I spent way too much money on computer stuff today. I got a 120 Gig Western Digital drive ($200) and a copy of Adobe Premiere 6.5 ($550). I’ve snagged a copy of Windows 2000, so once all of this crap gets here, I should have a fairly decent video editing machine. I also found out last night that my camera supports frame-by-frame and time-lapse recording. I made a stop-motion test movie tonight (40 seconds of video shot in 30 minutes - I forgot how tedious this shit is) and I have a lot of ideas for time-lapse stuff. It would be pretty cool to sit out in Times Square with a camera and do a time-lapse, or maybe out of my window during a snowstorm. Lots of ideas, not a lot of time.

The new Hunter S. Thompson showed up in the mail today, and I’ve read 30 or 40 pages so far. It’s a good read, but I wouldn’t say it’s incredible. At least I finally have something to read - maybe after I get done, I’ll be ready to start writing again.

On the way home, I saw this woman sit down on the train, and she was holding like 3 or 4 pots and trays full of food, plus balancing a backpack and reading a book at the same time. This is on the subway - the New York subway, the one that goes from 0 to 40 in about .2 seconds, creating sideways forces of about 10 G’s, knocking loose everything that isn’t firmly seated or grabbing onto a rail. I stared in amazement as she balanced all of this food - hot food, you could even smell that some of it was chicken - in bulky, metal containers, while the train sloshed the rest of it around. People like that truly amaze me, the people with the John Kennedy gene that can step in from a hurricane perfectly dressed and without a single hair out of place. I remember a day last month when it was about 80 below zero, and I saw a guy in Times Square, walking around with nothing but a fucking t-shirt on. He wasn’t sprinting to a subway, or running back into a store after a smoke, or anything else. He was just reading a fucking Playbill and walking down the road, while I was freezing to death in my coat inside of a damned restaurant. Every day, I at least put in a marginal effort to groom myself and get dressed, and yet I know I look bloodied, beaten, and fucked to the casual observer, while many New Yorkers look like a god damned Calvin Klein ad. Did I miss an immunization as a kid, or is this the product of private education?

Okay, back to reading.

Forget what I said earlier; today it is colder than fuck out. And I didn’t really bundle up, because I went out yesterday and it was in the 30s, fairly reasonable. It was the walk of death from the subway to my front door today. And while my apartment was like an oven all weekend, I’ve only got a lukewarm temp with a horrid breeze ripping through the closed windows.

I’m doing the dance of computer software and hardware upgrades, or at least trying to avoid it. I feel like I won’t get much out of this video setup unless I have a copy of Premiere running ($500), but that will require a copy of Windows XP ($200) and a big hard drive ($200). Or I could do nothing and spend $0. But then when I decide to spend nothing, I later get this nagging feeling that I should do something, maybe cut a corner and only buy one or two of the three. I don’t know.

And part of me thinks I should take the money and go on a vacation to somewhere warmer. Delta had a fare this weekend to Orlando for $220, including hotel. But I would have to leave at 7PM on Friday (not a major problem) and come back at 7AM on Sunday (a major problem). I don’t deal with early flights like that, and I don’t think it would be worth it to spend essentially one day in Florida. But shit, I would spend $200 to spend an hour in Florida if it would mean I could feel my toes again.

I’m not reading anything or writing anything. My new book is available for preorder on iuniverse, but I don’t feel like mentioning it with a link because they are so shitty about preorders, and I don’t think anyone will buy the book anyway. Oh, and I put Vegas pictures online: here. [Broken link, sorry…] They are not all captioned or turned the right way. I’ll get to it eventually.

I’ve installed anti-spam software, and I’m pretty happy with it. I have the Spastic set of procmail rules, and it’s only accidentally deleted one mail, from Evite, but otherwise it is running 100%. It doesn’t pick up all spam, but I’d say it gets more than 90% of it. Today I had about 70 pieces of spam, and all of them got quietly whisked away. I am not actually deleting them yet, but once I’m sure the filters are working, I will automatically nuke stuff marked as spam.

That’s it. Throat still hurts, but it is slowly getting better. OK, I think I am giving up on this so I can read or something.

It is too cold to think. To get to work today, I wore two pairs of pants, an army jacket, a leather jacket, a hat, a hood, and a pair of gloves. I was still so cold I couldn’t breathe. My apartment has been in spats of hot and cold; the heater runs but sometimes bangs like Godzilla is in the basement and trying to escape via the radiator, and that worries me that the whole thing will stop working and my landlord will be in Italy for months. If so, I will light the place on fire. Also, the wind blows so hard, it blows right through the windows, no matter how much foam tape and bunched up blankets I cram into the crevices. I am slightly sick, but not a lot - maybe some kind of infection in my throat, a lump that I can’t swallow. It is getting slowly better, so hopefully more juice and water will lodge things free.

I got back on Tuesday from a pretty decent trip to Vegas. There were four of us: Bill, Lon, me, and Lon’s pal Cliff, who is a pilot for a regional airline. It was cool to talk to Cliff about planes and flying and the inside world of the aviation industry. I envy being able to fly a plane, but I don’t envy the fact that a third-year pilot makes about $20K a year. Anyway, we did a lot of cool stuff, so here’s a short list off the top of my head:

• Went to Blue Man Group and sat in the front row (the poncho section.)
• Ate at Emeril’s fish restaurant; had the 6-course tasting meal, which was all incredible.
• Shot a Madsen M50 9mm automatic rifle with a silencer.
• Rented a pimped out Caddy with leather everything, power everything, onstar, rear radar, an incredible stereo, ass-heating seats, and all the other goodies.
• Bill found out that the Caddy has a 120 MPH cutout. It felt and sounded like we were going 60, though.
• Ate at In-n-Out and Jack In The Box
• Went to the Grand Canyon; threw a copy of Rumored to Exist into the canyon.
• Went to the Hoover Dam, took the tour, found a tour guide who didn’t know what The A Team was. I made the wild sarcastic guess that she was born in 1986; she was actually born in 1984. I officially feel old.
• Ate at Denny’s twice.
• Went to 7-Eleven. Got a Slurpee. Did not fuck sluts. (Sorry, Ray.)
• Went shopping at Caesar’s Forums. Bought a new pair of Vans shoes.
• Went to Best Buy and bought a ton of new CDs and a new camcorder battery.
• Won $40 on blackjack at Imperial Palace.
• Went to the car museum at Imperial Palace.
• Threw paper airplanes out of the hotel windows.
• Got the Caddy airborne on a speedbump.
• Went downtown and saw the Fremont Experience light show.
• Went to the worst pawnshop ever downtown.
• Talked to some strippers on Fremont Street.
• Watched the movie Jackass on pay-per-view.
• Watched the movie Undercover Brother on Bill’s laptop.
• Ate a good breakfast at the Luxor.
• Drank way too much at Smith and Wollensky.

That’s all I can think of. But we got a lot of stuff done from Thursday to Tuesday, and we didn’t do that much Vegas strip stuff. So I’m pretty happy with the results, except for the part about puking up a $160 dinner.

My camcorder was great on the trip, and now I have a firewire card for my PC. I installed all of the stuff on my Windows partition, and it works pretty good for editing video and pulling in stuff through the DV connection. I need to now pull in old stuff from Hi8 and make some real movies with it. I still have a lot to learn, but it’s not like I’m going anywhere this weekend.

OK, I need to do some more DV editing research. I’ll try to get back on schedule with regular updates, but my semi-hibernation isn’t helping things much.

I’m watching ER, packing for the trip. I’ll leave for Vegas tomorrow afternoon, meet up with Lon and Bill, and check in to the Boardwalk for four nights. I’ve barely planned for this thing, but it should be fun. I still feel slightly sick, but much better than yesterday. I hope another gallon of juice and twelve hours of sleep will get me closer to better.

I bought my birthday present to myself at B&H photo, a new Sony camcorder. This will replace the old Hi-8 I got six years ago, the one that I recently broke. It is the TRV-240, and it records in Digital8. This is the same format as DV or Mini-DV, but it stores the digital data on a standard Hi-8 cassette. This means it is bigger than the palm-sized camcorders (it is almost exactly the size of my old one) but it also means it will play my old Hi-8 tapes. Camcorders have improved quite a bit in the last six years; this one has a cool flip-out LCD screen, and a night-vision feature, plus a million other bells and whistles I will probably never figure out. Most of all, it has a firewire port on it, so I will be able to easily hustle the movies in and out of my computer.

I’ve spent the last two nights watching a lot of old movies, and they really remind me of Seattle. It’s very strange, and it makes me wish I taped more stuff from New York and Bloomington. It’s so cool to have a solid record of a timeframe, to see a room the way it was, to hear the sounds and see the traffic and actually look at that period. I really need to take more video, and starting with this trip, I will.

Not much else here. I need to pack now, and get ready to roll. Wish me luck!

I stayed home from work today because I felt sick on Monday and couldn’t get out of bed this morning. I ended up sleeping from about 10

at night to about 5 this afternoon. I kept waking up every hour or so to drink some juice or water and try to think about a shower and some food, but then I would go back to bed. I feel a bit better now, and I will go to work tomorrow, but I have this horrible feeling in my throat, and I really don’t want to be sick at the end of the week when I travel. But I always seem to get sick right before I fly, which always sucks.

The proofs for the book came back this afternoon, and I looked through them tonight. Everything seems cool, and I approved them, so it will take a few more weeks and then people will be able to place orders. It’s great to have the proofs, but I haven’t been able to think about it too much because of the mental haze from the cold.

Not much else is up, except that I’ve had some truly bizarre dreams while I was asleep. I’m going to bed in a few minutes, so I look forward to more of that. Maybe I will be able to write some of them down, use them in a book, something like that.