the diary of antoine roquentin

I’m on the train coming back from Burlingame…I had to get up at 5 a.m. to catch the 6:30 a.m. BART train to get to the 8 a.m. Amtrak train to get to the 10 a.m. RT train to get to work before eleven. The Amtrak train is packed…they are one car short or something…I had to look all over before I could find a seat.

I hate that public transit moment when everyone has their own seat except for you.

The sun is rising and the bay looks pure and crystal blue. My tethered Internet is being flaky and I don’t know why. I didn’t change any of the settings.

I’m watching music videos on the other half of my screen…even though they are no longer culturally relevant, the boys from Justice are fucking hot.

As much as I love spending time with my family, it’s nice to get back to the environs of Sacramento.

I think I have a few gifts to myself waiting at the house. I was going to get my mom an iPod Nano, but apparently she got a new Nokia XpressMusic phone, so I think I’m just going to get her an 8GB card and save $130. If I can’t justify the purchase of a new iPod for myself, I can’t justify it as a gift either.

Apple is going to find itself increasingly irrelevant in the age of music-playing phones, since the iPod has long been such a cash cow.

The fam seems to be dealing with my uncle’s health problems pretty well, my grandma talked a lot about the knot in her stomach was gone when she was able to see Jim talking and moving around and such. He’s still in a wheelchair, but last night he seemed to be better able to move his hand and foot (his left side is basically unusable).

I’ve been reading a ton of Future Shock on BART, I’m about halfway through now. It’s incredible how accurate his predictions are. I’m going to post a ton of quotes once I get home.

I’m really not looking forward to work…settling back into my routine feels like resuming my slow trudge towards the grave. Yelle is so cute, I love her being all dirty in the “Je veux te voir” video.

I’ve been working a lot on the site for Josh’s movie theater, he’s considering doing an e-mail newsletter, something easily accomplished with open-source software. I cannot say enough how fucking amazing open-source is. It wasn’t until I read about book curses that I realized the historical precedents of copyright and how it can take a generation to reverse those entrenched ideas about…well…the “ownership” of ideas.

One of Toffler’s predictions that didn’t come true (yet) was the exploitation of the sea in terms of underwater colonization. I think that one just will never be economically feasable. Even a house on permafrost is cheaper than a house underwater. Possibly this one is waiting until genetic engineering makes possible humans with gills.

He also talks at length about the transition from industrial to super-industrial societies being tied to the end of product-based economies to experience-based economies, with the products being subordinate to the experiences of using them.

While I was on the train, I started reading Molly’s novel The Curse, and I was hooked. I was considering printing out a copy of it on Lulu to be able to read a physical copy, but I’m 40 pages in, just reading it in Word.

I never realized it would be so deliciously semiautobiographical. I’ve never read something by someone I’ve actually known…it’s an interesting window into the person’s mind. I miss writing fiction. I used to think that I had nothing to contribute, but I feel like I’m reaching a point in my life where I can create round characters based in years of experience.

I was liking being back in Sacramento until Grammie showed up. Now I’m counting down the seconds until I can board that train back to Burlingame.

My knee is so fucked up…I have to try to get in at the free clinic tomorrow, I can barely walk and it feels like the ligaments are about to burst free.

I’m looking into getting a new memory card for my N95. I thought this was going to be an easy decision, but it’s complicated as fuck. My 8GB card is class 4 (speeds are 2, 4, and 6, with six being the fastest class), but the new 16GB cards are only coming in Class 2 varieties…which I can’t stand. My phone already hangs enough when it opens the photo gallery, hangs when it refreshes the music player, etc. I’m thinking of giving up on the 16GB card and just getting a super-fast 8GB card.

But here’s the weirdness. If you go on SanDisk’s site, they show a 16GB Class 4 card on there, they have press photos of it and everything, but it just says “not available” in the store. So it must be coming out soon. Add that to the list of things I’m waiting for, like iLife ’09, Snow Leopard, etc. My computer probably won’t get to take advantage of all the cool new features in Snow Leopard, but maybe by then Apple will add Intel’s quad-core mobile chips (god knows they’ve been out for four months or more).

I’ve been geeking out with my phone, installing version 3 of Share Online to instantly post my pics to Flickr. The new one supports batch upload…who forgets to implement something this crucial until version 3? “Crap, you mean they want to take more than one picture at a time? We’ve got to rewrite this one from scratch!” Nokia is weird.

Well, I should read more on my novels (the stack is getting shorter and shorter!)