I grabbed this ad from a red line train:

I would LOVE to have a wallet that reduces my wallet size by 200%. Think of all the crap you could walk around with. Does it reduce the mass as well as the volume? Would I have a wallet that's much bigger on the inside than on the outside, but weighs like 4 tons, or is it more of a portal to a multi-dimensional space that you can just put things in? Like a TARDIS? Two Daleks can tow the TARDIS, even with all of the stuff it has inside, so is this like that? Can I put like a TV in there?

I think Cambridge, being home to the best engineers in the world, is probably a likely place for such a transdimensional breakthrough to make it to market.

I've just been playing with Google Chrome from the Dev Channel site. After 5 minutes, I've got some things I hate.

• Title Tabs Done Wrong:
  I like the idea of integrating the tabs into the title bar, however they don't go far enough. If you just reach up there and click-and-drag, chances are you'll grab a tab, and detach it or move it in the tab order.

  When Apple lifted this same trick in the Safari 4.0 betas, it was great because if you just grabbed any tab, it acted as the title bar would and moved the window, if you clicked and held, then started dragging, it would drag/detach that tab. That's how this should work.

  I like the fact that there's very little, well, chrome in Chrome. I like minimal layouts that give me maximum space for what I'm looking at and don't interfere. Chrome could probably drop 20 pixels by pushing the tabs to the top of the window and making them behave properly.




• Tabs open behind current tab:
  This makes me nuts. When you click a link in the current tab, the new tab opens behind the current one, and not all the way to the right like I expect. Here's a use case that shows how worthless this is. If I'm on Fark, and Fark is on tab 4 of 8, and I click 3 links and 3 comment section links, they're now jumbled in as tabs 5-10, rather than 9-15. They're not where I expect them, they're where I have to hunt for them. This cannot currently be changed by the user.




• No on-the-fly Search Selection
  I like Flock because, among other things, you can drop down the search box and choose an engine on the fly. By default Chrome will let you change your default engine between Google (go figure), Yahoo and Bing!. But there is no search box in the browser. What they mean by "default engine" is "what engine is used when you type text into an empty tab URL box, or highlight and right-click text in a page". That's pretty cool, but I'd love the ability to change that engine based on the context of the search rather than through Preferences. A good case is typing in "Big Trouble in Little China", dropping down the menu to IMDB and pulling up the IMDB page. The way to do that at present is to type "Big Trouble in Little China" into the URL box, right click the URL area, click Edit Search Engines, and tell it to make IMDB the default (after setting up the IMDB search engine yourself). Then you'll have to change your default back to Google later.




• Mid Click Auto-Scrolling:
  There is none. One of my main gripes in Safari is the lack of auto-scroll. For anyone not paying attention, the idea is you click the middle mouse button, and then move the mouse up/down left/right to scroll around, no need to slavishly ZING a scroll-wheel/ball around to go up/down the page, or dive to the edge of the window and try to grab the scroll bar. Civilized, brainless, and easy on the tendons.




• Chrome is low on Chrome:
  This is a "LIKE", I'm really happy with how sparse it is. The nav-bar + tab bar + window chrome is much smaller than Firefox, and even smaller than Safari. That gives more room to me and gives me a window that is small and tight, not annoying like FF. I also like the solution to the Status Bar, which is the bar at the bottom of Firefox or Safari where it shows you the destination of a link you're hovering, or how many items of a page have loaded.

  Chrome doesn't have a status bar, but instead they have a status "ribbon", let's say, that appears to cover part of the lower left of the window when you hover something or the browser has something to say, like that.

I'm sure there will be more, I'm not sure if it will be more positive or more negative. I suspect this will be another browser I use occasionally to see if it fixes the things I gripe about, and then put back in the drawer and go back to FF or Flock until it gets better, MOAR, or whatever.

My bathroom is being remodeled and is now completely gutted. Before this project, I proposed a change of venue to the brand new Hampton Inn like 7 miles away, but I was vetoed. I am to "suck it up" and use the serial killer Buffalo Bill bathroom in the basement of our house.

Here is that bathroom, and the journey to it. It took a good deal of self control to do this in the dark. Walking the length of the house in an unlit basement with only the timer light dealy on my camera...I fully expected to see a hand coming at me when the flash fired.

Take a tour with me:

Pictures

This is the DUMBEST argument against "public option" healthcare I've ever heard, and I've been hearing it more and more, even in such Lieburul Hotspots as NPR:

"CNSNews.com
With 50 Million New Patients Possible, Nation Needs More Primary Care Doctors"

On the one hand, these mouthbreathing fucking cretins challenge us to show them "a SINGLE American who ever went bankrupt because of medical bills", well, that was easily disproved, hell, I personally know a couple of people who came close to losing it all. People are denied care all. the. time, and many who get treatment are denied payment for the care they receive.

Now they're saying that since there are 50MM uninsured, if we suddenly insure these people it will be disastrous for the country because we'll run out of doctors. Right now, if these people get sick with an acute illness, they can go to an emergency room at their local "hospital of last resort". They must be treated for serious illnesses, then the hospitals chalk it up as "money someone should pay us sometime". The money that gets paid is generally in the form of the taxpayers paying the hospital. That system works great for "gunshot wound", but does not work for "colon cancer" or "congratulations, you've got diabetes". What it does do is encourage people to use ERs as PCPs. This stretches ERs limits.

What they're really saying is "These people are too poor/stupid to have medical insurance, therefore they don't deserve medical treatment, and should die". That is not "oversimplified" or "out of context". What they're saying is, "If you can't afford or are denied medical insurance on the basis of 'pre-existing conditions', you should not see a doctor, and you may die". After all, the claim is that if these unwashed masses suddenly had insurance, the healthcare system as we know it would collapse, because suddenly poor people and sick people can visit doctors for free.

Assholes. Staying alive is not a privilege. Where's your "right to life" now? What about the right-to-life of the worker who loses his job and can't afford COBRA, or COBRA runs out before he gets a new job? What's that? Fuck him? Ok, thought so, thanks for clearing that up.

[music | Leonard Cohen - Don't Go Home With Your Hardon]

Yep, Alice in Chains (!) at the Paradise (!!)

I can't believe how incredibly lucky we were with this show! I'll get to the show, the luck actually started earlier. We rolled down Comm. Ave around 6:10 or so, and apparently, seems like this was move-in weekend at BU, at least, there was lots of "moving in" looking activity. AND there was a show at the Agganis Arena as well. Luckily they opened up the lot to general parking for the low low price of $25 (generally street parking is pretty easy to find, but with this triple hit, it wasn't to be).

So we slid into Brown Sugar for some of the fastest Thai food ever. Love that place, needs to be hotter :-)

We ended up making it in line just before doors, but wow was it a line. We didn't get in until 7:30, and by that time I thought I was fucked, with no good photo spots left available. Getting inside, that looked like the case, until we went all the way stage-left where there were some road cases and not much else. They had taken over the whole area at stage right for mixing desk and guitar tech stuff, so you couldn't reach the balcony from there, it was a bit of an odd setup. This is when I noticed there was also a barrier 3' out from the stage, which was unexpected. Maybe this was the better spot after all? I remembered from the Lupo's show a few years ago that Jerry was at stage-left for that one, so that's why I wanted to angle that way to begin with.

Turned out I was in the absolute perfect spot to shoot from tonight. The sound was fantastic, the crowd was perfect. Way better than most any Boston audience you get I guess. I've never lived anywhere else, but from what I understand, artists roll through Boston and the audiences are all too jaded and hanging around and not seeming into shows. Not tonight, not even a little. Everyone sang every word to every song, it was great.

At one point, Jerry Cantrell tried to hand a pick to someone and took a mean header off the stage into the 3' gated security area dealy. Got back up, miraculously, found a mike, and just said "Bitch cursed us this morning" (it might have been Duvall that said this, I don't think so). Evidently Mistress Carrie (Mistress Yoko?) jinxed the band by asking them if they'd fallen off stage in an interview this morning, they said it hadn't happened in some time, now BAM. Har.

I have to say I enjoyed this even more than the Lupo's show, if that's even possible, probably just due to my proximity. I got more energy from the band, and crowd, than I have in a long time.

Toward the end, the road cases I was camped out on became stage runway, so suddenly I was gathering up my stuff and joining the staff in holding the cases tight for Jerry and William so no one else took a spill. They were incredibly interactive with the audience and it was great to see how happy a band can look when they seem to be really having fun.

Here's the setlist as it was handed to me, looks totally accurate:

Rain When I Die
Again
Check My Brain
Them Bones
Dam That River
A Looking In View
We Die Young
Nutshell
Down in a Hole
God Am
Acid Bubble
Angry Chair
Man in the Box
Would?

Encores:
Sludge Factory
No Excuses
Rooster

And here's some of my favorites out of the dozens and dozens of pictures I got. Many more at Flickr, many more than that on my machine. Clicky Biggy:

PICTURES!