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Katie and I went to the Desert Museum before seeing Rent. I posted an album of pictures from the day (and night).

I’m typing this on a 13-year-old IBM Model M keyboard with real mechanical buckling springs: keys that clatter like a broken Ford and snap back up at you as if to say “Hey! I will smack you if you keep that up, mister.” Typing feels precise and deliberate again. They also have two features that increase home security:

1) With two going at once, the sound could be mistaken for an intense gattling gun battle.

2) The giant plastic-encased steel bases make them excellent tools for inflicting blunt force trauma.

Matt found these locally and on e-bay and cleaned them up. Please rescue any you come across if your everyday activities involve sifting through dumps. These things never die, but my mushy Apple keyboard might get killed soon. They’re glaring at each other.

Why is it that when I buy organic fruit, each individual piece has to have a giant “ORGANIC” label on it, half the size of the fruit itself? Somewhere, there’s an organic skidder clearcutting an old growth forest to make paper, upon which sweatshop workers will surely use organic ink and organic glue to fashion these incredibly unnecessary giant green labels.

I declare war on Sprouts; from now on I will remove the extra label from each piece of fruit and affix it to the bin in which the fruit resides (which is appropriately labeled). Stay tuned.

Today is the day that the rest of the United States switches to commie time, while Arizonans laugh and take a moment to reflect on how nice it is to never reset our clocks.

This year’s switch is especially exciting, since the last Congress decided to extend Daylight Saving Time, ostensibly to save even more oil. Never mind that we got better gas mileage 20 years ago; clearly the problem is the precise time at which we turn on our lights. And never mind the time and money the IT industry spent installing DST updates. I’m starting to suspect that the lawmakers think that changing our clocks actually changes the amount of daylight.

Either way, the change of DST dates is important for one reason: statistics. Someone will generate a statistic purporting to prove that the extension of DST saved, say, x gallons of oil. Then we’ll also get a statistic, y, of how many school children died after being hit by cars because they were walking to school in the darkness of an artificially-early morning. And you know what we’ll know then? We’ll have x over y, precisely how many gallons of oil the life of a child is worth, according to our government. With some extrapolation, the number could be applied to certain war policies, but I won’t go there.

[I wrote this post a few weeks ago after working on DST changes, and forward-dated it to today. Then I planned a trip to Boston, so I gained an hour today anyway. So much for laughing at the rest of the nation. Incidentally, it was 85 degrees in Phoenix when we left on a red-eye flight, and 4 when we arrived in the morning.]

At various times in my life I’ve thought that it would be nice to have one of those nifty headphone splitters so that when I fly somewhere with another person, we can both listen to the same device, or watch a movie on a laptop. I’ve owned at least three of them, but I have never successfully used one. Over the course of my lifetime I’ve spent, cumulatively, at least two hours trying to locate headphone splitters. Like any geek, I have numerous drawers full of nameless technological devices, not one of which has ever gone missing, except for the elusive headphone splitter.

I’m quite certain that next time I move, I will find a secret cache of indescribable pieces of hardware – widgets, dongles, adapters – each of which plugs into nothing I still own or can even remember owning. But I’ll keep them. I have to. They may come in handy one day, when for some reason a friend has a dire need for a 2-inch USB extender or a Centronics SCSI terminator (I don’t think I have any friends who would get themselves into such a pickle, but one never knows), both of which I can locate in a heartbeat. Most likely, the heaps of essentially useless items are obscuring the view of my headphone splitter, which is up to something entirely mischievous at the bottom of the drawer (though clearly, it is not procreating, because unlike other adapters, headphone splitters vanish instead of multiplying).

My predicament brought to mind a great article declaring war on dongly things that Douglas Adams wrote almost ten years ago, and which still holds true.

“There’s nothing wrong with making money, but if you know your history, then you know that there is a certain poverty of ambition involved in simply striving just for money. Materialism alone will not fulfill the possibilities of your existence. You have to fill that with something else. You have to fill it with the golden rule. You’ve got to fill it with thinking about others. And if we know our history, then we will understand that that is the highest mark of service.”

Thus spake Obama in Selma, Alabama yesterday.