I am sick today. I got a sore throat over the weekend and it hurt so much today that I have a pounding headache. I would honestly rather be at work programming instead of sitting here thinking I should be working on the written portion of my final thesis for grad school. I know this is a recurring story but it depresses me on so many levels. The worst of which is how I failed to arrive at my goal or how Buffalo failed me. The rest of this post is not so boring I swear.

I started reading some more of Howard Rheingold, "Smart mobs" in which he talks about mobile communities that have formed around the world and the effects they have on society. Lots of concentration is on mobile networks that help users share real time information. An example was a group of people in Scandanavia that all scammed the subway (I am not promoting this) by having a cell phone network that would alert the users where the train conductors were. When you saw one, you would send a message with the location of the conductor which would then be sent to the other users.

There are hundreds of examples in his book. One of the most famous mobile socialo networking groups is called upoc - it lets you create a mobierl social network that works similar to the tarin conductor example above. One of their most famous is a celebrity stalker mobiel network in NYC which send all the user sthe locations of NYC celebrites when other movbile users send those lcoations to the list. Exmaple, you see julia roberts at a restaurent and send a message everyone else gets it and rushes to her. Freaky and scary - i think.

The one thing I have hated about living in Buffalo is the lack of public willing to accept mobile internet. I really don't understand it at all. I provides the benefits of instant information access with benefits of social networks. Something as simple as being able to look up a recipe at the grocery store, or to record an event as it is happening.

Being horrified that I was a super failure by not being able to create a mobile network I decided to check out upoc communities that were centered around buffalo. There were not very many and the ones that were had few users and even fewer messages. The largest group was of course one that sent messages about the bufflao bills.

Even crazier is that there was a mobile user group for upstate NY - yes - all of upstate - Syracuse, Buffalo, Rochester, Utica, etc. It had only 44 users across hundreds of miles and these were the messages:
    
Jun 05 10:11PM     
Fr: cliffr39
dude chill out with the whorin 4 times in 3 hours is aggressive
Jun 05 10:05PM     
Fr: Supermanmax
Any cute white single moms here?
Jun 05 10:04PM     
Fr: Supermanmax
Any cute white single moms here?
Jun 05 7:49PM     
Fr: Supermanmax
Any cute white single moms under 30 here?
Jun 05 7:48PM     
Fr: Supermanmax
Any cute white single moms under 30 here?
Jun 04 4:05PM     
Fr: Supermanmax
Any cute single white moms under 30 here?
Jun 03 9:28PM     
Fr: Supermanmax
Any single white mom here in her 20s?

So maybe Buffalo just isn't ready for something like this. But why? That is a question I really just cannot answer. I really wanted to build a mobile empire, a temporary reality layered on top of the city, in which people shared their lives and and radically changed each others perception of local community. Instead we have a journaling community which shares many of the same benefits in terms of building community but has gotten all of these people stuck at their computer screens.

Although, the average user of estrip.org has not reached the level of mobility/portability that I desire, it has laid the foundation for a community which continues to grow and adopt new technologies as they become available and afforable - ultimately helping to make these technologies socially acceptable in a mobile technology unsavy town.

Ironically, I made plans from my phone in the chat to meet e:joshua and e:libertad right after this. Maybe it does work, but I am th emobile link, lol.

The squirrel never made it across West Ferry. Maybe the car was going to fast?

The show at the baseball stadium is ultra nationalistic. They spent like 15 minutes announcing each part of the army and lighting off one firework for each.

The finale was a little better but still kind of blah, sorry about the blair witch effect at the beginning, it was windy.

I updated the surebertCom library to add lots of new array functions and two new string ones.

strings: ltrim, rtrim, trim
arrays: drop, random, unique, combine, inject, substrCount, strstr, stristr, walk

I still haven't documented everything but strings and array methods are fully documented with examples. Same with sound, events, and ajax. Check it out if you are a javascripter.

Yummy, 4 boxes of really fancy dipped chocolate cookies in silver boxes arrived from e:hodown in NYC


I went to my cousins graduation party in East Aurora. Their house is no nice with lots of land. It is a log cabin that they built back in the 80s. I still can't imagine living that far from the city. As usual we played boccie ball.

0706/boccieBall5605.jpg

Met a guy who was a Roswell patient and got cured only recently - he loved Roswell.

Speaking of Roswell. I Marie Curie at Roswell when walking to the server room the other day. She looked somehow different than I expected.


The other day I went with e:Matthew and e:terry to southpark next to the botanical gardens on route 62 in Lackawanna.

A crazy bug we saw of a type I never saw before, at least I don't think so.


Here is e:mattehw taking a picture of it too.










Went to go see Indie Arie at Thursday in the Square. I believe it was even more crowded than Pat Benetar for those of you that were there. They even closed off the square part way through and shut down the subway so no more people could come and it couldn't run anyone over.. I got stuck behind the stage most of the evning.


e:eknot knew some woman who had a store that had a bathroom so I went to go pee but some 13 y/o drunk girl went in before me and messed the bathroom up really bad. It was yucktastic.


Afterwards, I saw e:ladycroft and e:nejifer and we walked over to my house which took a while but we got to go past the new mansion. At 10PM e:theecarey came over and she came with us and then out to dinner at Panos. Then e:theecarey and I planned our business super universe and get rich schemes till about 4am. Someday you will be say, "Hey I knew those bizzilionaires when they were just estrippers, before they bought Disney and Microsoft"

We signed our lives over to the new house. Apparently, the patriot act has something to do with buying a house too.

I was writing a comment to congratulate e:shawnr,280 on his landing of a great job at PBS in DC and it got me thinking about the BUffalo Brain Drain.

It is so sad that Buffalo is losing him though. Buffalo should be more sad than I am because he is truly one of the young people with a vision and capability to make a change and places like UB are so lame for not having jumped on that.

In fact all of the smartest people I know have left. Maybe I am an idiot for staying (selfish sidenote: the more of you that leave the better I look - if enough tech people leave, I can just lie and say I invented the internet).

e:southernyankee, e:ajay , e:hodown , e:haikuster , e:codypomeray , e:emilyjane , e:iriesara , e:emily , e:jesse , e:julie e:robin have all already left - not to mention the fact that I have heard e:nejiffer , e:ladycroft , e:jenks and many others say they expect to work in other cities when they are finally done with their school/interns.

I have a feeling in ther end it will be carey, mike, jill, me, terry and matt- hopefully living on lincoln parkway.

I tried being super nice and then I just get rent checks on the 20th of the month. This is my new attempt at better control. I spent more than the total downstairs rent on upgrades and paint this year and owe a mortgage on the property so I have to be most serious.

Dear Tenants,
Before I renew everyone's leases for August I just wanted to make it clear that I am not running a rooming house and that the rent for the apartments is for the total apartment regarless of how many tenants reside inside.

Upstairs:
1. Good news, the rent will remain the same $550 for upstairs. ($183.34 per person for 3 people, $275 per person for 2 people, or $550 for 1 person).

2. Starting in August you can mail checks to my new residence. I need all rent checks in one envelope - saves you two stamps and saves trees.

Starting Next Month;
24 Linwood AVenue,
Buffalo, NY 14209

3. Thank you to those of you that have paid on time this year. I am no longer going to be allowing people to pay late without penalty. As before, the penalty is $5 per day after the 5th of the month. As before, the penalty is $5 per day after the 5th of the month. It will be strictly enforced and late payment penalities are required to be paid with that month's rent. Failure to comply will result in eviction.

4. I am taking the dining room set out, however, I will be replacing the table with a new table for you to use.

5. If any of this is not agreeable to you, please consider this a 30-day notice.

Buffalo just tastes good.



Seriously, I love this freakin' festival. I eat until I fell like I am going to puke and I get to try all kinds of new stuff and old favorites. I was full and had left over tickets with only $20. I know if went with e:hodown or e:mike I would have eaten about $40 worth of tickets.

Before I left I debated whether to wear flipflops or shoes with shorts. I think flipflops looked better but I didn't want to get stepped on so instead I wore shoes. My feet look huge when I wear shorts with shoes but nowadays, I just embrace the dorkiness.



Avon was there delivering some message about woman getting beaten.


I think they wanted them to cover up the problem or to get them and their men to "makeup"?


There was lots 80s songs and even some 90s ones. e:matthew notices that early 90s might be starting to come back. Thank god, I am ready for the eighties to go away again. It's really weird to think that 1980 is as far away now as 1960 was in 1986. Remember the 60s nostalgia then followed byt he 70s and most recently 80s nostalgia.

Crawfish just taste good. I am so satisfied ripping their heads off and eating the meat from the tail.



Pigskins. I think this is new this year. It is deep fried potato skins loaded with pulled pork and covered in nacho cheese.


There is this mirror on bada-bing on chippewa that makes me look tough. e:matt and e:terry too - it adds about 30 lbs


This is a pic of Lance Diamond entertaining us. He kept singing love songs and replacing the woman in the songs with Buffalo itself. You got to love Lance Diamond. Notice the vote for Nader 96 sticker which leads me to believe if I order real estrip.org bumper stickers and put them up everywhere, no one will ever remove them.

First of all we did not win a fish.



Secondly, this wa sthe best fireworks display I ever saw. It went on for a full in your face half hour.

Clusters

The Wigglers

The Finale

The rides

Q. How do you know you are in a gay bathroom?

A. When you find the pages of an inerior deocarting magazne stuck together on a table in front of the toilette.

Here is also a picture of a cool car I saw on the highway. I think it was a corvette, see you all at Shakespeare in the park.