I am doing something this week my family is eminently not good at, actually seeing each other.  Like many families of the modern age we have spread to all corners of the U.S.: my mother to Virginia, my Dad to Texas or Minnesota depending on the time of year, my sister is still in my home town of Fargo, I have one brother in San Francisco and my natural-brother is in Seattle.  We generally all stay in touch with the occasional phone call.

Today I was spending my morning as I usually do reading various newspapers and I noticed an article on how the military has stopped delivering 13 different websites to military personnel to free up bandwidth to be used in recover efforts in Japan, a smart move for sure.  I had no idea Amazon, MTV, Metecafe's websites was literally getting in the way of any military operations.

I like to get at least one blog post up a week, and I was sitting here this morning mulling over the prospects: the scraps of paper and short e-mail notes I have left myself with ideas.  However none of them really seem appropriate or well-timed.

Sometimes I think the same law that keeps a gyroscope upright keeps me upright: the conservation of angular momentum.  In the physics sense, the law relates to the rotational component of momentum, in a less geek-squad view sometimes I am less sure I am making progress in any specific direction but that I am spinning around terribly fast and that perhaps that alone keeps me from falling over.

The hulking mass of twisted, crumpled and lightly worn clothing compressed into a plastic baby blue basket could not be ignored any longer.  While it fit in the container the density of the object must have started to draw other objects in the room closer to it.  The calipers of modern physics allow only a partial understanding of my laundry pile, certainly interdimensional objects swallow up some of my socks and underwear explaining the almost constant need to perform laundry tasks.

My apartment complex has several areas with laundry machines, but these rudimentary implements are not nearly large enough to contain the mass of my laundry nor the can produce the high velocity agitation of the super-colliders at the laundromat on Grand Avenue in Grover Beach.  So, I got everything I would need for the two block journey (cell phone, e-book, and a lot of quarter-shaped silver objects the particle accelerators require to function).

I think in my head I made this into a scientific-physics adventure because the mundane task of shoving clothes through water can be a bit lacking.  I inadvertently made it much more interesting by not checking the pockets of my kids clothes.  They stay with me on weekends and in the flurry of activity I apparently failed to observe the embedding of several handfuls of Light-Bright pieces. 

Most of the people in the facility noticed me scooping the pieces, especially as they ker-plinked the ground having slipped out of my hand...half went back in the machine and hit tin, the other half bouncing off the side of the machine and onto the linoleum floor.

I re-pocketed the pieces, essentially just for the photo above.

Having less-than-stealthfully repositioned my clothes into the dryer I turned on my eBook reader.  I recently got the Nook Color eBook reader and had already changed the firmware so it is more of an Android tablet than anything else.  I used my phone to create a WIFI network so I could pull vital status updates from people on Facebook and see the latest picture of Kim Kardashian without make-up (the website made it sound like she looked like a cratered moon of a distant planet, she just looked the same to me sans makeup).

I was cruising along when I happened to glance down at my phone and noticed 3 other people had hopped onto the network I created.  Having recently upgraded my phone firmware too I had default settings on the WIFI, so no security was required for anyone to acquire it.  I quickly fixed the flaw once I noticed it, but then I started my cursory investigation.  There didn't look like a lot of good suspects.  Certainly not the person with less than a handful of teeth tumbling past the door, nor the mother of three just trying to keep her three year old from hopping in a front loading machine.  In fact, no one appeared to be operating any electronic devices.  But then I caught one guy, sitting in his truck clicking away on his iPhone4.  I know this because his WIFI credentials listed him as a user.  He was clearly taking his assigned seat inside his pick-up while his partner literally did the dirty work.  I never found the other two but suspect the car a few down from the truck which was loudly playing rap music was the next place to look.  The iPhone guy I don't get.  You have your own 3G service, why steal my WIFI?  I actually know the answer to that: he is probably on metered service, I am not.  It is the reason I have stuck with Sprint and forked out for the premium phone and the 'everything' plan.  This guy forked out for the premium phone too, but unless you really pony up with ATT or Verizon you'll end up seeking free WIFI wherever you go.

Phone providers are trying to clamp down on the amount of data they hand out (hey, so am I).

Interestingly the story about iPhone4 on Verizon is that the sales were far lower than expected, almost no lines opening day, and no reason for specially planned UPS services to deliver the expected mass of orders.

Bottom line is that a lot of iPhone users are in contracts, Android has very competitive products, and ultimately everyone knows it is a 3g device with the next greatest thing to be delivered this summer when it goes 4g.  That won't matter either since even that buyer will still be looking for free WIFI.