I’ve had a regular Eye Fi card for a while, but I recently ordered an upgrade to the Eye Fi Explore, which is so far a pretty interesting experience.
The Eye Fi card is a simple little device. It looks and behaves mostly like a regular 2GB SD memory card, but if you go through an initialization process, the card has a single special feature that regular SD cards don’t: It will upload your photos to your computer via your home wireless network.
For our 10th wedding anniversary, Berta and I stayed over night in Philadelphia. The interesting story is less about what we actually did than what we tried to plan.
Mostly, you wouldn’t call it a plan. Friday night, we dropped the kids off at Mom’s then raced home to decide what to do. It was still early enough to consider flights out of Philadelphia, provided that they were late enough.
We’d been thinking about getting away for a while, specifically to exercise our passports one more time before they expire. Berta has stamps from Mexico, and I’ve got stamps from France, and we both have stamps and visas for India. I thought it would be nice to be “world travelers” and add another stamp to the book before it was retired.
It’s kind of strange explaining these trips we take. It’s like we just need to get away for a while, and it’s not about being pampered or being extravagant (although the travel might seem that way), but more about just getting away from home. And so on Friday night we simply looked for a reasonably cheap flight to anywhere that wouldn’t keep us away longer than the weekend. This is harder than you might think.
Over the past weekend, we took the usual summer pilgrimage to Johnstown. This time, Berta’s sister Therese was in the process of moving, so while they packed up some of their things, I watched the kids. This turned out not too unpleasant. During the time going out and while the kids were entertaining themselves amicably, I was able to do some more reading.
When last Pat as in town, he loaded up my Kindle with a few sample books. I started reading one by Vernor Vinge called “A Fire Upon the Deep”. It was both interesting and strange. We also started listening to an audiobook prequel to the Tales of the Otori trilogy, “Heaven’s Net is Wide”, by Lian Hearn.
I’ve been working on some improvements to Pastoid lately. It started out as more of a response to the URL shorteners that keep popping up everywhere and getting all the press, which Pastoid languishes in obscurity.
For those that don’t know, Pastoid is a site that serves two major functions. First, it functions as a URL shortener, like the ubiquitous TinyURL. Second, it functions as a pastebin, like pastebin.com. It has a few little extra features that set it apart, and I have a lot planned for it that will break it out as something really different and special from those other tools.
Today is the second contiguous day waking from utterly weird fatidic dreams of a dystopian future. Blame the chemicals in the air, maybe. Or something else. I think these things run in cycles.
I’ve had this thought lately that I should set about recording my thoughts during the day, and then play them back to transcribe them in a way that might read like something. This would be something more than Twitter, I think. Twitter is immediate and shareable, whereas these thoughts are more internal and insightful. On Twitter I might say, “I’m setting my hair on fire.” In one of these short summary posts, I might provide insight as to why I’ve done so. Perhaps tracking these things could lead to some kind of predictive instrument for mood or environment.