Plaidophile

So, I noticed that T-Mobile's 300 minute plan also includes 300 mobile-to-mobile minutes, which actually does make it suitable for my calling needs after all (since pretty much all of the people I call regularly are on T-Mobile so that makes it essentially 600 minutes), so I switched to that. Plus, T-Mobile is still the least-shitty cellphone provider and they probably will continue to be for at least the next two years, so I went ahead and ordered a Sidekick 3, and reintroduced myself to hiptop.com.

If I don't like it, I can always sell it on eBay.

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A housewarming party is where you celebrate finally getting your home cleaned up and livable by having all your friends come over and trash it.

Right now I'm watching an episode of The Outer Limits, entitled "Decompression," where a woman has come from the future to warn a presidential candidate that the flight he's on is going to crash, and that he needs to save himself so that he can be elected. If he doesn't, she says, a weak-willed president acting in his own self-interest gets elected, terrorism escalates, there is an attack on America, and then this president uses it as an opportunity to further his own agenda to subvert the ideas of freedom and democracy in order to turn America into a totalitarian state.

The interesting thing: this episode aired in June 2000.

The gas station near my place is now at $3.079/gallon, down from 3.24 or something. It seems "low." I wonder if every time there's a price hike the stations all artificially collude to raise prices past market price just so they can lower it a month later to make it seem cheaper, when it was a heck of a lot less just a few months ago.

• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 small seedless watermelon
• 1/4 cup lime juice
• 2 shots triple sec

Across the way from me on the bus right now: a cute androgynous person with a pet albino rat sitting cutely on their shoulder.

You were the last major provider to hold off on moving to a two-year contract. But now you too have decided that it's easier to lock customers in than to give superior service which people actually want to stay with.

For shame.

I'm selling my TV. It's too small for my living room.

Never mind, a 32" 16:9 TV isn't going to be appreciably bigger and I don't want to spend $2000+ for a 37" or go with rear projection. Current set's fine for now.

Hm, though some of the current DLP sets are pretty tempting! Maybe I'll order one and then sell my old TV when it arrives. (I'd want to order it ASAP since there's a nice big rebate on it right now...) Of course patience is never a bad thing either.

Just checked some DLP sets out at Best Buy. They suck. However! Westinghouse makes an incredible 1080p LCD monitor (which requires an external tuner box but that's not a big deal) which is actually cheapest at Best Buy ($2000 right now), strangely enough. But something which costs $2000 now will cost less than $2000 in a few months. I can definitely wait.

I've been going about treating my wrist problems all wrong. I mean, I was doing an established protocol for treating inflammation of the tendons, but cortisone didn't help at all. Reading further I found out it's much more likely I have tendinosis, which is caused by several microtears in the collagen layer of the tendons. In the case of tendinosis, the last thing you want to do is get rid of the inflammation, because that is how the body sends important stuff to the tendons to repair the collagen.

There is an experimental treatment for tendonosis called "prolotherapy" which actually induces inflammation to speed the natural healing process up, but apparently the best treatment is to exercise the muscles in "braking" motions, not stretch, not use anti-inflammatories (instead using painkillers like acetaminophen) to mitigate the pain, and not do the things which cause damage for a month or more. Argh.

28! WTF.

I finally got sick of the crappy futon I bought two years ago out of desperation (needing something in a hurry to sleep on when I moved to New York) so I went over to Fürni and got a sofa as a birthday present to myself. I also finally got a tea pot, a picture frame, and some other stuff I'd been needing.

I used to really hate Ikea stuff because it all felt cheaply-made and so on, but both the sofa and the entertainment center I bought a few months ago are made of real, solid wood, and actually feel pretty sturdy and look good, and are also both exactly the sorts of things I was looking for in the respective pieces of furniture. I guess that's what Ikea's best at, as long as you know exactly which items to look for.

So, apparently Target's cotton placemats can't withstand a gentle machine washing. Ugh.

Whenever I go to Cash And Carry (a local restaurant supplier) I always feel like such a tourist. There's a handful of things they carry which could potentially be useful for me and then a whole bunch of stuff which I'd like to get if it were in smaller quantities, which you don't normally see in smaller quantities at other grocery stores.

So I bought a whole bunch of chocolate-covered espresso beans (which I'm already way too high on), a case of Red Bull, a really nice restaurant-quality (meaning, well-made, but inexpensive) santoku, some blackcurrant syrup, some soymilk, and four avocadoes. I also found out that the exact same seedless baby watermelons I paid $2.50 for one of at Ballard Market the other day was only 95 cents at Cash And Carry.

So, now that Macs can boot Windows and also run Windows apps virtualized via Parallels, a lot of people (including my brother) are finally buying Macs without fear of having to leave behind their scientific computing apps and so on. It's pretty sad that the killer app for the Mac is Windows, but I digress; I have a great idea for another Get A Mac ad.

So, nerve conductivity tests showed that there's no compression or damage. So whatever I have isn't typical carpal tunnel syndrome. Yay me.

You know it isn't a good sign when a traditional doctor suggests trying acupuncture...

(Well okay, he didn't actually say it outright but he implied it.)

What a provocative title. But in this case, it's how I feel about something I found while looking up formative childhood influences; apparently, the Supreme Court of New Mexico has decided that the logical conclusion of the doctrine of separation of church and state extends even to contractual disputes.

A couple of doodles I did at work today (decided to do a little bit of line of action). These might be the last things I draw for a while — tomorrow I'm finally getting tested for how severe my carpal tunnel syndrome is and find out what treatment is necessary and how royally screwed I am.

So, uh, enjoy.

So, I've been reading John K's weblog for a while and have finally decided that even though he warned that after the age of 24 it's too late to try learning how to draw right, it's time I learned how to draw right.

Tonight I did a few quick pencil sketches, some based directly on his lesson pictures and some based on the lessons learned from trying to emulate the lessons.

So, I'm really tempted to switch to T-Mobile's pay-as-you-go plan, seeing as how it's a flat-rate 10 cents per minute (when paid $100 at a time), which is of course much better than my usual $55/month for an average of 180 minutes. Also when it's billed by the minute it's easy for me to itemize my bill so that I can get reimbursed for business calls (which accounts for usually 150 of those minutes per month). It also has free incoming SMS.

I'm not sure if this'll last but I've decided to take de^x/dx in a new-ish direction (or more accurately, not locking myself up in a single comic series). So now I have a home for the other little doodly ideas I have.

This decision was somewhat inspired by reading John K's weblog. I was thinking too hard about how Cherry and Jen keep on going off-model when I do draw them, and then John K has a whole bunch of rants about how one-offs and evolving characters work a lot better (with plenty of concrete evidence showing how this is true).

So, I'm trying to get some support on an issue with Expedia (where they have arbitrarily imposed constraints on which airports you can use when booking a hotel in a city which doesn't have an airport). To their credit, their email response came pretty quickly, but the answer was vague. So I replied requesting a clarification.

Of course, I don't top-quote email because it's stupid and doesn't provide context and so on. So, you can probably see the humor in this response I got almost immediately...