Elliott Plack

Today's email stream has been oh so interesting.

Just some quick background: I own a house in Towson Manor Village which is
just east of downtown Towson, MD.

The chain started with the following request from a neighbor:

*From: Murray, L
Subject: people sleeping in the park pavilion

* *There was a person sleeping in the pavilion at the Towson Manor village
park this morning around 7:30 am. I also caught someone sleeping under the
pavilion bench 2 weeks ago. Who do we contact about this?*
*Lisa Murray*

Then a neighborhood official responded with:

*I haven't been able to get anyone over at the County to respond to my
repeated requests to have the pavillion removed. Any ideas as to how can we
get this to happen sometime this summer, while we have the good weather?

*
Another neighbor marvels back:
*
**Wouldnt it be fun if we all got together with our nifty tools and knocked
it down together as a neighborhood then have a party afterwards on the
rubble?!?!?!?!?*

Then comes the best reply I've ever read:

*Is it any wonder the Hitler was so successful? With modern social
networking we can out-do Nazi Germany in the fomenting of hate!

Just light the pavilion on fire and hopefully the person too while they are
sleeping. Or beat them to death with a baseball bat like those teenagers
did for fun as shown on 60 minutes.

Or...how about leaving them alone. Just a thought.... After all, I might
need to sleep under that pavilion before too long. You wouldn't want to
deprive a former neighbor would you? Or, is it as soon as one falls out of
the suburban formation they become expendable? 'For whom the bell tolls...
it tolls for thee'*

And it continues from there. What do you think? Should we raze the pavilion
or allow vagrants to sleep there?

I stopped using Remember the Milk about six months ago when my pro subscription ran out. I switched to a Mac/iPhone app called Things from Cultured Code, based on a twitter recomendation from Kevin Rose, or was it Veronica Belmont... Anyway I like the interface a lot more that Things provides.

Remember the Milk makes two Gmail plug-ins that anyone can add to their Gmail page, and I had done so and was trying to get rid of it. I thought that I had the Gadget, which is a piece of code that Gmail runs. However, I was actually using a Firefox extension that was causing Gmail to run all kinds of slow. Bad programming fail! So, all I had to do was remove that and I was good to go.

I deleted my account with RTM for good measure.

What a day. So far i've been from my house downtown, to Owings Mills,
back to Charles Village, and now I'm picking up dry cleaning in
Timonium. The life of a suburban exile. I also missed my meeting in
this whole fiasco.

So I've got this blog running and I hope to be posting more soon. Did
I mention my iphone battery totally sucks?! Wow it dies all of the
time when I need it most.

I stumbled upon a great site using the Google Maps API to show you where bars are in your area, and the specials on any given night. It's called Drinktown, and you should check it out today.

Now, it's a bit buggy, but otherwise very usable. For instance, I just learned that Looney's in Canton has $2 Blue Moons on Tuesdays... nice!

I'd definitely recommend this site if your trying to figure out where to go on a given night. Very cool indeed

This morning at my daily Panera breakfast trek I noticed a peculiar piece of kitchen equipment that I have never seen on a counter line before. The only label said "Roundup", and there were three LED Lights, Egg, Bacon, and another. Aside from a single button there was no indication of what it did.

Curious, I asked the man working the cooking operation what it was. Busy as ever he curtly replied, "Egg cooker." With nothing else to go on, I Googled roundup only to get a bunch about the weed killer. I tried other terms like bacon, eggs, cooker, along with roundup with no results. In fact most of the results were like "World of Warcraft easter egg roundup" or something. Fustrated, as a last ditch I tried, "roundup brand" egg cooker, and with luck it was the only result 1-1, of 1!

Wow, so its a specialized food service gadget that cooks eggs via direct heat and steam all at once, for that perfect, quick egg. Very cool indeed. Get yours now for $2,490.00 at A.J. Tunes and Co's Roundup e-commerce site: (link note you must click on the egg link). End result? Perfect!