Steve Jobs! You rascal! This article I just read said that users of the AT&T EDGE data networks are noticing huge increases in speeds. One of the major head-scratching, why-is-apple-doing-this kind of complaints about the iPhone is that they went with EDGE which is a whole lot slower than 3G. Well, looks like they knew what they were doing all along!

The Indy did a combo piece on competitive eaters and my roomie Billy. I did some of the guitar work on the song… admittedly not my best, but it is what it is.

I need to coach Billy a bit in the art of providing an interview that doesn’t make us sound like a prize pair of idiots:

“We have a lot of get-rich-quick schemes that end up making about $50. Or we do things that get a lot of attention but bring in no money or women.”

My blogging has been spotty. I can’t tell if things are boring and therefore nothing to report of if I have a skewed perspective on what’s entertaining. In the meantime, some links for your ass:

• Mine hands doth tremble!
• Kool-Aid
• junk shadows
• Flagellum
  
• It’s a little too easy to hate on the spelling bee champ.

Photos:

• Cute pandas
• Aurora borealis (one, two)
• These hills… something is… compelling… about them. It’s.. it’s like I’ve seen them before.
• Depression? Answer: Baby in the sink.
• Coffee with a drop of milk

Braille condom

Note: None of this happened.

Back from camping and still have mountain-primed lungs, so during my run I was feeling the easy stride. It was like the way my body should work; like me minus all the asthma. I left at dusk and thought I had time before the real darkness set in, but man the sun hit that horizon hard and I was running in low-contrast grayscale. Snakes slithered away from my lightly patting feet, deer jumped away out of nowhere and I was starting to get a little freaked out. Then: Snorting and growling and it was coming towards me. “Bear” is what my straight-from-the-Smokies self thought, but I quickly saw it was two large dogs coming for me. Wolves? I was unsure, but the unspoken language was that they were genuinely after my blood. I didn’t scream, in fact, I don’t think I could replicate the sound I made. My body shot into some sort of crouch and I (embarrassing in hindsight) roared. It’s the only way to really describe the sound I made at those dogs. They sort of hovered around me for a bit and finally took off when rocks were lobbed at them. I come back from bear-infested mountains for this?

• Mitch Hedberg - An influence of Demetri Martin, who is pretty damn good
• Richard Pryor - Chuck and I were talking about PR and I brought up how the positive spin that PR folks put on the face-burning thing was that it was free-base related.
• Richard Parker - Reading this makes me want to read Life of Pi. I desire to understand my own personal Richard Parker.
• Mos Def - I smashed it like it was an Idaho potato.
• Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco - 420.
• Hartless Bastards - Coming to the cradle. The lead girl looks kind of like Beth Gibbons, so I wanted to check if it was.
• B battery (vacuum tubes) - Not as common anymore because when you say it people think you have a stutter.
• A battery (vacuum tubes) -
• Dime
• Proof Coinage
• United States one hundred-dollar bill
• Large denominations of United States currency
• Salmon P. Chase - This guy seemed to really understand money
• Energy Drink - people keep asking for them at the cradle.
• Redline (drink) - particularly potent.
• United States five-dollar bill - In addition to the proof dime, I also found a five-dollar note.
• Flowerpot Island
• Year 2000 problem - thinking about Office Space
• James Bond - don’t remember why I was thinking of this. Since seeing Casino Royale, I’ve had little vacation-style bond fantasies. Say what you will about the guy, he does end up in some picturesque places.
• Casino Royale (2006 film) -
• Office Space - saw some at the Cradle
• Epilepsy
• Wisconsin card sort
• Santa Fe Institute - Renowned research facility for complex systems. Kind of a dream job.
• Nicholas Metropolis - Monte Carlo method
• Melanie Mitchell - One of the most influential authors of my life
• John Henry Holland - Father of genetic algorithms
• Theldrow - an old mac computer game
• Physical Graffiti - The next few… I’m not so proud of, but you can see the click trail pretty obviously
• Led Zeppelin IV -
• Aleister Crowley -
• Seal of Solomon -
• Lust for Life (song) - Possible Rho Band song
• God Save the Queen (Sex Pistols song) - ditto
• Richard Branson - This guy fascinates me.
• Michael Richards - The fourth “Richard” on the list. What’s up?
• Portishead - When is their next album coming out? This year some time (supposedly); I hope someone tells me.
• Blur (band) - Boys and Girls came on the iPod…
• Ben Folds - …then a Ben Folds Five song.
• Aphasia - I had always called it “aphonia”, but I think this is more accurate
• Dysphasia - the term has fallen out of favor as it is too easily mistaken for “dysphagia”
• Led Zeppelin - the song remains the lame
• Kuru (disease) - prions are scary. real scary. Still, to fully understand them could lead to powerful applications.
• Sickle-cell disease - do sickle-cells transmogrify neighboring cells to also be sickles?
• Prion
• Skiffle - “It’s not a skiffle band!”

• The perfect storm of things I hate
• Parents, seriously, control your kids. The other day I was in a restaurant when a kid suddenly fell of his chair under the table. Fine. Accidents happen. Now take your kid outside so he can get his crying done with. Nope. Not what happened. No, the whole restaurant was treated to the aftermath.
• More from that Google street-view thing. This would be the time at the corner of Haight-Ashbury.
• Dudes. Yellowstone is so on my list.
• One more reason Canada is cool: Flowerpot Island. Question: is that one flowerpot artificially reinforced at the bottom? Those rocks don’t look quite right.
• Anachronostic portrait-splicing = heebies + jeebies.
• I’m not usually a fan of these things and I’m also not a fan of saying things like “that makes me happy” because hippies say things like that, but it made me happy.
• The Neitzche Family Circus: (one) (two).
• Yo, I’m feelin’ that crazy miss on Camp Loyaltown.

It’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, homies. Ms. Greenburg sez that if i’m gonna get any extra credit i need to really start applying myself and something i could do would be to show what i learned about in environmentle scinces. so i just talked about some nature move i found on youtube. here is is: