This weekend went straight to my thighs.

Friday started with a haircut and a frantic ride home to take Yamaraashi-chan to a birthday party way out in the boonies of the county. Like many people, I'm doing the math on each trip, and just there and back cost me about four bucks. Since when is a trip to a birthday party more expensive than coffee? Except when it isn't.

The birthday party was lovely. It was for Yamaraashi-chan's friend, who's just turning 11, and for her friend's sister who's fifteen. It was held a lake where I fretted about drowning and squamous horros from the deep (I took Charlie Stross's The Concrete Jungle with me), tried to read source code on my laptop when she wasn't swimming, and complained bitterly when the battery died on my ebook.

Saturday was Kouryou-chan's ballet recital at the Performing Arts Center. I ate so badly all day; had a heavy breakfast of oatmeal, a heavy dinner of calzone with too much mozarrella, and after the performance we went to the Cheesecake Factory where I foolishly ate the whole thing on a slice of coffee cheesecake.

But Kouryou-chan's performance was delightful. She looked great and did well. The ballet was Copellia, which gave me a fun and somewhat creepy idea for a Journal Entry, The Dead Doll Collector. The ballet would be so much better done steampunk: Dr. Copellius is a mad scientist trying to create the perfect dancing robot girl, and the villagers discover his activities and ridicule him for it.

Since it's a dance school for all ages, there's a piece in the middle where the mad scientist "dreams of mechanical dolls" to give the lead dancer a chance to change costumes which the school used as a chance to trot out every preschool group they had-- "the little kid slog," as Omaha put it. They were cute, following each other around on stage squirmily like tadpoles.

At one point, the lights died and the emergency lights came on. No explanation-- the center just lost power. It took a few minutes after the power came back on to reboot the entire theater.

I was disappointed with the theme of the ballet: I mean, they messed with the mad scientist, and nothing bad happened. Don't they know better?

Sunday wasn't much more relaxed. I made banana pancakes, which were received with mixed reviews from the children, and then Kouryou-chan had a birthday party to go to, and Omaha had a political schmooze event to hit. I had to go to the political fundraiser as well to rub shoulders and pimp my role as an experienced web developer for small to medium political campaigns. It worked out okay. I met two very young and ambitious political science kids looking for campaigns on which to sharpen their teeth. I was tragically overfed by the buffet.

It wasn't until I got home around five, having dropped Omaha off at her biweekly role-playing game at lisakit (and giving poor Lisa a hug after hearing that her house had been broken into last week) that I had even a slight chance to slow down. I made burgers for the kids, took a fifteen minute nap (which messed up my sleep cycle later), and generally tried to live more casually.

George Carlin. Gone.

I can't begin to explain how sad it is that Carlin is gone. The man was a genius who, with Robin Williams (who, sadly, did not retain his genius quite so much when the cocaine stopped flowing), were the formative comedic influences of my childhood. What can you say about the man who thought:

• If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.
• Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong.
• If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted?
• Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?
• I don't have hobbies; hobbies cost money. Interests are quite free.
• Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.
• If we could just find out who's in charge, we could kill him.
• The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.
• If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten.

And finally:

It's never just a game when you're winning.

Life was never just a game to George Carlin. I don't know what we're going to do without him.

Design Decisions

So, this week I bought myself a new Palm T|X off EBay. It took me a while to figure out why the thing was so cheap; as it turns out, it's an early manufacture, so it has the nicer screen but the battery is only 70% of its manfactured capacity. Bummer, that. Still, compared to my Palm V, it's a hell of a step up. It even has an SSH client in it, which makes it wackily useful. The tones for the meditation timer are quite wonderful, much nicer than the old ones.

There are three major design decisions with this one that bother me though. The first is that the vibration unit was removed. It no longer buzzes to get my intention-- sound only. That was a nice secondary feature to the old one.

The second is that the case is much larger than on the old one. This is mostly to provide space for two SD storage cards inside the case. Apparently, Palm discourages users from keeping the card in the machine as it's one of the two biggest battery drains in the system (the other being the WiFi stack). When you don't have cards there, the unit rattles inside the case. Also, the case isn't integral with the stylus like in the Palm V model, so you have to fumble the unit out to get the stylus. Annoying.

The third, and worst design decision: driving the sound through the main CPU rather than a secondary card. This means that the CPU can easily miss an event like "stop the music!" This doesn't seem to mean much for MP3 and WAV files, as they can be pumped to a buffer, but MIDI sounds (like those used by the alarms) will often play all the way through. Really obnoxious.

But having a 480x320 screen with a photo album, a high-quality MP3 and movie player, and all that is very nice indeed. The Palm T|X is generally a solid package with a decent web browser, and much more open compared to the iPhone. With an 8-gig card and a new battery, it definitely exceeds the new "touch" iPods for usefulness and functionality, and can be purchased for a similar cost.