Going down to Seattle for a meeting, then Portland, for a meeting, then San Francisco, for a meeting, then Mercury and 9:30, for a brief vacation. May be posting, may not be posting, who knows? The Future is Uncertain.

When the phone rings when I'm still asleep I wake all at once with my heart banging and envision: blood on the highway, Emergency Room, personal crisis, falling towers. But when the phone rang early early this morning it was UPS telling me what the extortionate fees were I was going to have to pay to receive a gift sent from a friend in the U.S. Shouldn't it be illegal to call people before, say, 9 AM?

Sorry it took me so long to fix this, but now the RSS feed should be giving the full entries.

When we went over to Ben's house, Lorelei showed us the time lapse movie that she'd made from Ben's porch overlooking the Bay, and we all got very excited about it.

There is a really good article in last week's New Yorker by Oliver Sacks: Speed. It is about our fascination with perceptions of time, and it provides some excellent excerpts from the literature of time aberration. From "Principles of Psychology" by William James:

I've always admired Dorothea Tanning, and there is a lovely interview with her in the Guardian.

Once again the best team in the world has built an incredible tool: Organizr. You can group your photos into photosets, batch add photos to group pools, and easily browse your entire photostream. Check it out:

(via)

After Liz had posted about the low number of women that were represented at technology confereences, a misbehaving.net reader requested that we put together some advice of how to get speaking gigs. I wrote one up: How to get Out of the Audience and Onto the Stage.

The Terrorism to Come concludes thusly:

The report: houseguests! Maura and Cameron are visiting from Edmonton. Went to dinner with Kate and Mike Friday night, then to Blim, where Intermission was performing. Playing lots of board games lately, Settlers of Cataan at Intermission, and Anagrams and Set today. Stewart and Maura and Cameron just finished playing Quo Vadis and have gone to see some music, leaving me at home to write my novel. I am delaying by writing this instead.

I just spent an hour making my doll with the Candybar Doll Maker. Some of the people on Flickr are mad about this, and kept posting their dolls to Flickr. I was curious and went to check it out. It is addictive. There are over 12,000 doll parts to choose from. Fantastic!

More articles and interesting stuff by Tjebbe van Tijen. This is a lovely page too.

If anyone has a good acupuncturist to recommend in Vancouver, I'd love to get a referral! Write me: caterina at gmail. Thanks!!

• There is a new biography of Borges out, and I still haven't read the last one I bought (Borges: A Life by James Woodall). My cultlike obsession with Borges has had little nourishment or momentum lately.

• I somehow happened across Where in Washington DC is Sun Myung Moon?, which tracks the shenanigans of the cult leader and his ties to the capital. I've been approached no fewer than five times by Moonies in public places, who sought to take me to a meeting, the bus is leaving right now. They tend to lose interest in me when I want to do bothersome and anti-Moonie things such as "get the address and come later" or "call my sister" first. I did want to go and observe their marketing strategies first hand. But they seemed to want to kidnap me.

I must have some kind of Moonie-sucker aura. The Jehovah's Witnesses steer a wide berth around me, and Hare Krishnas evince no interest at all. Perhaps they think I'd be unwilling to part with all this thick, beautiful hair?

• I wonder how many people take the Wizard Academy up on its offer to set it as their home page? I was trying to figure out exactly what the intriguingly named "Wizard Academy" was, then came across bio of The Man Behind The Curtain, which has one of those photos typical of cult leaders in which they are simultaneously hidden and revealed. Also interesting is that the guy's name is not mentioned in the bio -- he is referred to only as "Him" or "He" or "the Wizard". Hmmmmm....

Went to the park and played tennis with our new tennis rackets. Practiced my guitar. Ate a hamburger. Took a nap. Now have an awful headache. Unable to read, sleep, play guitar or do much other than stare into the abyss, also known as the internet.

What would Kissinger have done?. An interesting question, which my brain can't really handle right now. Maybe some fruit juice...

It's so great to be back in Vancouver! Finally! Last night I went out dancing with Elizabeth, Allison, Renee, Jane and Holly to Tokyo Lounge and then to Celebrities. Woo! The music wasn't so great at Tokyo Lounge, and Celebrities closed down too soon after we got there. Maybe we have to go to Shine next time? Or...? I don't really know where to go out in this city. Going to a place called Celebrities is kind of like shopping at a place called Club Monaco. See how I'm right about that? But sometimes it can't be helped.

Today we woke up late and had some Dutch pancakes and then ran a lot of errands, including getting Stewart some cute new glasses.

Tonight is the fireworks on English Bay, the fourth and final show, thank god. Holly was telling me that the cops had rounded up some Hells Angels wearing their colors at the last one. Weirdly enough, the fireworks have become a venue for fights between rival gangs in the area, who come in from the suburbs. Strange. It's such a Norman Rockwell activity.

• Languagehat has a post on funny Chinese curses which I found very amusing. Your mother's! There are also a great many interesting links on language a Heckler and Coch.

• I am reading the very fascinating Millenials Rising, about the "next great generation" -- the high school class of 2000 and their coevals. The authors make some surprising claims about this group: they say that Millenials are "protected, pressured and celebrates far more than Boomers of Gen Xers ever were"; that civic spirit and test scores are up, crime and risky behavior are down; that kids are held to higher standards than adults apply to themselves; that Millenials are "a lot less violent, vulgar and sexually charged than the teen culture older people are producing for them." This last part in particular surprised me, since the girls I see around with their midriffs showing and their thong underwear sticking out of their lowriders, and the boys spending all their time downloading mp3s and porn, don't seem to fit this description. But I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that many of these kids are 2nd generation, and are being raised by immigrants from more traditional cultures. I myself was raised very conservatively by a 1st generation Filipino mother, (and a 13th generation American father) and so relate a lot to this group as a whole. Far from having the typical Gen X "latchkey kid"childhood where children were left to themselves and seen as inhibiting their parents personal growth, my upbringing was Millenial: wall-to-wall French lessons, piano lessons, sailing lessons, great importance placed on my and my sister's educations, kids first.

• We saw Napoleon Dynamite, which was...OK. The dancing at the end was superb, but the rest of the movie so-so. I rented Rosemary's Baby and gained new respect for Mia Farrow, who I'd only seen in Woody Allen movies and in The Great Gatsby in which both she and Robert Redford were horribly miscast. The old Hollywood actors playing the coven were fantastic.

• I'm also reading the trashy CEO bio The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison : *God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison -- I also scored a copy of Straight From the Gut, the biography of Jack Welch. My good friend Eric was reading this recently. He and I were in a sort of Marxist/Lacanian reading group circa 1996, reading a lot of Zizek. He reads as weird a collection of books as I do.

• I have rented one of the two Stanley Kubrick movies I haven't seen yet, Barry Lyndon. I'm really looking forward to it, but don't know if I can watch the whole thing before it's due tomorrow -- it's three hours long. The other one I haven't seen is Full Metal Jacket.

It is a holiday in Canada, and I am, of course, at work. But the good thing is that Stewart showed me Last FM, which I have been listening to (and training to find me music that I like). I downloaded the Audioscrobbler plugin for iTunes too so it could get even smarter.

It was a crazy weekend on English Bay. First the fireworks on Saturday night, then the Gay Pride Parade on Sunday. It seemed fairly muted for a pride parade (my favorite costume was a hot dog on rollerskates), but then again, I used to live in the Castro, so my expectations are high. We spent a lovely afternoon with Jon Udell up at Lynn Canyon, and then at Guu with Garlic, and he told me about means of bookmarking places in RealMedia files, which intrigued me. I'll have to find his post on that.