(e:southernyankee) and I hit the Tops stores yesterday for our impromptu seafood party. It was the first time I got to go to the tops on Niagara St. since they redesigned it. It has really come a long way, there are even rainforest noises in the vegetable department. Unfortunately, they did not have enough clams to satisfy our craving so we had to go on to the next tops but managed to buy 3 lbs of catfish nuggets while there and found pappy's sassafrass, see below.



The Grant St. Tops is as crappy as ever. I hate that one, if you have a choice go to the Niagara St one. Everytime I am there I am so amazed at what a different world and quality level it is from Wegmans which is only a block away.

Maybe it's a local business thing. Wegman's, although they practice many unfavorable business tactics such as strawberry picker union busting, they are local, while Tops is mega-super-ultra-trans-national. Let's at least pretned that Wegman's cares more about the community and it's image even if it's just pretending.

For me, tops is just too sterile. It looks like a hospital. (e:southernyankee) says bright white sells stuff, but I like the homey Wegmans orange - wood - brown scheme.

We also stopped at the coop and bought the necessary organics. My coop milk, eggs, 1 lb cherries and bacon cost as much as all of my other tops groceries combined(2.5 doz clams, 3 lbs of catfish, 2 sodas, collard greens, 1 block of dill havarti, .25 lb cured black olives, .25 lb greek olives, and baby portabellas.)

As for mega-store shopping what do you guys think, Tops or Wegman's?

(e:flacidness) and (e:lilho) stopped by for Dinner. Actually, (e:lilho) did much of the cooking along with (e:terry) who was master chef [inlink]terry,269[/inlink]. I steamed the clams and acted as a team supervisor, hahaha.

This is (e:flacidness) 's cousin frita. She was playing with the sidekick and I found this picture of her on it.

Here is a picture of my Grandmother with her brothers, sisters, and parents.



I have been thinking for a while about how I could use a new audio blog and this seemed like a good match. She is describing the names of the people in the picture from left to right, top row first.

::DOWNLOAD SOUND::

Here is Nonna during the scanning process.



If any of the rest of you would like to add audio to your entries, just remember you can simply use the add media box at the bottom of your journal entry form. Just make sure that it is in mp3 or wav format and is under 100k.

It seems like everyone is on vacation. Hopefully they are because we only have about 4 weeks till winter starts again. I was gonna do summer colors but the site went right from bright green spring colors to this fall scheme. I suppose Buffalo did almost exactly the same thing with the weather.

In wired magazine this month, they predicted that the latest craze is going to be social networks combined with P2P file trading software. I hate to tell them this has been around long before the beginning of napster, etc.

As a matter of fact, I think file sharing instigated some of the earilest forms of computer aided social networking.

I remember the when a friend of mine's mailman, armed with a database and a printer used to have a social network he created to trade Commodore 64 software enroute. Every month he would drop off a list of new software that people along the route had aquired and then you could trade by giving something to the mailman that somebody else requested. He would then deliver what you requested the next time he came around.

At the same time electronic bulletin boards, IRC, and later programs such as Carraacho for mac and Hotline for PC were made exactly for such a thing. They actually predated all the anonymous P2P trading possibilities of today.

In soem ways, these older forms of filesharing were cool because you secured online friendships and built trust. In another way it sucked because you had to spend time buildinh online friendship and trust! I mean say you wanted a copy of the newest DVD or video game, you would need to give the person that possessed it something they wanted in return. Over time you would develop a friendship that allowed you to give and take at will - all password protected of course.

I think nowadays, in the age of mass databases and breadcrumbs, it seems like a dangerous market. If you combine the social networking habits and data with your file sharing informtion, you begin to have a good case against you in court. A digital papertrail with all of the necessary information to figure you out.

Does anybody else have feelings about this?

Thanks (e:mike) for holding doown the fort. Have fun (e:chris) said he would look out for you

We are heading home to e_town with some atkins on the way. This is a picture of my eye catching up on some weekend journals, using a microscope and taken with the sidekick cam.

(e:beast), I also think letterboxing sounds cool and so does (e:terry). (e:rachel) wants to do something similar called geocaching. Maybe it's even the same thing, she would know more.

On the way home, I decided to listen to my voice mail, something I had never done before. I've had my phone since Christmas Time. Almost each one was a pissed off call from my brother ((e:mike)) who was waiting for me at work to give me a ride home. I feel really bad cause I thought he knew I never listened to my voicemail. He must have been really mad, when I never responded to them. I am going to record them cause it's almost funny.

Camping was fun, we swam around a bit and collected wood. Pat and Terry showed up too and they have a dog.