I can plug into the Internet from many places in my condo now, but I’ve realized what I really need is not wireless access or a computer in every room, but a lightweight dumb terminal that has wireless access to my main computer. It would be like a laptop with a killer flat panel and decent sized keyboard, but it wouldn’t need to do much besides communicate keystrokes and screen updates with my main system. Of course in order to do that, it probably needs just as much of a brain as a full computer. But the idea is that my actual computer stays protected and wired onto the Internet while I can travel around my place, heck maybe anywhere, with this interface device. This idea may not seem practical when you could just have a laptop as your main system, but the idea of keeping my “mainframe” secured is nice. Maybe one day we’ll all have our real systems in data centers and be back to the dumb terminal idea, except this time they’ll be good to go.

Is Socks the cat still at the White House? Will he move to the posh Westchester County digs or hang out until Hillary finds D.C. lodgings? Or, perhaps, he’ll join Chelsea wherever she ends up after graduation.

A while ago, I linked to the Mosquito Magnet which uses carbon dioxide to lure mosquitos. I just found this indoor bug collector from Sharper Image which attracts mosquitos and other flying insects with a blue light. Blue light? It’s hard to believe that would be more appealing to a mosquito than a yummy blood-filled me.

I never understood the “Shipoopi” song in the musical “The Music Man”. Apparently, I’m not supposed to. In fact, this writer has decided to use the word as her term for a “painfully superfluous musical number”. She also names a few cliche gems from “”Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary”, such as “Fruit Cart!” which you’ve probably seen in many movie chase scenes. It’s similar to “pane of glass being carried across the street” for car chase scenes.

Via Steve, ‘Stop the presses!’ and, uh, the ‘servers’ too, which chronicles the Houston Chronicle’s “real, live-action ‘stop the presses’ order” at 3:30 a.m. This takes me back to “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” Do any newspapers still print “Extra” editions?

Aimee Mann has a special message on her web site explaining how a song compilation bearing her name and her quotes is being put out without her permission and without her cooperation, which she did offer when she heard about it. “Aimee Mann–the Ultimate Collection” is, in her opinion, an inferior product, and it was not authorized by her.

The close Presidential election and the importance of just a few votes in Florida reminds me of the recent Olympics where races were won in split second timings. Granted those races were a lot shorter than this drawn out ballot counting. If they had known how close it would have been in so many states, would Gore and Bush have done the election equivalent of shaving their hair and wearing skin-tight hooded suits to squeeze out every last vote? Bush took last Sunday off while Gore kept going. What extra word spoken, hand shaken, baby kissed, issue emphasized would make enough of a difference?

It struck me the other day that Macy Gray and Carol Channing have a similar, dare I say, quality to their singing voices. It’s a raspy, scratchy thing. It’s not the same voice by any means, but you gotta wonder how they both made it with those rusty pipes. It’s a “you gotta have heart” thing, I suspect.

When I first moved to California and got a new driver’s license, I noticed that the Dept. of Motor Vehicles supplies a lot of their literature, including the Driver’s Handbook, in Chinese (and other languages). I thought of this again yesterday when I noticed someone with voter information and ballots in Chinese. I had mentioned the DMV literature to my mom, who obtained her license in Connecticut in the ’60s without the benefit of translation. I expected her to be delighted that California was so progressive and helpful, or at least perhaps wistful that here she could have used material in her own language. But her response was “I don’t think I would have learned English as well if I could have read things in Chinese.” Still, I’m sure we are both glad that California does take care of its mosaic population. Perhaps if I had grown up here I would’ve retained more of my Chinese.

I had to suppress a lot of laughter in the grocery store today. Two shelf stockers were unpacking bags of cat food and meowing repeatedly at each other. It was a precious sight.