wow, after saving my phone’s battery with a little piece of wire, I tried for hours to recreate the trick this weekend, to scant result.

I did it again, once, but it took me 3x as long, I think I sort of fucked it up in the procces of trying to help it. My poor friend, in Boston for the weekend, was witness to my obsessive attempts to revive the ailing battery pack. Something about the simplicity of it, how easy it looked, just a lil bit of wire here and a little piece there… it made me just a little crazy. Finally I just gave up.

But, today in the mai,l is a brand new sprint cell phone battery, the one I ordered from ebay for $4, fuck yeeeeeeeeah. It actually seems to work pretty well too, now I can devote more time to worrying about more pressing issues, excellent

I really hate talking about myself, obviously, but I am really proud of myself right now.

Today I realized that my cell phone hasn’t been charging at night and it’s tiny battery was slowly wearing away, down to a lowly one bar! WTF?

A quick check-up the phone revealed what was ailing my poor friend, one of the 4 battery contacts on the back was missing! This may have been a result of my efforts to make the phone look tougher

Anyways, I had just purchased a pair of needlenose pliers and some double-sided tape, so I figured I could jury-rig a new contact made out of a paper clip or something. I tried it for a good while with a section of a staple, but the bad red blinky light remained. I kind of freaked out after this happened and ordered a new battery from eBay. yeah, that was a pretty weaksauce manuever, but I was scared that I’d lose my new adopted friend, so I caved, a little. The battery I bought ended up being only $11 including shipping, which is nothing to a guy like me.

Then “inspirado” struck as I was feeling badly about the whole situation, I noticed a length of leftover braided wire I used to hang a amazing & somewhat spooky wood burning of my pup Chewie that my brother paid some prisoner to do. I clipped some of the braided wire, rigged up the double-sided tape in a sensitive, almost Frenchish, manne, applied a mess of wires so at least some touched each side of the recessed contact ends and they crossed in the middle and popped that sucker into it chargy base, and that baby worked like a charm! I gots a full battery right now!

I’ve rarely felt so pleased with myself, this is cause for a treat. Actually, I just had fucking amazing dinner at Upstairs on the Square, god-bless restaurant week!

Recently an old friend came into town with her friend and we spent some good times together. We did some meandering around JP (did you know that the word meander = Maeander, orig., a river in Phrygia, proverbial for its many windings which is modern day Turkey, pretty cool!) until pretty late. One of the only restaurants open late in JP is also one of the best, Bukhara, real tasty stuff.

Anyways, my friends ended up going back the restaurant for another tardy dinner the next day & having a great time. And they scored this ridiculous mix/mash-up cd of America hip-hop and Indian hip-hop, perfectly combined into some truly catchy and bizarre songs. The smooth combo of Usher singing his Top 40 hit “Yeah” with some wacked-outIndian vocals and what seems to be a electrotronic sitar jamming away… it is sublime.

I added some fancy new things to spice up dr. thinky!

Well, I just found & figured out how to use Photo Matt’s Random Image Script to make the pages a little more dynamic

I think it should load a lot faster too, I found a little no-no that I left in from before. Awesome

Here’s some picture that I took in black and white:

Some thing about b & w photos can be really powerful to me, maybe it’s the reduction, replacement of color. That sounds dumb, but some of the smartest things sound dumb at first, so I guess a good question would be:

Holy shit, I tried to google to find some nifty graphs and charts about the color blindness of dogs, instead there are thousands of hits with kids asking for help doing science fair projects on their dogs. But, I guess the consensus is that they (the dogs, not the kids) actually have more rods than cones then us humans which means they have greater night vision while sacrificing some of their color range. I think this was the most definitive post on this topic:

NO,dogs aren’t colorblind because my dog Max proved it because he ate two out of three dog treats that were on a blue circle.

cool, I can think of a lot of funny experiments to test the color field of dogs, oh to be 8 again!

So, I tried to colorize this picture back into colorfulness. Then I got the idea to make it all crazy-like and it being part of MassArt, I tried to make it look arty-crazy! Maybe this what dogs see instead?

Here’s some page that basically shows being color-blind would really fucking suck

So, the ride sent my trusty phone of more than 2 years to a watery grave, which is rather sad.

I decided that I didn’t want to stay with Sprint which meant I wasn’t buying a new new phone, so I started looking on craigslist for Sprint cell phones offered for sale, but the only ones I would find were long gone. Very sad, then I put my little (custom, very expensive!) thinking cap on and made one of those little “wanted” ads on the c list

Literally with an hour I had five offers. The person that provided the most detail, lived off the Green line and said I could pick it up today, got my hard earned $40. Now I am the somewhat proud owner of a LG TP-5250 that was moderately used by it’s previous owner. It’s pretty complete, but the screen wobbles a bit, which kinda freaks me out.

Oh yeah, and the weirder thing is that the guy who sold me the phone was obviously Indian (”I’ll sell you my old phone!”), and all the names in the phonebook were definitely not Indian, ooops! I think they were Chinese, yeah…

And, the phone allows you to record conversations, which is kind of weird, but there were 2 saved on there from the previous unknown owner. One is some conversation about $7 fascinating. The other is a recording about how pilots should be allowed to carry guns on planes because the Feds are dragging their asses. Wow, what an interesting fellow this previous owner must have been!

Here’s one thing I couldn’t stop thinking about on the ride:
Isn’t it weird that the words

“plane”

and

“plain”

are so closely related and kinda mean the same thing but are different words?

A little sleuthing reveals that the word “plane” is derived from the word “plain” which makes sense.

Kinda make you (if you were me) wonder, are there other synomyns that with such similar structures? yeah, that was the kind of messed up stuff that occupied my mind during my 15 hours of biking, crazy stuff, right?

Because I don’t really even understand what I am talking about, I couldn’t find much about this confusing idea of mine, but I discovered some other fascinating (really!) wordy fun-ness, namely:

the quirkiness of Capitonyms

and

the beauty of typographic Ligature

I had a really great time on the Mass Red Ribbon Ride. I kept a little journal thing of the ride, then I lost it, here’s a close retelling.
Just to skip ahead a bit, the coolest thing I saw was a trailer home painted like a cow, covered in spots with a head towards the front and a tail at the back, I wish I had a picture.

Pre-Ride
After a pleasant stay at the Crown Plaza Hotel, we took the shuttle over to the staging ground for our grand send-off. At this point I seriously questioned my desicion to drink those two tasty Sam Adams from the charming hotel bar, although happy I refused the shots of Jager that were proposed by a local drunkard as good luck for the ride. Anyways, the beer set into my brain and went on to elaborate on my anxieties in a series of bizzare dreams. The best that I can remember without revealing to much about ole Nate’s thinky-box was a dream where I showed up to the race to discover that instead of the 225 bike race I had anticipated, I had indeed signed up for a 225 mile road race, ouch! I’m not sure how I got out of that one, but my shaky nerves continued to conjure up wacky dreams until morning seeped in.
(continue reading…)

So, now it’s just three days until I’m off onto my epic charity bike ride. The MassRedRibbonRide should be fun, I think I’l be able to do it without much problem. I have convinced myself of this fact without any real semblence of logical thought.

My obtuse reasoning is that I am not really going to think about physical stamina and focus on happy thoughts, like the end.

I mean, I’m in decent biking shape & I have all the gear now, so good stuff. The most motivational aspect of this whole ride and the reason I wouldn’t fail or at least never admit to failure is the fact that I have been able to raise so much money for this event from my friends and family. I’m currently at $1,900, only $200 from my goal! That’s pretty awesome, I’m humbled by the generousity of my peeps. And, if you haven’t already, you should check out my fancy-pants web site . This puppy has garnered phone calls from a number of other agencies involved in the raise, it’s the sauciest donor page out there.

Here is an obligatory shot of me and my bikey, look how angry I am, that’s positive anger!

My brother, Eli, came up with the brilliant idea of creating a new dog house for Chewie, our legendary Rottweiler who’s beautiful mug graces this site’s intro (& her lil’ feet are at the bottom as well). Judging from the photos I have here, he used some standard plywood, a couple novelty stencils (sadly, he did not use real dog paws) & some white and green paint (incidently, those are our LAHS colors). The results speak for themselves:

This is clutch:

That’s pure genius