Razor

Saturday, 24 June 2000

I went in to work for a few hours this afternoon. Eric suggested yesterday that I do so, and though I had initially thought that just working up a few icons on my Palm and hacking together some pages Monday morning (early afternoon, more likely) would be sufficient, I'm glad I went in today. I got a lot more done than if I'd just fiddled Monday. We've now got mockups of three games we can show people, and I have a better idea of what areas of WML I need to work on figuring out exactly how they work. Implementation of the <go> tag seems inconsistent in multi-card documents on the Yospace Nokia emulator, for example, or maybe there's something there I'm just not getting. More research Monday.

I stopped off at Paragon Sporting Goods on the way in. Sporting goods stores are place I just don't hang out in, but the stuff is starting to look good to me. I'm getting a little of that fetishistic itch that designers hope customers will get looking at their products. Current sporting gear looks neat and hi-tech in a way that's nothing like what looked hi-tech when I was growing up. It's odd to see the fashions change, and relieving to note my tastes changing in step -- it means I'm not yet at the age where everything looks bizarre and ugly, where I just shake my fist and rant about how the world has gone wrong and everything was better in my day. It means I'm not old yet.

While in Paragon I priced an item I'd been thinking about buying for a while: the Viza Razor scooter. This is a foot-powered scooter, like a two-wheeled skateboard with a handle, not a motorized job. The Razor is the category-killer for this particular line of product -- it's light (six pounds), collapsable, and stylish. I hunted around on the Net, but didn't find an online vendor with a significantly lower price, so after work I went back and bought one.

It's a spiffy device. Silvery metal, weld scars highly visible, well-designed locking mechanisms. One disappointment: Although the websites I looked at said the Razor is weight-rated at 350 pounds, the documentation in the box says not to ride it if you weigh more than 220 pounds (100 kg). I'm starting to wonder if the JDRazor (that's what the label on mine says) is the same thing as the Viza Razor; the clerk at Paragon said they were, and they looked identical. Mine didn't seem incapable of bearing my weight, but I may not be using it correctly -- I think an experienced user would spend more time resting his full weight on the device.

Riding it is a bit scary; I wound up chickening out and carrying it most of the way to the subway, which pretty much defeats the purpose of having it. I may buy some protective gear and practice with it in the park on weekends till I have the hang of it. Or maybe I should wait till I've lost 60 pounds. So it's into the closet with it for now, at least till I've picked up some fetish gear.

I finished The Iron Dragon's Daughter last night -- magnificent. A book just rich with ideas, well-drawn characters, and drama. I've started (and halfway finished) Greg Costikyan's First Contract, an SF comedy in which the aliens conquer Earth with superior business models. Amusing, but it suffers from my having recently read Cryptonomicon. On the other hand, First Contract is exactly the kind of short, fast-moving, light, clever SF that they used to write in the old days, and that we could use more of. (I'm so tired of authors who can't seem to say anything at less than 600 pages.)