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I’m fine, though shaken. Everybody I know at [My employer] is fine, too. Right after I heard the first phone calls about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center, I pulled up MSNBC, and saw the picture of the north tower on fire. I couldn’t believe it, pried open my 11th-floor window, and looked…

The “Message my phone” input box from the “contact me” link above has been broken for longer that I care to admit, but it’s working now. At least, I *think* it is; now the Voicestream end of the bargain seems to be out of comission. So: if you need a baby delivered in a taxicab,…

King Geek For a Day I’ve been trying to observe a seven-day wait period on expensive gadget purchases. Unfortunately, I have yet to observe it successfully. The latest breach of willpower: on Friday, I found out that the incredibly cool wireless Bluetooth headset was available in the US. The headset uses radio to talk to…

I’m back from Newfoundland, where Kate and I wore sweaters, hiked a lot, watched whales, and ate roast moose! Roast moose tastes like birch, it turns out. Kate tells me that game animals taste like what they eat; while living in Alaska, she ate moose, duck, even bear. Duck was the worst, apparently, because wild…

What Dr. Ho SAYS, Dr. Ho DOES. I got a mysterious envelope in the mail the other day. The return address merely said “Caribbean Online Ltd.” Inside was a shrink-wrapped CD, all in Chinese, with the bold, mysterious name of “Doctor Ho.” The CD carried an allure I haven’t felt much since high school —…

Messing with Manhattan’s Control Panel settings There were two artists crouched outside Lafayette Cleaners this morning, drawing a startingly detailed portrait in charcoal and chalk. It was titled “American Astronaut”, and showed a bald man staring up from the concrete with an inscrutable expression. It’s not rare to see street art in my neigborhood —…

I went to go see the World Famous Pontani Sisters at Marion’s Continental last night. Marion’s is my favorite bar in New York; it’s friendly, has a nice mixture of non-impossibly-hipsterish people, is packed with 1960s kitschy crap, and tries really hard to think of fun things to do. Like on Mondays, when the Pontani…

Dirge for a Dot-Com Dinosaur I’ve been reading a lot of Mark Twain; by way of Tom Swift and G.A. Henty, I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. After that, not wanting to leave the Mississippi, I downloaded Life on the Mississippi, and discovered the chapters on Twain’s apprenticeship as a Mississippi…

So on Saturday, I continued out another 75 miles or so to the Susquehanna river, where I stopped at a boat ramp and saw various folks in various stages of sunburn putting boats that had cost various amounts of money into the water. They were all pretty normal inland-river-holiday type boats except for one tiny…

I’m in the middle of Lancaster county, in front of the Strasburg Country Store (“Soft Black Raspberry – Reputation Unrivalled”.) I’m having a Genuine Motorcycle Experience, having gotten up at the crack of dawn, put on my new elkskin gloves, and ridden out on back roads to the small towns where there are grooves on…