Hilarious

In case anyone needed a little hump day humor, I came by this by way of Techland (click to go the Techland post, which has the video of how this wonder came to be):



Edited because Blogaway does not rock video clips...

A Faraday Cage For Your Purse

 Purse Organizer with RFID blocking by Corporate Travel Safety - Security Travel Handbags - CorporateTravelSafety.com 

This is both funny and scary.

I Love an Octopus with an Interest in the Beautiful Game

 BBC News - 'Psychic' octopus predicts Germany victory over England 

I love the fact that he's named Paul, and the bit about how he sits inside the jar after he's made his "choice," and this is seen as emphasizing his prediction.

Smartphones Are Only So Smart

So I'm now on my third Droid Eris. My phone effortlessly made the upgrade to the new version of Android and then mysteriously began experiencing weird errors a week and a half later. I took it back to Verizon (fortunately on my way home) and after trying a factory reset they just gave me a brand new phone.

I wasn't worried because I had bought a backup program, but when I took the phone home and tried to access my backed-up data, the program wouldn't accept my password. Fortunately the Android market remembered a fair bit of my stuff, and I remembered the other things I used. Within an hour or so I was back up and running.

Then the next day I started having an issue where people would call me and there was no sound. So back to Verizon, where this time they didn't even bother with the factory reset and just gave me another new phone. This time, having witnessed the failure of the expensive backup program, I had backed everything up two different ways, and restoring everything only took five minutes. And the added bonus is that now I know my backup software works.

And I still love my Eris, which says a lot, I think. I'm also pretty impressed with Verizon. After my previous experience with AT&T, where I had a Samsung phone that reused to keep anybody on the line for more than five minutes, I wasn't expecting such pleasant and trouble-free customer service. (AT&T's response was to ask me to buy another phone.) I'm sure Verizon has its bad times, too, but so far, so good...

Shoe Shopping

Does anyone else hear Seth Green's voice in their head while shopping for shoes? "Do those serve an orthopedic function??"

Just me?

Allrighty then.

Thoughts on walking in Manhattan

In no particular order...

Do you want to walk, or do you want to play with your phone? Because as I and the other 80 people trapped on the sidewalk behind you can testify, you are not capable of both at the same time.

24 blocks wouldn't be so far if all these other people weren't involved.

Central Park makes everything worth it.

Supermoth

Mike Birbiglia was hilarious. We laughed. We cried. We were shocked. We laughed some more. I had the honor of speaking briefly to Flora Hogman, who told the evening's most affecting story, about her mother's final act on her way to Auschwitz, entrusting her daughter to the care of a convent, and Flora's journey to recover her name, her past, and her sense of belonging.

I also had the opportunity to accost Mike Birbiglia during the intermission, but I elected instead to let him proceed to the bathroom. I expect my fangirl medal in the mail any day now.

The evening was all I hoped and more, and if I manage to find a gas station before I run out of fumes on my way home, my life will truly be worth living.

Moth at the Player's Club

After a real roller-coaster of a day (all work-related and all thoroughly boring to humans with lives) I actually managed to leave work early enough too catch the train and get to the Player's Club. I'd never been before, and it's amazing. The place is stuffed with portraits--I waited in line for my tickets next to Edward Albee and Katharine Hepburn--and it's not at all the setting I imagined. It's all red velvet and gilt and dark wood.

Mike Birbiglia is hosting the evening of storytelling, and the theme ("Hoodwinked") is immensely promising. More from the train if I'm awake enough.

A Serious Question

I know we have more serious priorities. I know this isn't a potential Nobel prize. But can someone please invent a pair of glasses that don't rip the hair out of my head at random intervals throughout the day? At this rate I'll have a dramatically receding hairline in a matter of weeks.

Again, leading scientists of the world, I can appreciate that you are very busy curing cancer and making bridges that don't fall down, and I don't want you to think I'm not grateful. I just think that if you took five minutes to take a look at these hinges, a lot fewer of us would be bald.

Excuse me while I go put in my contact lenses. I probably shouldn't wear them on weekends, but my temples hurt.

Mobile Blogging

A lot of my favorite bloggers routinely post from their mobile phones. What with every phone on earth being a camera, and with so many of them requiring an unlimited data plan, it seemed like a perfectly natural development.

Then I got my smartphone, and it just wasn't. Natural, that is. That's because I'm not really a text-savvy person. On my old Nokia phone, I had gotten reasonably proficient, but that was mostly because I had it for five years. If you do anything for five years, you can get better at it, so even though in the end I still wasn't very good with it, I was good enough that I didn't actively seem retarded.

When I got the Eris, I knew the on-screen keyboard was a challenge for many users, but having had the pleasure of a Blackberry, I also knew that a physical keyboard didn't add any noticeable speed for me, so I figured I'd go ahead and risk it.

I got pretty good with the native keyboard, but I knew I was never going to be good enough to e-mail or blog from my phone. Since the phone (or, technically, the phone's data plan) is more expensive than my old one, I really wanted to get more out of it.

I finally heeded advice ubiquitous in Android forums and downloaded Swype this morning. And now not only can I blog from my phone, I can blog the word ubiquitous!

I sincerely doubt there's anyone left who doesn't know how awesome Swype is. It's an application that replaces the native keyboard with one where you drag your finger from one key to the next. It's quickly learned and astonishingly accurate. I literally just started using it, and this entry has taken me just moments longer than it would have on a full-size keyboard.

Magic, I tell you! Here's hoping developers keep coming out with apps that make me seem like less of an old fogey.