Aside

I’ll be back home again, on California soil. Off to CT tonight, and to Montreal for the weekend. Have a good weekend.

For those of you who knew me back in 2001, then you’ll know that I went on a trip to Cuba with my Freshman Seminar at UC Berkeley. We got a chance to spend a week in Havana, acting as researchers (us lowly undergrads at the time) for the grad students. I was the researcher for this piece, called Cyber Libre: Cubans Log On Behind CastroÕs Back. There was talk that these would be put into a book, and it’s…

Wired News: 02:00 AM May. 05, 2005 PT by Cyrus Farivar Scientists are helping blind people see again, one pixel at a time. If all goes well, an artificial retina could be commercially available within three years. Artificial retinas have been successfully implanted in six patients, allowing them to see light and detect motion, researchers announced at the 2005 annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Developed by researchers from the University…

I like the idea of extending The Daily Show to a full hour. But I don’t like the idea of moving Stephen Colbert off The Daily Show. NYT: Stephen Colbert, who plays a phony correspondent on the fake-news program “The Daily Show,” is getting a real promotion. Comedy Central said yesterday that it was giving Mr. Colbert his own show: a half-hour that is expected to follow “The Daily Show” on weeknights and will lampoon those cable-news shows that are…

So just now I read Paul Boutin’s cool Slate piece on Wikipedia. And then he emailed me if I was the one responsible for creating his entry. I was. (He could tell because the IP address points to Columbia.) Then I went back and looked at my own entry. There, I discovered that about a month ago, I was almost deleted from Wikipedia. Whoa.

So I get the fact that gangsta rappers aren’t the brightest of cats, but still — being that “California Love” is about the whole state — I guess it’s rather revelatory that “worldwide” constitutes from Long Beach to Rosecrans (a street in Compton). In other words, about 15 miles. Famous cause we program worldwide Let’em recognize from Long Beach to Rosecrans.

So in the ongoing saga of my stolen money, Paypal has informed me that they will reimburse everything, which is good. The account number has been cancelled and will be changed. When I went to look this morning to see if the payments had cleared so I could determine what was actually purchased, it looks like that nearly $900 in payments via Paypal to IGXE (an online trading post for selling of virtual gaming goods). So my guy had a…

An “Arturo Ryman” has made nearly $900 in payments to PayPal using my debit card number. Somehow he got ahold of it, even though I didn’t lose the card. Now I can’t withdraw cash for the next week. Let me just make a shout out right now to Mr. Ryman. Hey, Arturo? Fuck you.

This is absurd. Print newspapers as we know them will be dead within my lifetime. Why should I pick up a stack of dead trees and read the news a day after it actually happens, when I can get up-to-the-minute information from that same news source electronically? Magazines, on the other hand, feature magazines, like the New Yorker or Wired, I don’t think will die. Why? Because they don’t rely on immediate breaking news for their bread and butter. I…

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger speaking at a news conference on Friday. Is this really what he looks like when he speaks? Goddamn. No wonder his poll numbers are down.