While I was listening to NPR yesterday, I realized that their “ads”, read by NPR staff, are basically the equivalent of the text ads in search engines like Yahoo Search. They’re usually highly relevent to the audience, but subtle enough to not overpower the content.

Well, I had my first Segway ride today, over at The Tech Museum in San Jose. It feels pretty natural to move forward and back on it, but I nearly ran out of the little coned in area they had for it when I tried to figure out how to turn. It would definitely take a few minutes practice to get the hang of it. The 0-degree turn radius was very cool though.

I realized that what makes it look so strange is that the people riding it are not perceptably moving their bodies, yet they are moving. We’re used to seeing people move their arms and legs when they wark or at least their legs when they ride a bike.

The rest of the museum was standard-museum-type stuff. About 10% of the exhibits were broken at the time, probably from all the kids banging on stuff. We spent more time than we thought we would exploring the exhibits and we caught a pretty good IMAX film, Coral Reef Adventure. Part of it was shot in Fiji which was where we had our honeymoon, so watching it brought back good memories.

The people in the film were often talking about how dangerous diving was and how they had to avoid sharks, getting the bends and other underwater hazards. I couldn’t help but think that it might be easier if they didn’t have to swim around with that huge IMAX camera box between them.

It was a fun day though and we got to explore downtown San Jose a bit, which we really haven’t done since we lived here. There’s lots of caches there, so I’m sure we’ll be back.

The Sunnyvale Town Center Mall or (the WAVE as they tried to rename it) is closing. We went in today and most of the non-chain stores were closing out and selling everything at half off in preparation for the Aug. 31 shutdown of the mall. The Target and Macys anchor stores will remain open.

I’m glad they’re finally putting that mall out of its misery. It’s always been weird going there when half the stores were closed. I’ve never seen a Carl’s Jr. or Cinnabon close, but they did in this mall. I hope it does get revitalized at some point; it sure is a convenient place for us to go shopping and there was a good Hallmark store in there at least. I know the city was never really happy it was there as it breaks up the Murphy street downtown area, but it would be great if something compelling were to end up there. Maybe it will drive more people to Murphy street which is a cute little one block stretch of shops and restaurants. It sure was happenning this morning for the weekly Farmer’s Market.

I’ve never been a big fan of New York City. It’s just too big and too busy with way too many people. Then every once a while something crazy happens and the whole city goes into crisis. I bet a lot of people give up on New York after this latest incident and move to saner cities like Boston, just like people leave San Francisco after earthquakes or when the economy implodes.

So, can I post to my blog from my Treo? Apparently I can. Pretty cool.

Just in case you’re trying to eliminate all the possibilities.

“Whats with the frickin’ crickets?!”

— Anne, lying in bed last night, apparently not amused at the crickets who have moved into our backyard.

I rolled over on my ankle on a hike a week ago and now it hurts more than it did an hour after I injured it. Damn. Well, I guess I have good excuse to skip running for the rest of the week.

I’m pretty sure that computers are making us stupid. The more I stare at my monitor, the more dumb things come out. If I spend 2 seconds thinking while not staring at a computer, I usually think much better. My best ideas usually come to me in the shower for some reason. I wonder what would happen if I brought a waterproof computer into the shower. Probably nothing, except I wouldn’t get very clean.

Had a good time in Tahoe. Hiking, watersports, gambling… what more could you ask for? The cat is glad we’re back too. He’s been reminding us of that at 5 am for the last few days. Grrr. That fan sure is effective at drowning out his meows when we lock him out of the room. Thankfully in this house the door is too hard to open. When we lived in LA, he figured out how to open our bedroom door and was very loud in doing so.