My Treo was stuck in a reboot loop, so I gathered links.
How to edit the preset favorites on a locked Treo. How to enter debug mode at boot (hold the up-arrow key on the little navigation pad thingy). How to flash the ROM in a Treo 650. Shadowmite’s Treo hacks site. Using a Sprint Treo 650 as a bluetooth dial-up modem with Sahadowmite’s DUN hack in place.
FastMailWiki will help me as I navigate the transition between running my own sendmail and having fastmail provide primary hosting. I already hate the piece-rate alias charges. Ah well.
oops – Last night I met Dan after work for a beer and we ended up having dinner – delicious Ethiopian food – with Viv and Vonda. Sleep followed immediately thereafter, at the cost of blogging.
I wrote a 500-word-plus meditation on the changing fortunes of Broadway in my neighborhood today. I was sitting in Cafe Septieme waiting for Viv, watching the street as cloudburst after cloudburst cycled between sun and wet. Alas for me, my Palm-based blog app lacks an autosave and due to a moment of inattention on my part, poof, away it went.
Our old neighbors Shawna and Christian walked in while we were there with their one-year old. I did not recognize them at first – the baby might have had something to do with it. I forgot to ask about Mavis, darn it.
Finally, Greg reminded me that I should be reading Stacey’s blog, having badgered her into it over the past couple of years. He’s right, I need to, but due to insane business at work and in real life, my blog reading has been much curtailed of late.
Update – he’s doubly right, Stacey’s got the makings of a great blogger. Her posts are clearly unfiltered internal narrative; it sounds like her talking on the page. Hm, I probably have an obligation here to do some basic blog-lore education.
Man, how weird is that! Blog-lore! There is clearly such a thing, and I can recall when there wasn’t!
I read this amusing NYT piece to Viv aloud because she was asking why I was chuckling. Extra points to the author for assiduously avoiding the Napoleon Dynamite and Pirates of the Caribbean referents the photographer so carefully captured. While a tad glib, I am filled with admiration for the writing itself in this article.
Geez, 2-for-2 from the Times. I gotta stay in more; my link-fu weakens!
NYT: New Theory Places Origin of Diabetes in an Age of Icy Hardships
When temperatures plummet, most people bundle up in thick sweaters, stay cozy indoors and stoke up on comfort food. But a provocative new theory suggests that thousands of years ago, juvenile diabetes may have evolved as a way to stay warm.
Hm. Not sure I buy this. Apparently I am not alone:
Most doctors who treat diabetes are extremely skeptical about the idea. In a typical comment, one doctor said, referring to a dangerous complication of diabetes: “Are they kidding? Type 1 diabetes would result in severe ketoacidosis and early death.”
Seems like dying before reproducing might confer some evolutionary limits. The presenter of the theory argues that an Ice Age average lifespan of 25 might have meant that diabetics fared comparably well in the cold climate. The article goes on to note that Nordics are the most prevalently affected by this disease, and moreso in cold climates than in warm ones. I can only note that my wife is Cuban and was affected in sunny California. I will take some salt with this idea, thanks all the same.
JG Ballard reviews The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination 1920-1950, by Robert Wohl, in the Guardian.
I have read, and deeply enjoyed, Professor Wohl’s previous book on the subject of the cultural symbology of aviation, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908 to 1918. I am quite looking forward to reading this newer book as well. The period covered in the latest book represents the zenith of aviation as a pop-culture referent. Therefore, it’s the period in which the aviation archetypes that have always gripped me first gained wide purchase in the popular imagination.
While I loved the prior book, I found it overly documentarian. This complaint probably stems from Wohl’s profession, that of historian. I craved not merely encyclopedic paragraphs stating who did what and how given expression of the symbology of flight was disseminated, but also what it may have meant at the time. That’s not to say Wohl doesn’t provide interpretation, only that documentation is his primary focus.
While I’m at it, what a treat it is to read Ballard’s typically dystopian dry wit on the subject. Maybe he’ll take a crack at it – Plane Crash, anyone?
(Given that my folks are currently winging off to this week’s god-knows-where – is it China? – my own black joke is really quite inapproriate. Let’s hope I lack reasons to regret come tomorrow.)
So, you’ve probably heard that this time out the NYT’s A. O. Scott rejects, I’m sorry to say, a curb-stomping for Star Wars, Episode III (sorry for the link, but the blogerator appears to be down.) Apparently eager to make up for it, The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane unleashes a review of overreaching vituperation which fails to amuse in (for example) its calls for the extermination of Yoda, and generally appears to reveal the critic as an enemy of fun. From what I can make of it, you’d think he’d actually like the film. He prophetically describes it as a “remorseless non-comedy,” sadly telegraphing a review into which he undoubtedly chortled three decades’ worth of deep loathing. It saddens me, because I do so enjoy a sound sour Star Wars review and had held great hopes, if not for the film, for the reviews.
