Jon Nelson, an elder statesman of the bohemian and odd and Bay Area bus shepard par excellence dropped a line noting his recent foray into the world of blogging.

I first heard of Jon from my late pal Steve Millen, who saw fit to run some of Jon’s material in his celebrated (by me) zine Tussin Up back in the eighties. Since that material is the sort of thing that routinely gets folks fired these days, you’ll have to figure out what Jon contributed on your own.

Jon first got in touch with me about a year ago, as a consequence of reflecting on Steve’s death and having come across my archive of the zine (See link above; no, really, you should check it out – the zine’s hilarious).

Since then I have looked forward to receiving his occasional ruminations, and the very idea that Jon is now in the building makes me all quivery.

Ladies and gentlemen – Jon Nelson!

May be void where prohibited by law. Closed track with provessional driver. Persons with easily disturbed digestive processes, a tendency to believe that Democrats and Republicans offer a materially different electoral choice, a fondness for Ayn Rand, and outmoded views of sexual morality may wish to avoid the links cited above. Your mileage may vary.

As I walked out of Cafe Argento, where I was working for a while this afternoon, a screech of tires and rattle of metal attracted exclamations from a few people on the sidewalk in front of the cafe.

I walked by them, on my way to Caffe Vita to keep working, and looked down the street to see what they were exclaiming about. My eye caught a white van accellerating down the empty street toward the reservoir park and playfield at the end of the block.

As I watched, it careened through the intersection and plowed through a chain-link fence surrounding a stone wall in the process of being constructed. As the van hit the wall, it slewed sideways and came to rest in a cloud of dust.

Absurdly, with my new cell phone in my hand, I called out to the knot of onlookers at the cafe to call an ambulance, and proceeded toward the wreck. Someone who passed me noticed my phone and told me to call 911, which gave me pause. Later, I asked my friend Sabrina how that works, and she assured me that any call to 911 placed from a handset is now legally obligated to connect to geographically-local emergency services operators.

The park had been crowded with people, and many of them were drifting cautiously nearer to the van, evidently fearful of the sight awaiting them. I heard someone say, “Was there anyone in the van?”

“Someone was driving it,” I said as I walked closer to the van, stepping over the shattered remnants of the low stone wall. As I did so I thought for the first time about what I might be just about to see and the fact that my phone was also a camera.

As I paused, a somewhat unkempt man wearing a blue plaid shirt and a Caffe Vita cap emerged shakily from the other side of the van. “Are you the driver?” I asked. He was not able to speak, but did not appear physically hurt, just very badly shaken. His left hand remained at his side while his right was lifted to his chest in the universal gesture of relief.

“You are a very lucky man,” I told him. Other onlookers began to draw closer, including one woman who gestured to her car, stopped in the middle of the road. She expressed relief as well; had she been a few feet further into the intersection the speeding van would have T-boned her on the driver’s side.

I was torn between staying and moving on, because I got a late start today and have a ton of work to do. In the end I settled for snapping a few photos and moving on.

Once I was a block down the street, I became aware that I was shaking with adrenaline. I sat down and called Sabrina and Viv.

After last night’s MeFi meet, Jim and Dan and I repaired to the confines of the snug in the very back of The College Inn, a fusty relic of the 1920s featuring a battered and moldy piano upon which Jim and I executed half-competent tinkle-tones at various points through the evening.

This, by the way, is what Jim looks like to my Treo when drinking under low-light conditions. It is a companion to another image which willl be posted in due course.

PalmVNC 2.0. That is all.

Cingular Treo 650 FAQ: r34d 7415 n00bs! In fact, read everything at TreoCentral, but start with the forums. This is the place that explained how and why I need a hybrid headset in order to accomplish my internal call-recording goal.

As an aside, the music-management on the Treo is kind of not-so-hot, but it works! You must drag the audio assets (presumably MP3s) to the icon for ‘Send to Handheld,’ a PalmOne widget that installed with the 4.2.1 Palm Desktop suite, and the files are prepped for the next time you sync, where they appear to be converted into RA files which you access via a RealPlayer on the Palm.

Investigating photo syncing with iPhoto yielded cryptic references to a “PalmOne Photos” folder in your user directory’s “Pictures” folder, which apparently instantiates only if you choose to use Palm Desktop rather than iCal, AddressBook, and iSync. Here’s a resource page at Palm that doesn’t explicitly cover the 650 but which appears to apply to the documentation provided with the Treo.

BigClock doesn’t work on the Treo 650 or 600, but someone patched it for the 600; at first impression, it appears to work well enough.

Returning to the bug-up-my-nether-parts-du-jour, I have downloaded and played with PAR, and while the audio quality appears to be excellent, if subject to the rustling noises produced by handling the case, it also very definitely has a tendency to crash if you attempt to record for longer than a minute. That, coupled with the inability to make a direct internal recording, means I must keep searching. Time’s a-wasting!

Eric mentioned in passing that the Gizmodo entry that flagged Natural Recorder also mentioned Spy Call, an app which offers nearly the same functionality as NR, but (thankfully) includes a toggling option for automatically recording or not – with the autorecord feature on, it just records every call. With the feature off, a dialog is presented at the start of every call asking “Record this call?”

There’s a 14-day demo and a manual. I’ll be checking it out.

This software’s primary drawback appears to be the interesting feature it offers – you can install the app and then hide it from the phone’s user. That, in combination with the transparent recording feature furrows the brow.

The app’s developer, Killer Mobile, appears to host a Nokia Series 60 blog, and to be based in Portland.

So where’s the Treo blog?

Blogjam presents: Neil Armstrong – The Truth. Rare, unedited footage of the first lunar landing which dramatically challenges my childhood memories if parsed for fact. Yet, as it alwasy has, this particular reinterpretation captures something of the truth.

Say, how would you like it if you knew that your pal’s cell phone recorded every call placed to it, by default?

I don’t really like it one bit, and sure hope that I’m just misunderstanding the basic functionality of the software. It’s a shame really, because the software’s transparency is absolutely cool.

MeFi links to “Complacency Kills,” a 36mb pdf containing Joe Sacco’s reporting from Iraq for (natch) The Guardian.