I liked the part in Dale's post-Game GC writeup where he talks about programming the phone system. I especially like the part where he mentions that it was cheap to set up for inital development/testing. Talking with Snout about voice systems wasn't so reassuring. "Well, one of us worked at Hearme, so we got this free testing account...". But $11 a month for a few months sounds workable. And it's good to learn new things.

Like last weekend, I found out that the jelly from jelly rolls is not the same as hair gel. It's not so difficult to notice the difference; bees can distinguish between them quite easily.

It was difficult to decide whether or not to go to that gallery show opening. But I was able to harness the wisdom of crowds: the humongous slow evening commute traffic decided I wasn't going. Bah.

Anyhow, this isn't about me. This is about the novel Geek Love. I'd been warned that this book by Katherine Dunn was about circus freaks, not about nerd-ish geeks. But I read it anyhow. It was a pulpy novel. I never got into it. Bah.

I attended this meeting via video conference. No, I was not the guy in the gorilla suit. I have never ordered a gorilla-suited singing telegram. I figured that the concept is so wonderful that the implementation could never live up to it. But I have to give props to the folks at Furrier Courier of New York City--that was pretty fun. I would say that it was as much fun as a gorilla-suited singing telegram should be, which is to say, quite a lot.

Speaking of which, Shampoo Planet is a fun novel by Douglas Coupland. There weren't any gorilla suits, but there were other things. Malls. Diners. Los Angeles. Toxic waste. Following the arc of every other Douglas Coupland novel I've ever read, young people living in the modern world realize that they must understand old-fashioned ideas like "love" and "helping each other" to get by. I could read these things like popcorn.