Pacificapocalypse

And it’s filled with fresh piping hot mini donuts.

Court and I were at Fogfest this weekend; the usual assortment of arts and crafts and other nonsense… until we saw this, the ultimate application of technology and mankind’s overwhelming desire for fried dough products.  I give you Harvey and his automatic mini donut machine.

photo credit: Scott Ableman

I *need* one of these. Imagine it just chugging away on your kitchen counter top; an endless parade of hot, fresh, mini donuts. Video awesomeness below.

Well we weren’t planning on making the jump to Blu-Ray so soon, but…. our less than thee year old JVC DVD player went tits up the other day so we picked up a Samsung BD-P3600 yesterday and frankly it’s pretty awesome. All the standard stuff, up converts standard DVDs to 1080p but here’s the kicker – it has integrated WiFi and is set up for Netflix streaming and Pandora radio out of the box. Set up was painless and it recognized the network and self configured, and just like that we had access to our Netflix streaming que. And damn ain’t it good to be a gangster.
Course we’ve made a promise to only buy new releases on Blu-Ray, so we picked up Watchmen… and some older films that we didn’t already have.

And 28 Days Later.
And From Hell… okay so we duplicated a few films.

You know that thing where you technically have a weekend, but you pack so much into it, it flys by and you blink and it’s over?
Yeah me too.
Last Friday night was Spamalot at the Golden Gate Theater which was hilarious; I mean come on JOHN O’HURLEY! Dude’s funny and I forgive him for Seinfeld which I loathe. Not a exactly a straight stage production of ‘The Holy Grail‘ but a good mix of the more popular Python skits and I was grateful that they didn’t try to have actors try and portray any of the actual Python cast.  So yeah, if you’re a fan of MP, you should go. Oh and court got some really cool Killer Rabbit slippers.
Ok so that was Friday night, didn’t get back home until midnight, then have to be up at 0600 Saturday morning because….

River Arts Festival!

In Sacramento no less. We picked up Kelé and hustled up to Sac. Set up the table and then I got to play photographer amongst the various homemade… crap. Hey no offense but most of it was garage sale quality. Court hawked her custom hula-hoops and Kelé had a bunch of knit stuff that was pretty cool, and there were one or two other vendors with neat stuff (Roger the depressed carved wooden spoon man being one) but mostly it was just okay.

Court sold I think eight hoops, which is cool (I think her demoing one in the aisle every once in a while really helped sales; that’s called marketing children) and more than paid for the material to make them, so yeah, this whole custom hoop thing may be a viable money maker… especially when a vendor is charging $60.00 for the exact same thing at…

Makers Faire 2009

Which we got up, again, at 0 dark 30 for. Court and Kelé were volunteering at the Bizarre Bazaar so we got there way early, which turned out to be a very good thing ’cause the place filled up quicky and we were able to score a pretty close parking spot. Too many cool things going on to go into in detail; suffice to say that crew from The Crucible were wicked cool as was Cyclecide.
I have a full photoset that I’ll get up later today. The Crucible had their E.R.V (Educational Response Vehicle) on scene; a converted 1960’s firetruck… no seriously, a real firetruck. Like Bradbury’s Firemen from Fahrenheit 451; a truck that shoots fire. Loud as hell; it set off car alarms for Christ’s sakes. So cool.

*sigh* I drank the Kool-Aid.
I had hoped that it wouldn’t come to this.

I bought an iPhone.

Here’s the deal. My old phone (a 3 year old Motorola RAZR) that was starting to show it’s age. Not holding a charge very long and problems with SMS and plain old getting calls. Court’s had the iPhone for about six months now and there have been a couple times where she hasn’t been able to reach me and from day one, she cannot get SMS texts I send her – I can receive hers, but when I respond, she never gets them and the “customer service” at AT&T has been, shall we say, less than helpful.
I knew when I upgraded to a new phone, it would be a smart phone of some variety, and after looking at all the models offered by AT&T the iPhone was the front runner.
I’ve always kind of resented Apple product and I wanted to avoid like the plague any sense of buying into the hype (There are currently 246,000 returns for “iphone douchebag” on Google.) oh sure, they look pretty, and obviously they work well, but something about the cult vibe always threw me off – go to an Apple store and… it’s so shiny.  And everyone is so… happy. It’s like Logan’s Run. Just weirds me out. Plus I’m a died in the wool old-skool PC user. But I did it. I slapped down my cash and walked out with a shiny new 12GB iPhone. After some initial dismay (what the fuck? I HAVE to use iTunes? I hate iTunes! Fuck you Apple.) and a few hiccups in configuration (what the hell? What do ya mean it won’t synce with Google Calendar?) and a little frustration on initially synching with iTunes (why the fuck is this taking so LONG!), I think I have it working reasonbly well.

Yeah yeah, the Facebook app is pretty cool, and being able to check your mail and websites on the fly is neat (and there’s even a WordPress app, neat.) but the camera function is pretty clunky and almost impossible to use with one hand.
But I’m going to give it a fair shot. They sell a hell of a lot of these things, so they must be doing something right… I mean, not everyone that bought one is a complete douchenozzle trend whore… right?

Wait… what do you  mean it doesn’t record video?
Seriously?

Fuck you Apple.

photo credit: William Hook

Flying car.
As fortold in the prophesy of the ancients.

Holy crap, I want this thing more than Christmas.

From the Times Online:

To Timbuktu by flying car: it sounds the most unlikely journey on earth; a sci-fi voyage from the pages of Jules Verne. But this is no fantasy. The car really flies. And the journey will become reality early in the new year when two explorers set off from London in a propeller-powered dune buggy heading for the Sahara.

Ok so it’s not the classic Jetson’s flying car but it has a certain Mad Max appeal.

DUDE! FLYING CAR!

You, you are that false tingle, that lying trick of the nerves.
You are that feeling from a mobile device carried in a pocket, that’s set to vibrate.

And you *feel* the vibration, and you look; no missed calls, no new messages. Liar.

You are ‘fauxbration’

Until someone comes up with a more clever word for it.