GRABBINGSAND

dang tasty. that is all.

yeah, it’s been quite awhile, but rarely do i remember what day it is during the week, much less that it is friday and even less that these five questions might be worth the five or ten minutes it takes to answer. that being said and the day being remembered, here you go:

when was the last time you…
1. …sent a handwritten letter? hmm. that has been awhile, and i am guessing that the postcards i sent at various points through last year don’t count. did it have to be postmarked? i wrote a rather lengthy couple of letters back during the winter, but they were typed and not by-hand. it has probably been about four years since the last time i put pen to paper for a prolonged period of personal pontification.

2. …baked something from scratch or made something by hand? i cook whenever i can. stir-fry is probably my signature dish now, with good vegetables and ginger curry sauce, but i never bake. meals i do. desserts i don’t. and it has been ages since i attempted a decent pan of lasagna. made something? mix CDs probably don’t count, so it has probably been quite awhile. probably last spring, contributing some manual labor to the set of romeo & juliet.

3. …camped in a tent? i know this one. probably the early spring of 1997, i think. i know it was a little chilly in the morning, perfect campfire weather at night. we camped on an island in the middle of lake allatoona. somebody brought a bottle of ouzo.

4. …volunteered your time to church, school, or community? these days, i am volunteering my time to theatre in one way or another, something that gives more satisfaction these days as i am working with a not-for-profit group. in august, i will volunteer for the third time at dragoncon, though i am not sure just how one could consider that a charity. i was terribly active in the methodist church on in to my twenties, even spending a few years as a youth minister.

5. …helped a stranger? every chance i get.

what about you?

i will not tell you twice. wouldn’t it be nice? anyway. the hiptop is has made the rounds with quite a few of my friends, and i have tried to avoid the aggressive “show & tell” techniques that might normally accompany such a neato little gadget. people might like new toys, but most take issue with having such things shoved in their face and personal space. the response? mostly positive, mostly along the lines of “you mean it does that too?” and “so when am i going to be able to get one?” now, i have agreed to a rather substantial non-disclosure agreement, so i am not too sure of how much i can say about the device. i edited my original post substantially before i was certain that my likelihood of facing a lawsuit (or simply the termination of my beta testing) was avoided.

so i will stick to what is already out there. techtv previewed the device back in january, going into a substantial amount of detail regarding its functionality and promise. in fact, i had to read that article to learn just how much memory the little gadget has.

how much will it cost? well, a very early article in the mcpaper from last september price-points it around $200 and i have yet to see anything to refute such a guess. in fact, a cnet article from april seems to support it. the cnet article also confirms that the instant messaging application would be a handheld version of AOL’s instant messenger.

how does it work? it uses something called general packet radio service or GPRS that is capable (in theory) of wireless data transmission of 171.2 kilobits per second. you can read all about it, or at least enough to make your head go all swimmy, here. basically, it works much like any other mobile phone, but faster and more efficiently.

overall, it is a great little device, one that could be just the perfect toy with some minor adjustments and fixes. once the test is over, in another three weeks, i am guessing i will have to return the little guy to his rightful owners and then i will just have to wait with the rest of the world to see how the end product will turn out. but i can already tell you one thing…

i still want to keep it.

i would hate to scare him off, but it appears that a fellow from the good city of charleston has been so kind as to link to my site. he calls himself kilt kingpin king kiltpin, but it is not apparent if he is truly a magnate of the woolen apparel industry, or just a guy who appreciates more freedom than trousers can offer. either way or none, he seems perfectly harmless, rather gregarious and quite industrious, so go pay him a visit and populate his undeservedly vacant guestbook with curious quotes and witty observations.

i submit for your perusal, the current top fifteen of the best albums that i can think of right at the moment. please feel free to submit your own at your leisure, or attempt to derail my own choices as you see fit, though i should warn you… these are the near and dear and they will be defended mightily, i assure you.

there is a radio somewhere. a small clock radio. i think it is in a cube about five yards from me. the owner probably believes that i cannot hear her radio. she thinks that she is keeping it at a low enough volume as to not disturb the world around her, not realizing that the open design of our floor allows anyone to hear the conversations of a mouse clear on the other side of the building. and so the audio aroma of this little clock radio is drifting over to my usually quiet desk. clock radios are especially heinous because they are probably the last remaining devices that have a monophonic speaker by default. the advent of stereo has yet to reach the research and development ministers in the world of wake-up and snooze. mono has it’s place. beatles records sound best in mono, like that cool way you can isolate the percussion on the reprise of “sgt pepper’s lonely hearts club band” — but modern music sounds horrible when squeezed through one speaker. one cheap, lowly clock radio speaker. the kind that sound like a broadcast from the bottom of a 50-gallon oil drum.

so there is this radio somewhere. i can just make out the keening keyboard riff from madonna’s “live to tell” — which is better than the keening vocals i heard just a few minutes ago. i think it was that song about heroes having the right to bleed and it’s not easy to be me or something. earlier it was faith hill singing about breathing and elton john sacrificing. must be star 94 or peach 98.5. all i know is, if i don’t go to lunch soon, i will be tracking down the source of this grating pop overflow and taking measures too desperate for acceptable office behavior.

oh, listen… sting is singing about fields of barley…

i love rome. rome is like a second home to me. if i don’t have time to make a roadtrip to the coast or points other-where, a drive up to rome is a day’s worth of therapy for a half-tank of gasoline. i try to explain this to others, the way that this small north georgia town has a charm all of its own, but it has to be seen and felt firsthand. the acres of hiking on berry’s campus. the view from the battey mausoleum at myrtle hill. a really good pita bread sandwich at schroeder’s deli on broad street. maybe if there was some way to experience rome virtually.

unfortunately, the official virtual tour of rome is perhaps the most depressing spot i’ve found on the web in years. click on, and shudder in disbelief.

and the u.s. goes home to a country that really doesn’t understand why they were there in the first place. maybe it was the time of day, a match that started at 7am est, as that is the temporal pitfall of a sport played on the other side of the planet. but let’s face it, the world cup is either a curious mystery or a laughable curiosity to the american public. you will never hear anyone call into an afternoon sports-talk radio program to discuss soccer. if anyone tried, they’d be summarily insulted and dropped like a prank caller. or maybe we all think that there are enough sports to worry about without lumping in yet another. but what do we have? there’s baseball, the all-american sport invented by abner doubleday (or alexander cartwright), though it could be said that dear abby (or alexi) just adapted cricket to more wide open spaces. there’s basketball, another all-american sport created by james naismith, though it must be noted that naismith was actually canadian. and, of course, there is american football as orchestrated and fathered by walter camp (he even wrote the book on the subject). but these sports, as popular as they are in the united states, are rarely played outside of this country. and soccer? well, soccer is played everywhere. and it comes down to one simple thing: economics.

what do you need to play baseball, even a neighborhood pickup game? a ball, a bat, some gloves. sure, you can play with any stick and a rock, but it’s not the same. what about basketball? a larger ball, a hoop (with a net, preferrably), a hard surface. it was originally played with an actual basket, but times have certainly changed. and football? an odd oblong ball, goal posts, helmets, padding, cleats and a lot of room. you can get by with just the ball, but that’s not really football. it’s touch football, no tackles involved, unless you’re just wanting to get hurt.

soccer… soccer just requires one ball. sure, there are nets and large pitches (that’s fields to you and me) and referees and yellow cards and red cards and umbros and cleats and shiny jerseys, but it all comes down to the ball. if you have the ball, you can learn soccer, you can play soccer. with a rock and a stick, you are playing stickball, a low-grade shadow of an actual game. not so with soccer, not once you have that ball. this accessibility allows soccer to transcend economic levels and cultural barriers.

had the united states remained viable in the world cup, perhaps this country could have changed its collective mind about that curious game that so excites the rest of the world. but now the team is going home and the local radio jocks won’t be mentioning a thing about the remainder of the competition, i won’t come into the office to find the breakroom television turned to espn2 and the idea of professional soccer’s acceptance in this country will go back to the shelf.

however, it does email, web browsing, voice mail, instant messaging and note taking. it is only slightly larger than a cell phone. and speaking of cell phones, it is a cell phone. and all of the things i mentioned can be done from practically anywhere. it has a nickname, the “hiptop” — and you can take a look at one in action over here.

they are not yet released to the public, but there are a handful of them being tested in major and less-than-major cities across the united states. some are being tested in atlanta.

and one is being tested by me right now — i am updating while walking down the hall.

a venti hazelnut latte consumed too quickly between the hours of 8am and 11am will result in a post-noon mental fugue consisting of odd focal vibration and a feeling in your fingertips not entirely unlike the effects of darvocet and/or percocet. whether this is a good or a bad thing is entirely subjective.