A few years ago I saw a great illustration in Scientific American magazine. The illustration was an artists sketch of what the body would look like to scale if you factored not the size of the body but the size per sense neuron for touch. The resulting person was a strange monster with a giant phallus, a huge tongue that wouldn't fit in their mouth, big hands with big fingertips, and a large nose. The limbs on the body were foreshortened as was the torso.

I have never been able to completely accept every part of my body as being me. I think of my head as me and I am generally very attached to body parts like my hands. When it comes to my feet they may as well be a pair of shoes attached to the bottom of my legs. I have always had trouble with my feet. The first problem is that they are so far away from my head. The mere distance make them seem like they shouldn't be a part of me, but they are attached to my legs and thus far have been to every country where my head has been. The big problem with the distance is that they are hard to touch with my head but even if I use something more dexterous like my hands they are still pretty far away.

Because they appear to be a possession rather than a major part of me, and because they are the closest thing to the ground, my feet take more abuse than other parts of me. I step on sharp objects with them, I kick suitcases that I forgot to put on the floor, I drop things like bowling balls on them, and every day I walk all over them. While this abuse is not particularly cruel I am sure that they could justify getting a divorce. Instead they have decided to form a mutiny starting with my toes.

My left foot has a bunion on it. Because of this the toes are slowly bending to the left so that they don't fit well into my shoes. The toenail on my left toe has also decided to bury itself into the skin to form what may be an ingrown toenail. This toenail causes me extreme pain when I bump that foot into things like furniture in the middle of the night or kick soccer balls. As if this weren't bad enough my feet no longer react well to exercise. When they exercise they get sweaty and after that they are very itchy. I was told that it was a minor staphlococcus infection and that all I need to do is put Gold Bond Powder onto them whenever they get sweaty.

I am trying to stay on top of all these problems with my feet but they always seem to have me on my heels with one new problem once I think I have the last one under control. Maybe I am putting my foot in my mouth by saying this but I just hate my feet. With a little therapy we might be able to take things one step at a time and improve our relationship but for now they are always keeping me on my toes.

I began today with yet another time zone flub. I had my venture mentoring meeting scheduled for 2:30 in the afternoon in my calendar but when I looked at the invitation to the meeting I saw that the meeting was really at 10:30. This would have been no problem were it not 10:00 AM at the time and if I had a car handy. But my car was not handy as Sarah was using it while hers is in the shop. This still would not have been a problem had it not been raining the remnants of hurricane Helen, Xavier, or Zachary. So I biked to MIT today in the rain wearing my goretex rain gear top. This did nothing for my khaki pants or shoes.

Arriving at the venture mentoring meeting my pants were sticking to my legs and covered with whatever grit came from the mud and puddles to shoot up into my pants. Luckily we were sitting at a table so I could keep my wet pant legs from showing too obviously. I was listening in to the conversations around me and one in particular caught my interest. The person sitting across from me was talking about how he had bought an assault rifle last week because the assault rifle ban had been finally lifted. He had bought something like a Bushman 5000 Megasport killer special.

Normally I would naturally be an opponent of guns but he seemed to be both doing a good job explaining how he has a target range in his backyard and that it is useful to lower property values in his neighborhood and can continue to buy more land. He also could protect his town in the event that there is a hostile takeover from insurgents. Since he had good reasons for owning an assault rifle I changed my mind on the topic of the ban. People should be able to buy really powerful military grade weapons for home use provided they have a good reason to purchase. Jeremy wanted to buy an assault rifle simply because he can but given the price tag of $1,100 it is a little out of his league for a gun that could be used to lower the population density in Quincy market. I actually am torn on the subject because I have noticed that there are sane people who purchase these guns with no more malace than the other guns that they purchase. So the philosophy that people kill people and guns just makes it easier basically leads me to the conclusion that unless we can forget how to make guns altogether we aren't likely to be able to stop people from killing each other with them by modifying the grades of guns that are easy to purchase from a store near you.

With the Venture Mentoring meeting behind me I had to move on to another few pieces of important pending activities. The first of these was to install a PHP script with Robert for "The Swedish Nurse Foundation". The foundation is a non-profit that is having an event on Halloween to outfit as many women as possible in Swedish nurse (sexy nurse) costumes as possible and then to take all of them on a pub crawl with the sponsors who donated money to purchase their costumes. My job for the day was to install the PHP script that would be the back-bone of the auction site. PHP installations always boil down to the same basic set of instructions but I do tend to screw them up.

First - Find a cool FREE php tool that does what you need - like auctions or chat
Next - Unpack the software at the host site.
Next - Struggle to find the installation help files
Next - Look around for a bunch of passwords including the MySQL password
Next - Set-up a MySQL database by running a sql script
Next - Find the friggin configuration file (that they don't tell you about properly in the installation help files) that has the pointers to the database.
Next - Run the scripts changing little items in the configuration file until they stop showing errors like "Could not connect to MySQL localhost".
Next - Realize that the script is pretty crappy and might not be worth all the trouble.
Next - Drink something alcoholic


I went to my improv class after the installation and did a fun scene where I got to tell a story along with two other players each from a different perspective. It basically consisted of a beauty queen being attacked on a float during a parade by a group of anti-beauty contest protesters dressed in monkey suits. I got to play the dumb cop who was "outnumbered" by the monkeys while the other two people played a protester and the beauty queen. Another group did a great story about a hot dog vendor dressed in a hot dog suit who couldn't see out the flap of the hot dog and ruined the world series game 7 for an intense Red Sox fan.



Women

I did finally get the drink at Bukowski's in Inman Square. Most of the improv Boston class goes there after our class. For the first time in a long while I was at Bukowskis and had been reading a Bukowski book the night before. Jeremy has added "Women" to our library as a part of the move off of his boat. He thinks he has reached a Bukowski like status but getting lots of women to come over to the apartment to sleep with him but I think he hasn't because he doesn't have an alcohol problem, boils, or a strong reputation as a beat poet. "Women" is a very readable book. It fits into the big pile of books and films about the seedy undercurrent of people who exist in the world but you don't think about from day to day. The amazing thing about him is that from the accounts that he gives of the world around him there seems to be no reason why he would be literate enough to be able to record the accounts. He is supposedly a drunken leacherous deviant man that never can get anything right. It is a work of fiction but how much fiction could this "Chinowski" character really be?

The last observation of the day came as the evening was winding down and the Red Sox had scored two runs in the bottom of the 11th to beat the Devil Rays. One of the people in my improv class has the problem that his job is at risk because his CEO and him share a similar affiliation. Because someone passed this information throughout the company it seemed that he was the one who communicated it and it could be bad when the board of directors hears that both he and the CEO frequent the same dungeon. I hadn't realized that there were dungeons in Boston but I guess they are everywhere.

I also guess that we all live on the fringe of many worlds. We can breakfast with millionair entrepreneurs that shoot 800 rounds per second for fun, dine with former sailors who aspire to become drunken philanderers, and share drinks with folks who like to be whipped and beaten, and we can still take a moment to pretend to be a police officer fending off protesters dressed in monkey suits or a giant hot dog.

Most of the time when someone thinks they saw me on television they really saw a doppleganger. In this case Alex is correct. An image of me was stored on his Tivo from a technology television show. Match.com had offered my video clip as an example of how to make a bad first impression using a desktop camera. As the woman in the video states "Is that a double chin or a turtleneck" the video then focuses on me and tells the viewing audience that it is "Hard to make a good first impression". I had made this little match.com video because it looked like something silly to do with my camera and given that I wasn't expecting anyone to find me on Match.com I didn't need to go through a full production cycle of video editing with the Canon XL1. But I was caught on tape with a little herky-jerky movement. The background clearly is identifiable as the bedframe and window in the room behind me.

See the video

I learned at lunch from the Indian workers here at ChannelWave that the difference in cost for a haircut in India vs. the US is remarkable. A haircut in India costs about 50 cents USD while here it costs about $10.95. This is a factor of about 20X. I have been reading articles about telemedicine lately about how doctors are now starting to do surgery through remote control. So why not get your hair done by remote control. On one side of the connection would be a hairdresser in India charging 50 cents USD for the haircut and on the other side would be a robotic arm that would operate scissors, clippers, and powder your neck. This could also work for make-up or for expert haircare. Why not get the best hairdresser in the world to do your hair tonight. Move over flobee... We are going to do our hair via remote control!

Just when I thought I was the smartest person on the planet I learned a new word today. Dave Kilimnik sent me this email from Los Angeles --

"i just sent you an SMS that I saw his doppelganger in L.A....it was creepy...
i asked the guy is his name was Ben, and I didn't believe him when he said "No.:"

My first thought was that a doppelganger was some type of skyscraper. Given that it sounds like a zeppelin or a hanglider I then moved on to believe that it might be something to do with sky writing although I was pretty sure it had something to do with a blimp because it sounded german. I also considered that it might be the image that appears next to an article in a newspaper. Since I couldn't figure it out on my own I had to look it up on dictionary.com. Below is the official definition.

dop·pel·gäng·er or dop·pel·gang·er ( P ) Pronunciation Key (dpl-gngr, -gng-)n.
A ghostly double of a living person, especially one that haunts its fleshly counterpart.

I am still wondering what happened to my doppelganger or if a video recently found of me really is me. Alex Lui had sent me this message about a week ago.

"Hi,
I was watching "Fresh Gear" (G4TechTV channel) on my Tivo today, and suddently I saw you (I am pretty much sure it is you since I rewinded couple times and my wife confirmed it as well)!!! You were talking something in a web cam (I think the web site is "match.com"). I will try to see if I can capture that show using my TV tuner card and send to you."

Maybe it was me. Maybe it wasn't. Someone also told me that they had seen an doppleganger of me on the cover of a book about active server pages. There must be plenty of people who look like everyone else. There should be a web site called doppleganger.com where you can submit your picture and find people who look like you who are also looking for body or facial doubles. People could be drawn into the site with a free offer to test how well they match looking like famous people. For example - everyone always tells Robert that he looks like George Clooney. It could even find famous people that you look like.

Well - that about does it for me on this subject or maybe it's someone who looks a lot like me writing this.

Lynne was asking me today to let her know the next time I go on an adventure like the trip to the Grand Canyon. I let her know that lots of cool trips are going on all the time and anyone can go and recommended potentially going on an existing trip with a friend or someone she met online. Later this morning I got my REI rebate email (below) which was very exciting since I immediately started drooling over watches with embedded GPS.

"Dear DANIEL, Just a reminder: Our records show that as of September 20, 2004 your remaining dividend under Co-op number XXXXXXX is: $24.97. Don't miss out on this great perk of your REI membership. Use your dividend on new fall gear and clothing and then point your compass towards adventure!"

I never know what time it is when I am hiking and if the GPS really worked it could be quite useful. Unfortunately in my experience GPS almost never works. It did work once to get Sarah and me off of Monadnock in the rain and got Jeremy and me back to Boston from St. Maarten on the sailboat and one time helped us to find a gas station in a blizzard when we are running low on gas. Otherwise it has been a disappointment because it doesn't see through things like trees.

Anyways the thing that excited me was the great effort REI has put into creating some very cool adventures. I am not sure that I would go on one of the packaged adventures because I can normally undercut them on cost by going direct to the providers, but they have a great list of outdoor adventures that need to be done once in a lifetime.

All I need is another $2,150 from my dividend account and I can go to adventure week in Belize.

Electricity has been moving us along for a good century now and we still haven't worked all the bugs out of using it yet. On friday an MIT professor made an announcement that he could create electrical power from spinach. The amount of power created by the spinach was miniscule but it could be advanced and scaled up to a meaningful supply with more research. He said it was like making a penny. Millions of them are useful, but alone they just fill small jars in your house.

This gives me some hope that I won't be feeling powerless so often in the future. As a hopeless gadget freak I have found that gadgets all run out of power at inconvenient times. Furthermore some gadgets are more graceful when they run out of power than others. For example, my hp5540 pda runs out of power and then refuses to turn on. Somehow it can be revived through a poorly understood process where I plug it in for a week. It then forgets important things like the fact that I spent an hour loading gps software on it a week before and requires a complete new set-up. This would be worth it if I actually used the gps all the time.

Last week when Robert and I went out to edit our movie in his new apple G4 laptop at the bar he had forgotten the cable and the power was insufficient to work. I am lucky that I have drowned two cannon powershot cameras. Despite a great size weight and picture quality they run out of batteries after you take the crummy pictures when your evening really gets hopping. With all the extra batteries I usually am powered-up now by swapping them as I come and go. I also think they improved the power consumption between the s100 and the s400.

I must congratulate the research in motion RIM people. My blackberry telephone is the only phone that seems to hold a charge between the times that I feel like charging it and it gives a fair warning of at least a half a day to get back to a charger.

But I want the future and I want it now when it comes to power. Whether it is Mr. Fusion from back to the future or feeding my laptop spinach at dinner I hope to avoid any further gaps in service from my wonderful fleet of electronic friends. I promise to feed them regularly. Maybe a little better solution to power management would be our solution to the middle east. I doubt it.

You can't say that dogs have personalities because they aren't people. When was the last time you were having a problem with a friend who wouldn't stop barking whenever you left them alone? Each dog does have their own unique way of viewing the world and little quirks. Take the three dogs in the back of my parents Volvo cross country (XC) station wagon as an example.

Mack, the husky, has a gentle disposition, but if you let him off the leash he is prone to run away for miles to be found later in a swamp gnawing on a piece of deer leg that happens to be decomposing there.

Gemini, the australian shepherd, is for some strange reason clearly in total head over heels love with me. She acts like a teenager that has just been told that she won a date with Justin Timberlake. She also can be a bitch but that is because she is the only female dog in the car and that means that she is the top of the dog pecking order.

This brings us finally to Maestro, a mix between a doberman and most likely a greyhound. Maestro has a habit of barking, in the car, at anything that he objects to. He takes particular offence to people in uniform, motorcylcles, dogs, and convertibles. At times he just seems to bark for no apparent reason. While useful as an alternative to purchasing a radar detector this behavior can be only described by any sane person sitting in front of him as incredibly annoying. To solve for this problem my parents recommended holding onto his leash and yanking it hard whenever he began to bark.

After spending an hour alternating holding my hands over my ears and yanking on his leash I have come to the conclusion that this is insufficient and we should take more extreme measures. We should switch to what Lynn uses for her dog, a collar that shocks the dog whenever they bark. It seems cruel to put a collar like that on a dog but medeival torturers could have gotten sinners to confess by leaving them in the back seat of a volvo with Maestro.

There was a knocking at the door at 64 Homer street. A police officer who arrived at the door wanted to have a conversation about something that had occurred yesterday. He wanted to speak with Karen because he claims the day before he had been working in front of a construction site and Karen had run through a red light and tried to run him over. Officer Torrez was very angry and wanted to directly complain to the driver, Karen. He wished my mother a happy Jewish new year and tried to be pleasant on the way out.

Last night I was watching episode 5 of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy DVD. In this episode Marvin, the paranoid android, had been waiting for zaphod beeblebrox to return and had waited until the end of the universe. I am a Radiohead fan and have been known to listen to ok computer on a constant loop on trips from Boston to Barnstable. I wonder if the song paranoid android was inspired by Douglas Adams.

Fitter happier more productive. Getting along better with motorists.

The likely end to another promising bid for a pennant by the Red Sox. Everyone was cursing Francona looks a lot like Grady Little for leaving Pedro Martinez in the game in the 8th with a one run lead to go on and lose the game by allowing two earned runs before getting yanked; Or maybe after getting yanked?

Opinions are like toe nails everyone has 'em.I certainly have lots of opinions about nearly every subject. I also have noticed lately that opinions on the internet are all over the place. I can get film opinions on netflix.com or book opinions on amazon.com but I want to give opinions on all sorts of media and products. Jeremy and I have even discussed that you should have a place to rate your dates from sites like match.com and jdate. So I would like to propose an integrated criticism portal where you can post opinions on any item and get to opinions from many sources. The system could reward opinionated people with sales through affiliate sites for positive reommendations and ppc advertising in other areas. The system would also allow them to publish the opinions back to their own sites through various structured rss feeds or automated ftp processes. I'm sure this idea will fall on critical eyes, probably my own thinking how dumb it was if I ever look back at this.

My parents were wondering whether I was still eating marzipan on a regular basis. Sarah was a little confused by this apparent “phase” in my life I still like marzipan and can get to it more easily at Mike's pastries now that they spent 11 billion dollars to get rid of the highway in front of hanover street. My mom did make a great tomato cake that was choc-full o almonds. You have to figure out what to do with tomatoes when your garden is teeming with them.

Tonight is the night before yom kippur. This is not to be confused with the night before christmas. While we are supposed to fast tomorrow and to repent for a full years worth of sins I am not sure how much of that I can repent with the red sox playing against the yankees tonight with pedro martinez vs. Mike mussina. I have a long history of jewish events mixing with baseball. My bar mitzvah was the same day as the game when bill buckner let a ground ball run through his legs. Tonight I am going to the game. I never was good at repenting.

Life in Tommy Doyles with the rather serious film maker Robert Frigault. Plenty of Guinness tonight.

Although I have figured out how to make money with my blog with my clever adsense keyword indexing I am sensing that I am most likely to only make a few dollars a month in ad clicks. This amount is totally not enough to live on in boston. But in Tanzania or Cuba you could live quite well for only ten dollars per month. So I think that people with internet access in third world countries should blog and create adsense keyword accounts. Although I do recall you need a us social security id for tax purposes. But I have one and would be happy to collect the money on behalf of a third world blogger looking to support their family through a difficult flood or winter by creating channels for them and sending the few dollars via a wire transfer or by mailing it directly as cash. Contact me if you are reading this and interested in participating in the american dream.

The best songs never use idioms. Our band tonight has moved into a song that may be an original that has the chorus “the harder they come, the harder they fall”. This is right after they played all along the watch tower and the scientist. Neither of these songs relied on idioms. Idioms have no place in music. They can barely justify their place in the world when people should think and elaborate rather than relyiing on tired old ways of saying old truths. They have moved on now to “no woman no cry”. It is a huge improvement over the idiotic idiom song.

Stenographer and sketch artist

At some point in the near future robert and I are going to go out on the town and bring with us three additional people. The first would be a stenographer who could take detailed notes of every item of conversation. The next would be a court sketch artist. Finally we would bring a real judge dressed in a judges uniform. They will be tasked with creating a transportable court like atmosphere on a perfectly average night on the town with all of the resulting benefits of decision making capabilities from the judge, a complete record from the stenographer, and images from the sketch artist. We will advertise on craigslist.com and pay each of them $50. It has never been done before... Or at least not to my knowledge. We may also want a court reporter from a local newspaper, one of those people who goes around following small time local stories and moves the police log each week for towns like Bedford.

The band struck-up a great rendition of under the bridge by the red hot chili peppers and someone in the crowd ran up to them to ask “do you guys know any Blind Melon”

I am sitting in tommy doyles aithentic irish pub. Only 18 months ago it was the coyote grill. Now as I sit in a room formerly decorated with southestern patterns, inages of the grand canyon, cocopellis, and angular Hopi styled artwork I am instead surrounded by images of dublin, pictures of bottle caps with the guinness logo, and being waited on by a woman who most likely was raised in cork or meath. Gone are the days of the religious salty edged dinner margarita. They are replaced with a thick frothy murphy's stout. Pubs are like churches - the religion takes over on the same spot as the old shrine. While the church and temple focus on using god to bring people together, the pub uses alcohol and chips.

Despite whatever they have been doing in Redmond for the past 20 years they still haven't figured out the problem of computers crashing. I know that I am an annoyance to my computer with all of my clicking and moving of mice but I would hope that preventing me from deep sixing my machine would be a major priority for those folks out there. Now I realize that it probably isn't their fault because I do know the program manager there in charge of relationships and compatibility with device manufacturers who are constantly trying to make drivers that improve speed but increase crashes. This time I crashed when trying to print. I sent the fun spy error report back to mr gates and company and microsoft crash analysis gave me the useful message that I crashed because of a device driver but they were unable to specifically figure out what caused the problem. Well I guess it is back to try to print my America West receipt from june for my expense report before the quarter ends. Sedona was nice. I don't remember worrying much about my computer crashing.

I should just be happy that Microsoft doesn't design cars.

I have always wondered whether the invisible man was supposed to cause his clothing to be invisible or if he was only invisible when he was naked. Going on the premise that the invisible man could cause his clothing to disappear there needs to be some plausible explanation like how Peter Parker was turned into Spiderman after he was bitten by a radio-active spider.

At tonight's improv show I learned a plausible reason for how the clothes might disappear. Here it is. The clothing was made invisible by a secretion of sweat that causes things to become invisible. When the sweat comes in contact with a surface even in gaseous form that surface is rendered invisible. The implications of this are interesting because if you were to know of the existence of this sweat it would be the equivalent of an invisible paint that could be placed on any surface to make it invisible as well, until the sweat evaporated.

While munching on our satay we were looking for an internet connection. We found a wireless connection provider from a company called Genetic Services. We looked them-up figuring that they might be a sperm bank or some kind of X-files project involving cloning and mutants. They are involved in providing research for flies and worms but have a great marketing department as anyone can tell from the two flies enjoying a drink by the pool offering two for one transgenic orders. It is stange enough to be something I would expect to see on Futurama. 

There I was a few weeks back with Elton John singing with the Boston pops, live video hook-ups to see Jessica Simpson on closed caption television, and the big game about to start. This was following another segment in a long saga of failed attempts to tail-gate. This one was because I had used all of the propane and coudn't cook the assortment of sausages that I had bought at Whole Foods including chicken, pork, and salmon. I still have the salmon sausages frozen in my fridge. They would have been better fresh.  

I went to unlock my bike and overheard a group of people trying to decide whether to go to the blue room or to “the irish bar”. They were poo pooing the snootyness of the blue room and I distinctly heard them say “there is no fish called scrod... It is just the catch of the day.”

At the bar we are being forced to endure a showing of “in search of the partridge family”. We have not only run out of worthwhile topics for televion but we have also run out of reality television concepts so we are doubly punished to watch this crap that revives bad television as a contest. I think younger people love this stuff. They eat it up like fresh pancakes on a sunday morning. I am trying to contain my enthusiam for the upcoming “danny partridge showdown” but it is proving difficult.

Once again we didn't order enough food at the bar at jasmine, the thai restaurant where we are eating and drinking. We had to order the satay and fresh spring rolls twice for three people. That is still not enough food. We have a problem with commitment. We can't even commit to order a main course.

I have decided that most people take life too seriously. They allow their daily lives to affect them so that they are miserable or happy at the whim of the day. People get sick because of stressful events like their projects not getting funded or not getting paid enough money or not being able to pursue their dreams of becoming a mambo drummer.

We are hanging out at the bar and two hen like women are clucking about their siblings having babies.

I am so excited that hattie has finally received the star wars boxed set. We must watch it immediately. But until then we will have a drink and edit the movie.

Robert is quite fond of the marketing message 'whirling dervish' in his efforts to promote toth, a new york street performer that does a full opera including dance and instruments in a language that he wrote himself. Everyone needs a phrase of beauty to describe themselves in this way. I haven't figured out what mine is yet.