TED is a yearly conference bringing together people from Technology Entertainment and Design fields. Basically every year the conference hosts some of the most interesting people in the world and has them give a 20 minute talk about all sorts of amazing things. Several of the blogs I read posted a number of talks from the 2008 conference. I watched a bunch of these and found them extremely amazing. The other day Boing Boing posted the top 10 most viewed TED talks from the last three years. I just finished watching them all today and wanted to post the link. I recommend watching them all. My favorite was Jeff Han’s talk on the touch screen he created because two years after he gave the talk we are using his technologies in daily life. That makes me excited when I watch Johnny Lee’s Wii hacks lecture because I feel like the Wii remote technology is going to be something we are going to be seeing a lot of in the future. I just think the future is very exciting and a lot of these talks prove that.

Holy shit. Someone needs to get a video of this knife in action up on YouTube right fucking now.

It takes routine stabbings to a whole new level!

 Update: Here is the video!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa_NC-_fvKs[/youtube]

This is not going to be the most exciting update ever, but it just may change your life.  While I have several reasons, the number one reason I have for not jumping under a speeding bus is that I am really excited about how quickly technology is going.   I am really looking forward to being around for the Singularity and having my brain implanted into a robot.  Someone was bitching to me about global warming the other day, and I assured her that robots do not need an atmosphere or trees, and that once they rule the world, our sensitive flesh coats will be unnecessary.  They are the next evolution and we just need to spend all our time working on robots so they can carry on our legacy long after the last human has been exterminated in the robot uprising.

Anyway, one of my favorite new advancements in technology is one that if I had my whole life, I probably would have forgotten a lot less of my crazy schemes and/or brilliant freestyle rap lyrics.  I also probably would have missed less apointments, because I barely know how to text message on my phone, much less use the calendar.  The technology is not so much a technology, as a website called Jott.com.

Using Jott.com you can call their number, and leave yourself a message which they will then turn into text and email it to you, or text it to your phone.  You can also have it send it to your phone at a specific time, reminding you of something you have to do.  I can finally stop writing shit on my hands.  ALSO if your friends sign up, you can Jott them and send them emails via the telephone.  It is pretty amazing.  So if you are my friend in real life, let me know once you sign up (it is free) and we can connect or whatever.  Now whenever I get any hair brained schemes I can let you all know about them while I am walking over a bridge trying to figure out the meaning of life, or how I can bring more traffic to my blog.

Get Jott Now.

As you know this site has been a bit slow recently and as you know this is because I now have a day job.  That job is working for the Internet Archive scanning old books that are now in the public domain so that anyone can download them forever.  I have gotten pretty good at it if the books don’t suck.  I scanned 4300 pages today.  Anyway I wanted to show you guys my little library.  You can click this link and look at all the books I have ever scanned.  Updated daily.

Anyway, the last cart of books we did had all these insanely racist old books with titles like “The Negro Problem” and “The Black Shadow And The Red Death“.  The later is a religious attack on the blacks and latinos in America at the turn of the century.  The book calls the Chinese “Coolies” and refers constantly to “Huns”.  It is so insanely fucked up.

When people ask me my ethnic background I have been known to say that I am 1/4th Swiss, 1/4th Scottish and 1/2 Texan.  I am not quite sure of the hillbilly roots on my fathers side, but its a pretty reasonable guess that his family was living in Texas between 1836 and 1845 when Texas was known as The Republic Of Texas and was in no way part of these United States.  And since I don’t really know what else I am made of (I have heard rumors of French, Irish, Dutch and German) I just consider myself part Texan.  My father spent the first 20 sum years of his life living in Denton, TX a small one horse town suburb of Dallas.  My grandmother still resides in Argyle which is a 0 horse town which is pretty much a suburb of Denton.  (Full disclosure, my grandmother owned at least one horse and at some point in my life it tried to buck me off and I held on because even at 9 years old I was a bad ass.)  My grandmother is also pretty much a bad ass and she proved to me that living in a trailer home is not as bad as it is made to seem in the movies.  She also retired from her job when she was 70 in order to become a truck driver with her husband who taught me to shoot a gun when I was like 7.

Anyway, I could write many paragraphs about my father’s life in Texas before he quit eating meat and became a sell out corporate lawyer and bought me this Mac Book, but that is not the point of this blog entry.  The point is to show you this NY Times article my dad sent me this morning about the Denton, TX rock scene.  The article talks about how Denton is the new Austin and the hipsters are leaving Austin because it is too commercial and trendy.  Now I have spent a good deal of time in both Denton and Austin and I will tell you this:  Denton is pretty much the town that George McFly grew up in in the first Back To The Future… Austin is not.  The funny thing is, that the NY Times article said almost EXACTLY that about a decade after I first thought it.  Denton has like one record store and 3 bars and this amazing hardware store that my dad told me has not changed since he was a kid in the 50’s.

There is a college there UNT, of which my father is a proud alum.  He briefly played on the same football team there as Mean Joe Green and he played clarinet in the school marching band. That is not exactly living the rock and roll dream but I do now own a copy of the UNT marching band’s record, which is exactly one more records than I have from his surf rock band who’s dream of fame was horrifically ended when their lead singer was run over by a motorboat and killed.  But these are the things you have to deal with when you are living in Texas.

Anyway, next time I am in Denton, I am going to have to check out this so-called rock scene.  It sounds fun.

Download: Midlake – Roscoe
For more Free Denton music check out Anyone’s Guess.

Because of my love of the HBO show OZ, about a year ago a friend recommended I check out the Wire which has a lot of the same cast. Over the last year I watched the entire series right up to the final episode ever that came out a few weeks ago. (Speaking of the last season of the Wire, I shot the after party to the season 5 premiere.) It was sad to see the end. I was talking about this to a friend and he recommended I check out The Corner which was a mini-series on HBO that was based on a book of the same name which eventually spun off into the Wire. The writer of the book, David Simon, was also the man responsible for Homicide back in the day. I used to watch that show and since it was filmed in Baltimore I have met tons of people in my life who have appeared as extras and such. I grew up in DC, and Baltimore is about an hour away and I have spent a lot of time there. The Corner and the Wire are also based on Baltimore which is probably one of the reasons I did the show so much.

Okay, let’s get back to the point of this post. The Corner like I said was based on a book. That book as a work of non fiction. The Corner the mini-series is fictionalized, but it is based on actual people. At the end of the series they interview some of them. The heroin addict mother on the show I recognized from a cameo she had in the Wire so I googled her. Her name is Fran Boyd. What I found when I looked her up was this amazing article in the New York Times about her recent marriage to a man named Donnie Andrews.

Donnie Andrews was the basis for the drug dealer murdering anti-hero on the Wire, Omar. Omar is by far my favorite character on the show, and probably everyone’s favorite character. I was shocked to learn he was based on a real person, a real person who was serving a life sentence for murder… That is until David Simon introduced him to Fran Boyd.

“They had a hunch Mr. Andrews, who was turning his life around by earning a general equivalency diploma, taking college-level courses and studying the Bible, could influence the life of Ms. Boyd, who was still nodding out in the old neighborhood. They gave Mr. Andrews her phone number.”

Mr. Andrews, also a former heroin user, understood her struggle and her pain. His first wife was murdered three years after he went to prison. He began calling Ms. Boyd frequently. Their conversations were sometimes “four and five hours long,” he said. After a $2,900 phone bill, limits were set on their calls. He used less expensive communication, too, sometimes writing three or four letters a week.

After Boyd and Andrews began talking, Andrews helped Boyd quit drugs forever and Boyd did everything she could to get Andrews paroled. After calls and letters and even convincing the DA who prosecuted Andrews to testify at his parole hearing he was released after 17 years. Andrews has turned his life around and now works security at a church and works in anti-gang outreach programs in Baltimore. Fran has been sober for many years and works in outreach programs for drug addicts. And in August of last year they were married.

I could not imagine a happier ending to a story that could have ended so badly for both of them. At the end of the Corner they tell you what happened to the people on the show since the book was written. They were not good stories. This one is, and it just goes to show you can never write people off.

Today is the exact 10 year anniversary of me losing my virginity. In celebration of this fact I am posting a project that I have been working on for a while. I was not thinking about today when I started the project, but when I realized what it was, I thought that this was a perfect time to post it. Enjoy.

On a recent drive through the neighborhood I grew up in I realized that most of the strong feelings that I had were a result of a nostalgia directly related to a more innocent feeling of women and my own sexuality that I had when growing up in Alexandria, VA. I wanted to do a photo project on this and take some images of the spots that gave me the most tingles. I decided to use Polaroid film because it’s number one use is taking dirty pictures of people. My relationship with the film has also been a sleazy one as 95% of the pictures I have taken using the medium have been of naked girls. I though documenting my early sex life would be a perfect reason to use Polaroids to do something other than take naked pictures, yet to still play on the sexual identity of the medium.

I lived in Alexandria from 1980 to 1999. These were my formative years and they were they determined the way I dealt with women. When I was a kid I was very weird and had no luck with girls. This was not really an issue until I transfered to a private school outside my neighborhood in the 4th grade. From that point on I was in school with the same people for the next 9 years. The first week of 4th grade I made a joke about eating a praying mantis and that haunted me for the rest of my time at the school. At my old school eating bugs was funny, at my new school it was weird. From then on I was the weird kid… and then the fat kid, and then the weird kid kid again when I started getting into punk rock my freshman year of high school. I eventually started working out, lost all the weight and starting in about the 10th grade I really came into myself and started acting confidently. I stopped getting beat up at school, but I still had no luck with girls, because even then I was still viewed as the weird kid who ate bugs. As soon as I met girls outside of school, that changed forever. I have spent the last decade of my life trying to make up for my short comings as a kid and that has left me perpetually single and probably a bit more promiscuous than is healthy. But my unhealthy relationship with women started slowly and those more innocent times bring back amazing memories and that’s what this project is all about. Working thorough those early sexual encounters and finding out what the fuck went wrong.

I decided only to include stories and images from directly around my old neighborhood. Many of the important events in my life happened outside this little area as my school and all my high school hang out points were farther away. That being said, this is the most concentrated area and because of that, being in these few square miles gives me the strongest sense of my past, both of my life and specifically of my early sexuality

This project can be viewed by visiting the Google Map I made. Each map point has a Polaroid and a description of why that photo is important. The map points are listed in chronological order and should be read in that order. I hope you enjoy the project, I spent way too much time on it.

To view higher resolution versions of the polaroids click here.

Update: Due to the amount of interest that this post has received, if you are linking this, please link this post and not the map directly, as the explanation of the project is important to it, and the google map did not allow me enough space to get all my thoughts down. Also, if you dig this, Digg it.

So, let’s get old school for a minute.  Back in the day (teh day?) people used to send me fan signs all the time.  The idea was you would write my name on your boobs and I would post it and give you a link and then people would come to my site to see the boobs and go to your site, to see more boobs.  Unfortunately I don’t really know any cam girls anymore, but I used to know TONS of them back in the day.  One of those girls was named Nay.  And guess where she’s from?  Orlando.  As you probably know I was just in Orlando and I met some of her friends and she added me on myspace, and we talked back and forth and realized that we knew each other in 2001.  The thing is… she was 14 then, and I mostly just made fun of the creeps who hit on her on my site.  Now she is 21 and has fake boobs and is a reasonable human.   She is actually helping me redesign my site… at least the parts mentioned in my last update.  Anyway, she made me an old school fan sign.  No boobs in it though.  Hopefully those will come soon.  Anyway, check out her new blog and her fan sign…

The two fan signs below it are also from Orlando.  The top one I took right before I left Orlando.  One of the guys I was staying with passed the fuck out so I wrote on him.  The bottom one is Ali and Kat and they are cute.  They got wasted on Tequila and Tacos and took this picture before we went to Carnival.  Fun.

If you want some traffic and me to link you, send me a fan sign.  It just has to be funny or sexy or both.  Check out these for example… some are better than others.

My friend Robyn is amazing…. and every bit as good as Annie Leivovitz. I am sure by now you have heard about this “controversial” topless photos of Hanna Montana star Miley Cyrus in Vanity Fair. Well my friend Robyn shot two comedians who do a thing called “Red State Update” in the style of the Vanity Fair photos. I think the photos are pretty brilliant. Compare below.