The volcano being my mind, of course... What with losing (and replacing) the iPhone, coming down with the flu (no, not quite over it yet), and dealing with the usual uncontrolled chaos at work, I'm feeling especially run down. The good news is that I get a vacation of sorts: tomorrow morning, a few of my colleagues and I are flying out to Kona, Hawaii, as part of an awards program Microwize Technology wins regularly. L.C. has already been relocated to my friend Barbara's house, where he's in an uneasy, fragile truce with the other three cats cohabiting there at the moment. Considering that he normally lives with one of them, it's actually kinda funny.

I'm leaving the laptop behind. Sure, it might come in handy, but I'll do just fine without it, and the iPhone is perfectly fine for jotting down notes and reminders. I may find myself forced to do some work while I'm out there, but if so, I'm going to inconvenience someone else to do it; I'm not bringing my own computer just so that I can be taken away from my vacation. So, anyway, updates and pics will mostly have to wait 'til I return late next week.

Yes, I am looking forward to this. Frankly, at this point a few days in Hoboken, away from the office, would be nice, but Hawaii is lovely, and so are its hula girls. Bring on the healin'...

It's been a long weekend. Friday night, I got picked up by Sally (no, not like that) and we headed down to the Jersey shore. Paige and I watched a bit of the original "Amityville Horror" (and chuckled over how cheesy some of it was now, while reminiscing about how frightening it was when we first saw it as children) while waiting for Sally and Matt to get ready, then the four of us saw Brian Kirk and the Jerks play some fun covers at the Mad Hatter in Sea Bright. We had a great time, but I probably had a few more Boston Lagers than I should have, and after crashing on Sally's couch sometime after 1 AM, I awoke on Saturday morning with a slight hangover.

Sally and Matt got me to the Long Branch station in time to make the 10:09 AM train northward, and by the time I got home, I was feeling a bit better. I had enough time to grab a coffee and a muffin at Dunkin' Donuts and hit the shower, then I headed to New York to see Margarita play at Banjo Jim's again. And that's when it happened.

My twenty-two hours or so without an iPhone began when I was sprinting down to the platform to catch an L to First Avenue, since I was cutting the time closer than I'd wanted. As I approached the bottom of the stairs, I realized that the train was sitting there, doors open, and I heard the announcement that meant it was getting ready to depart. So, naturally, I jumped the last four stairs and bolted for the doors. The problem is, the shock from hitting the platform knocked the iPhone from its holster on my belt (much like the shock of smacking my head against concrete had done less than two weeks ago). The other problem is, it didn't hit me until I was on the train, and the doors were closing, that the device had ripped away from the earbuds (I'd been listening to Nitzer Ebb at the time) and skittered across the platform, and under the train. By the time the realization had set in, the train was moving, and all I could do was get off at the first stop and head back. When I arrived back at the Sixth Avenue station, all I could see down by the tracks was half of the protective case; the iPhone had either slipped under the tracks or into the murky water or else been snagged by someone who saw what had happened.

Nothing makes you recover from a hangover more quickly and suddenly than watching several hundred dollars' worth of technology disappear. I was angry with myself. I was concerned about possibly losing data (though the more I thought about that, the less likely it seemed I would), and about being incommunicado for at least the rest of the day. I was devastated, because while I occasionally suffer head wounds and psycho ex-girlfriends and buses that just don't show up, this kind of thing never happens to me. But then I guess almost everyone it happens to says that. I made my way to Alphabet City and saw Margarita when I walked into Banjo Jim's, so I headed over and sat down with her. The open mic had already started, so we tried to keep our conversation to the interims between musicians so as not to be rude. I explained what had happened, and she was sympathetic; telling me that she would make me feel better, she scribbled a note to tell me that one of her friends lost a thousand dollars last week. Ouch. That is worse...

Margarita bought me a drink this time, and I told her about how I'd injured my head at the train station. Good times... She went on kinda late again, not having been signed in early, but I stuck around and heard her play "Kill Yourself," and then "Tragedy," which she dedicated to me. I'd never had a live performance dedicated to me before; it was very sweet.

We both had to split after the show, so we headed back to the L together, hugging before she got off at Sixth. I was meeting Barbara for dinner on the Upper West Side at 6 PM, and I would've gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for the meddling MTA. I didn't realize the C wasn't running until after two As had gone by, and then the next train was an E, so I took that to Seventh Avenue, where the B would supposedly take me to W. 72nd. Only it never showed up, after 40 minutes or so, and I suspect that perhaps that line doesn't run on the weekends. I knew I was late at this point, but unfortunately I couldn't call Barbara to let her know what was going on; I didn't even know her cel number to call from a payphone. I decided to just walk the 20+ blocks instead, so I did, and I found Barbara at a pizzeria a block from where we'd planned to meet.

All in all, I got to tell the iPhone story several times on Saturday. Heh... Barbara and I saw her friend Stephanie perform with the Dessoff Choirs, and enjoyed it thoroughly, but I decided against joining Barbara and Stephanie and her family for coffee and dessert afterwards, opting instead to go to the Apple Store for a replacement phone. A few minutes with the crowds there, though, and I figured I could wait. It'd been an exhausting day already, good friends and music notwithstanding, and I didn't feel like taking an extra-late train home, so I left it for today.

While waiting at Penn Station for the train, I decided to get something to read. I hadn't brought a book or anything along, because I'd figured on listening to music on the iPh... anyway, I was looking around, trying to find an interesting book, when I was inspired by a discussion Margarita and I had had two weeks earlier while walking to the subway. So I picked up "The Alchemist" by Brazilian Paulo Coelho, and got hooked on it. It's quite a book...

So that's how I ended up iPhone-less for almost a full day. I did head to the Apple Store late this morning, picked up a new phone and headed back home to activate it and restore it. That went very smoothly, at least. I wanted to make sure I had a phone for today, because I had to pick up Linda, our new Arizona employee, at the airport this afternoon; she's going to be here in New Jersey for the week to meet us and get some training. Things went smoothly at the airport, too, fortunately, and after we grabbed some dinner, I got her back to her hotel.

I saw Margarita performing live via Webcast tonight, which was cool. She did "Mama," my favorite of her songs, and dedicated that performance to me, too.  :-D  I'm about ready for bed now, though. Let's hope this week isn't too bad...

Wow, it was so nice to go from hiking up a mountain in Arizona on Saturday morning in 80+ degrees to trudging to work in Jersey yesterday morning in 40+ degrees.  </sarcasm>

Oh, well. I still have to get the account, and the pictures, of my brief Arizona sojourn posted, perhaps tonight. Last evening, while trudging from work in 50+ weather, I bumped into my friend the black squirrel again. Only because I'd left the camera at home. D'oh!

My copy of Leopard (woo-hoo!) arrived at the office on Friday, while I was still on the business trip; Rhonda let me know via E-mail that it was there. I got my hands on the very cool packaging yesterday morning, but I'm not installing it just yet. It seems that someone has finally simplified a way to get third-party apps on the iPhone with firmware v1.1.1 (though ringtones might still be iffy, gotta check into that), so I'll probably play with that sometime this week/weekend, when I have an hour or two to devote to it. Once I get the iPhone updated, and a few more days go by without reports of major catastrophes after upgrading to Leopard, I will take that plunge myself. Good kitty...

Why, yes, I have been neglecting you, my few and far-between Web visitors. I spent the week since getting back from Austin and San Antonio, Texas mostly off-line. Last week may not have been the most productive time in the world, but then again... I was still on vacation. I was also still coughing and congested and stuff. It was nice to be away from the office regardless and, barring a handful of phone calls which didn't require me to actually look at anyone's data, to not have to think about work at all.

While I don't watch a lot of television in general, I did of course have to sit down and watch "Doctor Who" and "Flash Gordon." The latter has grown on me, so it looks like I'm going to stick with it. I've caught a few episodes of "Painkiller Jane," which isn't bad at all. And I kicked back to two or three episodes of "Stargate SG-1" last week, too. It's good, but I just never got totally hooked on it. Maybe I'll TiVo it when the new season starts...

Texas itself was very much enjoyable; the pics are finally up here. Barbara and I arrived in Austin early enough to have lunch at a little Mexican place on 6th Street, after dropping our bags off at the Radisson. We wandered around some more after eating, visiting the Capitol building briefly, then headed back to the hotel, where we soon learned that the Batfest was going on riiight next door on the Congress Avenue bridge, with one of the two stages conveniently adjacent to our room. Heh... Barbara took a nap, despite the noise of one particular band, and I went downstairs to Friday's for a raspberry margarita, then out to do some more walking, catching some of the brilliant performance by Future Clouds and Radar on the south stage after I'd decided to pay the four bucks to enter Batfest. I followed the path under the bridge and read up a little on the hundreds of thousands of bats living underneath it, then walked along the Town Lake (actually the Colorado River) over to the S. 1st Street bridge and crossed back over. Barbara and I stopped in at the festival once she'd gotten up (I'd purchased a re-entry bracelet for a dollar, so I didn't have to pay again), and ended up having dinner at Friday's, where we could just make out the Mexican free-tailed bats from our seats; they (the bats, not our seats) started flying out for their own dinners around 8:45 PM or so.

Sunday morning found us at Fadó, an Irish pub (part of a small chain, apparently, but with an authentic feel nonetheless), for breakfast and football (Roma vs. Siena and Chelsea vs. Aston Villa) and... hurling! No, not the kind you experience from bad breakfast, the kind involving flat wooden clubs. Mmm, nothing like a corned beef hash over grown men injuring one another... Barbara and I went back to the Capitol and explored it at a more leisurely pace, then we stopped in at the 1886 Cafe & Bakery, part of the lovely Driskill Hotel, for a light snack. OK, breakfast at Fadó could've been improved with the addition of one or more of the several blondes in circulation amongst the staff at the 1886... We did go back to Fadó, for two rounds of Texas-brewed Shiner beer (good stuff!), watching Real Madrid trounce Villareal 5-0 before departing for the hotel as rain began to trickle down. The raindrops were big, Texas-sized, by the time we made it back. We relaxed for a while and headed back out, into a lighter rain, for dinner at Manuel's. Got to see the bats a little better this time, out behind the hotel, and we saw Anagen rockin' the crowd from the north stage as Batfest was preparing to wrap up.

The rest of our time in Austin was taken up by public access TV (including a rabid anti-Bush psycho and a slew of '80s music videos, which kept us up way too late), visiting both the Mexic-Arte Museum and the Austin Museum of Art (both of which were smaller than the museums we're accustomed to), dinners at Doña Emilia's (where I had a raspberry mojito and then a caipirinha - yum) and Rio Grande (the mahi mahi tacos were quite good), a jaunt through Wild About Music (a very cool music-themed art and gift gallery), riding the red Armadillo (no, really) to the University of Texas, and a return to 1886, this time for breakfast. We took a side trip to Lockhart for lunch at Black's Barbecue on Monday, Labor Day, and I devoured 3/4 of a pound of brisket, plus a sausage and some corn and jalapeño corn bread. Attempting to walk off the enormous meal, we took another side trip, this time to Bastrop State Park, where we started hiking one of the longer trails. The skies were getting darker, however, and thunderstorm threats were implied, so we turned back a third of the way in and were driving out of the park when the rain began. Whew! Back in Austin, after the downpour was done, we walked out on the now Batfest-free bridge, from which we could see lots of the mammals departing from, and returning to, their roost. Tuesday night saw us heading to the Parish Room for a no-cover show. Openers Kissinger were damned good, but it was the Jungle Rockers we were interested in checking out, especially since they were listed as an Austin-based band. Their set definitely kicked ass, but when we went over so I could buy their demo CD and we spoke with them briefly, we learned that they're originally from Cleveland.  lol  Oh, well. Cleveland rocks, too. Unfortunately, we missed out on Austin City Limits, which was last weekend...

I awoke on Wednesday feeling noticeably headachy and congested. D'oh! We stopped at CVS so I could pick up some pseudoephedrine and diphenhydramine, for which I needed to have my driver's license scanned. At least we're not at the point where I have an RFID chip inside me, giving that info out. We left Austin behind and made another stop in Lockhart, this time partaking of the barbecue at Black's rival, Kreuz Market, which proudly and sternly advises you, "No forks (they are at the end of your arm)." As the sign proclaims further down, "No kidding (see owner's face)." Of course, the brisket here is as tender as that at Black's, so it's easy enough to pull it apart with your plastic knife and then pick up the pieces with your fingers. Personally, I liked both the brisket and the sausage better at Black's... but I never would have said that out loud inside Kreuz Market.

Barbara and I checked in to the hotel in San Antonio and, despite a runnier nose than I'd have liked, I agreed that we should get and walk around a bit. I noted a distinctly more urban, and slightly run-down, character about the city than we'd seen in Austin. After checking out Market Square, we found a descent to the famed River Walk and began walking it, and while the views were very nice, there was little in the way of restaurants and bars, which was strange. When we came to the end of the line and started heading back on the opposite side of the San Antonio River, we eventually came to the bit that loops around and realized we'd initially headed in the wrong direction. Well, 'wrong' if you wanted the fun River Walk rather than the purely scenic one. Anyway, we stopped for drinks at Waxy's Irish Pub, and got some fries with ranch dressing, too.

I was feeling a bit better on Thursday morning, thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster. We had breakfast downstairs at the hotel both Thursday and Friday mornings; they had waffle irons with molds shaped like the state of Texas, so you could pour the batter and make your own waffles. Cute idea, though it wouldn't work very well with New Jersey's shape. Wyoming and Colorado should have state-shaped waffle irons, though.

We visited the Alamo and the Tower of the Americas and the Presidio de Bejar (the old Spanish governor's palace) on Thursday, lunching at the Bolivar Cafe in La Villita, and were greatly entertained over drinks at the Iron Cactus on the River Walk by an attractive young bartender who bitched to us about other customers who were taking forever to decide what they wanted. I knew what I wanted; more margaritas, please! Eventually, after some more walking, we had dinner and a bottle of wine at Pesca on the River.

Our plans of visiting SeaWorld were dashed, as it doesn't open on Fridays after Labor Day. D'oh! We went to New Braunfels instead, stopping in at Lone Star Music before having a hearty German lunch (and bier!) at Friesenhaus. After we'd both stated that we didn't really want to have any more Mexican food, Barbara and I lingered over some nachos and guacamole as a late-afternoon snack at La Margarita back in San Antone, and as much as we'd have liked some Indian cuisine, we ended up back at Waxy O'Connor's pub for dinner. We'd been planning on returning to Fadó Saturday morning for breakfast, as the pub was going to be celebrating its birthday, but the steep entry fee (to cover the satellite TV coverage of the Rugby World Cup) sent us next door to Halcyon for egg paninis instead, and there wasn't too much more to our Texas adventure after that...

Whoa. I've set myself an imposing task. I spent almost twenty-four hours (with breaks for sleeping and eating and stuff) between last Wednesday and Thursday organizing all my old photographs, in preparation for scanning them. All. All 2000+ of them.

I'd been planning on starting this Herculean feat quite a while back, and had previously organized the prints but had them fall into disarray after procrastination took its toll. This time, though, I'm serious. They're finally all in order, and beginning this week (tonight, in fact, now that I've gotten these tanjed Web updates done), I intend to spend an hour a day scanning, and editing, of course. The digital pics I've taken will of course be incorporated into the massive iPhoto library I'm going to compile as well, and eventually I'm going to put a lot more (a lot more) pictures up on the Web site.

I may not be the best-looking or most photogenic guy around, but in going through all those photos, I was struck by something: I used to hang out with a lot of attractive women! Which is not to say that I don't still spend time in the company of attractive women... Heh-heh. But wow, there are pictures where I'm surrounded by 'em. The more things change, the more things... change.  ;)

I'm also planning on spending an hour a day playing guitar, something I've said before, and even done before for a few weeks at least. I'd intended to try performing live at least once this year, but it's highly doubtful that that's going to happen now, nor do I really think I'm going to finish recording Tougher Than Flannel, my long-overdue follow-up to Joy in the New, by the end of the year. If I can stick to this regime, though, I can ensure accomplishing both before next summer. I've been putting in around an hour each day since Thursday, and I feel those calluses building up again. I started working out the music to "Loster," too, and maybe I can get that recorded this weekend.  :) Of course, between the hour for guitar and the hour for photo-scanning, I'm not going to have time for much of anything else after work!

Saturday morning, I was inspired to make waffles (Belgian waffles, to be precise) in my own waffle maker, something I'd not done in a long time. Damn, they were good. Got a few frozen against future breakfast needs, too. I need to start making real food again, more often than I've been lately, which is not very often at all.

How sad it is that governments are willing, even eager, to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to destroy the lives of others, while not showing so much monetary interest in trying to save or aid others. On the one hand, broad swathes of Africa are suffering from flooding right now, and on the other, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, which aims to combat growing aridity on that very continent as well as in other parts of the world, can't get commitments from its signatory nations. We can't give money to help either the flooded or the arid portions of Africa, but we can certainly buy more artillery and weaponry to kill people in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I don't understand why people were bitching over Apple's iPhone price drop. OK, maybe it was a bit sooner than we'd all expected, but surely no one was surprised that the price did in fact come down. The way I see it, you pay a premium (or a nerd tax, as Bill Maher put it) when you decide to be an 'early adopter.' I could have waited a few weeks or a few months before purchasing my iPhone, and the thought did occur to me, but in the end I wanted to get my hands on it right away, whether or not it turned out buggy, whether or not I could get a better model cheaper three months down the road. I knew what I was doing when I plunked down my $600, and I for one am pleased that Apple chose to refund us early adopters one hundred of those bucks. I signed up for my refund on Friday, though I'm not going to redeem it until Leopard comes out. Yeah, I'll probably snap that up the week it ships, though I don't know that I'll install it right away...

I found out accidentally last night that I can FTP in to the iPhone using Cyberduck, which makes a connection via Bonjour. Pretty cool... I'm thinking that I can use this to do a little more hacking, a little more easily, but I'll need to spend some time playing around with it first. When I have some.

You know it's going to be a great day when there are three helicopters hovering over your town, and a fourth one on its way. Somethin' must've happened on Route 3 this morning... Yesterday morning, I saw the chipmunk near the office as I was heading back from Dunkin' Donuts. Cute little critter...

Well, now that the hackers are really digging their fingers into Apple's pie and getting us more and more access to our iPhones, I decided to partake. AppTapp installed quickly and easily, as did the handful of other things I've installed (and uninstalled); not a single crash or hang during the process. I've got my custom ringtones back (nothin' like knowing you've got a work-related call coming in because the iPhone starts blaring "Bang the Drum"), and I've rearranged the icons on the SpringBoard, getting rid of Stocks, which I never looked at anyway. I'm going to try tinkering with the icons and backgrounds, too, but probably not until after Texas.

I played around with iPhoto and iWeb '08 last night and finally posted a few new pics to the Miscellaneous 44 page of the Gallery; I put up the pic of me playing the Danelectro with the "Police Line" strap on the Guitar Man page, too. I like the new look, and it's a little easier now for me to send a page from iPhoto to iWeb, then export it as HTML, then integrate that with my Web site. It'd be nice if I could customize a template in iWeb so the pages come out formatted for my site already, with all the appropriate JavaScript and CSS, but...

We learned yesterday that Hilly Kristal, the heart and soul of CBGB, died on Tuesday. I can't help feeling that the forced closing of the monumental club in lower Manhattan late last year was the killing blow, even if it took a few months. Requiescat in pace, Hilly.

Two more days 'til vacation! I am very much looking forward to being away from the office. Barbara and I are going to Austin and San Antonio for a week, then I'm taking a week off for myself. I may make a day trip or two, but mostly I need to a) relax, and b) get some of my own work done. I need to record. I need to scan my prints, or at least start, so that I can fully utilize iPhoto. I need to rip music from some of my LPs. I need... more time.

Managed to get Slackware Linux installed and running on Hallie, the ancient Hitachi laptop, last week. It's a little slow, but it works, and what can you expect from a 133 MHz Pentium processor?

Ubuntu is chugging away nicely on the PowerBook (and the iBook, and the Dell PowerEdge), of course. In fact, I've taken to booting the PowerBook into Linux at work and then running Mac-on-Linux (see the penguin hugging the apple?), so including Windows XP Professional on the Dell desktop, lately I've been running three OSes at the office. We're doing some testing of backups through Linux...

Maybe if our clients have better, more regular backups of their data, I'll be looking at their data less. I've been looking at lots of data lately, to the point where it's cutting into my sleep time. In fact, once I'm done posting this, I've got more Medisoft data to examine. D'oh!

Speaking of lots of data, what's up with AT&T's wireless bill? The first bill I received after getting the iPhone was still under the Cingular name, but I just received my second bill, and everything's being done as AT&T now. Strangely, as others have pointed out, they seem to think we need a line item for every time we use the Internet from the iPhone, even though unlimited Internet access is included in any iPhone plan. My wireless bill does not need to be 63 pages long! Frak.

No "Battlestar Galactica" yet, but I sat down to "Doctor Who" and the pilot of "Flash Gordon" on Sci Fi Friday night. Is it just me, or is Martha slowly turning into another Rose? I'd hoped that her relationship with the Doctor would be more like that of his companions of old, and she's certainly smarter than Rose was, but it seems that they're building up romantic elements again... So far, I like "Flash." It's retained some of the cheesy camp of the 1980 movie, and it doesn't seem to be taking itself too seriously, which would be a mistake. Princess Aura's a good reason to watch, too.  ;)

I think I saw about three Perseids this weekend. Last night's skies weren't really the best for it, and Saturday night I just wasn't up to it. Still, better than nothing. I haven't done any real stargazing in a long time. Of course, southern Bergen County is not one of the better places for it.

As I was walking to the train station yesterday morning, two guys on a roof asked me how to get to the New Jersey Turnpike. I explained to them how to get on Ridge Road to Route 3 eastbound to the Turnpike, and they began explaining how some guy (the guy they were working for/with, presumably) had passed out, which was really more than I wanted or needed to know. On the train, I found myself not wanting to know about the "American Idol" aspirations of two teenyboppers, either.

I cleaned up my MacMAME ROMs on the bus, and entertained myself with some "Donkey Kong" and "Omega Race" and "Gyruss." Ah, the classics... Say what you will about WoW, but I'll take a good game of "Centipede" any day.

I finally changed the guitar strings on Nena last night, which was long overdue. I don't know how other guitarists remember the string sequence (E-B-G-D-A-E) of a standard tuning, but my personal acronym is 'Every Bad Girl Does Andy Excellently.' Hey, it's helped me remember for twenty years...