• New phone: Ordered. It's a SLVR L7.
• Holster for said phone: Also Ordered. Amazon.com did not carry this, for some strange reason, so I had to visit another vendor.
• Ordering new service, getting SIM card: On hold until phone arrives. I suspect this will simply be a trip to the nearest T-Mobil store.

I wonder if the mystique and respect given to the concept of nobility (in a very abstract sense) in American culture is tracable significantly to Disney. I now find that kind of thing very irritating..

A few extra interesting bits:

• jwz on feed aggregation. It's an old post, but a response of sorts to a recent post by someone I know. I agree with jwz completely. The point of a feed is to spread information, and to pretend to restrict that with license or copyright is both antisocial and like trying to stop the tide.
• I had a few nice conversations on my future-blogging project today, although I don't think anyone's read any of it yet. Here it is on Livejournal. I also had a nice political discussion at the 61c.
• The recent in-the-news stuff on nullity naturally brought up some discussion among the CS crowd at CMU, mostly derision. I am not convinced that all the criticism I've seen on the web (and among the CMU folk) is valid - one guy, for example, tosses around phrases like "meaningless expression" or "cannot do it", which are a bit unfair given that if we, for example, were working within a mathematical framework that did not admit negative numbers, we could not subtract larger numbers from smaller ones, and if we did not permit irrational numbers, we could not take the square root of negative numbers. There is some value to working within different mathematical frameworks, and the possibility of extending in different directions and formalising things outside boundaries may lead to new and possibly useful such frameworks. Likewise, the feature that without the concept, the (presumed) foundations of the framework reduce to the common framework is a good feature of the framework (but, at least as I understand, some clusterfolk chuckled at it). I suspect a lot of people could stand to take some philosophy of science classes (and perhaps more philosophy in general). Overall, a lot of very pro-science people, in my opinion, don't look down at their foundations enough. That said, I fail to see the utility of the alternate framework. I still will give it a decent read. The biggest difference I immediately see between the properties of Nullity and NaN, as frequently compared in things I've read about the idea, is that Nullity equals itself while NaN does not. NaN may not be intended to be part of a proper additional mathematical scope-of-values (I'm not sure about this), but I don't think that it should be disqualified as such. I must confess that I've always privately held, as a vanity, that infinity multiplied by zero is zero (at odds with their terms), although I won't claim that to be anyhing but a personal quirk.
• Frustrated at parts of KoL, I spoiled myself heavily by reading some parts of the Wiki, and am now much closer to ascension. I am undecided if I will ascend immediately or farm for a bit, and am again unsure how I want to ascend next time. I am seriously thinking about the hardcore path, as there are some items I'd like to get from eventually doing Hardcore no-meat no-drink paths, and that would be a pain without a nice set of hardcore-permanent skills. If I ever want those items, I should start preparing for it from the first rebirth. Hmm. Also, if I want to do this and still do another idea I had, I need to ascend before the crimboween stuff finishes to get an item I wanted to wear for my entire next character run.
• Eric and I had a cool idea for a custom, strange themed ascension, based off of some Terry Pratchett stuff. It'll take us awhile before we're ready to do this.
• I am very pleased that both Mindspillage and Oscar were appointed to the Wikimedia Foundation board recently.