Corpdecker

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

Sorry about the sidebar. I’m working on that. Unfortunately it’s going to require me to dig into an old hard drive mounted in an old box that I’m not eager to get into.

But that’s just one of the problems on this blog. The biggest one is that my audience has fractured into a few sects. Some of them are completely incompatible, others are nearly hostile to off topic content. Here are the major sects I’m currently considering.

1. Family - We have a 7 month old baby. As such, my wife and I are largely secondary figures to the extended family. They are militant in their desire for pictures of the baby. All they want is the kid. We are only important insofar as we provide said kid. Did I mention they want baby pictures?
2. Friends - I have no idea how many of my friends read this, but this sect is the one I most identify with this blog. It is for this sect that I post things about rayguns and neo-hippie music reviews, you know, stuff I like. I guess I’m my own friend. Is that sad or self-actualizing? These folks just want cool stuff. “Baby drool” != cool;
3. The Children - This is the big wildcard, my students (who I’m sure love being called children, hi guys). This is not really for them, but it’s public and linked to from my MySpace page so it’s not like I can pretend they won’t see it. I have no idea what they want although ammunition to mock me is always welcome.

I realize that this isn’t the Times of London or something where I have a readership and advertisers that I have to kowtow to. However, if this is just going to be me whining about my life then I might as well go back to livejournal.

Wait a minute…I’m whining right now! DAMMIT!

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

Remember when everyone was into poker and I got that book for my birthday about Doyle Brunson’s exploits back in the day in Texas? Yeah…

Oh and remember when we all bought paintball guns and were gonna go in on a box of paint and stick it to the man? Yeah…

Remember when I started that blog and was gonna post every day and make millions from Google ads? Yeah…

There are two ways to look at this. The first and most obvious is that I never stick with anything very long. This is more or less true. Sue me. What can I do?

The second, and somewhat deeper point is that I really love learning. In the cases above, I really love learning how to do things. The problem is that I have the attention span of a fruit fly. Once I have a good idea of how to do something pretty functionally, and realize that the rest is simple repetition (also known as practice), I wander off. Understanding how something is done is (apparently) what I really want, not so much mastery of a topic.

All of this is completely exacerbated by my lack of networking. If I hung out with people and all we ever talked about was underwater basket weaving, I’m willing to bet that eventually I would try it out just to be able to join in the conversation.

Ironically if everyone gets into something then my contrarianism kicks in and I push it away (this is also known as the retarded rebel response, R³).

Why I’m prattling on will become clear in time, but I’m tired of saying what I’m going to do on here. I think it would be better for me if I just showed of what I’ve done.

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

2. Bluffing & Hustle

Anyone who doesn’t think that bluffing isn’t a design skill has never done it professionally. Let’s say you’re presenting to a client. You have worked night and day on this design and have gone to the wall to present it as beautifully as possible. Everything is great. The client asks you something to the effect of, “why did you put that widget on the left?”. A great designer would have a respectable answer for this. “By placing it on the left it evokes the eternal labelling of the left as evil and flawed thus making your product look divine” or some such. Two bit hacks like myself have to be able to come up with this crap on the fly. It’s probably over there because the crappy printer I’ve got can’t print red on the right side of the page or something, but I can’t tell the client that. I have to come up with something impressive, like I did in that example of the great designer.

But there is more to it than bluffing. The other part is hustle. This is how the young manage to compete with the experienced.

When I was learning to play racquetball I had to run at least twice as hard to keep up with my friend who had been playing for years. He could put the ball wherever he wanted and I just had to run and get it. As I got better I learned how to return the ball in such a way that I could run less. In the beginning it’s all about running flat out in order to keep up.

If I can react faster and get information quicker than you can, I can seem infinitely knowledgeable without actually being so. The phrase, “let me check on that” becomes very handy in this technique. Essentially just being able to say “I don’t know, but I can find out.” is critical. Of course remembering the answers helps too. That way, the next time, you do know the answer and don’t have to use some trick to get by.

Possibly more on this to come…

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

Half of new teachers quit inside of five years.

I can certainly see why. This is a tough job. It’s demanding, the critics are harsh, the pay sucks, the bureaucracy is thick and the hours pretty much stink.

It takes a certain type of person to do this job. I don’t yet know if I am that type, but I have my suspicions.

How did I get here?

A year ago I was a burnt out freelance web designer who was looking at a mortgage, a wife and an extremely positive pregnancy test. My business wasn’t working and my heart had gone out of it anyway. I needed a job.

Fortunately for me, there was a school just down the road that was in as dire need of a teacher as I was of a paycheck. Despite my lack of a master’s degree, I was hired and within five days of clicking “send resume” on Monster.com I was standing in front of a room full of students. Needless to say I was terrified.

Up to this point in my life I had taught two (2) classes at two different community centers. One didn’t have grades, and one was pass/fail only they didn’t use the word “fail” since it was “too negative”. None of this had prepared me to stand in front of a room full of students and explain to them the intracacies of color theory in Photoshop.

Where my teaching experiences had failed me, my freelance and design skills saved me. I’m still not ready to declare my teaching a success, but I’ve managed to not fail through careful use of several skills.

1. I know more than you.

Luckily these were first year college students. They are all about eighteen. I very clearly remember this time in my life. I thought I knew everything. I was an idiot.

I have been using the software I was teaching (Adobe Photoshop) for nearly fifteen years. I know this thing. I used this to my advantage.

When you show competence in one area, people tend to assume that level of competence in all areas unless given a reason not to. Since I know, and could demonstrate near total mastery of Photoshop, everyone just assumed that I was equally adept at everything else. I did not discourage this belief.

To be continued in part II.

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

I was just poking around and on a lark decided to look up the stats for old AMD. I haven’t posted here in nigh on three months, but I’m still showing about twenty visitors a day. I must just be that awesome.

Or not. most of them are links to photos or obscure references. There’s nothing in there to indicate that someone sought me out.

The garden is truly overcome with weeds and brambles.

Normally this would be the point where I would go into some long winded parable about how I was going to clean up this dump and make things right again. But I’m not going to do that. On the upside I’m not going to take the other option that usually shows up, shut down the site entirely.

No, I’m not sure where this little thingamabob is headed. I have some ideas but I’m not really in much of a position to post them right now. I have more going on in my life now than I ever have before. I can’t say what will come to pass in the coming days and months, but in case this is the only way you know me, I’m still here, just busy.

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

It’s very important to remain hydrated when you are lumbering around the earth in an unholy quest for the flesh of the the living.

This is particularly important when you have a raving lunatic with a cricket bat on your ass.

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

I always thought that my parents were just neat freaks. I had always assumed that I was some sort of genetic mutation that had none of the desires for cleanliness that my parents had. I was wrong.

I think I understand now. When we brought the baby home there were a few things out of place. That is to be expected. We’ve never done this before and not all the right stuff is in arm’s reach when you need it to be. Normally that wouldn’t be that big an issue. If I don’t have ketchup for my fries I just get up and get it, or possibly just say, “Screw it”, and go without if I’m feeling lazy. There was one key factor that was missing, a baby’s cry.

My baby’s cry in particular. You see what I didn’t understand, couldn’t really understand, was how badly a parent wants that noise to stop. No one likes hearing a baby cry. It’s annoying, it’s disruptive, it’s loud. We all want the kid to shut up. When you’re a parent, at least a pathetically inexperienced one like my wife and I, it’s critical. You want it to stop like you want the 200 degree coffee you just poured on your crotch to stop being hot, like you want brain freeze to go away, like you want the cheese that is scalding the skin off the roof of your mouth to not be hot. It’s very primal.

The thing is, when you are effectively in excruciating pain, you really don’t have time for a messy house getting in your way. In seconds I had swept everything off the counter when I needed some clear space to get formula ready. Nothing breakable was on the counter, thankfully. Although I don’t know that it would have mattered to me if it had been.

We are keeping the house a bit cleaner now. I suspect when the child begins crawling around and sticking things in his mouth we’ll probably crank the clean up another notch. By the time the kid is old enough to consider such things, I’m sure he’ll think that we’re just wierd neat freaks and that he’s some sort of genetic mutation that has none of the desires for cleanliness that his parents have.

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

Kenna is getting prepped for a C-section. They’ve parked me in front of a terminal to wait for them. It’s weird; I’m pretty terrified.

From what I understand I get to sit here for about 45 minutes while they ram a needle into my wife’s spinal column to numb her for surgery. She went from “all-natural” to “I want to feel NOTHING” in about ten minutes.

The doctors are concerned about the size of the baby and the size of her pelvis. If she tries to push she could end up pushing for hours and then not getting anywhere and having a section anyway. Or, worse still, the baby could get lodged halfway out due to her gestational diabetes making his shoulders huge. In that case they have to do a massive episiotomy, break the baby’s collar bone, or Kenna’s pelvis. No real good options there.

Of course at the c-section is surgery and carries all the risks that go with it as well as increased risk of infection afterwords, but the risk to the baby drops to almost nil. Kenna wants the baby to be safe, I want the baby AND my wife to be safe.

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

Crikey. The only word that comes to mind upon realization that the world has lost the craziest nature guy to grace boob tube. That’s right, Steve Irwin is dead.

It’s a very odd feeling. On the one hand it’s not anyone would have been surprised if we’d told you five years ago that Steve Irwin would someday be killed by a wild animal. We all but expected it. Most of the stories involve some variation of the phrase “I was betting on crocodiles”.

Somehow he had alwasy pulled it out before so it’s somewhat surprising that he didn’t this time. It’s also a more than a little frightening that a stingray has enough oomph to ram that thing into your heart.

I never watched the Crocodile Hunter with any regularity, but somehow the world seems worse off without this crazy bastard out there molesting innocent animals. I suppose to the animals that stingray is their new king.

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

Another week long lull in posting, another sad excuse. I was working on this damn nursery. You want proof? Fine, that’s what this whole post is all about. There is also a brief pause to look upon some wet, black, pussy. I’ll get back to that.

The flooring is done. That was the worst part of it all. Then came the trim. Painting the trim was horrid. I should note that everything that was done was worse in the evil closet. I hate that closet so bad.

In any event, I uploaded a bunch of pictures to Flickr. If you are up to date with this whole scenario, you’ll want to start with the new stuff here. If you haven’t been keeping up with this whole remodel (and assuming you care) the beginning of the photostream is here. If you are some poor bastard who subscribed when I was writing funny stuff on a regular basis, I am truly sorry. If you there is the sole lure of the aforementioned wet, black pussy.

I’ll be back soon with some more observations about things after this baby shower on Sunday. I might be back sooner, but I doubt it.

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

Man there is some cool stuff flaoting around the web at the moment. These are three of the cool ass things I’ve discovered this week (primarily by getting my BoingBoing feed working again).

Ray Guns

Weta Workshop has been a font of fascinating stuff for a while now, even beyond the Finger Jewelry Master series. The latest thing they’ve come out with is frickin’ ray guns. Holy crap these things are awesome. I want all three just on principle. This will fulfil all of my Son of Ether dreams in one handy shopping trip. Check’em out.

Gay Guns

Ok not really gay. This isn’t a version of the above ray gun that will cause a sudden craving for pushbroom moustaches and leather chaps or anything. I suppose I’m being bigoted by even calling them gay, but fuck it (!) I’m ok with controversy.
These are guns with FUR dammit! How can you wield a teal and gold Desert Eagle with fur grips and not be gay. This seems too kitchy for women. I’m sorry even in the depths of Hoboken there can’t be anyone who thinks this is fashionable can there?
You have to admit that tossing a gold plated grenade adorned with Swarovski crystals just sends the message that you aren’t just a murderous psychopath, you’re also repressing your desires to sing “It’s Raining Men” while wearing a leather bustier. There’s plenty more where those came from right here.

Parasites

Finally to end on a tasty note, Neatorama might just be my new favorite site. These guys came out with a list of “Six Horrifying Parasites”. Come on, how awesome is that? From slugs that invade the host from the inside creating a mindless zombie that seeks only to feed the parasite, to worms that eat a victim from the inside out, to elephantiasis of the genitals I can’t think of a more horrific cornucopia of horror than this one.

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

Yeah I’m gonna suckle on the teat of an A-list blogger for a second because he’s so popular you can’t just comment on his posts, you have to trackback to them. So here we go.

Seth Godin, author of the amazingly originally named “Seth Godin’s Blog“, posted an excerpt from an interview where he talks about the future of radio. His ideas breack down into four options Wifi, iPods, satellite or some hybrid mix like we have now.

He seems to imply that any one of these will kill or completely devalue current terrestrial radio. To me this sounds a lot like the folks who insisted that TV would kill radio, or that the internet would kill TV or the phone or your dog or whatever other bull they are still shovelling about the internet.

Here’s the thing. Radio is a worthwhile asset. Regardless of it’s current or future incarnations it will be around forever. No really, I mean FOREVER. Short of some cosmological apocalypse I can’t even comprehend, the radio spectrum will always exist. What we use it for may vary a little, but as long as we have the ability to transmit information across the radio dial, we will do so. It may be a smaller audience or a bigger one. It may be local or global, but it’s not going anywhere.

In fact I kinda hope that mass media gets the hell out of radio to the point where it falls into disuse. Then the hackers and makers and OSS folks can get in there and do something really impressive. I have no idea what that might be, but I know that if you give a world of geeks unfettered access to something interesting they will bring forth something amazing.

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

I’m hip deep in a remodel of our previously unused third bedroom (third of 247 in our palatial estate). We’re tossing out the carpet so I’ve scraped the annoying popcorn off the ceiling and let the resulting splooge just fall on the carpet.

A little known fact about some popcorn ceilings. If you are in an older house (mine was built in 1983) your popcorn might be plaster based. Mine is like spackle with little bits of vermiculite or something in it. The trick with this stuff is to just get it good and wet with a spray bottle and then scrape it off with a putty knife. Alas more recent popcorn is a mix of latex paint and foam bits so it may not come off at all. Still I’d try it in a closet corner to see. We took down 120 square feet of it in about 45 minutes with two people scrapeing.

Speaking of closets, the interior of our extra bedroom closet turned out to be completely full of stuff. Some of which we hadn’t seen since we moved in. All of this stuff is now spread like a fine mist throughout the house. There are little paths between the piles of stuff. It looks like the home of that crazy woman who lives next to my grandmother who has every newspaper since 1972.
You see the closet has to be repainted and refloored as well. You don’t think about that right off. You just ignore the closet. Who cares about closets? But the closet always comes back. Just when you think you’re done with the trim, oh right, the closet. The painting is done man…except for the closet. My partner in crime J-Rod and I have agreed that the closet is evil.

I’m not sure I’m going to be able to look in my son’s eyes and tell him there are no monsters in the closet. I’m starting to thing the closet IS a monster. And it’s pissing me off.

If you’re interested in some pix of the remodel in process, I threw some up on Flickr today. Here you go.

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

But Bryan, you are a stunning vision of worldly charm and a daring master of the written word. How could you ever be a “dork”? Yes, yes, I know. But it’s true. I am a dork for one reason alone. One mighty scar across the gleaming beauty of my identity…

I now have a MySpace page.

Wait, doesn’t everyone on earth down to the annoying gopher that keeps eating my pathetic attempts at carrots have a MySpace page? Well yeah, but I didn’t until today. Ok techincally I had one before but there was nothing but the default page and my good friend Tom. So I am not a dork because of my MySpace page, I’m a dork because I just got one.

Now everyone can “friend” me and I can look like that old guy at the bar at 1:30am who just doesn’t understand that he looks more like a pedophile than a “cool dude”. I once saw my sixth grade teacher in this position. He looked like a “wild and crazy guy” of SNL fame.

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

When you start a blog, they tell you to find a niche (pronounced “neeche” if you’re a pretentious twit) and then write on that topic. My problem was that I was only really starting a blog in order to say I’d done it. All my friends in the business had blogs and it seemed like the thing to do. Now I have one and a year in I still don’t think I have a niche (you can stick out your pinky too if you like, tosser).

However I don’t think I’m alone in my nichelessness (just don’t say that word out loud). I have found someone else who’s niche (just stop), or lack there of, is much like mine. What is that nitch (ha, I got ya there) you ask? No, it’s not the parenthetical comments society blog, it my favorite ineffectual mythical man beast, Matthew Baldwin and his blog, Defective Yeti.

It seems that Mr. Baldwin is as scattered and weird in his interests as I am. While he does have some favorite topics (board games, bad movie reviews, his son), he’s not really tied to any one neeeché (you just think about that one for a while). He writes however he wants and does a damn fine job of it in my humble opinion (IMHO for the acronym addicted).

So it appears that I am to be locked in an epic struggle for dominance of the quirky, but humorously phrased observations about daily life Nietzsche (probably the most apt spelling given my feelings about them). Only one man can prevail, the other must settle for second, and I, I am that man. Good luck Matt.

Did I mention I’m not fond of the whole niche concept? Hmm, maybe I’ll get back to that another time.

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

I really don’t care for Dylan myself, at least not as a singer, but as a songwriter he was pretty impressive (yeah I know, he was a god to you hippies, shut up it’s my blog). Really though his biggest contribution to society was to act as a lighting rod for a lot of sentiment that was brewing in the country at the time. There were tons of great artists and songwriters out and about at the same time Dylan was, but for whatever reason, he was a name people could point to and say “that’s what I’m talking about”.

The times tend to push people like Dylan to the fore whether they like it or not. Cobain couldn’t take it and killed himself. Although in actuality that act was very much in keeping with the emotional wave that had carried him. It seems that some things simply bubble up to the surface. One of those things is Michael Franti.

A few weeks back one of my students picked him as the subject of a biography site in my web design class. This was the first I had heard of him. I know I’m hopelessly out of the loop, but that’s sortof the point. Since then his name has surfaced several times in my life in completely different places. This morning I heard an interview with him on the BBC.

Michael Franti seems to me to be a modern analog of the anti-war movement that Dylan was so much a part of. The sound is a little different, there is a little more of Gil Scott-Heron’s revolution than Dylan’s guitar. To make a movie pitch out of it, it’s like Rage Against the Machine meets Bob Marley. In any case it is seriously good stuff.

As much as the Bush administration would like us to believe the war in Iraq is going well, and as much as they FEMA would prefer us to not think about New Orleans any more, people are thinking about them. I think the county is getting a little sick of this crap. It always bubbles up from the fringes. Consider, Michael Franti just came back from a trip to Iraq where he made a documentary and wrote an album telling his story. Neil Young is gathering a coalition of anti-war songs (including one by my friend Anthony Neff), an incumbent Democrat just lost a primary over his support for the war and the Bush administration. I’m usually a pessimistic S.O.B. but this all seems like good news to me.

As much as I love Shakira’s honest pelvis, I think we are in for (at least) two years of anti-war songs hitting the mainstream. I’ll save the serious politics for another day, but for now Stay Human.

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

School Staffer: Hey guys, Melinda  just sent me a postcard, she’s in Austrailia. She got licked by a dingo!

Me: [cough, sputter, choke]

Note: The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

I like to think I’m a pretty good husband. I open jars and mow the grass. I dispose of the large scary bugs and get things off the top shelf as requested. I love my wife dearly and try to help her whenever I can.

Over the years I’ve noticed this tendency I have. When she cries or yells in pain, I have the urge to kill something. One might presume this would be bad for our arguments, but let me clarify that this unbridled agression is never aimed at her but at whatever is causing her harm. There is an instinctive, and I mean that quite literally, urge to defend my mate when she is injured. I’m sure this is all very sweet to her and she is surely in tears at this point if she’s reading this (Hi!). Lately this urge has become problematic.

You see my wife is in the throes of childbirth. We’re about eight weeks out from the proposed date. This process results in my wife discovering lots of new pains that she’s never felt before. Her hips were a problem for a while. Her sciatic nerve has been a real bastard lately.

As nice as I might find it to leap from behind the couch with a sharpened curtain rod, plunge it into her thigh and slay this accursed “Sciatica”, I think that would result in still more crying and yelling pain which would eventually whip me into a berserker rage and cause me to lay waste to every living thing in a half mile radius. So that’s out.

Basically my only other option is learn to live with it. So I have. At this point a cry of pain is met with a brief bit of concern, the requisite “you okay?”, and a grunt when the reply is something involving nerves, cartilage, joints or babies. Last night I didn’t even roll over for this exchange.

Men are doers. We DO stuff. I can’t DO anything about this damn baby hurting my wife. Not yet anyway. I will bide my time. I shall lie in wait for him. Perched like a coiled spring in a hair net and stupid hospital booties at the arm of the doctor. Soon enough he will emerge from the protection of my wifes body and then, then, I will strike.

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

Last night I was struck by an urgent need to crap. It was too urgent to pause to acquire reading material so I announced that I was “taking the Browns to the Superbowl” and disappeared. With naught to do but ponder my most recent thoughts I started thinking about all the various phrases that we use to avoid saying things “I’m off to release the excrement trapped in my bowels”.

In the olden days folks seemed to be ok with technical terms. My grandparents tend to use the word “bowel” a lot. Things like “void your bowels”, “move your bowels” or the ever popular “bowel movement” (which I think refers to both the act and the results). Somewhere in the last generation though we lost this stoic ability to discuss our bowels in those terms.
We have many classes of poop euphamisms now. Oddly enough many of them are food related. From the raw prep area (grinding the beef) to the oven (baking a loaf, potato, brownies), as well as some cooktop activity (cooking a brown carrot, cooking a brown kielbasa, cooking a butt burrito, cooking fudge, sausage, trouser chili, butt gravy or even sphincter stew). I’ll also note as a segue that some people prefer to act more violently towards thier poo/food euphamism as in “choking a brownie”.

There is a lot of aggression towards the toilet itself in this process. After being used as a scatological cooktop, the bowl may also get bombed, torpedoed, stained, cracked, punished or even killed.

In these Xtreme days we’ve also done away with simple “movement”. Today we really put some energy into it. Nowadays a turd might be heaved, hurled, hit, smacked launched(!), jettisoned, passed, pinched, popped, poked, ripped, blasted, birthed, sprayed, squeezed, tourqued, zapped, or unleashed. I like the idea of unleashing a crap. It really carries the connotation that it will bring about the suffering of the innocent, which is usually what happens when I do it.

Really, nearly any verb will work. You can take things (a shit, dump, steamer, growler, doogie, or a crap). You can give things (give the hemmies some breathing room or give the boss a burial at sea). You can drop things (a deuce, dookie, load, log, scone, spike, stool, anchor, wolf bait or a chalupa). You can lay things (brick, log, cable, pipe or brown carpet) and you can make things (a Baby Ruth, core dump, delivery, deposit, a doo-doo, mud, fertilizer, haggis, a Minnesota hand warmer or a three coil steamer).

Some people are simply trying to help the world be a better place. They do things like releasing the brown trout, feeding the fish, communing with nature, foraging for dungleberries, giving the neighbors some food for thought, letting the dog out, making modern art or perhaps a grunt sculpture, recycling fiber, or just testing the plumbing.

Ultimately in word play such as this things get so out of hand that it starts to strain the mind as well as the bowels. Things can get really esoteric. Examples include things like “turning the wienermobile into a submarine”, “negotiating the release of the chocolate hostages”, “the big brown man knocking at the back door”, and “introducing the toilet to the bald man with the cigar”. At some point you have to think that your announcement will get so long that you’ll end up crapping yourself before you can even finish it.
Ultimately we all “microwave a dachsund” from time to time and we usually feel the need to announce it to the world (I don’t know why). So whether you’re singing with Michael Bolton, wrestling a brown corn snake, dropping the kids off at the pool, or boarding the bus to strong anus city, we all know that the bunghole train has left the station and we’re right there with you.

For a complete list of all this poop check out Jeff Z’s World of Crap.

Man, I gotta shit.

Originally published at Ad Modum Digirati. You can comment here or there.

It’s amazing to me the need that I have to acquire the acoutrements of a job without actually beginning said job. In the very first blog post I ever wrote (sadly, lost to the sands of database collapse), I talked about the twelve dollar pencil I bought in one of my many collegiate art porn runs to the art store. Art porn, for those out of the know, is the act of going to the art store and drooling over all the fancy widgets and doodads that will (in theory) help you draw better. You spend a lot of money and still don’t draw enough to improve enough to make it worth spending all this money on art supplies. This also happens ever fall when students around the world buy a cart full of school supplies swearing that this year, by God, the homework is going to get done. I still have my porno pencil, although it was never really any good for drawing, it’s still a damn nice pencil, and only goes for about eight bucks now. As usual, I digress.

I just bought a two gigabyte flash drive. It’s an unimpressive little doodad that is about a quarter of an inch thick and about thumb length. It cost $60 (a good deal at this point). I got it so that I could haul my files around school, to and from school and from time to time back home to this archaic machine on which I now type.

Like most people, when I buy something, particularly something annoyingly expensive (this this was 960 bucks a pound!), I want to use it as soon as possible. When I buy a new pen or pencil, I want to write with it. When I get a new game, I want to go home and play it. Can you imagine the sheer horror of buying a game you really wanted and then go out of town for a week without opening it?

When I arrived home I spent some time fiddling with the lanyard attachement. I already have a lanyard with my school ID and a Cross Ion pen on it so I figured I would attach this too. Eventually I hope to have a massive clutch of miscellaneous crap that hangs around my neck like a productivity Mr. T. For now though, I managed to stick it on there and even jury rigged the detachable function to work. I considered copying some files to it, just for fun, but that seemed silly. Slowly the simple truth began to dawn on me….

I bought a storage device. A device intended for moving files to and from work. I bought it on a Friday. I’m an idiot.