Tab Parade in the Clouds

My laptop broke, sometime in December. I think I'd done some grocery shopping at Costco, and the bulk packages filled up the pannier space in which the Mac would ordinarily fit, so I foolishly strapped it in, under the lid, but atop the bags--I got most of the way home before it tumbled out onto the street. The dents looked pretty ugly, but when I got home, I was still able to push all the peripherals into their chosen slots. Nonetheless, it froze up when I popped the lid (it had already had some troubles under a previous owner, including body damage, so "popping the lid" means removing the rubber band that straps it shut in transit). However, curiously enough, the next day, it returned to normal. I immediately took the opportunity to back up to Time Machine, not expecting to duplicate the start-up success, but it kept on trucking for another few weeks. Then, one day at work, it had a "kernel panic". I only know those words because a client happened to be in the shop at the time and recognized the message flashing on the frozen screen. Ever since then, it makes the noises (the orchestral "dunnnn") of starting up, and the fan whirs to beat the band, but no screen ever appears.

It's been a couple weeks since I tried now... maybe today? Nope.

I've been waiting for a basic MacBook to show up among the refurbished itemes on the Apple website, but they're few and far between, so weeks have passed now, wherein I've been stealing time on Deb's computer at home, and laying out patterns on Scott's computer at work, while I dream of one day "getting a good deal".

On Deb's Firefox browser, I opened a separate window for the tabs I tend to accumulate in browsing; but I haven't been doing a very thorough job of reading and deleting those tabs--even the tabs I've read and may want to keep, I've been hesitant to log bookmarks for, since I'm not using my own computer. The other day, I inadvertently clicked the red button to remove the window, instead of the yellow button to stow it in the dock, and a message popped up, saying "you are about to delete 61 tabs". I canceled.
Okay, all that stuff's gonna have to just sit in the library for now. There's no way I'm going to read through all the materials on 61 tabs anytime soon. So, I'll use this post as a bookmarks folder, that I can dip back into, if and when I ever end up replacing my old laptop. I'll eliminate some of the weak links, putting this together, and in the meantime, maybe someone else will find something interesting among the tabs below:

• Move to Amend the constitution, to reverse gov't trend toward treating corporations as persons. Apparently, this week, the Supreme Court made it even clearer that they think of these fictional business constructs as having all the rights of sentient human beings.
  
• Self-reliance in the wake of disaster, lessons to learn from Haiti, Popular Mechanics--the top three things this makes me feel like doing: (1) get a wind-up solar flashlight/radio/USB charger, (2) keep the bathtub clean enough to fill up with drinking water when the time comes, and (3) get a shotgun
• Alert: NYTimes switching to paid subscription model next year
• Dewey Music, an interface for browsing public domain music on archive.org. I've whiled away a few enjoyable hours just clicking on the peculiar descriptions people have devised to describe their "genre".
  
• Clay Shirky believes women could do well to claim for themselves some of the male capacity "to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks"
• a reminder to pick up some highly-touted-yet-eminently-affordable bourbon, to infuse with bacon, for breakfast cocktail treat
• other better uses for bacon fat, than dumping it down the toilet, including bacon fat mayonnaise
• photo gallery from a NY-area field trip to encourage DIY butchery
• website for an UK campaign to expose the ridiculousness of homeopathy
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation's, "list of a dozen important trends in law, technology and business that we think will play a significant role in shaping online rights in 2010"
• The Edge Annual Question 2010: How is the internet changing the way you think?
• the pristine website of Sarah Jane Newbury, Britain's Most Famous Virgin
• 40 restaurants that will give you free food, provided you first prove you can eat more than humanly possible, in a preposterously brief amount of time, or something like that
• YouTube Doubler mash-up: furious can-pecking parakeet vs. death metal rooster!
• searchable online archive of Harper's Index
• Vice Magazine video Travel Guide to Liberia
• some blog posts discussing creative panhandler signs (including more in comments), as reference for the upcoming NBS/Adobe Books sign show
  
• Bruce Sterling's State of the World 2010
• news item pointing out that, while typing just about any major religion into the Google search bar, followed by the word "is", yields a Google suggestions column of all sorts of quick opinions on the matter, typing "Islam is" renders Google mute
  
• more Google search fun, for people who frame their searches in the form of a question: the Ask Google tumblog
• Two Gentlemen of Lebowski --as mentioned in a previous post
  
• NYTimes article about the "Americanization of Mental Illness"
• a recent issue of Harper's contained a portion of an interview with Christian Bok, about his attempt to write a poem in the DNA of a certain bacteria that has proven very evolution-resistant, in hopes that the poem's code will outlive the likely span of humankind on Earth--a task much more logistically complicated than attempting to describe it briefly here, which itself exceeds my capabilities. But I have that in print: this reminded me to put his Eunoia, five chapters, each written with a single vowel throughout, on my Amazon Wish List
• a Paul Spinrad BB guest post, picturing God as "The Great Game Designer", reminded me to look again at a Times article I enjoyed reading a few years back, about Nick Bostrom's theories concerning the likelihood of our living within a simulated reality developed by the machines of our perceived future. This led onward, to other blog bits and mag articles: a Pesco BB link points to an Atlantic article from '88, excerpting a Robert Wright book profiling Ed Fredkin, and his views on "the universe as a computer"; a Wired piece from 2002, in which Kevin Kelly opines on "the transcendent power of digital computation"; and another Wired piece from '95, in which Hans Moravec suspects "robots will replace us as the dominant form of life on Earth" by 2040 (fleshed out further in his book, Mind Children)
  
• Speaking of games: BB has been posting, lately, all sorts of lists of games--2010 Indie Games Fest guide, best indie games of '09, and the indie games student showcase--few of which are available as Mac downloads, or online play, but, oh, how those few have been eating up the leisure time I'd ordinarily spend reading all these other unread links! The undisputed time sink champion of the household thus far is Chain Factor (the online version of iPhone app, Drop7), but it's easy to while away the day on the rooftops of Canabalt; I enjoyed puzzling out Windosill enough to even shell out $3 for the whole game; other fun puzzles include VVVVVV, Continuity, Closure, and Every day the same dream, ranked in order of ascendant level of creepy atmosphere of entrapment. Today I Die took me a hint to get the hang of, but its plot arc serves as a poetically gleeful antidote to the tone of the last few I mentioned. Also fun, as a shoot 'em up, unbeleaguered by plot concerns, but unfortunately a little buggy, is Star Guard. Oh--and I am as yet undefeated at Browser Pong. You probably shouldn't even ask me to play, unless you have an unquenchable thirst for losing. (UPDATE: since I wrote this, BB has set up a game page, which lists most of the above, and many more. And I remain undefeated at Browser Pong)
• a list of David Brooks' year end Best Essay awards includes a Wilson Quarterly history of Central Asia (starting way, way back in the pre-"stan" era), a Weekly Standard profile of Marion Barry, a New Yorker breakdown of what's broken down in US health care, and a study of the physical and mental damages wrought by NFL play--all of which look fascinating, but also very long, as essays go--by my attention-hampered standards anyway. I did manage to make it all the way through the compelling story of a wrongful execution in Texas, but only by reading it aloud to Deb, in lieu of television one night. Also, Brooks encourages me to augment my regular diet of Boing Boing (which, along with the NYTimes, is responsible--in case you couldn't tell--for nearly all of the tabs listed here) with helpings of Arts & Letters Daily and/or The Browser
• 5 Jokes About The Apparent Eagerness Of Certain Democratic Members Of Congress To Abandon Health Care Reform In Light Of Scott Brown’s Electoral Victory
• Grassroots mapping in Lima, Peru
• Pardon Me <--The rest of the links in this post, besides being bookmarks, bring you some kind of value, perhaps some promise of edification, with the possible exception of furious can-pecking parakeet vs. death metal rooster. I might also have to make an exception for this one.

After that, there were about a dozen more tabs related to booking houses in Sea Ranch for a weekend wedding party coming up this summer.