Category: Entertainment

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I have to confess: I’ve started seriously thinking about a netbook.

Not that I actually need a netbook. I’d only really end up using it for conventions that I’d want to post live (which would probably boil down to Comic-Con International), and I have the ability to do that using either my G1 or the laptop.

Long-time readers (all five of you 🙂 ) may remember that last year I agonized over upgrading my phone to something with real web capability until they announced wifi, and I just lugged the laptop around. Which worked fine, but it was heavy, especially the day I was also carrying around Comic Book Tattoo.

Of course, now I can use the G1 to post to my blog, or Twitter, or Facebook, or (almost) anywhere else even without wifi.

Except…

  • Typing on that tiny keyboard is slow. Not as slow as the onscreen keyboard, but still a lot slower than typing on a full-sized keyboard. Then again, netbook keyboards are also smaller than standard, so it might not be much of an improvement.
  • There’s no easy way to transfer photos from another camera. I can only think of two ways other than using a computer as an intermediary: use a Micro-SD card with adapter in the camera, or get a card reader that will clone data from an SD to a Micro-SD.

The camera issue shouldn’t bother me. Chances are I’d just end up doing what I did for WonderCon this year: post the occasional phone pic to Twitter and then upload the good photos to Flickr each evening. Just like I’d mostly be writing brief posts from the convention and detailed posts at the hotel.

Not my book, but the same page that she signed in mine.But then I remember the post I made on the Tori Amos signing last year. After the signing I was so hyped that I found a table, set up the laptop, banged out a blog post, hooked up the camera and added a couple of photos…and the post ended up getting linked on a major Tori fansite, producing a traffic spike so big that not only is the following day still this blog’s busiest day ever, but that post, even though traffic fell off over time, is the 8th most-viewed post on the site over the past year.

Still, the promise of another 15 minutes of blogfame isn’t enough to justify several hundred bucks. (Though the < $200 models that pop up on Woot from time to time have been tempting.) So I’m making an effort to practice typing with the G1, both the physical and on-screen keyboards. I’ve got Twidroid and I Tweet for posting to two Twitter accounts. I’ve got wpToGo to simplify blogging. I’ve got a plugin that will automatically liveblog using Twitter, which I still need to test.

It’s just a matter of making full use of the tools I have, rather than running after the latest cool toy.

Update: I posted this last night, but somehow it ended up backdated to the day I started it on May 20. I think wpToGo must have set a publishing date when I posted the draft. Yes, I started this post on my phone.

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One day, someone will take a collection of popular songs from the 1990s and turn it into a nostalgia musical.

Update July 2016: I was wondering if this had happened yet. I suppose you could count “American Idiot,” but apparently the album was intended to tell a story, so it’s not quite the same as someone stringing together the hits of ABBA or whoever.

It turns out someone put together a Spice Girls–inspired musical in 2012. It was not well-reviewed and didn’t last very long.

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We’ve been following singer/songwriter Butterfly Boucher since 2004 — in fact, since the first day we tuned in to the now-defunct Indie 103.1 and heard “Another White Dash” for the first time. We caught her opening for Barenaked Ladies a few months later and picked up her album, then caught her again opening for Sarah McLachlan later that year. Her second album, “Scary Fragile”, finally came out on Tuesday (it’s very good — Katie says it may be the best sophomore album she’s ever heard), and she’s doing a concert tour. She’s playing in Los Angeles most of this month, but timing worked out better for us to go see her in San Diego on Saturday. So we bought some tickets and made a weekend trip out of it.

Historic San Diego

Old Town San Diego Wagon.We drove down after lunch on Saturday and hit Old Town San Diego on the way in. (More Highlander Grog!) I could swear I don’t remember having trouble finding it before, but the last few times it’s been hard to get to even following a map. At least we managed better than we did in December, when we ended up several miles inland before we could find a place to cross the inlet.

I don’t remember much going on the last time we were there, but this time Old Town was in full-on living history mode, complete with tour guides dressed up in 1800s outfits and a horse-and-buggy ride.

Fancy lobby. Once it was a bank, now it's a hotel.I’d booked the Courtyard San Diego Downtown because it’s literally next door to the House of Blues. It took a while to negotiate the one-way streets, but once we arrived, we stepped inside and were blown away by the lobby. It turns out that the hotel used to be the building for the San Diego Trust & Savings bank. After the bank closed in the 1990s, Marriott bought it and converted it to a hotel. The vault, safe deposit rooms, and other rooms on the first floor became a conference center, and the offices on the upper floors became guest rooms. They’ve preserved as much of the old look of the place as possible, down to keeping the mail slots on the former office doors. (Don’t worry, they’re blocked.)

Clouds and TowersWe ate dinner at Chopahn (6th Ave. near F St.), an Afghan restaurant we first visited during last year’s Comic-Con. It was empty when we got there, which I hope was just because we were there on the early side, because the food is great. Another couple arrived while we were eating, but they were the only people we saw other than the waitress. She had started pushing tables together as if they were expecting a larger party later on.

After dinner we wandered the Gaslamp district for a while. I kept making notes of where various hotels or restaurants were located. Eventually I realized I was basically scouting for Comic-Con next month.

Around 7:00 we made our way to the House of Blues.

Concert

That’s when we discovered that we’d been under a misapprehension about the nature of the venue. Continue reading →

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The original Star Trek TV series was famously pitched to the network as “Wagon Train to the stars” (Wagon Train being a then-well-known Western). Star Trek: The Next Generation was in the same mold, with Deep Space Nine described as Gunsmoke (in space!). Babylon 5, while not a Trek series, appeared around the same time and was described as Casablanca (in space). “Sooner or later, everyone comes to Babylon 5.”

So it was kind of odd tonight to watch an episode of DS9 that basically was Casablanca in space.

In “Profit and Loss”, the owner of a local bar encounters the love of his life who disappeared years ago. But she’s here with the leader(s) of a foreign nation’s underground resistance against a powerful military regime — and that regime wants to capture her companion(s). There’s also the matter of obtaining an object so that they can leave safely. She could stay here with the bar owner, but in the end has to leave. Meanwhile, there are shifting alliances as the bar owner has to deal with the local chief of police and other citizens with their own agendas.

According to the writeup at Memory Alpha, the episode was originally going to be more like Casablanca, even titled “Here’s Lookin’ at You…,” but they had to change it due to legal pressure.

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Okay, I remember the days of Heidi’s Frōgen Yōzurt (the company that, as far as I could tell, touched off the frozen yogurt craze in the 1980s and then was forced out of its own market by competition), and I’ve studied German, so I know that this name is supposed to be pronounced roughly the same as yogurt…

Jöghurt

But seriously, I can’t help but read it as “Jog Hurt.” (Sounds like someone needs more exercise…)

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