I’ve had nothing interesting to write here. Most of the silly pithy stupid things I’d post here are ending up on twitter. Occasionally I’ll add something separately to tumblr but that site is mostly a regurgitation of whatever is here or on twitter (or del.icio.us).

We have no major travel plans. I would like to head to Illinois in May or June but haven’t picked a date range to shoot for.

We keep talking about buying a new car but nothing on the market is really moving us. We want something with the space of our MDX and mid-20s mileage. Our 2002 MDX tends to get (still) 22mpg highway, and averaged 25mpg on the way to/from Miami in December. It’s possible that the onboard computer is lying.

I need a new cell phone. I had this notion I’d write up a blistering critique of both the Motorola RAZR I bought a couple of years ago as well as the Nokia e70 I got at the end of 2006. My critiques can boil down to:

• The software on the RAZR looks and feels like it was developed by engineers who had never actually tried to use a cell phone before. Or the Microsoft Vista team (the RAZR seems to want a lot of confirmation, perhaps it had a difficult childhood).
• The Nokia e70 started out well but its performance degraded over time, and now I think the antenna is hosed since it barely gets signal (though this could also be T–mobile’s way of telling me to find another carrier).
• The camera quality of both phones is fine, however I constantly find myself losing pictures I’ve taken because both phones require you to decide what you want to do with the picture you’ve taken. If I snap a picture and then close the phone without confirming that I want to store the picture then I lose it. On the RAZR I think it’s three steps to store a picture after taking it, on the Nokia it may only be one step, but still annoying.

I suppose I should wait for the 3G Apple iPhone in June but I think I’m quickly annoying those around me with my utter lack of care about my current phone situation. The worst thing that’s happened is about a week ago I received five phone calls (including two from my apparently concerned Grandmother), which I had no idea about. For three days. I’ve since returned the calls, well the ones that needed returning.

I continue my quest to rid my life of detritus, both physical and digital. In the run–up to Seder, I pitched five boxes of books (pitched ≡ donated to charity). I finished going through a pile of family photos and am now packaging them together for their flight to Austin. I also ran a series of scripts on the home fileserver to analyze the photos we have. I allegedly have 20,000+ photos on the Mac (counting JPEG images). By computing a sha1 sum on each image I discovered that there are 30+ copies of the top 1000 images. I haven’t actually done anything with this yet, but I think what I’ll end up doing is eliminate all duplicates and rename the images in a Year/Month/Day directory structure (unfortunately there’s many filename collisions because Sony only numbers images to 9999).

Frisket just had her yearly physical. She is in perfectly fine shape. The medical assistant and I will take a few days to recover.

Both Frisket and Sailor were happy to see so many people Saturday night, but upset that they could not join us for the reading of the haggadah.

We forgot an orange for the seder plate this year, and almost forgot a cup for Elijah.

I did not see the Pope. I had no interest in seeing the Pope. The Pope did fly over me, twice. Somehow I did not feel the presence of grace.

Lisa started her new job last week. So far so good. I’ve posted a couple of pictures of her after her first day for friends and family only on my flickr account. You can get a sense of her new attire from this picture of Sailor: .