Out and about like I was working for DCist
So far the weekend's been all about spontaneous discoveries and unplanned fun.
Friday night I hung out with
Gina to celebrate her dad coming out of major health problems mostly intact. I met up with her and several of her friends at Whitlow's in swinging Clarendon. For an area that's supposed to be the new hotness for white exurban youth, I was distinctly unimpressed by the surroundings--Abercrombians as far as the eye could see. Some of the chicks were hot, but they were all so--eh--cookie-cutter.
Still, I had a great time meeting Gina's friends, cheering on Villanova as they narrowly eked out a win out over hated Boston College (I'm no sports fan, but as a proud Boston University alum, I must wish plague and ruin on all things BC), and getting introduced to the coolness that is "Napoleon Dynamite." I need to see this movie in its entirety, as it looks righteously funny.
Today,
Sweetie Pie and I allied to wreak havoc on D.C. with our Wonder Twins-style pimp powerz. We first hit the National Building Museum for the opening of the Cherry Blossom Festival. We got to witness kendo demonstrations, create mugs out of origami, learned how "Dance Dance Revolution" is played, and tons of other stuff.
We traversed the Mall and watched little kids fly all kinds of funky kites--I even suffered a "kite attack" when a particularly fearsome dragon-like creation nearly decapitated me--and then hit the National Gallery of Art for the Dada exhibit. That was wicked cool. I didn't get into Dadaism as a concept when I was younger, although Grant Morrison's popularization of the idea in "Doom Patrol" was badass. But the modern Dadaists of today are the mash-up DJs, the bloggers, the v-loggers, the podcasters, the culture jammers and remixers. We shatter ideas, challenge them, rebuild them, and sometimes just dust them and leave their contemporaries weeping in wonderment. Toni and I took every opportunity to snap photos of the many aspects of what was an amazing day.
Here I shall pause to share some imagery of our adventures.
I bid farewell to my partner in pwnage and spent the rest of the afternoon vainly trying to find a replacement headset jack/adapter for my cellphone.
So my Treo 650 has a loose headphone jack. This is apparently a common manufacturing defect in the phone, as Palm inexplicably put it right next to the charger port, guaranteeing it would be dislodged or bent with repeated use. The result is that music only comes through one channel in the headphones. I tested it with six different sets of phones from Best Buy, Sprint stores, and Graffiti. No joy. So they ended up replacing my unit gratis...and the same thing happened with the new unit. I lost all the stuff I had saved on my phone for exactly jack and squat.
Cue lots of wandering around D.C., hitting every electronics and cellphone dealer in the NW DC quadrant, looking for a set of headphones that would work, or an adapter that would allow me to bypass the headset jack. No dice. My Bluetooth is only 1.0, and the only 'phones I could find that were Bluetooth-enabled were naturally 2.0. Not to mention that most headsets I wanted were at least $129. I'm leery of Bluetooth for security reasons as it is, and I don't want to drop a chunk of change and end up having my shit hacked by any dick with a port detector.
So after hours of explaining my situation again and again to clueless service reps who gave me contradicting stories ("It's the phone!" "It's the headset!" I know what it is, bitch! :)), I finally ceded the day, and ordered a new stereo headset, an adapter, and a new connector jack from Seidio. I really think I'm cursed by the karma gods for sticking with Sprint--this goddamn Treo has been nothing but trouble from jump. Luckily, since I have a new model, I'm doing things up right this time, and I promptly came home and downloaded a bunch of neat freeware applications that should handle a lot of the issues I had the first time around. The Treo has given me a lot of potential for mobile journalism ideas (which I'll discuss more soon), but it won't matter for shit if I can't get the thing to do what it's supposed to do in the first place. ;)
Soon I shall be off to cut rugs at dcmidnight. I was trying to add some deeply profound or witty statement to close this entry off with, but nothing comes to mind, so I shall leave you with some favorite quotes of the day.
The neocons, in particular, stand for "values" that are antithetical to harmonious society: promoting every person for themselves over shared risk, labeling and castigating underclasses, striving for social and economic stratification over integration, willing to sacrifice environment and health to profit a very few, willing to sacrifice the needs of the many in order to protect the wealthy, fostering a culture of elitism over egalitarianism, and demonstrating a ruthlessness in the pursuit of their goals that reveals an absence of sensitivity to human need and suffering.
--from comments in Brad DeLong's blog discussing the egregious mistake that was the hiring of Ben Domenech.
computer about to die. not ignoring you. stuck in back room dressed as an evil fairy for a second road scene. wtf. this is a pulp game!...Did i ever tell you about the time we staged a cannibal scene, topless dancing with torches, eating pig brains? Heh.
--
Abi proving that no matter how hard you think you are as a LARPer, she is harder than you.
Edit: My ph3r-inducing powerz are so strong that they erased this quote from the annals of history, left only to those who need to know. :) And they know, you know?
Friday night I hung out with
Gina to celebrate her dad coming out of major health problems mostly intact. I met up with her and several of her friends at Whitlow's in swinging Clarendon. For an area that's supposed to be the new hotness for white exurban youth, I was distinctly unimpressed by the surroundings--Abercrombians as far as the eye could see. Some of the chicks were hot, but they were all so--eh--cookie-cutter.
Still, I had a great time meeting Gina's friends, cheering on Villanova as they narrowly eked out a win out over hated Boston College (I'm no sports fan, but as a proud Boston University alum, I must wish plague and ruin on all things BC), and getting introduced to the coolness that is "Napoleon Dynamite." I need to see this movie in its entirety, as it looks righteously funny.
Today,
Sweetie Pie and I allied to wreak havoc on D.C. with our Wonder Twins-style pimp powerz. We first hit the National Building Museum for the opening of the Cherry Blossom Festival. We got to witness kendo demonstrations, create mugs out of origami, learned how "Dance Dance Revolution" is played, and tons of other stuff.
We traversed the Mall and watched little kids fly all kinds of funky kites--I even suffered a "kite attack" when a particularly fearsome dragon-like creation nearly decapitated me--and then hit the National Gallery of Art for the Dada exhibit. That was wicked cool. I didn't get into Dadaism as a concept when I was younger, although Grant Morrison's popularization of the idea in "Doom Patrol" was badass. But the modern Dadaists of today are the mash-up DJs, the bloggers, the v-loggers, the podcasters, the culture jammers and remixers. We shatter ideas, challenge them, rebuild them, and sometimes just dust them and leave their contemporaries weeping in wonderment. Toni and I took every opportunity to snap photos of the many aspects of what was an amazing day.
Here I shall pause to share some imagery of our adventures.
I bid farewell to my partner in pwnage and spent the rest of the afternoon vainly trying to find a replacement headset jack/adapter for my cellphone.
So my Treo 650 has a loose headphone jack. This is apparently a common manufacturing defect in the phone, as Palm inexplicably put it right next to the charger port, guaranteeing it would be dislodged or bent with repeated use. The result is that music only comes through one channel in the headphones. I tested it with six different sets of phones from Best Buy, Sprint stores, and Graffiti. No joy. So they ended up replacing my unit gratis...and the same thing happened with the new unit. I lost all the stuff I had saved on my phone for exactly jack and squat.
Cue lots of wandering around D.C., hitting every electronics and cellphone dealer in the NW DC quadrant, looking for a set of headphones that would work, or an adapter that would allow me to bypass the headset jack. No dice. My Bluetooth is only 1.0, and the only 'phones I could find that were Bluetooth-enabled were naturally 2.0. Not to mention that most headsets I wanted were at least $129. I'm leery of Bluetooth for security reasons as it is, and I don't want to drop a chunk of change and end up having my shit hacked by any dick with a port detector.
So after hours of explaining my situation again and again to clueless service reps who gave me contradicting stories ("It's the phone!" "It's the headset!" I know what it is, bitch! :)), I finally ceded the day, and ordered a new stereo headset, an adapter, and a new connector jack from Seidio. I really think I'm cursed by the karma gods for sticking with Sprint--this goddamn Treo has been nothing but trouble from jump. Luckily, since I have a new model, I'm doing things up right this time, and I promptly came home and downloaded a bunch of neat freeware applications that should handle a lot of the issues I had the first time around. The Treo has given me a lot of potential for mobile journalism ideas (which I'll discuss more soon), but it won't matter for shit if I can't get the thing to do what it's supposed to do in the first place. ;)
Soon I shall be off to cut rugs at dcmidnight. I was trying to add some deeply profound or witty statement to close this entry off with, but nothing comes to mind, so I shall leave you with some favorite quotes of the day.
The neocons, in particular, stand for "values" that are antithetical to harmonious society: promoting every person for themselves over shared risk, labeling and castigating underclasses, striving for social and economic stratification over integration, willing to sacrifice environment and health to profit a very few, willing to sacrifice the needs of the many in order to protect the wealthy, fostering a culture of elitism over egalitarianism, and demonstrating a ruthlessness in the pursuit of their goals that reveals an absence of sensitivity to human need and suffering.
--from comments in Brad DeLong's blog discussing the egregious mistake that was the hiring of Ben Domenech.
computer about to die. not ignoring you. stuck in back room dressed as an evil fairy for a second road scene. wtf. this is a pulp game!...Did i ever tell you about the time we staged a cannibal scene, topless dancing with torches, eating pig brains? Heh.
--
Abi proving that no matter how hard you think you are as a LARPer, she is harder than you.
Edit: My ph3r-inducing powerz are so strong that they erased this quote from the annals of history, left only to those who need to know. :) And they know, you know?