news music links contact

20 December 2010

Dyker Lights, 2010

dyker lights brooklyn
We made the annual trip down the road to Dyker Lights last night, which, if you don't know, is what they call it when a bunch of houses in Dyker Heights (in Brooklyn, between 83rd and 86th streets and 13th and 11th Avenues) pay decoration companies to make their houses look like Christmas in Disney Land. I'm being snarky, but it's truly awesome, and we go every year. I love this shit.

This year I decided to take some pictures, because although you see tons of people there with cameras, good pictures of the magic are hard to come by online. I regret to say they still will be, because I'm a terrible photographer. Still, here's what I've got:
dyker lights brooklyn
This house is actually on 14th Avenue and about 10 blocks north of the action, but I thought it was cool anyway.
dyker lights brooklyn
I'm a terrible photographer because there's a huge Santa (more than 20 feet tall if he's an inch) and I failed to get him in the shot.
dyker lights brooklyn
dyker lights brooklyn
dyker lights brooklyn
dyker lights brooklyn
dyker lights brooklyn
dyker lights brooklyn
This is a topiary of a dancing bear; there are about five of them in this yard. I kept trying to get a good shot of them, and mostly failed.
dyker lights brooklyn
dyker lights brooklyn
The best shot of the dancing bears.
dyker lights brooklyn

dyker lights brooklyn
This Santa was moving. I'm pretty sure he was supposed to be waving, but it sorta looked like he was spanking this kid.
dyker lights brooklyn
dyker lights brooklyn
This bear (whose skin was falling off in places) was my favorite part of the whole thing.

16 December 2010

Cr48(!)

I got home last night and noticed a suspicious package on the front porch of the house whose second floor I rent. It was addressed to me, from someone I didn't know. I spent a few moments wondering whether I had simply forgotten that I ordered something, then remembered that I had to pee, so I went inside.

I guess Google doesn't want to put its name in the return address because then a laptop-sized box might seem like a pretty good thing to steal. I opened the mysterious box to find one of these. I had applied to Google's Chrome OS Pilot Program a few days ago, and promptly forgotten about it since I figured there was no way I'd ever be selected. There was, it turns out, a way. Fist pump.

I've been making a conscious effort for months now to move all of the things to I do into the cloud, but after playing with the Cr48 for a few hours, it's clear to me that I'm not quite there yet. I don't, for example, have an online music provider that I like better than my obsessively curated collection. Grooveshark is pretty good for finding individual songs, and I like last.fm and Pandora for radio functionality, but I really still like to listen to whole records. I did just get an invite to Tubeify, which seems like it might be cool, but it still doesn't do exactly what I want. But I digress.

I'm so pumped to be able to play with this thing. I even took pictures of the whole business as I was unwrapping it, like they do on tech blogs, but it turns out my unboxing pictures are too embarrassing to actually post any of them, for a few reasons. They're blurry, you can see my disgusting couch in the background, and I cut my finger on the box when I got really excited as I realized what was inside, so there's blood on the packaging and the inserts. Corrugated cardboard papercuts are the worst.

Anyway, I'll let you know, after I've been using it for a while, if I have any success in moving myself further into the cloud.

01 December 2010

Review: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius


A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering GeniusA Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I can't be the first person to say this since it's so deservedly well loved (and if I am the first then build a statue of me looking insightful), but I couldn't help thinking every time Eggers reminded me that he hadn't started masturbating until college that he was still making up for lost time throughout the writing of this book. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by a man named Dion Graham who was...marvelous. I loved the shit out of this.



View all my reviews