Well, Mike is on his way back home, one hopes. He's been through quite a bit. It will be good to see him.

In other news, tomorrow in Valentines Day, and hopefully it will be a nice one for all. Unfortunately, the wife seems to be coming down with something, but hopefully she can still enjoy the meal I'm going to cook tomorrow.

Baby smasher. Possibly the single funniest, and disturbing thing that I've seen all day. And that's after seeing the "Comfort Food for Bears" gay cookbook in a publishers catalog at work today. Via hypnagogica

"I could have been your statue,
I could have been your friend."

Man, I love Nick Drake. One of the strange side-effects of the modern day death of the ad jingle and the rise of "cool" music in commercials. A lot of the time I'll be watching TV, and I'll actually really be listening to the commercials and wonder, "how did they do that? damn, that sounds good."

Anyway, I love Nick Drake.

Nothing much going on. Fixed chicken curry for dinner.

Contemplating the mysteries of electrons. It's amazing how we can get these little waves/particles to behave in ways that are somewhat predictable, and even, dare I say it, useful. I was messing about with this toy drum machine thing, and I was looking for useful bends, in other words, I was short circuiting the circuit and looking for interesting results. What was cool was that when you connected these two resistors, it would go into this neat droning phased distorted tonesweep. Very cool. Not at all like a snare drum, really, which is what I was expecting.

I think what I find really interesting about circuit bending is how you can, if you're lucky and the toy/keyboard/whatever your bending is above a certain threshold of complexity, you can get these really neat nonlinear feedback loops. Which is basically what life is like. A nonlinear feedback loop. These things sometimes exhibit "behavior" that you might find complex, nearly random at times, but not. It can be earily beautiful.

Mike, by the way, is now in South America, in case you were wondering.

My friend Ashlie got in touch with me after a good long while. It's good to hear from her.

We went out to eat with Ken and Jessica on Friday night. The Kang Pa Nang was great, and the company was greater.

I found a Texas Instruments Speak & Math in a flea market on Friday. How cool is that? I'm going to have fun bending that one.