1/23/2004

 

moving it on over okay, I'm moving this journal stuff over to my new-fangled gizmo at http://josh.buzzkiller.net/mtjourno/ go over there to satisfy the mild, morbid curiosity, for now. soon enough, I'll make this journalizing material the main page of josh.buzzkiller.net, right up front there, and won't that make it all a lot easier? yes, a lot.

posted by redw0rm 1/23/2004 12:18:26 PM

1/15/2004

 

Dentally damned I'm thinking of writing a self-help book called "everything I need to know about life I learned by not going to a dentist when my filling fell out in the autumn and waited until even after the back of tooth #19 crumbled away in the yuletide, yea, verily, until acute necrosis of the pulp had set in and, in the dawning of the new year, found myself looking up at a very long needle and, two hours later, down the four freshly-drilled tunnels of a root canal." Catchy, yes? The point being about procrastination etc., you understand. Here: the yellow and white pegs sticking up out of my debauched pestle are, I think, the handles of a couple of the future-primitive finger-drill spikes with pointed, flexible, embristled shafts that go down into the drilled-out nerve holes and rip out all the nerve/blood vessel roots. Hell-o theah! And then we zoom in for a view of the excavation: All photos courtesy of the camera in my cell phone. Featured grille-work courtesy of David Clifford Brown, BDS, MDS, MSD and, in my opinion, the finest sawtooth a fellow could hope for.

posted by redw0rm 1/15/2004 03:49:08 PM

1/8/2004

 

Report from the holidays, Dec. 23 to Jan. 2 ::Miramar, Fla. Having a great, relaxing time at my aunt Trish and uncle Bobby's place in Fla. (yo, uncle Bobby!) The house is excellent, with a pool and palm trees and warm breezes and a huge-screen TV and seemingly unlimited food and beer and, on the couple of occasions when I've summoned up the motivation, great roads for jogging. Of note: the Internet connection is a balky 56k; that means I have to hit the Starbucks down the road, $10 a day for the T-Mobile, because I just don't feel like cruising around the neighborhoods to find an open home network. I can't decide whether it's better to have to leave the place of relaxation to conduct the online part of my life or whether it would be better to have the Internet happening in the relax-o-location. On one hand, it means that when I'm chilling out with everybody, I'm on the same chill wavelength as they are. On the other, it would be nice to be around everybody while I'm grinding away at the bit-fountain.

posted by redw0rm 1/08/2004 01:42:33 PM

12/17/2003

 

Waiting in Pain

I had a 133-minute session in the AT&T Wireless hold queue last night. Of course, the battery in the cordless phone gave out before anyone picked up. I'm thinking - if this is the service I get when they're wooing me as a new customer, what's it going to be like if I end up locked into a contract with them? Will AT&T Wireless come to my house and throw rocks through the windows?

posted by redw0rm 12/17/2003 10:59:27 AM

12/15/2003

 

The Switch: Switching to AT&T wireless for one reason: I want that phone. And they're giving it away free with the new account. How can they afford to do that, you ask? By firing all of their customer service representatives! Great move, guys! The only reason I haven't written the whole thing off is because I'm sort of stuck now, straddling my switch from SprintPCS to AT&T. I've been on hold for an hour now. At least I'm not the first to go through this.

posted by redw0rm 12/15/2003 09:51:56 AM

12/11/2003

 

Canvas Cafe, 9th and Lincoln, SF. whoa. There's a guy hunched over his laptop. He is sitting on a low couch, facing away from me. I can see over his shoulder. He's logged on to Friendster, looking through gallery after gallery of pictures of girls, occasionally clicking through to the pages of info about height, weight, etc.. There are two seriously cute girls sitting to his left, on a couch perpendicular to his, sharing the coffee table with him. They are within an arm's length of him. He hasn't said a word to them or, as far as I've been able to see, so much as looked at them. This girl keeps looking at me from the corner. I have to get out of here.

posted by redw0rm 12/11/2003 04:50:39 PM

12/9/2003

 

sighted at 268 Carl St.: a fellow talking animatedly on his cell phone while doing an Austin Powers-style 28-point parking job. His ride: green Toyota Camry with a 10-inch-tall Godzilla doll for a hood ornament.

posted by redw0rm 12/09/2003 12:15:01 PM

11/30/2003

 

Ah, commerce. Black Friday, 2003, Orange City, Fla.: The woman at the front of the Wal-Mart line (she'd gotten there at 3:30 a.m. to be the first into the store!) gets trampled and has a seizure as fellow-shoppers step over her spastic, prostrate body. At least her hands were still clutching a $29.87 DVD player when the paramedics arrived. Nice work all around. Not sure what's worse - stepping over a seizure victim to get to the goodies, or showing up at 3:30 a.m. to be first in line. Makes you proud to be a part of the thriving market economy, no?

posted by redw0rm 11/30/2003 04:57:05 PM

11/24/2003

 

"When you walk along the street and talk on a cell phone, you are not sharing the experience of urban life. You are there, but you are not there." -excerpt from a great essay in Metropolis mag on how cell phones dilute the significance of physical location. Makes you wonder why you'd bother to travel any place where your cell phone would work. Great kicker to the piece: "Now calling across the street and calling from New York to California or even Europe are precisely the same thing. ... Every place is exactly the same as every other place. They are all just nodes on a network--and so, increasingly, are we."

posted by redw0rm 11/24/2003 10:23:49 AM

11/19/2003

 

Working on a piece about U.S. tech jobs going offshore, specifically, to India. I think part of what's so hard for people to deal with, as you can see in recent coverage of the phenomenon in the SJ Merc, Business Week, Time, etc., is that the legend of America's technological unassailability that went hand-in-hand with the tech financing boom survived the equities crash and even the recession pretty well. People figured that the Troubles were mainly due to the overheating in the stock market, and once that mess evened itself out, we'd be back on track. The people who got put on pedestals/magazine covers - the heroes of the late 90s - were engineers and programmers. Now the economy and employment pictures look to be coming around or at least stabilizing, but suddenly everyone is freaking out about India, which is where a lot of the new software engineering and programming jobs are being created - by U.S. tech companies. Smart people are smart enough to know that America has no monopoly on smarts. There was some noise in 1997 about tech-savvy immigrants coming to the U.S. and doing formerly high-paying jobs for rock bottom prices. But that gripe was nothing compared to this - having the jobs done in a place where the cost of living is a fraction of what it is here. Easy choice for U.S. companies, and are their shareholders going to complain that their labor costs suddenly dropped by 60%? Not likely. But there's more to it: first, the U.S. companies save money and perhaps get stronger and bigger and hire more people in the US who can do stuff that can't be done in India; or they just keep hiring more and more people in India and growing bigger and bigger and their stock prices get bigger too, which their shareholders like. second, the end product is still being sold by a U.S. company - maybe to customers in other countries, even India. So that's money to the U.S.. Everyone I've talked to agrees that it sucks to be in a job that gets offshored. The remedies I've heard suggested are: 1. lots of retraining (as soon as you've figured out how to do one thing, get ready to learn something completely new). 2. Some kind of insurance pool that goes into a retraining fund for displaced workers.

posted by redw0rm 11/19/2003 02:49:27 PM

11/14/2003

 

insolence!
Jedediah Purdy is on a mission to chip away at irony. I have a different bee in my bonnet: insolence. Am I getting stodgy? Probably, but I've never been dissed like this before. Three instances of short-fused service-worker aggro flippancy in the last week, and they've got my ire up. #1: Saleswoman in Williams-Sonoma, Chestnut Street. I'm in there with Mags doing wedding registry stuff. I ask whether the in-store signup we are about to do carries over to the website or whether we have to go online to set up the website registry stuff. Her response, spat over her shoulder as she walks off to get the registry-ation forms: "That's what registering means." Nice. Granted, it's Chestnut Street and we're indistinguishable from the rest of the yuppies swirling around her, and maybe she's bitter about dealing with registry stuff for some reason, but damn, that is cold. What did I do to you, angry woman? #2 - Another yuppie stunt, down at Cherin's, the appliance store in the Mission. The place is busting with stainless steel stoves and fridges and fricking dumpster-sized wine chillers. The salesman, Peter Black - hey Peter, relax! - snapped when Margaret distracted him from his ripping rendition of the history of the Maytag corporation and its many subsidiaries; she asked if the one he was showing us was a skinny one that doesn't stick out past the counter too far. "I heard you say what type of refrigerator you're looking for, and that is the kind of refrigerator I'm showing you, okay?" The guy sort of just went off the rails for a moment, then regained control and went on selling fridges. The first instinct is to look around to make sure he actually said what he said. What do you do, get the manager and go through the whole "this person was very rude to us" tattletale thing? It doesn't seem to make sense to make things worse for someone who's already clearly not in a good mental/emotional place. So you kind of try to brush it off and a couple of days later you call back and order the fridge from Cherin's because it's $5 cheaper than it is at Sears, and the guy gets credit for making the sale after all. I mean, you need a fridge, do you not? #3: The tow-truck guy. A little more subtle, but overall, way more aggressive than the others. Young burly guy rolls up in his Ted & Al's wrecker to tow the Sea Donkey, my '85 Grand Wagoneer, asks what the problem is. I tell him I think it's the flywheel - the teeth are stripped off. A sly kind of look comes over his face. "Do you think ALL of the teeth are stripped off the flywheel?" "Maybe." A few more quiz questions, and he's got me. I have to admit that I don't have a degree in car maintenance. THe questions keep coming. I keep having to admit I don't know much about the engine of my truck. Now the only reason I ventured to mention the flywheel is that a mechanic who was up inside the guts of the truck just last week [different rant] had told me that the truck was making that heinous sound every so often when I turned the key because a number of the flywheel teeth had been stripped off, and that I ought to think about replacing it. [I would have, too, but he said it would cost $1,400] I had heard the exact same thing a while back from the guys at Cole Garage. Grinning, the guy mutters something about "the dot com age" under his breath. After I fail another question - this one about a pulley and some kind of bar he's suggesting I use to crank the flywheel around 90 degrees – he goes on to ask me, in a totally antagonistic way, what I do for a living. I say I'm a journalist. He shakes his head, saying "yeah, I can write too." The guy is basically standing there saying I'm useless. As in the other cases, I figure the guy has a screw loose. I don't say what's going through my head: "if I knew how to fix the car, I'd have fixed it already and I wouldn't be here taking sh*t from you." WTF? I mean, I'm standing there with no shave, bird's nest hairdo, track pants (okay, a little suspect) a mellow flannel jacket and a banged-up 1985 automobile, definitely not in the kind of condition that might make one think I was a millionaire, not on the list of yuppie cars. How can this guy possibly be deriving pleasure from sticking it to me like this? And then he won't tow the car because it's too close to the car parked behind it. Sweet, bro. I'm ratting you out. The bile rises as I recount these incidents. I am aware that the very use of the word "insolence" is rather pompous, and implies some kind of inferior-to-superior relationship between the insolent one and the object of said attitude. That's exactly the joke - to wit: why give me a hard time for asking a pretty innocuous question while I'm looking for something in your store? Why patronize me when my rig is broken down? My first thought after the tow-truck-guy experience was that it was just me getting old and the younger guy busting my chops. But at Williams-Sonoma and the appliance store, the salespeople were significantly older. Is it a general, Adbusters-y anger, aimed at anyone who is buying stuff? (Buy Nothing Day is on Nov. 28. There.) Or is it me? Do I exude the need to be taken down a peg? I'm not haughty. As a general rule, I tend to be nice to people I come in contact with. No obvious "kick me" sign equivalents. I dunno. update: called my buddy The Rat in Brooklyn. Told him about the above. His opinion: I've gotten really soft living in California. Damn. nother update: The guy fromTed & Al's who came to tow my rig this morning was a mensch. Super nice. He said the other guy was just lazy. He gets my vote for whatever office he wants to run for. Parking commissioner, maybe.

posted by redw0rm 11/14/2003 06:14:34 AM

10/27/2003

 

New, open, deliberately public WiFi networks at my two favorite Ocean Beach cafes, the Sea Biscuit (data-bearing 2.4 gHz waves courtesy of SF Surf Shop), and Java Beach. Offshores, hot weather and a long-period swell roping in. God I love this town. Wow are my arms tired.

posted by redw0rm 10/27/2003 05:57:31 PM

10/15/2003

 

Attending the Quattrone trial. Hard to guess which way it'll go.

posted by redw0rm 10/15/2003 06:02:09 AM

9/26/2003

 

Exit Zero I'm in Cape May, NJ at the Magic Brain Cyber Cafe on Perry Street. I've spent quite a bit of time in here recently. The price for internet access here is $12 an hour, $7 a half-hour and $4 for 15 minutes. Not a typo. Yet here I sit. I'm in Cape May for the annual Murphy family get-together. I've gotten very used to being able to find a relatively comfortable place to post up and use some friendly neighbor's wireless LAN. There are a dozen or two dozen of them around town, I've found via "war"-driving but many are password-only and I made the mistake of parking it right in front of the only house I've found with a strong signal and 1 Megabit throughput. Ended up in a conversation with the lady of the house, who was nice enough, but I could tell she was a little uneasy about the whole thing and now it's a tad awkward. Plus, sitting in a car is okay for checking email and maybe a surf report, but it sucks for actually doing work. Too cramped, with the possibility that the owner of the network will turn off the connection or prop a baking sheet next to the base station or whatever. I got charged $35 last night for just under 3 hrs and another $25 for 2 hrs today. That's what I pay for like 2 months in San Francisco. Yowza. A little competition and it'll be a different story right quick.

posted by redw0rm 9/26/2003 01:36:07 PM

9/7/2003

 

Good for Ted Koppel. He tore into the Patriot Act and its vile sidecar, the Victory Act (a.k.a. Patriot 2) last week on Nightline.

posted by redw0rm 9/07/2003 08:46:04 PM

9/5/2003

 

Okay, to the point: People who stand in public places talking loudly on cell phones are arrogant jackasses. This is not new. However, people who stand in public places talking loudly on cell phones via "hands-free" headsets come off as *clinically insane* arrogant jackasses. You - standing in the doorway of the corner store subjecting everyone within earshot to the mundane details of your private life or business dealings, perhaps pacing a little while belting it out - you have never looked more foolish in your life; in addition, the side of your conversation we can hear is just plain annoying. We despise you. You - e-boy in the raver pants - we don't want to hear your observation that "that girl was hot." You - frowning ding-dong in the suit with the legal pad - do not tax us with your whine about "the client." Again, we despise you. You look like an idiot. Can we get the Phonebashing folks to move to San Francisco? Then again, I probably look like an idiot right now - I'm writing this outside Tully's at Jackson and Fillmore. They probably despise me. I may well look like an arrogant jackass. I wonder if these guys have an outlet I can plug into...

posted by redw0rm 9/05/2003 01:18:35 PM

8/25/2003

 

Getting ready to head up to the Burn tomorrow. Will be based at The Temple of Twisted Truths - intersection of Literal and Creed, around 7:30 on the circle. Hilarious police blotter report from Reno on Tom Haan's site about some very Burning-Man-esque activity in the greater Reno area.

posted by redw0rm 8/25/2003 11:53:43 PM

8/14/2003

 

Ho-lee shee-it. Wrote a piece in Wired about how Apple rocks and how some distribution muscle from Sony could help them boost their market share, whether it be via a Sony investment/purchase or a deal like the Disney/Pixar arrangement. I had heard about what happens to one when one writes about Apple. But since the piece was pretty complimentary, it never occurred to me that I would get gooned. Wow. Scores of emails. The piece got picked up by a bunch of blogs, and the emails started pouring in. Here's one: -- From: Mark Dymowski Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 14:13:34 -0500 Subject: Apple shouldn't be bought period Josh, Leave the Apple buyout thing alone.�Steve Jobs IS Apple, and nobody else should control that. �We don't WANT everyone using the Mac.�It's special! �It's unique!�And to lose that niche would destroy the Mac.�Don't destroy a good thing.�This is our little secret place that nobody else knows about and once you ruin that, you'll ruin what the Mac is all about.�Get it? Mark Dymowski -- You can almost see this guy shaking a pitchfork. Here's another: -- From: Ian Bruce Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 10:33:49 -0700 To: Subject: Apple/Sony Dear Josh, As we know, an acquisition of Apple by Sony is a pleasant little though[t] experiment and unlikely to ever occur. But, applying your logic to yourself, wouldn�t it make sense approaching Rupert Murdock and NewsCorp to pitch the sale of Wired?Even though Wired clutches much less than a meager 3 percent of the Magazine market, I�m sure you can manage to sweeten the pot somehow. Sure, he�s a rabid conservative scumbag, and is fundamentally opposed to virtually everything Wired is known and respected for, but hey, bidness is bidness. Ian Bruce Los Angeles -- What a blast. Apparently, not only is it verboten to say bad things about Apple, it is, with some people, verboten to write about Apple at all. Amazing. THere have been a bunch of anti-Apple responses as well, and a few civil ones, though just a few. I must say that nothing I've written has caused such an immediate and vociferous reaction. I like it.

posted by redw0rm 8/14/2003 03:18:55 PM

8/13/2003

 

Got into a fun blog-on-blog exchange with Heath Row, who reviewed buzzkiller.net in Fast Company's blog. His review pointed out that the tagline I'd put up there was shaky in the chemistry dep't, gave some props to the various features, but ended by saying it had "more promise than punch." I concur, but, blogs being blogs, looked around a bit and realized that the NYT had - that very morning - done a pretty sour piece on the re-invention of FC - and that Heath Row had characterized the NYT story as being positive. So I mentioned that, juxtaposing quotes from the NYT piece with his comment on it. Snark attack. Then he emailed me (took the conversation off-blog?) and things got very cordial very quickly. Funny how that happens.

posted by redw0rm 8/13/2003 09:18:14 PM

8/6/2003

 

Blow-in cards. What a chafe. Magazine publishers should be fined for inducing readers to litter. How many times have I had to stoop and pick up a blow-in card that fell out of a magazine I was reading, then have to locate a trash receptacle to drop the offending item in, then bristle as another card fell out of the magazine a minute later? Many times. I Googled the phrase "blow-in cards" and found a very informative entry regarding blow-ins on deadprogrammer's livejournal. Those sneaky printers use air jets and static electricity to stick the damn things in there. I posted a response. Here: I am plagued by blow-ins as well. I feel only slightly better now that I know their insertion process, mainly because the static charge thing is cool. I wonder how many times someone has picked one of those things up off the ground and actually used it to subscribe. not many, I'd guess. I'm trying to figure out some artsy thing to do with the scores of these things that fall at my feet every week, something on the order of the stuff people have come up with for the AOL CDs. Maybe just keep them and have an annual blow-in bonfire? Any ideas?

posted by redw0rm 8/06/2003 07:40:35 PM

8/1/2003

 

Up late. really loving all the little apps people are writing for OSX these days. Work scheduler, newsreader, personal library cataloguer, etc. Flip side: downloading them all has taken a toll on the guts of this machine: I had to do a total software re-install yesterday. Missed a couple of days at the office. Should've gone in, but waited at the apt. for early conference calls, then decided it was too late to drive over the bridge then back for squash. Ah, well.

posted by redw0rm 8/01/2003 01:39:55 AM

7/28/2003

 

audblog audio post

posted by redw0rm 7/28/2003 03:18:50 PM

 

Not to be a name-dropping blogger, but I was chewing the fat with Marvin Minsky last month (haw!) and asked him what the post-Singularity entities will want from us. He said the question did not compute, because "they will be us." True dat, and our recent vacation experience suggests that They already are infiltrating Us. In the beach house on Figure Eight Island, NC: four adults, three of us taking an hour or two a day to deal with work stuff via email, web or conference call. On vacation. Does that count as a work-tainted vacation or just a week of partial work days in a really nice location?

posted by redw0rm 7/28/2003 02:59:00 PM

6/13/2003

 

All you freelancers in tha haus, be notified. The best argument for spending money on an office, no matter how spartan: Odd Todd. Thanks to my man Dane - I mean Dean - from Leisure Team for alerting me to this scarecrow.

posted by redw0rm 6/13/2003 10:11:48 AM

6/7/2003

 

Done moved in with Mags. Very much tight squeeze at first, but we're both learning how to move around this place without tripping over each other. Must...keep...place...clean. Very unnatural, but so necessary, given the square footage. Was recently back east - played in the Kimberton (where I went to grade school) alumni lax game alongside 8th grade attack linemates Sean "Shempy" Reilly and Dave "Frodo" Burg. Lots of fun. Unearthed lots of KFS stalwarts and memories as we strolled the campus post-game. Aunt Mary, bless her, has shuffled off this mortal coil (and, we feel confident, not just to Buffalo). A mighty loss for those of us still here, but she's been praying for this promotion for years now. A true original, avant garde even for California, she brought her boundary-bucking, mind-expanding approach to the rest of the family though the years. She was always surprising my classmates at the Yale scavenger hunts in Cape May Point with the stories of her travels and - ahem - experiences, which made us all feel so conservative in comparison.

posted by redw0rm 6/07/2003 08:23:01 PM

4/13/2003

 

Today I have seen a lot of people with broken hands/wrists or arms in slings or on crutches and one in a wheelchair. Unsettling.

posted by redw0rm 4/13/2003 08:04:08 PM

3/24/2003

 

Back in SF after a week in Boston to interview MIT folk on hydrology/political science. Creepy times to travel. The public houses of Cambridge, Mass. on St. Patty's Day - overall very disappointing (translation: could find nothing open late-night on Mass Ave.) though a good time was had by my cousin Jer and me, at least, in an establishment called the Middle East. Pretty peaceful in there, other than the speedcore band rocking when I arrived. Didn't catch their name. -Odd, very odd, watching the Oscars last night. US casualties, POWs, and movie awards. -Stretched a little thin of late with coaching, writing, fixing to move. - real estate much on the mind.

posted by redw0rm 3/24/2003 11:07:46 AM

2/14/2003

 

In SF. Finally wrapped up the Fossil story. Poor old Dick Tracy. -Not much surf of late. Good run there for a while. -Wedding plans. Trying to find the sweet spot between a Carolina beach location that amounts to a wedding factory and a place that doesn't allow weddings. -NASA centrifuge piece is out. Odd timing, the issue hitting stands the week after the Columbia tragedy. Having spent time at NASA, I know the astronauts had fully realized and accepted the risks. I was disturbed by some calls for the end of manned spaceflight. Are you kidding? How about tripling NASA's budget intead?

posted by redw0rm 2/14/2003 03:16:28 PM

1/6/2003

 

In Venice, now on assignment. And engaged. Stones and water, stones and water. And $8 hot chocolates and $1.50 beers, $45 hotel rooms and $400 hotel rooms. Green water. Like Mountain Dew green, but slightly darker. Flooding as a way of life. Very chilly.

posted by redw0rm 1/06/2003 02:21:43 AM

10/18/2002

 

Just back from seeing "The Rules of Attraction." Lots of people these days can be overheard by the subtler among us saying they'd like to go back in time to prevent this or that terrible thing from happening. I figure they all have the major stuff covered, so when it comes my turn, I'd like to go back to the founding of Bennington College and charter it as a technical institute with no English classes.

posted by redw0rm 10/18/2002 12:52:05 AM

10/17/2002

 

it's happening. the tide, as it were, is turning. things coming out on the good side of the probablility curve, patterns matching up, mental and observed "coincidences" abound...

posted by redw0rm 10/17/2002 07:58:27 PM

 

-haven't been out of the house for 24 hours. bunkered in, the idea goes, getting everything done. the idea goes.

posted by redw0rm 10/17/2002 01:06:01 AM

10/15/2002

 

-working on a bunch of stuff for Wired; writing the centrifuge piece and reporting a new one. also a couple of book reviews. -squash tourney a couple of weeks ago. won the consolation bracket of the 5.0 division after suffering a titanic case of "the yips" in the first round. -broke my toe. details too mundane to relate. -won a surfboard from SF Surf Shop in a raffle.

posted by redw0rm 10/15/2002 11:51:58 AM

9/11/2002

 

-back from Cape May. I will miss you, Momo. -centrifuge: KO'd by the G. New finding: Low blood pressure and a pulse rate around 40 are good for everything except standing for long periods of time while subjected to hypergravity, in which case those factors will cause you to crumble like a snowman beneath a boulder. -Dartmouth story finally sees the light of day in Wired 10.10. That's a 10-month round trip. Looks good, except that the names of the highly-deserving-of-mention Chris Lentz and Larry Levine didn't make the final edit. Sorry, guys. Stuff like that won't happen anymore once I'm the big boss of everything, which will be very, very soon. -Great surf yesterday and both preceding days. Managed to keep weekday sessions to one per day, but surfed all day long Sunday. So glad it's Fall again. -Lots of story pitching last couple of days. Some positive responses, some negative, but overall the activity is encouraging. -I'm afraid that Forbes sent yet another check meant for me to my photographer namesake. That's why my cell phone is still not operational, so stop asking.

posted by redw0rm 9/11/2002 08:12:05 PM

8/8/2002

 

-centrifuge: Ah, 22 hours in a padded cell, rigged up to a dozen electrodes and corresponding wires. At least the interior is blue; I think by the end of this experience blue may go from being my favorite color to my least favorite. After the padded cell, the G-induced temporary blindness. Then, blinking, into the light of day. Is it any surprise I sought succor in a chicken cheesesteak afterwards, despite the recent discovery of high cholesterol? I was told you get iron from items prepared on a metal grill or skillet, which is good, since i'm also borderline anemic, according to the same lab.

posted by redw0rm 8/08/2002 12:15:17 PM

7/22/2002

 

-Back in SF after traveling for most of June (NYC/CT/NJ/RI) and early July (Figure 8 Island, NC). -Finishing up stories for Forbes ASAP and red Herring, and starting a new, very weird piece, (the centrifuge item) for Wired. -Book: talked to an agent who read the proposal. Need to spruce the thing up to reflect recent events, but a lot of positive feedback nonetheless.

posted by redw0rm 7/22/2002 05:21:21 PM

6/6/2002

 

-In NYC. Feel like I got out of SF just in time. Madness. The Subaru rig is no more. The '85 Jeep Grand Wagoneer is in. -Doing a bunch of editing work for Vista Research. This IT security report is around 70 pages. Yikes. Great timing, starting an anti-Wall Street research company just now; the press coverage of this thing has been astonishing. I may just be jaded from being in SF. -Reunion in a couple of days. -Book: Amit Matta comes through with a connection and a confession. Stay tuned. -Put some time in yesterday on Ann Marsh's NYker piece. Looking good. -Ran into Jeff O'Brien, my editor at Wired, in front of the hotel -- turns out he's in town staying at the same place. He had some good ideas about the logistics of the centrifuge item. -Fine dining with Mags & co.

posted by redw0rm 6/06/2002 08:25:08 AM

5/24/2002

 

Updates on the last entry : Aunt Mary's house. Sold. The guys who she did her reverse mortgage with get the proceeds. Ah, well. Book: still nothing doing. Bank: Not budging. They're awful. The "service manager" at the Burlingame branch, Cindy, basically told me to go piss up a rope. "It says in the disclaimer that deposits might not be available..." etc. Funny, I really don't recall anything about not making deposits on checks from venerable media corporations available for three damn weeks. I could understand if the corporation were AOLTW, but Conde Nast? I'm switching to some other bank. Surf was up a little today, but I was inside, calling around trying to find a CIO who had nothing better to do the Friday before the Memorial day weekend than hang around and wait to be interviewed. Got the centrifuge job for Wired. It should make a great piece if it doesn't kill me. Reading The Right Stuff to prepare. Just got to the part where they are planning to send a monkey up for the first space flight. That's about what i'll be doing, except I found out they stopped using monkeys in this sort of thing years ago. My guess: inhumane. Also reading The Sun Also Rises, spurred by a conversation w/ lax teammate Josh Miller between sets at a recent Groovesmith show at the Boom Boom Room. At a rather slow spot now, outside of Paris on the way to a fishing trip in Spain before hitting Pamplona. Lots of stuff about the locals and the landscape. Liked it better in Paris. Everyone in this thing is just hemorrhaging emotionally. Wrecks, all. Miller also sent, via snail mail of all things, clipping of NYT "Writers on Writing" column. Vivian Gornick talks about the writing technique of creating a nonfiction narrator outside oneself. I think of it as triangulation. I like that idea better than the idea of "finding your own voice." Screw that -- find whatever voice works for you; it could be the voice of someone who's not like you at all, but if it reads well, get after it, no?

posted by redw0rm 5/24/2002 10:21:53 PM

5/17/2002

 

Spending probably more time than necessary on the site, but it's looking better and better. Lots of work editing the research reports. got the first edit of my long Wired piece back (not too bad). Sale of Aunt Mary's house is excruciating. So many details, lost documents from the last century, etc. I hate my bank, Wells Fargo. Who ever heard of a 3-week hold on a deposit? At least the only check they made me bounce was to Matt Field. He never really expected it in the first place, so it wasn't much of a disappointement to him. New movement on the book front. Trying to get an agent I talked to a while ago interested again. Got some very positive comments on the proposal from Jim Michaels. Also trying to get a pitch together for readyMade.

posted by redw0rm 5/17/2002 04:38:51 PM

5/14/2002

 

yikes.

posted by redw0rm 5/14/2002 06:10:31 PM