Lots of Monkeys

I got off the plane in New York, since Homer was going to drive me across the border. I’d been out of the country a couple of times, but that was the border town of Tijuana.

I didn’t really count those excursions. They didn’t even check my license on the way back.

Hell, in San Diego, some people do their groceries across the border.

That was years ago, and I was pretty sure that getting back into the States from Canada was going to take more than a polite recitation of my US address. I had my birth certificate with me, of course. I removed it from its plastic sleeve and handed it to the border guard with my DC Driver’s License.

It was a photocopy, and the guard asked me about it. I explained that it was the original despite being a photocopy, and that the seal was in the lower right corner, very faint.

He eventually handed it back to me after an interminable fifteen seconds.

Then the guard looked at Homer’s legitimate, United States passport for what seemed like five minutes, due to the ridiculously out of date photograph.

Eyeing the fragile xerox, I realized how tenuous my link to the United States seemed. If anything were to happen to a thirty year old sheet of paper, there’d be nothing to prove my citizenship. I replaced it in the sleeve and put it back in my bag.

Now, nearly a year later, in the depths of my illogical mind, I have worst case scenario daydreams of me attempting to prove my US citzenship. Ridiculous nightmares that include DHS officers asking me, “Papiere, bitte.”

So now, I’m filling out my passport forms and setting up an appointment to get the process started.

Well, that’s it.

I am now the proud owner of “No Television.”

I previously owned two televisions, and they would just sit in their respective places, gather dust and languish in disuse. It is a liberating experience, because the lairs that they previously occupied are now “empty” and a good reason to start rethinking the use of said spaces.

The bedroom television was a relatively small fourteen inch television that got little to no use at all. It was hooked up to a DVD player, and now I don’t know what to do with it. On the one hand, it is a DVD player. On the other, it lacks a lot of integrated features that my four five other DVD players have.

Features like:

• – is also a laptop
• – is also a desktop computer
• – plays PlayStation 2 games
• – plays XBox games

Whatever happens, I think I have DVD watching covered.

The one that was previously in the family room was the one I used more often. Mainly for playing games, but also used more often because it was easier to connect my laptop to. This way, I could edit footage that I had shot with my camcorder, and also watch television shows that were given to me by Internet Fairies.

(In a completely unrelated note, I think that Opera integrated bittorrent into their browser. I’m just saying.)

But now, I sold both televisions into slavery to a good home, where they can spend the rest of their days showing all eighteen hours of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

May their electron guns shoot at human retinas through vaguely shielded sheets of glass for years to come.

Going to be away from the Internets for a frabjous holiday.

Had a fantastic birthday party, and did not wake up in a pool of my own vomit, which was good. I guess you do get wiser.

I remembered a good bit of it, which is also good.

Sorry to disappoint you all.

One day, Sam asked me a question during lunch.

“How many cameras do you have?”

Good question. One that is not easily answered. The short answer is, “many.” I have had a lot of cameras. Most are not being used, tossed aside after their heyday. I am unable or unwilling to part with them in anyway. Most are still functional. Perhaps not the aiptek pencam that had the battery acid incident, but I did say, “most.”

I have a particular fondness for the Game Boy Camera I own, although now it would be difficult to get pictures out of it. There’s a graininess in the low resolution pictures that give it a certain charm.

I shoot everyday with a Sony DSC-U30 camera. It’s a point and shoot with no zoom. It just makes me get closer to the subject. Overall, I appreciate the small size, fast startup time, flash, integrated lens cover, and AAA batteries that I can replace on the fly.

Since the battery failure of my everyday watch, I’m wearing my Casio Wrist Camera, and posting the results to Flickr. What I love about it is that it looks like a clunky watch. No color screen to give it away.

Performing any work (software or hardware) on a personal computer is an amorphous event. You don’t know how long it’s going to take. You do know what you have to do. You don’t know if any other problems are going to arise in a system composed of dozens of parts from dozens of different manufacturers. You don’t know what’s going to go wrong in the dozens of programs composed of hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

It’s a miracle the thing boots up at all.

Trying to gauge how long it’s going to take is like trying to solve the n-body problem. You really can’t solve it analytically. Poincaré, in trying to solve it, merely laid the foundations for chaos theory when he talked about deterministic chaos. And that’s really what it is.

Solving any sort of computer issue is improvisation. You know when you’re at the beginning, you know when you’re in the middle, and you know when you’re at the end. You know some moves, you know some steps, but until you start dancing with the problem—you just don’t know what’s going to happen.