A year from today, I'll be 35.

That'll make me eligible to be the President of the United States. I had planned on announcing my web2.0 candidacy, and do a Ze Frank-esque 1-year internship of running for president. I even registered a domain, "designed" a logo, and planned on doing a write-in campaign to demonstrate the power of the hype of New Media.

But in my research, I discovered 4 things:

1. Stephen Colbert is running for president, so I don't stand a chance.
2. Even a write-in candidacy requires a crapload of paperwork and signatures and stuff.
3. Being a libertarian, it'd be ironic to try to be President and force my views of government on the population.
4. There's this thing called Unity08, trying to do an end-run around the 2-party system. The guy from Law & Order (and TD Ameritrade commercials) is their spokesperson. Getting a Unity08 nomination means that someone else handles the election paperwork.

So, today, I do not announce my run for President. But I'll consider it if someone nominates me for the Unity08 "party".

I do hope I get an invite to Twine today, though.

And maybe some cake. I like cake.

Went out for a Venti(tm) dirty chai tea latte, and decided to scope out the Cingular/AT store that will be carrying iPhones tomorrow. Asheville is not a very large town, so we don't expect many phones to come in.

But these two guys will definitely get one.

The lucky First Guy In Line is Greg Mayer from Charlotte Street Computers here in town.

I'll take them some sausage, egg and cheese biscuits in the morning, unless the coyotes have already eaten these guys in the night.

To be honest, I'm not that much of a Smashing Pumpkins fan, but I think it's cool that they're breaking out of the normal box, and doing a rather odd tour this year. They've picked 2 cities to have a "residency" at. One of them is my town, Asheville, North Carolina.

9 shows between 23-June and 5-July at The Orange Peel.

They aren't just rolling into town, playing a show, and retreating to the next stop under the cover of darkness.

It's a freakin' 13 day event.

Of course, events mean people. And people mean social networks. I guess.

Nonetheless, once again Ning pops up as the implementation behind Smasheville.com. Go Ning go!

This evening, sitting around with my wife and our friend Jeff, he mentioned seeing a crapload of emo kids outside a local music venue. I immediately asked what an emo kid looked like. My wife suggested the kids from The OC. Jeff described what sounded to me like followers of The Cure.

Luckily, Wikipedia's there to save the day. Then I realized that I'm old, and I don't understand and can't even identify this whole sub-culture of music. I do like Death Cab, but otherwise, I'm ignorant of it all. Wikipedia at least lets me feign knowledge of current popular culture.

It turns out that emo kids seem to be a mix of Robert Smith-alikes with a little punk thrown in, I guess.

At least I get to see Les Claypool next week.

Update

This post has become a magnet for commenters and people direct-linking to the image for their MySpace profile. Image has been removed. Comments are closed.

I struggled reading Shakespeare in high-school. We'd have to read a few scenes a day, completing a work in maybe 2 to 3 weeks.

At university, though, a professor noted that a group of 20 people can somehow manage to perform something like King Lear in under 3 hours, including costume changes, dramatic emoting, and an intermission. Why the hell couldn't we read the same words in the same amount of time?

I struggled because it was Shakespeare, and Shakespeare is supposed to be a high-brow struggle to read. But this observation by this professor completely changed my viewpoint.

Everyday we make choices based upon the perceived difficulty of a task. But every day, those perceptions can and should change.

There was a time that pumping gas was considered too difficult for most people to handle, so we had gas station attendants taking care of that duty. I think most people manage to fill their own tanks these days just fine.

What other opportunities to change the "difficult" into the "easy" exist today?

It seems the debate about links between brain cancer and cellphones goes back and forth. It seems like last year, they were declared safe. Now that is once again being called into question.

But are folks missing half of the equation? Sure, the phone is next to our head, but it's also being held by our hands. And kids these days are sometimes holding the phone with both hands while texting, keeping their noggins safe from the brain-warming effects of radiation.

Who is studying the potential link between cellphone usage and hand cancer?

Mostly, I just liked this image.

For a variety of reasons, I've come to the decision that I should learn how to speak Polish. I know a crapload of computer languages, of course: Perl, Java, Ruby, Bash, Tcl, Logo. But English is the only thing I can speak, even after 3 years of floudering in highschool French and a year of 8am university Latin courses.

It's time to learn another human language.

Sure, you can speak French and sound sexy. But even simply pretending to speak French is enough to accomplish that. Everyone's 4-year-old speaks Spanish fluently these days, and I simply don't need to be shown up by a 3-foot-tall crumb muncher. That's no good for the ego.

So, Polish it is.

I live in a small mountain town and figured correctly that our bookstore wouldn't have any useful Polish courses on CD. Thanks to the zippy folks at Amazon, and my seemingly unending free trial of their Prime cheap overnight service, I possess the first 10 lessons of the Pimsleur system.

For those of you who don't know (I didn't), Pimsleur is purely an audio/spoken system. There's nothing to read. The Polish speaker on the CD works backwards through sounding out words and there is just enough repetition to learn while keeping it all interesting.

So far, I can say

• Excuse me!
• Do you speak English?
• Are you an American?
• I understand a little Polish.

The package of 5 CDs is nice enough. I quickly ripped them to iTunes so I could drop them on the iPod. The CDDB is just whacked when it comes to the Pimsleur CDs, be warned.

Then, for the hell of it, I Googled for Polish resources in my town.

Lo and Behold! The local vocational college, about a mile away, has a Polish class starting next week. I'm heading back to school!

Well, the "5 things" meme has made the rounds.

Last night, what started as a lark has now made it to the far other side of the world. I present the Mouthful of Mouse meme. About as useful and intelligent as the "5 things" meme.

Just photograph yourself with a mouse in your mouth. That's it. Do it! You know you want to!

I was tagged by Paul.

1. I love bluegrass music
2. I think SoBe No Fear energy drink tastes like grapefruit. It contains no grapefruit.
3. I can't stand wikis
4. I have a fixation about female Australian pop stars, except Kylie Minogue. I'm not totally insane. She sucks.
5. I had 11 toes for a short while. Corrected by surgery. I don't miss it.

I tag Michael, Mark, Pete, Kurt, and Lance.

Over thanksgiving, my brother loaned me a Nikon D100. This is my first foray into digital photography beyond using my shoephone's camera to take blurry snapshots of strange supermarket items.

Sending photos to Flickr, I'm finding I'm going to exceed the limits of their free-ride accounts. My first thought was "oh, I should go FlickrPro". Then I decided to check out some other services before I go about spending money.

Currently I'm checking out SmugMug.

So far, I like the slideshow feature. I think I like the themeability, but then again, I reckon I just want a Flickr theme. I like the fact I can have multiple galleries. The downside to multiple galleries, though, is I no longer have just "my flickr," but rather "my foo gallery on my smugmug." Flickr's concepts of sets as pulling from a global gallery as an organizational tool may make more sense in the long run. It's not about what gallery a photo lives in, but which collection(s) the photographer has chosen to display it in.

Of course, as my wife said, "but everyone else is on Flickr".