So Handspring's poised to announce the Treo line on Monday. One of the devices has a build-in mini-keyboard to compliment the cellphone and internet capabilities of the device.

The color version won't come out for another couple months or so after the first two, but it just might be enough to convince me to rethink my Palm V, especially if they do go with Cingular in the bay area, so i could just tack it on as another phone on my existing account.

All this, of course, is contingent on my still having a job. (okay, to ease the melodrama, they'll be announcing staffing changes in mid-November, and it probably won't affect me or my group, but still...)

Okay, grab your saltshakers, but I figured I'd pass along this email I got from a reader today. The way I see it, it couldn't hurt as long as people don't treat it as gospel:

"Hey guys.. You know elif, my friend in CA; she called me last nite to tell me this: She has a friend in at work who had an Arab boyfriend who disappeared right before the 9/11 tragedy. He was nowhere to be found and one day he wrote an email to the girlfriend and said "stay off of the planes on 9/11 and out of the malls on halloween". She did not think much of this until the events occurred, and she immediately notified FBI afterwards. Keep this in mind: The people who want to and really can harm the U.S. are not outside of this country - they are still inside. The terrorists who died on the planes that day are just some of the people involved, and they have been here at least a couple of years. I don't want to start a scary chain email here, but I do believe a "trick or treat" is one of the twisted humor dates to pull this kind of stuff, and I know my friend would not have told me this if it weren't true to her. So please stay away from the malls on halloween, pass this on to the ones you love if your instincts tell you so. Lots of love to you all.

Feray"

I'd take an ounce of prevention any day, especially when there's a run on the pound of cure.

---

Update: As everyone and their grandmother has been emailing me, this has been debunked on Snopes. Not to say that you're necessarily safe in a mall on halloween, but that the email in and of itself doesn't constitute a credible threat.

On an interesting side note, SF Gate ran an interesting story a few days ago about how Hollywood screenwriters, including the co-author of Die Hard, are being called upon by the Army to come up with possible threat scenerios.

If all goes according to plan, soon the Army will be prepared for possible asteroid strikes, alien attacks, or reincarnated pharaohs with occult powers.

It's strange to articulate, but I've lost my web center. How to explain? Let me try this way:

Fall of 1990, I was 200 lbs, a brand new high-school senior. Somewhere in my head I decided I didn't want to be so big, and somewhere in my body, something changed. Everything got unsettled, and when the chaos subsided, I had a metabolism with a resting balance of 170 lbs. No monumental effort, just a natural change. That and I grew my hair long, but that's probably coincidental.

Around 1993 one day I suddenly was paranoid of public toilets. It's as if I was dropped into an alien culture and had no experience with them before, as I had no memory of how I felt about using public toilets, and therefore was timid about using them (sit-down only. No problem with urinals). I knew it was something I needed to get over, but I couldn't remember how I thought about them before.

In short, it was as if I had become so accustomed to feeling a certain way, that when I experienced the subject in question, I completely stopped reinforcing the behavior or feeling, and suddenly that engrained feeling vanished from non-reinforcement, and I was left using episodic memory instead of procedural memory to figure out (and remember) how I felt about things.

No, it's not just toilet trauma either. In 4th grade I suddenly became paranoid about sharing straws with my best friend Ali. When taking classes at UCLA my senior year in high school I had to remember how to walk casually. Suffice it to say that now and then skills, no, habits, completely disappear and I have to relearn them from scratch.

Okay, so taking the long way around: I've lost my web center. I used to have a routine, a litany of sites to churn through, blogs, news sites, humor, a regular garden path I would walk each morning to reacquaint myself with the world around me, yet somewhere along the past few weeks the garden's become overgrown and all the paths are obscured.

To take a different metaphorical angle, it's as if my site memory is like a standing wave on a string, keeping it's own form, changing only amplitude. Then a dissonance comes along and throws the oscillations just out of whack enough that they lose any sense of harmony; not just a beat pattern when the two tones happen to match up, but a chaotic loss of any frequency at all (or random mix of all frequencies, depending on how you look at it).

Coincidentally enough, this may be an apt metaphor, as this is one theory on how the hippocampus both writes and eventually (approximately two weeks after the first encounter) erases medium-term episodic memory. It fires the pyramidal hippocampal cells in time with the Alpha wave during the early stages of sleep, reinforcing procedural learning of the previous cycle. This is the effect of feeling like you're on a roller coaster when falling asleep after a day at the amusement park, or perhaps more recognizably, the feeling of seeing geometric forms falling from the sky after playing too much Tetris. This is the feeling of your brain learning new abilities.

You don't notice weeks later when the selfsame cells fire in the inverse of the Alpha waves (having gradually moved out of phase since day one until they are exactly a half-cycle behind), erasing the mid-term memory. You don't notice because this is when the procedural memory has either become established in long-term storage, or has fallen into disuse and is being 'recycled.' This is the stage when playing Tetris (or Dance Dance Revolution) goes from the stage of easily reading and dealing with the oncoming symbols, to the stage of doing so without liminal thought. This is when you can carry on a conversation without losing much skill.

Okay, floating off topic, but maybe you've caught my point. I don't have a bookmarks list. I don't have a page with all my favorite links on them. I have a brain with a notoriously short attention span, that knows what sites to look at from procedural, and to a lesser extent, mnemonic devices. Now that that procedure has gone without reenforcement, and has fallen victim to chaos, I have to try and remember sites I've been to, and judge whether I want to go again. It's like I'm starting from scratch, with my only roadsigns being episodic memory of having been to this site or that one, and the fledgling procedural memories that have been reinforced for the last month, namely CNN, SFGate, ABCNews, Yahoo News, etc.

It's enough to mess with a guy's head.

It's really enough.

I'm home sick today (I'll omit the details, other than to say it was probably food that did it)...

Anyhow, a few random thoughts: I just read that Kuwait stripped the citizenship of an al Quara spokesperson. It reminded me of one of the later episodes of Babylon 5, when President Mulari is trying to get rid of the Shadow bases his planet allowed, before the Vorlons come to destroy the entire planet because parts were still 'touched.' (No, it's not a perfect parallel, and I'm not trying to make a statement about US actions, just saying what it reminded me of.)

The Evil Bert and bin Laden poster meme is just crazy. Nobody's posted a comprehensive set of links, and I'd do it and assure myself of another few thousand hits, but I don't feel up to it just now. Does anyone have links to any of these pictures? Some news agencies are taking them down or cropping them, so if you see them, save then and/or email them to me and I'll put together a collection page tomorrow. Here's an overview, if you've no idea what I'm talking about.

In related news, The Tourist Guy is giving Bert is Evil a run for its money.

Okay, now it's time to get some food. I haven't eaten anything in 27 hours and, while that's great for the diet, that's about all it's good for.

Thanks again for all the great comments about fury over the past few days though. I'm starting to form a roadmap for changes to the site. Don't worry, most aren't major, and where they are, they don't get in the way of what's already here. That's exactly the kind of thing I needed to know, so thanks again!

Thanks to those who submitted Evil Bert & Evil bin Laden links.

This is an interesting piece because unlike most memes (even All Your Base) there isn't really a 'home' that can claim ownership to it, except perhaps the guy who created the original Evil Bert + bin Laden photo and photoshop guide to the manipulation. Nevertheless, one of the best pages I've seen explaining exactly what probably happened is at lindqvist.com.

Fascinating stuff. This is truly an example of how the online world can affect the offline, and come back again.

I love the Capitol Corridor Amtrak train conductor. Southwest flight attendants have nothing on this guy.

This morning's P.A. soliloquy as we're pulling out of Jack London Square:

"So we've got a couple things in the lost and found bin this morning. We have a cellphone, so if you lost yours, come on up to the conductor so you can talk to your friends again. We've also got a... actually we've got two books. The first one has a monthly pass in it and the other is 'Dating for Dummies.' If either one's yours, come on up. (pause) 'Dating for Dummies'? Now I want to ask all of you, say you meet someone and you go home with them, and on their coffee table you see a copy of 'Dating for Dummies.' You should really just bolt.

"Now I'm a big fan of the Dummies books. I have a bunch of them at home: 'Crash Testing for Dummies,' 'Astrophysics for Dummies.' Heck, I even wrote one myself: 'Train Conducting for Dummies.' Actually, you don't have to be a dummy to do this job; you have to be insane. Anyhow, go to Amazon and buy it. Help me out, 'k?"

Wow, he's like a kindred spirit, only he has a captive audience and a hole punch.

The only thing I can think to add to this is that maybe the owner of the book did meet someone on the train, and wanted to ditch the evidence before they brought that person home.

I had a very strange dream the night before last that left me with an odd thought: GPS navigation units for cars are great, but if you're in a car that can travel in time, the car should also have historical traffic data built-in, so when you're in the past, you can tell the fastest way to get where your going based on the traffic history already knows you'll encounter along each possible route.

Five times (or so) over the weekend I wanted to blog about something interesting, and each time I didn't have anything to blog on, so the bit was lost. Argh. I've got to work on alternate blogging methods. I could build an email gateway and use an alpha pager, if I owned an alpha pager.

Though you'd think that after two years of keeping a weblog, I'd have a clear concept of what tone and content my weblog should have, and what it should be about. While it's evolved over time, it seems that posts have tended to fall into three different buckets of late: The present-time life tidbits, with occasional insightful tidbits or wandering rants, the technology essays, and the stories from present or past life, told in more of a storytelling framework.

I feel that while the first is the subject for a blog, it's the second and third that people (other than my immediate, real-life friends) find more interesting. Also, those are the ones that aren't as timely, and it frustrates me that after a week these well-thought pieces that I put more time into are lost off the front page and never seen again except by the occasional 'by topic' wanderer or google search.

I'm looking for different ways to segment this content, so that someone coming to Fury for the first time can see this stuff, without having to know to click on the 'essays' button. I'm also trying to find a good kind of framework for tying in other projects I'm working on, both to and from Fury and to and from each other. One possibility is the 'troff' approach, ala Yahoo!, or cross-referencing bannerlets, but I'm trying to find the right way to structure data presentation so that some 'topics' aren't merely classifications, but real site features.

This is what I do for a living, so I should be able to find a good solution, but I'd like to hear about what you like and don't like both content-wise and navigation-wise, so I can design toward my real user base, not just those people who talk to me about my site.

If you're a lurker, and haven't written to me or posted in the comments before please do so now. Consider this an assignment. I don't run ads, I don't ask for anything from people who read Fury, but in exchange, I'd like to see every single person who reads this site think about the site for a minute or two, and give me your insights.

You have two choices:

Send me an email	Add a comment to this message

Thanks. :-)

Okay, so what with installing OS X on my powerbook over the weekend and futzing around with it, Fred's hobbit-riffic birthday party, dim sum and bowling in the city, and general apathy, I didn't write anything in the blog over the weekend. Oh the guilt.

But I am working on a few things (this weekend, Friday on the train, and this morning on the train):

• Installing PHP and mySQL on the powerbook so I can do database development on the train (read: metacookie, underblog, and purity survey).
• I'm refining an essay on Powerpoint Do-s and Don'ts, which will be up in a few days. I'm working on a rewrite now.
• I'm working on a post on 'OS and the soul' and how adoption of an operating system is like the adoption of a child.

Anyhow, I hope you all had great weekends! Got anything interesting to share?

Rush Limbaugh loses the ability to hear, fourteen years after he lost the ability to listen.