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Friday, January 11, 2002

Hey look! Booths!

When I was a teenager, I'd sometimes get invited to come up to Moscone Center with my friend's dad (who worked for IBM, I think) and we'd go to PC world. I loved coming home with a bag full of tchotchkes and spec sheets, which was like proto-geek, technological masturbation fodder at the time.

So I finally I made it over to MacWorld Expo today. I still love coming back home with a bag of promo materials and crap. But now I find my design eye critiquing the printed graphics and checking out booth layouts. Which is a different kind of geek fodder altogether.

As I suspected...the iMac is better-looking in person than I first thought from its photos. The base (which is bigger than I thought) and the monitor (which is less bulky than I thought) work pretty well together, visually. My friend wanted to know about the monitor...yes, it's sharper than your old iMac, but it's still going to feel tiny compared to your monitor at the design studio.

I wonder if my fellow booth wanderer will enjoy bossing his virtual people around as much as I will. If so I'll have to load him up with some new furniture and stuff (because, boy howdy, do I have plenty.)

06:14 PM PST (link)

Thursday, January 10, 2002

Two out of three ain't...

I've done two of the following things tonight:

1. Posted a massive diary entry to catch up through at least New Year's Week.
2. Written my Self-Evaluation for work.
3. Searched a Big Gay Web Portal's personal ads for Lance Arthur's hilariously-written one.

It's all about priorities, y'know?

02:27 AM PST (link)

Wednesday, January 9, 2002

Ladies and Gentlemen, it's a Meme!

Bloggers and online journal-writers: generate your own blogger code. (B7 d+ t+ k s- f i o+ x- e l+ c)

Neat-o. Have I mentioned lately that Ron rocks the block?

09:39 PM PST (link)

Give Me Back My Pocket Protector!

Jeez, all the Web links that are getting me excited today are totally geeky. I mean, really really geeky. Geekier than usual. Like the Dungeons and Dragons™ Character Stats real-life equivalents (and character alignment quiz.) A listing of Star Trek Phaser Settings". The 20th Anniversary of the movie "Tron," the upcoming special-edition DVD and, even more exciting for me, the long-awaited re-release of Wendy Carlos' original score. OK, maybe that's more nerdy than geeky. But I am so excited about it I may wet myself, and that's geeky.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go replace the tape on my glasses.

(Some links via Nick and The Roommate.)

06:59 PM PST (link)

Tuesday, January 8, 2002

Recycling and Refuse.

In a design review today:
  "Maybe it's the photo? He doesn't look very friendly."
  "He looks kind of Apocalypse Now, actually."
  I said, "'I love the smell of Ad Programs in the morning.'"
And they actually laughed. I love being able to recycle my material.

On the other hand, coming home tonight, I saw a discarded toaster oven in the gutter with a sticker on the side: "How's my Poetry? Dial 1-800-Eat-Shit." That just about says it all, though I'm not quite sure all about what.

10:14 PM PST (link)

Monday, January 7, 2002

Like a Sunflower?

Home sick again today, so I got to watch the Macworld Expo Keynote in jittery Quicktime while in my pajamas. I'm tempted to say the new iMac looks more like a lamp to me than a "sunflower". But I'll reserve judgement until I see one in person.

And that will happen this week. See, while I've lived in the city for almost 10 years now, and have worked on Macs all that time, I've never been to the expo. This year I only work a couple of blocks away from the show. Hopefully I'll have some delightful company who can help motivate me out the door.

12:22 AM PST (link)

The Numbers Racket.

On the subject of the Numbers game, yes, how very John Rechy. My lifetime totals are on the high end, though looking at the past several years of monogamy, I'm bringing down the yearly average pretty fast. In my very early 20's, I briefly looked into Sexual Addiction or Sexual Compulsion groups to see what they were about. But besides being turned off by the twelve step approach, I realized that being a young gay man with a strong libido was probably not an unusual thing and shouldn't be treated as malfunction. It was certainly an appropriate wake-up call to pay attention to my sexual responses at the time, but to treat every erotic urge as illness seemed erotophobic and misguided. Now I'm just becoming an old pervert. (Hi Mom!)

Is it a cop-out to say the sexual norms of gay men may be different than those of straight men? I don't think so. As long as your sexual behaviors don't damage yourself or others, what's the problem?

11:11 AM PST (link)