ok, here’s my idea for a product that will surely make me millions: personal heat sinks. the ultimate warm weather accessory. functionality is identical to heatsinks used in computers but applied to people. you just get some chunks of aluminum that are flat on one side with various fins sticking out on the other and sew them into garments so that the flat sides are pressed against skin with as much contact as possible. this maximizes surface area, allowing for as much heat as possible to be transferred away from the body.

venture capital, anyone?

heather and i were chatting the other night and she kept asking me what i was looking for, what i wanted. i couldn’t really come up with a satisfactory answer at the time. the question’s been rolling around in my head for the last few days this is the best answer i can come up with for now.

joey ramone died the other day. i am sad.

this is so hypnotic.

so I just finished up at the old high school — they had me come back and talk to kids about what it’s like to be getting an advanced degree in the sciences, which I guess is what I’m supposed to be doing.

gave a speech to the entire high school, and visited some classes. what I didn’t know until today was that they were paying me a small lump reward for my “troubles”. uh, BSing about science and getting paid for it. sure.

bottom line — they covered the plane tix too, so all in all it was a nice chance for me to come home for free and drink a yard of beer at the owl bar with some old friends.

i’m pretty sure there are better ways to fight acne than setting your face on fire.

i went to a lecture on Nikola Tesla given by John M. Cohn from IBM today. i’ve been mildly obsessed with Tesla since early highschool when i read Man Out of Time so i didn’t really learn anything new about him but i enjoyed it anyway. at the end of the talk we got to play with a big tesla coil though. enormous high voltage arcs. wirelessly powering flourescent lights from a few meters away. vaporizing the aluminum in CDs leaving the plastic around it intact. too cool.

i just wasted the last two hours trying to do my taxes online. i gave up eventually because the site was so frigging slow and poorly done. i’m on a fast connection but i had to wait a good 2 minutes for each page to download. and it just went on and on. i don’t have any stocks or bonds or other weird crap going on; i have one job; i’m single; no dependents; no weird deductions. it ought to take no time at all to do my taxes. but i had to go through answering one question at a time (almost always answering ‘no’ because i didn’t fit into some bizarre category (no, i’m not a nun, i don’t generate my own electricity using an alternative power source, and no, i’m not an independant llama farmer)) waiting 2 minutes each time for the next stupid question to come up so i could say no to it too.

what i’d like to see is ‘taxes for average people.’ it would have a form where you enter your name, check if you’re single or married, and enter your credit card. then the next page is a form that mirrors a standard W-2 that you just fill in the boxes with the info from your regular W-2. at this point, you can either let it calculate stuff and be done with it, or go on and answer other questions if you do happen to have a more complicated situation.

and just when i was getting really despondant and fed up with the whole thing i learned that even suicide wouldn’t get me out of doing my taxes. damn. there goes that idea.

this is great. steve albini offers his insider reviews and commentary on records that he produced. vicious.

alaska’s a cool state.