Friday Night In Boston

It occurs to me after four days on the road that I need to memorize my cell phone number.

So it's Friday night, and because I'm an idiot all plans I had to get out of the hotel tonight fell through, unless I want to go out all by myself, and walking about Boston in the twilight when it's 90 degrees holds about as much appeal to me as licking a dumpster.

Instead, I'm going to have me some class-A (I hope) room service. Used to be when I traveled on the company dime, I would always treat myself to a room service breakfast. Not with my current company. The motto here is, "Why treat for the extras when you can, well, not?" And they don't. There's a per diem of about $25 a day that can cover calls to home and any meals. (It might be $50, I really don't remember until I fill out my expense report, but it makes little difference with the prices out there. The frelling sandwich I have coming up from in-house dining is $18. And the 10-ounce Sierra Mist coming with it is $3. But since I haven't paid for anything else at all today, this meal's on the CEO.) Not that I'm complaining. Number one, being skinflints has kept this company alive long past the dotcom bust. Second, complainers in this company tend to get fired.

Oh, so I traveled out here for the 802.11 Planet show, the expo named after my site and at which I AM A GOD.

Well, I'm extremely popular at least. All the PR people want time with me to tell me why they're so damn great. At least they did, until I was saddled with doing judging for the expo's "Best of Show" awards. I went from booth to booth yesterday, dragging my kemo sabe Joseph around as his health slowly dwindled from sniffly to SARS, and forced as many nominees as possible to give me the blah blah blah. We picked five worth recipients, but I avoided too much time today on the show floor in case the non-winners (because there are no losers at this show!) wanted to pelt me with rocks and garbage.

Oh, my club sandwich, fries and drink just arrived. Twenty-seven bucks, total. They added on the tip automatically. It was good, but not that good. C'mon.

Now, I shall quietly read "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," (I got a copy on Monday morning when B&N released the unclaimed pre-ordered copies) and then watch "Monk" and sleep.

Phones I've Loved

I'm in a hotel in south Boston (the Seaport, by the World Trade Center) and the phones in my room are making me nostalgic. They're exactly the same Meridian phones we had at my first job, at Windows Sources magazine with Ziff Davis Publishing in the early 90's. Great phones. They did all you could want and more. Easy to use, big buttons, great speakers, nice CID dispay at the top. I've used many a crap phone since then -- some of which I bought for myself -- and few come close to the Meridian. If they had a wireless handset or at least a headset jack, it would be perfection for any PBX.

Collector Mentality

Something I've slowly been breaking myself of (very slowly... like over the last 14 years of knowing my wife) is the collector mentality.

Others would call it the packrat mentality, but those people are cruel and/or ignorant. They have never known the pain of knowing you used to have something you need right now. It's for that very reason my father has an entire attic filled with magazines like Popular Mechanics from the 1960s. Who knows when he'll have to repair something from that era?

My collector mentality has more to do with imaginary wealth than the practicality that comes from being able to rebuild the engine of a car with fins. For I collect comic books. Early on my dad supported this hobby. Once I got past the phase of simply buying a couple of books off the rack at the Keys Drugstore (where I would stand spinning the rack for an hour and a half at a time as Mom was down the plaza at Wegman's stock up for the next two weeks of feeding three males), Dad would sit down with me each month and help me fill out my order form to get my comic books via male order.

I started getting comics via group called Heroes' World, which sent them in a big, corrugated cardboard envelope. Later I moved over to a group called Westfield Comics , which I've been with ever since. I think I'm close to 20 years buying comics from them every month, without fail. How many people can say they've been that loyal to anything, let alone a mail order/retail outfit?

When I started with mail ordering funny books, the form was just a mimeographed sheet. Dad would sit at his desk, pay the household bills (also done every two weeks like clockwork back then, just like Mom with the groceries) and the final thing he'd get too, as I stood by nervously worrying he'd run out of money, was my comics. He'd clear a space so he could see his calendar blotter and he'd slowly, methodically do the math of adding together all the prices of each book together, by hand on the blotter, in one long trailing stream of numbers, until we finally got the subtotal. Then we'd calculate the shipping, he'd write the check, and I'd mail it off. (Since then, ordering has progressed from me doing that same math -- with a calculator, thank god (I think maybe dad was trying to show me how important math was back then) -- on an ever growing order from to doing the orders with specialized software, and then over the Web.)

(Aside: I think I got three parentheticals deep in that last graph! A new record even for me...)

Always when we did the orders together, Dad would ask me if I ordered "a number one." He knew, likely because I'd used it as a justification for being able to get so many damn four-color funny books, that occasionally a first issue of a comic would become wildly valuable. Closest I ever got was ordering Teenage Mutant Ninga Turtles #2 (I got #1 in a third printing). Ostensibly these were my brother's comics, but they had value, and that meant I took care of them. I bagged them. I boxed them. It was considered an unwritten given that a paper collectible in my brother's care was likely to end up as coaster or napkin.

Getting a first issue of a new book stuck with me for a while. I've always read comics because I love the mythoi of the various universes (universi?), the obvious adolescent fantasy worlds of heroes and villains has always been a comfort to me, even when I'm on top of the world. Seeing a new spin on it -- Watchmen, Dark Knight, Starman, Sandman, etc. -- always excites me to this day. And there's more than just super-heroes, by the way.

But anyway... When the comic book industry all but imploded in the 1990s due to the rabid speculation among some who bought up multiple comics thinking they'd get rich, and then they all left and companies began to fold and go bankrupt, I felt some responsibility. I admit to buying two copies of the pre-bagged Spider-Man Vol.2 #1 by Todd McFarlane... just so I'd always have one copy in mint condition to sell and get rich off of someday. Joke was on me and the speculators -- so many copies were printed, they could be used as a napkin today and lose no value. In fact, a ream of napkins is probably worth more. And maybe a better read. Toss up on which is more absorbent, though.

So, that guilt helped me break away for keeping everything, strangely enough. I have thrown away items in the last decade that I thought would be cremated with me. Things like pictures I drew, mystery novels I bought at library sales, and even an entire run of Doctor Who novels I bought during the hey-day of that brilliant, cheap-o series. That act broke my heart, while at the same time I kicked myself repeatedly in the ass for feeling that way.

In a recent issue of The Ultimates by Mark Millar, Tony Stark, AKA Iron-man, an alcoholic playboy with the genius to create wildly powerful suits of armor, admits that he's got a cancer that is killing him. And he's taken to giving away all he has every few months and starting from scratch, keeping only the necessities. Of course, that's easy for a rich fictional guy to say. But there's something about it that appeals to me. Why not start over? Why not give away what I don't fully need. It's a great idea...

But not great enough that I'll ever do anything close to it. I still have three dead computers laying around here because I figure I'll get to them and repair them someday. I've got cables that probably used to connect electronic equipment in the 1970s, but since I don't know what they go to, I keep them just in case. I've got furniture and clothes and decorations and more I can't part with.

My dad told me the other day he's still got a uniform t-shirt I gave him that I used to wear in my days working the dining hall at Ithaca College. I've likely got some in a plastic bin upstairs too. I know I've still got the IC Dining hat.

And it never ends... I've got a backlog of books on my shelf to read, and I got one out of the library last week that I'm in the middle of, but I'm still planning on being at Barnes & Noble tomorrow morning at 9am on the dot to get one of the (hopefully unclaimed) copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix because I wasn't smart enough to pre-order it, and I want to read it desperately... and I want a first printing.

Because, after all, it might be worth something someday.

Over the Limit

I had no idea that since March I'd been about 8MB over my 50MB limit of space available on my Web site.

I didn't know because the brain trust at the hosting company, Your-Site.com, sent the message to my "default" email with the account, which is one I never use, and wouldn't have checked today if I weren't in the process of changing my entire way of doing e-mail (so expect to see a new address for me in the coming week or so, if you care.)

Meanwhile, even tho they threatened that I'd have to pay for the extra space I was using, the company never followed up. Since I just deleted a bunch of extraneous images and other stuff taking up space (like old archives from Blogger), I assume I'm down to my 50MB limit (not that there's a tool to tell me) so I will pay nothing extra. So there.

Friday Night In Ithaca

So here I sit. Alone.

Well, except for two dogs.

When the wife leaves for weekends away during the summer, my ritual has become to stay up as late as humanly possible each night she's gone so as to mitigate any chance of not being able to sleep. It's a trick culled from many a night of sleeping alone and staring at a ceiling.

She's off in Massachusetts this weekend, doing dog agility with our monkey-boy Lab, Caper. I was in MA last weekend myself, visiting friends in a whirlwind trip (60 bucks in gas got me almost 900 miles), punctuated by having the dreaded "Check Engine" light come on in the car about four and a half hours from home. Turns out the cause of this malady was that the gas cap might not have been tightened enough. And people think the Blue Screen of Death in Windows is scary. Those not in tune with the internal combustion engine really should have a talk with the Subaru people about their user interface design.

I spent a cold week in the basement, feeling chilled every day, putting on a jacket when I went out side since it was usually gray or rainy. I felt that way today and went out to do some errands, but by the time I got home the sun was shining and the heat in my faux-suede jacket was festering. I spent the evening in shorts, lolling around the house. I finished a book by a local author who liked Ithaca so much she moved away, and even watched the last ever Dawson's Creek (a show I truly enjoyed until its creator left it in the second season). I sat through the hours in the new recliner my wife bought me (in exchange, I paid for our summer vacation. We are nothing if not equitable in this home.).

I wish I'd spend the night calling friends and chatting with people. But after a couple years of isolation due to the job and where I decide to buy my homes, I'm at a loss most of the time for how to even go about it sometimes. A voice in my head says, why would any of your friends spread across the United States want to hear from you? Besides, it's a Friday night, and they've got lives. You're the only one at home, the voice says. I know this isn't true, but the knowledge doesn't get me to the phone.

Tomorrow is back to gray and dreary, with afternoon showers. I'm kind of relieved and glad because I want an excuse to stay in. Summer is a time of great guilt for the sedentary, and we need the assistance of the weather gods to make us feel okay about indoor pursuits like Xbox, or writing, or cleaning my office, or, uh, Xbox.

I'm sure everyone out there is concerned about my health (thanks for asking). I joined the Wellness Center up on the IC campus a couple months ago, and was pretty good about getting there a few times a week, but that dropped off about three weeks ago when Wellness cut it's hours and the only option was to go on the campus and use the regular Fitness Center gym. That mean's going to the facilities used by the students instead of just faculty and staff. As much as that's nice because it gives me something to look at, it's much harder because I'll feel the need to suck in my gut the entire time. I know it doesn't hide anything, it's just an instinct that is hard to prevent.

I don't know why I bother with the whole gym charade. Well, yes I do… the exercise, much as I hate it – any of you who get that "exercise high" where you reach "the zone" and feel great after intense physical exertion can bite my over-sized ass cheeks – it makes m feel like I'm doing something. And, it's actually better than the alternative, which is really the only thing that will actually work: dieting. I know it works, I've done it before. Loathed ever breath I took during that time, but I did it. Nothing sucks the jolly out of me faster. So painful, yet so needed.

Well, time to hit he sack. I've got a stack of comic books on the bed stand that will get me through the next few hours until my eyes can no longer stay open. Good night.

Oo-oo, That Smell

I get about an average of 150 spam messages each night between my two main e-mail accounts. As annoying as they are, I check each one -- even those my Norton spam filter marks -- just to make sure something didn't get misfiled. For example, anyone who sends me stuff from AOL or Hotmail are automatically marked as spam by the filter (luckily I have filters that catch most of my friends still using those backwaters of Internet access).

What's a treat however is when one of the spams actually has a clever enought subject line to make me actually stop and read it. My favorite today, for a "pheromone concentrate" that will let me "attract the opposite sex like a magnet" was under the subject "Passion in this smell."