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.

::Download Flash Video::

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

::Download Flash Video::

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

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.

I gto an aemrgency call from (e:Terry) that his bike tire had popped while he was at the harbor. It was packed. There were literally no parking spots.



While I was there I saw ther replica of the nina - one of Christopher Columbus' ships. It was about the size of a large SUV. I hope that it was a not to scale replica. If it was to scale, I don't understand where the hell they slept. There is no way I would cross the Atlantic in that ship.



This is the kind of bike I wouldn't want to pop a tire on.

::Download Flash Video::

So I called the seller and explained that our landlord wanted us out by August 1st so that she could rent to students and that for that reason we want to stick as close as possible to the July 11th closing date. Luckily, he was goingg to look at a house today that he was going to put a deposit down on so it all might work out.

We really need to get in there before July is up. It is a long journey to destroy the dander.

Well, I am not surprised but my design got nixed. At first the person I talked to was thrilled but then they changed their mind because it would not be branded with the rest of their site - intentionally. Mind you this is a website on a promotional CD-ROM. Thank god for CSS, its only changing a stylesheet to switch designs.

Still think their idea is great, everyone should order cards from them this holiday season.

My final design.


Their final design.

The guy we are buying the house from informed us he has not found a place to live yet. What the fuck? He sigend a ocntract that we would clos eon July 1tth. If he didn't think that was psosible why didn't he negotiate before signing. The mortgage will be ready, the homeowners insurance is ready, we gave our 30day notice to our landlord and the stupid seller can't get his act together.

This is a windowsill in a bedroom



It's so annoying to me. I am getting very nervous about the situation because they are serious cat scummers and I need time beofre I can even live in the house. There house is coated in cat hair in the nastiest way you could imagine. It is necessary that I have plenty of time to clean it out during the warm months when the windows can be open. When measuring the other day at the house, I opened up a furnace vent and found a cat hair matt the size of about a basket ball. Everything is sick and disgusting liek that. The whole house has that nasty cat amonia smell. NOw I know you all know how much I hate cats, but even for a cat lover this house is pushing it.

The other thing is that these people have so much freakin stuff, that even if they find a place and move, it is going to take forever. This is really bad because I cannot live there while any of there stuff is there. I don't want them to leave anything. Not even a doormat. They simply have to go and all their crap too.

I mean who keeps a filthy litter box in the fucking dining room. It pretty much smells like the cats just piss on the rugs.

I though we would have plenty of summer time to tear out all the carpets and clean but now he is taking his time as the contract said the closing date is July 11th. Then he made it sound like he might be ready in september or something. I am so freakin angry about this right now.

He also took an old sink that matched the house and replaced it with a new modern one. He had to do it for his ailing mother who lives there but he made it sound like he was gonna tak ethe original sink with him. The laywer said he can't do that.

On another note, what is up with the weather today. It was basically snowing with hail, followed by sunny sky. I heard in Cheektowaga there was a tornado, it even flipped a truck



Hail

::Download Flash Video::

Followed by Sun

::Download Flash Video::

I also have a cyst in my arm that hurts. I think I am falling apart.

Visitors to a major science exhibition are to help teach computers how to read confusion, mirth and other expressions. It is hoped that this will lead to the development of ways to help people with autism recognise emotions.

The thousands of visitors to next week's Royal Society summer science exhibition are being invited to take part in research with "emotionally aware" computers designed to mind-read by analysing facial expressions.

and then the truthful part ...

The developers hope that one day smart adverts based on their technology will be able to tell when passers-by look glum and try to sell them something cheering, from an anti-depressant to a holiday.

I hate shit like that

On a totally separate note, how bad was it in the 50-80s on Deleware and Linwood that so many mansions got replaced by really ugly high rise buildings?

It's so weird. It goes mansion, mansion, mansion, super freakin; ugly sky rise, mansion, mansion, mansion. This one is pretty ugly on Deleware but the worst ones are those teal, florida style ones near Canisius High School.

Went to the Buffalo Hatch again with (e:mathew) and (e:terry). We saw (e:metalpeter) while there and hung out wioth him for a couple hours while we toured around the Hatch.

We went down to the beach part and I put me feet in the water only to look like 15 feet in front of me to see this half burried 50 gallon drum.



For some reason they have men's showers here. Who uses them? Did you used to be able to swim here?



I think this should be the univeral symbol for moblog.



At the hatch they have this map of the new plan for the Buffalo waterfront. There are areas for each ethnic group. Including even new carribean. They seriously have just about every ethnic group listed, new italy, new africa, new poland, etc but they forgot new ireland. Kind of surprised me considering Buffalo's history.



I think it is really digusting how all the fancy motorboats put so much oil in the water. There really should be some way of preventing this. It is mega digusting, there were all kinds of fish and birds playing in this.






Went to home depot to buy some stuff for the house and saw these new Disney rooms for kids that have the beds built into the walls.




Afterwards, we headed over to Target and they have a new series of slutty dog clothes. These clothes are really for dogs. I think it would be great if they had matching owner outfits.








I finally drank some ultra expensive fiji water. I would have the say it was the purest scam I ever experienced. I drank it and desani and the same time, and it tasted no different. They both have the same plastic aftertaste. I relaly think if it is "so" pure it should come in glass instead of plastic.




Pineapple plants are smaller than I expected.


EVerythign that look sfancy at Home Depot is made out of plastic. They even had plastic chandelliers. My thoughts on this is if you need a plastic one, maybe you don't need one.



Mike and I went out to get some electronic hookups for our old fashioned audio recording device. We are transcoding hundred of hours of audio from our family. I will post it to the web when I get it done.



It was pouring out, glad I missed the parkside garden walk.

::Download Flash Video::

I decided to clean the car out today in preparation of the upcomming move to the mansion and found so many bottles of drink in the car. No, non eof them are alcoholic ones but still. I think I have a problem - I need to start just buying larger sizes. Too bad every vending machine and cafeteria only has the tiny size.



My arms are getting bigger. I am deciding to concentrate of them for a while. I wish they would look like this when I am not flexing.



Okay, back to cleaning.