The Sidekick is here! I thought it would take another week or more, but it showed up during lunch, and I plugged it into the charger right away. My old SIM card from my VisorPhone fit right in, and when I fired it up, it asked me to set up an email account right away. I got the name jkonrath (at the host tmail.com - feel free to drop a line) and everything worked right away! So I am very happy about it.

Everything about the Sidekick is pretty cool. The display flips open in a very cool way, and the LCD is very crisp and easy to read. The whole thing is very compact, and small - like the size of one of those hard-wired pocket videogames or something. The keyboard isn’t too bad to type with, although it takes some getting used to using the edges of your fingers as opposed to a full-size keyboard. The whole design in general feels more like an appliance, a usable tool than something like a pager or Palm pilot. It’s some pretty Star Trek bullshit.

The OS and applications are the icing on the cake, though. There’s a good email program that operates about like Eurodra or Outlook, and it’s integrated into an address book that also feeds into the portable phone application. AOL IM is built-in, as well as a calendar, notes, todo list, and a handful of games. The Web browser is pretty cool - unlike WAP phones, this goes through a proxy that crunches down sites and graphics so they are easily viewed and so you don’t download as much. You still get graphics though, enough to make it much more rich than a WAP phone. And there’s a detachable camera, about as big as a small keychain, so you can snap a photo (color, but very small) and then mail it as an attachment or access it on the web aside all of your mail and other stuff in their secure portal site.

The coolest part - UNLIMITED DATA FOR ONE PRICE! You only get 200/1000 minutes for $39 a month, but you get all the data you can download. Pretty cool.

By the way, I have a small web log that I can update on the go that is located at http://hiptop.com/hiplog/read/4/292/. I don’t know if I will actually update it regularly, but it lets me send in pictures I take, so it’s pretty cool to mess with.

I booked a vacation to Hawaii today. I am going in the second week of May, to Oahu. I got the airfare and four nights in a hotel right on the beach for $900. Now I need to do some research and actually figure out what to do there.

Gotta go watch wrestling and play the games on the Sidekick…

1. I like the new Coke can design. It’s cool.
2. I’m trying to figure out how the impending Broadway musicians’ strike will actually affect me, since I’ve never been to a Broadway show and never really intend to.
3. I almost bid on a 1976 Gremlin in Staten Island that was up to $300. I wanted to paint flames on it, with a roller and housepaint, and paint OFF THE PIGS on the back of it. And if I got pulled over by the cops, I would say I was a pork farmer.
4. There seems to be some kind of national shortage of Levoxyl, a synthetic thyroid replacement. So I’ve been out of the shit for a few days now.
5. Emil Goldfus (aka “Abel”), the NY-based Russian spy who was exchanged for Gary Powers, lived in the same apartment building as Norman Mailer when he was writing the spy novel Barbary Coast. They didn’t know each other, though.
6. I have a chance to go to Hawaii for four days for $700. I am debating checking it out in April or May.
7. It’s raining like a motherfucker out.
8. I thought those Catherine Zeta Jones/T-Mobile ads were annoying, but now for some reason I find her incredibly hot. Maybe it’s because I keep going to their site every three minutes to see what is up with my Sidekick.
9. The Cigar Corner, on the corner of 30th Ave and Steinway, sells Barely Legal magazine. No I did not buy it.
10. There is a cheat in Grand Theft Auto - Vice City that changes all of the pedestrians into the cast of the Michael Jackson Thriller video: zombies, and an occasional red-leather MJ wannabe.
11. After someone is killed in the gas chamber, their body has to be completely scrubbed with bleach before it can be handled.
12. Only three US Presidents have cried in public while in office: William McKinley, William Taft, and George W. Bush.
13. You can use vinyl dye (sold at car parts store for refinishing car interiors) to paint plastic parts like bezels of computer drives, keyboards, cases, etc.
14. Diesel engines get better city mileage than highway, because heat makes diesel combustion more efficient.
15. I have a beard again. I’ll try to take some pictures of it this time. [I’m glad I didn’t.]
16. The acronym TWAIN (a scanner interface) stands for Technology Without An Interesting Name.
17. The bible is the most shoplifted book in the USA. (Strange, considering how easy it is to get a free copy from the Gideons…)
18. The first flushing toilet in a movie was in Psycho.
19. I’m sick of writing these facts.

On Friday, while I was riding to work, the subway stopped at 57th and 7th like it usually does, and while the doors were open, I saw three NYPD cops with FUCKING GEIGER COUNTERS! WHAT THE FUCK!?!?

Not a lot is up here. I got a copy of Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA by Bob Woodward from an Amazon z-shop for only three bucks, in hardcover. I read about a fifth of it last night, and it’s not filled with ultra-crazy conspiracy shit, but the kind of thing that makes the CIA Director’s job look more like a conventional executive’s job, except way more competitive and full of political bullshit, and instead of ordering raincoats from China, you’re covertly sending weapons of mass destruction to central Asia. So that’s interesting, and I’m going to have to dig through sources of other books to find more stuff to buy used on Amazon.

I bought the Fear and Loathing Criterion edition this afternoon, but haven’t fully dug into the extras yet. I watched about half of the movie with HST’s commentary, and it’s both interesting and weird. It’s almost impossible to understand a word he’s saying, plus he’ll ramble on forever about something, and then when someone asks an intriguing question like, “did you like the way Benitio Del Toro played Oscar?” he will simply answer “Yep” and that’s it. I haven’t looked at the other stuff but there are like 58 sets of commentary and a bunch of other extra shit I will probably never have time to get to.

I was dicking around at the delta.com site today and found a hotel plus plane package to Hawaii for $700!! I’m going to have to look into that, because even a trip to New Orleans was like twice as expensive. Maybe there’s some kind of stupid catch, like you have to sleep on the beach or you have to fly in the cargo hold. My sister went to Hawaii and I would like to check it out some time, especially if I can do it without spending like five grand on it.

Where the hell is my food? I haven’t eaten all day, and I’m waiting for my sweet and sour pork from the local Chinese dump…

Okay, it just took me about an hour and a half of dicking around to get started, but here I am. It seems Red Hat Linux 8.0 has a brain tumor in the program that I use to resize images, and I had to go through a lengthy procedure to get the fucking thing all right. But it is, and here’s a treat for you: Photos of the Blizzard! This is mostly a series of shots when I was walking to work on the Tuesday after, and it features lots of buried cars. [These are long gone, sorry.]

Another project I am working on now - I am writing another glossary, but it is a conspiracy theory glossary now. It is here, but I have barely started working on it. It takes a lot longer to research each entry than the last glossary, but it is loads of fun. So give me a week or two, and I should have enough entries for it to be interesting.

In other news, I bought a Danger Hiptop yesterday. It is a combination cell phone, small computer, PDA, web browser, and pager, with a small keyboard, a neat flip-open screen, and very cool integration. You can view the web with it, use it to read mail, do PDA-type stuff, and play games on it. All of your data actually lives on servers, and their back-end strips down and re-renders web pages for speed and simplicity. And the cool part is that the data network is all-you-can use for one price, at least for the first year. I don’t actually have it yet - I ordered on the phone, so I am very ancy about getting the thing. But I’m hoping it will let me send mail and maybe put up some tiny web journal while on the road with it. We’ll see.

Not much else is going on here, just busy with other crap and reading about 22 different books on the JFK assassination at the same time for the glossary. When you read this much shit about it, you can pretty much make up any story about that day and have it make sense. Anyway…

Yes, I’m still here. I guess I’ve been hiding out, although I really don’t know what I’ve been doing for the last week or so. After the snow ended, everything started melting, flooding, raining, and the walk to work became these waist-high mountains of snow, with giant lakes on the other side. The weekend’s been nothing but rain, and yet I was vaguely productive in the sense of getting out of the house and not sitting in bed until 3PM and then eating one daily meal of delivery pizza in front of the TV.

I got out into the city yesterday, fought the rain and got some DVD shopping at the new Best Buy in Chelsea. There are a lot of new stores going in down there, and I’m not entirely sure why, because I’m not familiar with the area. Maybe everyone’s getting the fuck out; maybe Bloomberg gave some kind of tax cut to big chain stores who wanted to move in. Anyway, I saw an Outback Steakhouse going in there. I am not entirely in love with the place, but it’s at the head of the A list for Ray, for some reason. So at least when he’s here next, I can bring him there in addition to other New York places.

Today I went to Rite-Aid to get fucked over on a prescription again. I don’t think they’ve ever been able to get one right yet. Also went grocery shopping, which as I’ve mentioned before involves grabbing about $50 of stuff that doesn’t even constitute a meal. I guess I really should eat before I go to the store. At least the iPod makes it a bit more tolerable. The muzak at this particular store is usually horrific, electronic horn and synth versions of bad 80s pop tunes blasted out of tinny speakers in the ceiling. You’d think they do it to get people the fuck out of the store, instead of somehow finding music that made people want to buy more meat or something.

I’m barely picking at some short stories for a book, and that’s what I must go do now.