Can Posterous (http://posterous.com/)) really auto-post to my blog? Let’s see…

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Well there’s your answer

It happened under the kitchen table at my grandmother’s house. I don’t know how old I was. Young, though. Everyone was leaving for some boring grown-up event and I begged to stay home. They let me.

With the house empty, I had no choice but to go exploring. In the attic I found a chest full of dusty old books. The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and a few scattered textbooks mostly. I picked up something called “Trixie Belden: The Red Trailer Mystery” and brought it downstairs. I wasn’t much into reading yet, but having nothing else to do, I crawled under the kitchen table and started to follow the adventures of Trixie, a 13-year old girl and her friends. I was hooked. I remained holed up under that table until the book was finished, stopping only to eat (the table was needed for that anyway.)

There have been a number of what I’ll call “perfect reading moments” since, but none so dramatic or important as that first time spending an entire day reading about Trixie Belden.

A lot has changed since then, but reading is still one of the most enjoyable things I know. The problem is that I don’t have make the time to do it as much as I’d like. Reading a book for 15 minutes before falling asleep every few nights is not enough, and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for too long. The internet is mostly to blame. I’ll sit with the laptop and browse, work, tweak - anything but read a book - until it’s too late or I’m too tired to read much of anything. And for what? So I can check my email just one more time?

This will not do. I enjoy reading way too much to let another year go by with only a book or two under my belt. The only way to change something is to go ahead and change it, so here’s the plan, effective immediately.

• Cancel Cable TV. Tough call to make, but I’ve done it before. It’s just too easy to plop down and lose a few hours by mistake in front of the TV.

• Turn off the computer. What bad things would happen if I turned the laptop off at say, 9:00pm every day? Right, nothing bad at all.

• Read easier books. It seems like I always pick difficult books. Screw the “important” books or those I’m supposed to read, how about some Stephen King? So much for impressing my friends, eh?

Time to load up the Kindle, take a trip or two to the local bookstore, get my priorities straight… and read.

Welcome back, Trixie.

Just upgraded this here blog to Wordpress 2.7. Took about 2 minutes. Control Panel UI is all new. Still getting used to it.

Can we all agree right up front that the MacBook Air is the thinnest, sweetest-looking laptop ever conceived by man? Yes? Good. That’s what I think too.

In addition to its oh-so-sexy look and feel, many geeks claimed that the original Air was plenty fast for every day use. After reading every review and blog post I could find, I bought one back in June. For the first month, I pretended that everything I’d read was true. It wasn’t.

The original Air was too slow. Even though many of its early problems; core shutdowns, overheating, etc. have been mitigated by firmware updates, the thing just never felt comfortable. Switching between Spaces was choppy. Video playback was sporadic and would sometimes take down the entire machine. Others may not even have noticed these things, but eventually it spoiled the experience.

I went back to using the MBP and the Air went up for sale.

Have you seen prices on used Airs? Once Apple released Rev B. (or Version 2.0 or whatever) prices for the original quickly became dismal. I paid $1,799 in June and couldn’t sell it for $1,100 in November. So instead of selling it, I used it around the house. You know what? The form factor really is awesome. It is a damn fine machine. A fine, sluggish, almost-but-not-quite-good-enough machine. Now, if Apple would just make a faster version. Oh wait, they did!

I wanted to continue using the Air, just not the old one. I wanted desperately to try the new, faster, SSD version. Look at the spec differences between my old Air and the new, top of the line model…

My Rev. A specs:

1.6GHz with 800MHz frontside bus 2GB DDR2 Memory (4MB of Level 2 cache) 80GB 4200-rpm PATA hard drive Integrated Intel GMA X3100 video

New Rev. B specs:

1.86 (Penryn) with 1066MHz frontside bus 2GB DDR3 Memory (6MB of Level 2 cache) 128GB Solid-state drive NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics

So last week I went and bought one.

It came in at $2,499. That’s a lot of money for what many would consider a low-spec, niche, feature-poor laptop. I don’t care. I use it for hours every day and it’s much faster than the original. I haven’t seen benchmarks on the new SSD drive, but it feels significantly faster than the old 4200rpm drive. The machine boots in under 30 seconds and launches apps faster than my MBP. That matters. Everything I’ve run on it so far has performed very well.

I know what you’re thinking, give a week and he’ll be complaining about this one too. You may be right, but I don’t think so. I knew what I was looking for and it’s quite possible I’ve found it. The new MacBook Air does everything I loved about the original, and does it much faster. It’s a keeper.

A couple of years ago Jessica decided to move into an apartment. I didn’t make much fuss about it since I expected it to last at most six months. That was about right. It was a disaster, and she was back home in no time.

Last night she did it again, and this time it feels like the real thing. Her job makes sense now. Her boyfriend has a real job, is nice enough, and doesn’t have an extensive criminal record (I gotta have some standards!)

This all means that I’m now living alone. It’s been a very long time since I’ve done this. She only lives five miles away, so it’s not like she won’t be around frequently to borrow money or do laundry or steal food. That makes me feel a little better, but I’ll sure miss having her around every day. Love you Jess.

Tom, John and Frank were the three brothers who lived in the house directly across the street from me.

One day we decided to build an airplane. A real one. This was probably 1976, which means I was 12 years old.

I grew up on a dead end street. Behind my house were infinite orchards. Behind the houses on the other side of the road was a long steep hill ending in something that may have been a river, but was more likely just a creek. In any case, there was a lot of room. Enough for an airport.

Nearby was a handy lumberyard where we could steal find all the wood we would need. We gathered up a bunch of it and set to building our plane. I can’t remember exactly what the frame of it was made out of, but I’m pretty sure it included the base of an old lawn mower. Whatever it was, it had wheels, and all good planes had wheels.

We built a fuselage and wings, then wrapped them in plastic sheeting. In the center we mounted a seat from an old tractor. It would only have the one seat. There was no motor or anything, so we would be pulling it behind my mini-bike. At least until it got off the ground. Technically, it was a glider.

Frank, the oldest, was elected to pilot the thing. I would drive the mini-bike. Not knowing how long he would be airborne, Frank packed a lunch in a small brown bag, just in case. He was also equipped with a helmet and a walkie-talkie.

We used a chunk of plywood and a couple cinder blocks for the take-off ramp. The plan was that I would pull the plane with a rope behind my mini-bike until it went up and off the ramp and started to fly. Frank would let go of the rope and communicate with us via walkie talkie once he got too high to hear otherwise.

I pulled him as fast as I could. The plane’s wheels hit the ramp, sending it into the air.

It flew!

Okay, “flew” is not exactly the right word. “Bounced” is more accurate, but it did leave the ground. Frank was airborne for somewhere just shy of one second, but it sure seemed like longer than that. He then came down hard and the whole thing broke into a dozen pieces.

After that we shared his bag lunch and played pirate ship on the old woodpile instead.

Remember the first time you heard Welcome to the Jungle or any other song from Appetite for Destruction? Me too. Goddamn, that was a good day. Hearing Chinese Democracy for the first time today may not be quite the same thing, but it’s a good thing just the same. It’s been a long time, Axl.

I’ll admit it, I’m a huge Guns and Roses fan. I like the strong, hard, simple tracks. I even like the wandering, indulgent, piano-ridden ballads like November Rain. You do too, even if you won’t admit it. I remember singing Sweet Child `o Mine to Jessica as she fell asleep. She was just a toddler then. It may only be nostalgia, and there’s no way the new album can live up to expectations after 15+ years, but it’s exciting to have it finally here anyway.

Believe it or not, Best Buy actually had the LP on the shelves, which seemed much more appropriate that a CD or iTunes download. What a nice surprise.

“I wanted to participate in something that wasn’t so heavy-handed.” You betcha.

Typography is not my strong suit. It’s almost nobody’s strong suit, which is fine by me. I don’t know a really good font when I see one, and I don’t care that much. I’m sure it’s all critically important, but to most of us it’s just navel-gazing.

When someone points out a really glaring typographical error I might take notice, and agree. “Widows” for example, are apparently an affront to typographical good taste everywhere. I wouldn’t typically go too far out of my way to avoid them. If it was easy, maybe. As it turns out, it is easy. Shaun Inman has written the Widon’t plugin for Wordpress. Just dropped it in, and now at least my post titles will be sans-widows. Happy now?

Louis CK cracks me up. Love this bit on Conan. It’s funny, ‘cause it’s true.