spider suit doing flips around NYC was entertaining.

    I left questioning whether action hero movies can still entertain me, which makes me sound lame. I want to be entertained by superheroes. I want to want to play ninja like I did after seeing the original TMNT movies years ago – jumping around in the woods with a stick hitting things and screaming, “Cowabunga.”

    I’m hoping there isn’t a sequel, and I will think a lot harder about paying to see another action hero movie. Sad, but true.