No one is passing me the musical baton because they know all I listen to are Ace of Base and an MP3 of random Ralph Wiggum sayings from the Simpsons.

Because I feel left out, I’m starting a new meme.

What are you smelling?
Total volume of smell
I’m thinking six roomfuls. Maybe seven, and sometimes my car. Sometimes outdoors, on airplanes, and creeping out of sewer covers.

Last Smell I Bought
Let’s see. It wasn’t designed to specifically smell, but it might soon. It’s an automatic fish feeder. I put some fish food in and it dispenses food pellets at programmed intervals. The last thing I bought that was designed specifically to smell were some flowers for Carrie that Leah picked out.

Smell Smelling Right Now
Mexican rice from my lunch combined with the smells of the lawn in front of my house which is getting rained on and basking in the sun at the exact same time. (It’s an Oregon thing). Also some hints of the asphalt road, and maybe a hint of flowers somewhere.

Five Smells I Smell a Lot that Mean a Lot to Me
1. Just wet diapers.
2. Wet diapers + The Seriousness.
3. Wet + The Seriousness + lost in laundry room.
4. Brownies.
5. My Family. Jonas usually smells like food. Carrie and Leah are sweet!

Three People Whom I’m Passing the Baton
Al Patridge – because I know his world is full of smells.
Andre Torrez – I’m really just super curious what Andre is smelling right now.
Cameron Marlow – Because he should be feeling guilty for not posting anything in a long time. And surely, MIT smells interesting.

Things happen to me. It’s not me, it’s the things. Today while waiting on a street corner in a very busy part of San Francisco, a man with a yellow short sleeved, black bodied shirt asked me to take his photo. He stood stoically in the shot, but made sure to turn his good side to me each time. I think he may have been from Mongolia, or some place in Asia that breeds very rugged cowboy like people. He looked robust, like he could withstand a razor blade tornado.

He asked me to take his photo seven times. But never in a row. As I waited for my friend (who I hadn’t seen at any great length for several years) to arrive, Mr. Robust Yellow Sleeves showed up six more times after having left after each photo, leaving my area completely. And it was never a “please, can you take my photo.” It was always him just walking up, shoving the camera in my hands, pointing at the button on the camera, and stepping away from me with his left shoulder forward. Things like this happen to me nearly every time I leave the house and he could tell. He knew I’d know what to do.

I have a theory that that was his thing. His purpose in life was to rotate around that busy part of town commanding people to take his photograph. Sometimes he put the camera to his ear like it was a phone. After my friend and his girlfriend arrived, she admitted to having taken his photo a few times as well on her way to meet me and her boyfriend.

Later on that evening while walking to House of Nanking (super tasty! we let the man pick our food for us! I ate yams that didn’t make me wretch!) a man, as I passed him on the sidewalk, said Pickle. Right into my ear. Others might not think that’s one of those Things, but for me when someone says Pickle right into my ear who I’ve never met and never will again, that’s something.

And finally, on the way back to my hotel, I walked into the Apple store. I was looking for some new headphones, something easier to travel with, when a man walked up beside me and said flatly “I’m a big fan can you sign this it’s for my son.” Beside me stood the tallest man I think I’ve ever seen in real life. I couldn’t even guess – maybe he was nearly 8 feet tall. My head was at his nipples and I’m 6 feet. Shocked in more ways than one, I was about to explain that he was mistaken, but before I could do that two Apple employees came up to both of us and asked that we leave the store, they’d been closed for 20 minutes. Mr. Elevation said “I gotta run”, pushed a taxi receipt into my hand sort of urgently, and handed me a pen. I signed it. He grinned, said “Thanks Bill” and practically sprinted out the door.

At that, I decided going back to my hotel would be a good idea. It was only a block away, but my night of weird wasn’t done yet. After crossing the street to get to my hotel a naked black guy ran down the street yelling “THIS IS AMERICA. THIS IS AMERICA. YOU LIVE IN AMERICA” and following the black guy was a very obese woman carrying his clothing, trying her best to keep up, and yelling “GET YOUR DAMN PANTS ON CHUCKY. CHUCKY! YOUR PANTS”.

Surely tomorrow will be normal.

Update(s)
And yes, this all happened tonight. I have witnesses to half, but you have to trust me on Mr. and Mrs. Naked and Mr. Elevation. And no, I don’t think he thought I was Bill Gates. I bear no resemblance. I’d be more puzzled about which Bill he thought I was if I wasn’t more puzzled about Mr. and Mrs. Naked.

Yes. I’m on the edge of the Tenderloin, or so I’m told. And all I know about that is that Things Happen in the Tenderloin. I’m pretty sure I know what that means.

These kinds of things happen. You write about a gopher building vast and expansive catacombs beneath your lawn and eventually you get in the top results for “gopher exterminator”.

The gopher: he’s dead. Without a doubt. I’m pretty sure I put a lead pellet through his neck, and while I love animals, this one was working towards breaking my ankle. And I didn’t end up spending $225 on having someone come out and poison my lawn.

The real sea change (who uses that term – crazy!) to my gopher problems: Remington Air Rifle with Scope.

If you have gopher issues, buy yourself a nice air rifle and point it at the gopher when you see it and you’re done.

Jeff made a list of why he is a wuss for shaving off his beard. I’ll make a list for why he is a wuss for shaving off his beard, and then I’ll show you some facial hair that will prove why he’s a wuss for shaving off his beard:

1. Growing a beard for team solidarity is prehistoric. When groups of hunter gatherers hunted bison, did you ever see one guy saying “man, the sweat, and the beard, I just can’t take it.” Nope. Those guys died off pretty quick because they’d be taken by surprise by a mad bull bison while they were staring into a placid lake while scraping hair off their face with obsidian. And if a mad bull bison didn’t do them in, their tribe mates would push them into the placid lake.

Actually, I’m done with my list. I thought I would fire off a bunch of bullet points about why giving up so quickly (ok, maybe a month isn’t that quick) is wrong, but that first one took my steam away. It all boils down to genetics and cave man tendencies somehow, somewhere.

And now, check out my contribution to facial hair. And I’m not shaving it off until we’re done.

And finally, I sort of wish I wasn’t as stubborn as I am, because that’s an ugly mustache and I’d love to shave it. I can’t blame Jeff for doing it, and really don’t think he’s that big a wuss.

I got the Motorola A360 today and so far I’m nonplussed. I want the phone to be able to replace my Sidekick, but also add Bluetooth and a better camera into the mix. The Bluetooth is so I can use the GPRS connection of the phone, and the camera is so that when I travel and want to take quick pics I don’t need to carry the digital SLR.

Couple of big problems already:

1. Won’t sync with my Mac over Bluetooth. Strike one for Bluetooth.
2. The user interface absolutely sucks. I’m not sure I’ve seen worse. Ever. I’ve had dozens of phones.
3. Compared to the Sidekick the QWERTY keyboard is much more difficult to use and doesn’t seem as responsive.
4. I haven’t been able to use the GPRS connection of the phone over Bluetooth with my computer. Strike two.
5. Setting up an email account is the pits. You put in your email address and it tries to be clever and figure out what your mail server settings are. It doesn’t work. Eventually you get an email to the account you tried to setup saying “Yeah, that didn’t work, double check your information and try again”, despite the fact that you can’t hand enter any information other than the email address and password.

The good things:
1. Camera is easy to use. Seems to work good for a 640×480 camera phone.
2. The phone is pretty small. But not too small.
3. Being able to dial and do pretty much any voice related activity with the phone closed is cool.

At this point, unless I can get the Bluetooth syncing to work and figure out how to use the GPRS connection, the phone is going back. So far it looks as if I’m going to have to figure out how to uncripple it’s weaknesses by myself, as the phone is so new people have figured out how to make it stop sucking.

Welcome to the world Fiona!

You know when you get automated emails from online stores, and it says something like:

Dear Michael,</p>

Thank you for purchasing: CRATE OF CHEESE
</code>

It all makes sense now, and unfortunately I’m not pleased at all.

The other night when I purchased the 2GHz G5 at a much lower than expected price, I told the Apple store people “grab me the base model, I don’t need any RAM or HD upgrades”. I knew I could get RAM cheaper at Fry’s (which I did today) and that I’d buy a new HD when I needed one down the road.

What I didn’t know is that Apple sells a 2GHz Dual G5 with a cheaper video card than the ATI Radeon 9600 (the cheapest they show on their website). And now, after writing that, I wonder if I got one of the newer G5’s at all! It did come with Tiger, so something must be right, but the G5 I have came with the GeForce FX 5200 with 64MB of RAM (a fact I just learned) and not the expected ATI 9600 with 128MB of video RAM.

I’m not at all happy, and I’m pretty sure it’s not my fault. It’s not readily apparent on the box what video card comes with the system, and in the chaos of the Tiger premiere, the only confirmation of what I was getting from the Apple folks was that it was the new 2GHz G5. I literally asked the woman 3 times if the price was correct for the base 2GHz model, and she confirmed it three times. If not for the chaos of the store, she might have picked up on my concern that something was not right.

I’m not even sure if I should even consider trying to get what I went to the store for or not. I’m thinking it’ll be a tough battle, but ultimately I think I’m willing to pay for what I wanted in the first place, which no one should have a real issue with. I’ll be pretty unhappy if they do something tricky with my 10% discount.

I didn’t mention this yesterday because the thought hadn’t really occurred to me, but the Dual 2.0 G5 isn’t very fast with only 512MB of RAM. In fact, I did a quick test with iPhoto. On my 12" G4 iBook (is it 1.2Ghz?) the photos load as quickly off my external Firewire drive as they did when I only had 512MB of RAM in the G5. I added 2 more gigs of RAM this morning, and the G5 is smoking fast now.

Surely I’m not the first to see this, but every so often when I click on More Widgets from the Dashboard in Tiger, it tries to take me to a password protected URL (http://www.apple.com/macosx/dashboard/) rather than the correct URL (http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/dashboard/). This is pretty strange, because it’s literally hit or miss. You’d think that the URL was more “baked in”, and wouldn’t change from click to click. I haven’t ruled out that it could be sending me to a single URL that is redirecting me to the two different locations.

Another sort of funny thing – when Dashboard first loaded after I transferred all my settings from my iBook, it plugged in the city of Portland into all the location sensitive widgets. Problem is, it assumed Portland Maine, not Portland Oregon. I saw that today’s forecast called for rain and highs in the mid 40’s, and was relieved to realize it was looking up weather for the wrong coast.