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I’ve got a 3G iPad that goes nearly everywhere with me. Pizza joints have online ordering. For emergencies I carry a Glock .40 caliber and my car has Onstar (Verizon) minutes. Given all that, what do I really need an iPhone for? Am I getting enough value to justify the $1,000 annualized expense?

Do I really need to have a phone in my pocket at all times?

Is it necessary to have a phone at all?

Kindle: $9.89
iPad: $10.99

Paperback: $8.99
Hardcover: $10.87
“Bargain” Hardcover: $6.40

I really want eBooks but I am firmly in the “eBooks should be cheaper” camp — I can’t lend an eBook to a friend, sell it at the second-hand bookstore, or display it on my bookshelf to create the appearance that I am a well-read person of intelligence, so the eBook version of anything is inherently less valuable to me. To the “but you can carry a whole library with you” crowd my response is that you should stop reading so goddamned much and go outside and play. Seriously.

Under these circumstances I don’t want to buy the physical book either. Book publishers are playing games and I don’t finance the stupidity of others.

So I’m going to the Library.

It’s like living in the future.

Soooo… Funerals suck, but not Al’s. He had more friends present than I may have had in my whole life. From childhood to high school to college and beyond. Everyone that spoke for Al had stories that made me sad for not having known him that well.

The whole family thing was… awkward. My youngest cousin wasn’t around much. My other two cousins are women, and with my aunts they formed a circle of girl talk that we men could not penetrate. My uncle couldn’t get himself off of Australian time while we were there.

I’ve never felt so alone while surrounded by so many people.

But that’s fine. It wasn’t about me, and I wasn’t there for me. Seemingly I wasn’t there for any reason that I could tell.

Reconnecting with my Dad was a whole other layer of stranger. While I wasn’t looking he got seriously old. Bad driving, gonna fall and break a hip old. More ornery too. I’m starting to feel sorry for his second (current) wife. Crazy.

The more new things I learn about Al, the more I realize what a loss it was that we were never close. Every “surprising” fact and story fits right in with what I thought I knew of him. We would have made great friends.

“Your Aunt’s ex-husband died about a week and a half ago.”

No surprise that I’m getting that news a little late. I never knew him and he wasn’t well loved by the family he left behind. His funeral notice failed to mention that he was survived by my aunt and their children.

“And the really bad news is that at the funeral your cousin Albert collapsed from a double aneurism.”

We weren’t close — I’ve spent nearly my entire life at least 1,000 miles away and he was about 14 years my senior — but he was family and I liked him. He was my gay New Yorker author cousin. I was a bit surprised that he went to the funeral, so far as I knew they’d never reconciled after he came out and I would imagine that it was not an easy decision for him to go.

“The doctors just declared him brain dead and they are going to pull the plug over the weekend.”

Whoa.

“Please stop smoking. There’s nothing worse than having to bury your kid.”

The stop I was making on the way home was to pick up some nicotine patches. For real.

Resisted the urge to tell him that some idiot Miami driver will take me out on my motorcycle long before smoking-related cancer or my inherited health risks have the chance to get me…

Albert, I pray that you will rest in peace, hope that you had the chance to make amends with your father, and wish that we’d had the chance to know each other better.

Installed the SAE terminal. Ran the SAE cable under the gas tank to the under-seat area. Then I sacrificed an SAE adapter to use its connector to power a Fuseblock, which I then wired up to the Coocase to power the alarm / keyless entry / brake light.

May not sound like much but that consumed most of the daylight hours.

Tonight I installed the electrification kit in my new Bags-Connection Daypack II tankbag. Bags-Connection has a really slick line of bags that use a quick-release system that mounts to the ring around the gas cap and keeps the bag off the tank itself, and provides power for electronics within the bag through the mount. I’d already had the mount on my bike from a previous bag that was too big for my bike so this was just installing the corresponding parts on the new bag.

Before I go for my Sunday morning ride I’ll add a 12v cigarette socket to the bag. This will only take a moment thanks to Posi-Lock connectors, which I now believe to be just about the best thing ever.

The bike is now about 75% prepped for my April road trip. I’ve got new 90-degree valve stems on the way so that checking / adjusting the tire pressure isn’t such a pain, I’ll be ordering new tires within the next couple of weeks, and I still have to figure out a better way of powering my GPS and radar detector…

My Lenovo U150 shipped out on Monday. Can’t wait for it to get here! From the outside it looks like any other netbook, but with the SU7300 and 4GB of DDR3 it ought to be capable of doing some real work. I will probably end up using it at home and work to replace my Windows 7 virtual machines, which are damned slow under VMware Fusion.

I’ve got my hotel booked for the weekend in Helen. Have begun to firm up my plans for the following week. It’s all coming together, soon I will have nothing left to do but wait…