I wiped out and hurt myself last night while zoobombing. It sucked and still sucks. Lots of scrapes all over and my left hand is all swollen up. my fingers still work pretty normal so i can type, luckily, but i have a hard time gripping anything firmly.

Hopefully this is nothing serious and it will heal up on its own soon, cuz, suprise, i have no insurance.
I'm lucky, though, it could have been a lot worse.
Ironically, this was my first bomb with a helmet. The other five times my head was bare. I didn't hit my head last night, so it wouldn't have mattered.

My bike's totally fine, too, except i broke my front light. Like i said, i was really lucky.

On the way home i was having all these negative thoughts about zoobombing and other idle decadent things we do in our "spare time" - in Bolivia people are hurting themselves while putting up roadblocks and running from soldiers, meanwhile we're up here making up stupid meaningless ways to put ourselves in danger. sigh.

Just found a cool site/blog about using bicycles with wireless connections to protest the RNC in NYC this summer. It's called Bikes Against Bush. Nice to see geekiness, bikes, and anti-bush activism all tied together.

Too bad I'm lately leaning toward NOT going to the RNC protests. I feel like my focus is south, Bolivia and latin america in general. I want to go back this winter and I have to concentrate on that and the computers for Bolivia project. I can't think of how I could be that useful in New York other than as just another body on the street, holding a video camera that MIGHT shoot something unique but probably won't.

So now someone has discovered a virus that infects mobile phones. Just what we need. Another reason not to buy another mobile, I guess. I've been thinking about it for months.

As Thoreau once said, "We have become the tools of our tools."

sigh.

Today is Bloomsday, and in fact is the 100th bloomsday, the day that is the day James Joyce's Ulysses takes place.

I read Ulysses years ago, liked it but I'm sure I didn't get as much out of it as I could have. It took me 8 months, and I was pushing it even at that.

However one passage from it has stuck with me lucidly ever since, furnishing me with a phrase I repeat to myself often when appropriate it. I don't quite remember the context, some moment when Leopold Bloom is thinking about all the people that die every day around the world, and he says "shoving them under doublequick"... or something like that. Such a powerful, but brutally simple, thought.

This article explains how to use your iPod to make a pirate radio station.

There's lots of great ideas for what to do with such a portable FM transmitter. One of my favorite is:

We usually keep a couple tracks of silence ready to go, ever get stuck at a stop light for like 10 minutes and the dude in the next car is blasting the radio? With the super easy iPod interface you can quickly get to the station he

Ok I know I just blogged about Mark Morford the other day but this particular column of his is really extragreat. doubleplusgood. He is my new favorite writer ever. Well, not really, but he's so freaking great, so clever and zillion miles an hour and cynical and yet so idealistic and outraged, he's like if Mark Leyner wrote for a newspaper and was really really angry all the time.

But the good thing about this particular installment of his column is that it ends happy. It basically says, let's be optimistic and happy, no matter how bad things seem to be, because to just be stressed out and fearful and angry and paranoid all the time will destroy us.

And that's an important thing to remember.

Chris Bowers brings us a great rant on Iraq.

Today for the first time, my blog started getting spammed. How freaking lame. Like I don't have enough trouble with email spam. Luckily, I know SQL and it was fairly simple to just go into the mySQL shell and mass-delete all the spam comments. But I also looked around for some methods of preventing blog spam, and I foung this handy article,
"Seven quick tips for a spam-free blog". I've done 2 of them already. Hopefully this doesn't become a huge problem...

This column by Mark Morford about behavior modifying drugs is really freaking great. It has this totally biting, barbed, super-sarcastic, laser-focused blast of invective style to it. I really love it. Read it.

Godammit, i fucking HATE it when i have to listen to somebody sitting in a cafe talking on their damn mobile at elevated volumes, and even worse is what happened just now, when 2 of the jackasses where doing it. It would be hilarious if it weren't so annoying, 2 people sitting together at table, both talking on their cellphones, yelling into their phones, actually. I mean, it wouldn't be that bad if they would at least talk in a normal tone of voice, but so many people have this "HI!! YOU PROBABLY CAN'T HEAR ME CUZ YOU'RE ON THE PHONE WITH ME! SO I'LL TALK LOUDER" way of speaking.

The other day, walking into this same cafe and seeing all the wireless laptop wankers, I felt slightly annoyed, in that "and I'm one of them" kind of way. And I wondered if cafe laptops were the new mobile phones, in terms of people being annoyed and having contempt for them as a symbol of yuppie affluent lifestyle, now that mobile phones are used by everyone of all classes everywhere. But laptops will never, ever be as annoying as mobile phones. you don't yell into your fucking laptop, even if you're an asshole. grrrr....