A while back, I wrote a post with some advice on how to feed medicine to your cat. I now have realized that if your cat is determined not to take the pill, it isn’t going to happen. Javier is on steroids (long story) and he’s decided that he is not going to let us feed him medicine any more. No amount of water or rubbing his throat is going to change that.

Now, on the cell phone saga. My Samsung phone from T-Mobile is on its last legs. The screen was damaged a while back and there is this black nothingness spreading across it. I can barely read the phone number I am about to dial, and I get the feeling that one of these days it isn’t going to work at all. It lost its charge today, so I panicked and decided that I had to get a new phone. The problem is that I don’t want to renew my contract, so I don’t want to get my phone at the T-Mobile store. T-Mobile blows (to put it mildly), and there is no way in Hell I am signing another contract with them.

I went on Craigslist, my favorite place to shop for things, and found a place in the Mission District of San Francisco that claimed to be selling inexpensive used cell phones. It is on Mission St., which is the sort of busy city thoroughfare where you can buy Ecstasy or crack at two in the afternoon, shop at a dollar store, catch a bus, buy cheap socks, get really good tacos, enjoy a drink, and purchase a neon Last Supper themed wall clock. It is also really filthy and there are tons of pigeons. Oh, and I used to live there. Anyway, I called the cell phone guy and he said he had some used phones. He also said that when I get there I should either call and let him know I’m there (duh, no cell phone!) or “knock on the window.”

I took the BART train over to the neighborhood and walked two blocks to the store. Actually, I walked past the store and then turned around and realized that it looked like it had gone out of business. There is plywood over the door and the metal security gate was closed. I knocked (hard) on the window three or four times a face appeared as the curtain at the back of the display window parted. The owner let me in to a small, dark space with leather jackets (all for sale) hanging up the height of the left wall and glass cases under the counter filled with cell phones in the middle of the store. There was also a work bench covered in electronic gear and a number of computers.

All of the phones were heavily used and most had minimal features and sold for $40-$60. I asked why I wouldn’t just go on ebay or craigslist or buy a phone there that was newer and probably cost less. He said I should buy from him because it was a reputable store. Plus, he doesn’t charge sales tax.

I told him I’d have to think about it.

Happy Valentine’s Day! Want to impress a special someone with an email-able candy treat? Want it personalized? Go to crytogram.com and make a conversation heart!

Special thanks to markasaurus reader Jessica for pointing out yet another wonder of the internet.

A few days ago, I was chatting with a coworker about frosting printers (I’m sure you have seen the cakes at the grocery store with pictures of people on them, or of a Little League baseball team, or somebody’s new puppy). A new printer had arrived in the office and we were discussing how great it would be if we could get a cake printer for the office- we could print our architectural drawings straight on to delicious buttercream frosting! Alas, it was too good to be true. Our office has a new color inkjet instead.

This led me to do some research, and I came across a product from a company called Kopykake (they must have figured out how clever it is to use the letter k instead of a c). The people over at Kopykake really couldn’t make it any easier, their signature “Kwik-Kopy III” device works in just three easy steps:

1. Simply take any photograph, drawing, logo or artwork, place it into the Kwikscan IV and press the Copy button.
2. The system automatically crops the photo or artwork and sizes it to fit the Frosting Sheets.
3. Within minutes, you’ll have a beautiful work of art, ready to be placed on any cake.

Note that it doesn’t just make dessert, it makes a beautiful work of art.

There’s nothing quite like slicing into a photo of your face with a sharp knife to celebrate a special day!

I’m not sure how the gmail advertising works, but for some reason Google thinks I am really interested in things like Christmas outfits for pet birds. Actually, they are right. I am VERY interested in things like that but I never actually buy them.

I really don’t get the new hipster fascination with shitty old mopeds. I can see where many of them, especially aging hipsters no longer able to ride up San Francisco’s steep hills on fixies, needed to find another method of transportation. But a 1970s 2-stroke moped that burns oil and is probably more polluting than a Hummer? I’m not sure what exactly is cool about these vehicles, but then again I’m not sure what is cool about not washing your hair or wearing skin-tight tapered jeans that don’t fit in any sense of the word “fit”.

This weekend, I had the pleasure of visiting the Going out of Business sale at the Drug Barn in Colma. Much of the remaining stock has been there a very long time, but a few lucky shoppers are still stocking up on off-brand cherry flavored vodka and religious candles. My favorite remaining item had to be this stuffed dolphin, left over from Valentine’s Day (in 1982, most likely):

The prestigious California Street Cable Car whisked us to the top of Nob Hill

On Sunday, Rob and I went into the time machine known as Nob Hill. We took the California Street cable car up to the Fairmont hotel, and then walked over to his apartment and used the rotary phone (yes, you can still use rotary phones). We had to take this adventure at the beginning of the month after he had bought a new transit pass but before his old one expired. There was no way I was going to pay $5 to ride the cable car three blocks.

Feel like you need a rotary phone of your own but you don’t have a land line? Have I got the solution for you. A rotary phone with a slot for the SIM card from your mobile phone! Okay, so maybe this is the equivalent of having a horse pull your Prius around town, but what’s more satisfying than slamming down a nice heavy phone when a telemarketer wakes you up on Saturday morning?

The author enjoying an old-timey phone conversation

I read this article while I was at the gym today and was very impressed by the advances that have been made in recycling in recent years. While you often hear that it is inefficient to recycle and that it is actually worse for the environment than not recycling, this study by the Technical University of Denmark and the Danish Topic Centre on Waste refutes these claims by looking at an array of 55 life-cycle analyses and 200 scenarios to compare recycling with other disposal methods. They found that in 83% of all scenarios that included recycling, it was indeed better for the environment.

This article also explains how recyclables are sorted when they are all in the same bin and how aluminum is plucked out of the stream of trash despite it’s non-magnetivity. I always wondered about that (click on “read more” at the bottom to find out the secret).

I was thinking about the environment before I went to the gym because Monday is Blog Action Day, a day when bloggers around the world have pledged to write about the environment. Now I have to think of another topic for Monday because I couldn’t wait to post this one…
read more | digg story

Wow. What a difficult title.

After completing the second of nine Architecture Registration Exams today (Lateral Forces, if you’re interested) I wandered over the the Apple Store in downtown San Francisco to catch a glimpse of the new iPhone. After hearing so many people in the media discussing it in terms usually reserved for the discovery of a cure for a terminal illness, I thought I should see it for myself. Considering I haven’t even purchased an iPod (but I did win a free iPod Nano) I’m not a very likely customer.

I had to wait a minute to get to the table where people were eagerly fondling the phones, but I finally got my chance. The screen is gorgeous, as has been mentioned elsewhere. My reverence for the device pretty much stops there. It is cool how when you turn the phone sideways the screen automatically flips to a horizontal orientation, and it is also nice that they have worked in a fairly intuitive way to zoom in on web pages (it shows them in their original format, so everything is tiny). Other than that, I found it pretty hard to use. My thumbs could not accurately type on the on-screen keyboard- it is nowhere as easy to compose emails etc. on as something like a Blackberry. I checked out this website, but it took several tries to type in “markasaurus” correctly as I kept ended up with a “z” in the middle.

I think I’ll hold on to that $600 and spend it elsewhere. Unless you have an overwhelming need to look at kiddie porn on the bus or update your myspace profile while driving, this device hardly seems necessary.

In other news, check out this fascinating story from the NY Times about how cats domesticated themselves. No wonder they think they are better than dogs (you might want to skip out on this link if you think Noah brought dinosaurs on the Ark because it will seriously conflict with the notion that the world is 3,000-4,000 years old).