Sam’s Cub Scout pack visited the Neil St. Post Office this morning; I decided to tag along.

(Jake would have preferred to stay home & play Half-Life 2. He’s pretty much old enough to be home alone – for a little while – but apparently the quiet & empty house creeps him out. So if the rest of us are going somewhere, Jake comes along.)

Watching a half-dozen first-graders following the tour guide was rather entertaining: pack is certainly an apt description. They were very attentive and well-behaved, marching along in what was supposed to be – and occasionally was – a line. I think we all learned a little about how the Post Office works.

Behind the counter is a single large room (there are a few offices along the north wall). It’s full of route stations, each comprised of three shelves of cubbyholes. The mail – what couldn’t be sorted by machine – is manually distributed into the cubbyholes.

I should have taken pictures. Oops.

I was expecting more automation, rather than a bunch of people pushing baskets around & manually sorting mail. I assume all the machinery is at the Mattis Ave. Post Office, which is much larger and newer.

Either way, there’s something very last-century about trucking pieces of paper across the country. I’m surprised that so many people are still doing it.

WordPress tells me I haven’t posted anything here since the 15th. The last time I neglected the daybook for so long, I ‘d been hospitalized.

Nothing like that is going on this time. (Thanks for asking!) Mostly, it’s just laziness.

That, and a tendency to post my blather elsewhere. These days, I have quite a few elsewheres to receive my blather: some public, some not.

I noticed a while ago that the iTunes store claimed to have four albums purchased (by me) but not yet downloaded; this puzzled me a bit, because iTunes also told me all four albums were in my music library, with nonzero play counts.

Maybe they’re upgrades, I thought. Amazon has done that, once or twice: spontaneously offered to download to my Kindle an updated copy of some book I’d bought months previous. I thought about downloading them, but dithered. I hadn’t noticed anything wrong with the current files; why ask for trouble by updating?

(Unnecessary ‘upgrades’ cause endless problems on Windows. I’ve learned to be a little cautious.)

This evening, I decided to download the new files. The results were…disappointing. The ‘new’ files were all 128kbps & DRM’d. The old files are 256kbps, no DRM. At least iTunes kept both, so I can delete the one & do my best to forget they ever existed.

(I suspect this is some kind of licensing squabble between Apple and the record labels: I bought the tracks during the brief-but-happy time when they were available in iTunes+ format – 256kbps, no DRM – then Apple was forced to revert them to their pre-iTunes+ state. Silly record labels, screwing your customers is not a sustainable business model….)

A little over six years ago (October, 2004), I bought some e-books from Fictionwise: mostly science fiction, short stories by Gardner Dozois. They were .lit files, for Microsoft Reader: I read them on the Dell Axim X30 handheld thingy. (Remember Windows CE? It was going to take over the world. Then it turned into Windows Phone, and that was going to take over the world. Instead, the world bought iPhones and/or Android phones, and the ‘softies are a distant third.)

I read the stories; they were pretty good. Somehow, though, I was never motivated to buy any more.

Years passed. The Axim went away; then Microsoft pulled the plug on MS Reader (after years of ignoring it). I figured my .lit files were gone forever.

This evening, I happened to log in to Fictionwise (never mind exactly why); it turns out all those stories I bought in 2004 are now available in .mobi format (i.e., they’ll work on the Kindle). And I still have the $1.90 credit left over from the purchase.

So I downloaded all the stories (again), and will (one of these days) figure out how to move them over to the Kindle.

Who knows? I might even buy a few more, if I can find anything for $1.90….

Seeing much rantage online this morning, regarding “male privilege” – a nebulous & unhelpful concept.

It carries a whiff of the Life of Brian catch-22:

“I’m not the Messiah! Will you please listen? I am not the Messiah, do you understand? Honestly!”
“Only the true Messiah denies His divinity!”
“What? Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the Messiah!”
“He is! He is the Messiah!”

If I feel privileged, then I am proof that male privilege exists. If I don’t feel privileged, it means that I have the additional privilege of being oblivious to all my other privileges.

There’s no escape – no possibility that some men aren’t privileged, that some women aren’t oppressed.

There is no magic pixie dust of male privilege falling from the sky, landing exclusively on men & conferring upon them wealth, power & status. “Male privilege” – if the phrase means anything at all – exists whenever one person behaves differently toward another because somebody, somewhere is male. So who’s doing this? I want names, dates, places. Not vague accusations.

Jake, Sam & I went on a little bus adventure this afternoon: we drove to the train station, then took the 120E bus to campus.

We walked around a bit: checked on Zorba’s (still not open), discovered the cookie store on Sixth Street is still there (it was open, but we didn’t go in), fended off a panhandler or two (there are homeless shelters in town, fellas; try there), and ended up at Cocomero for some froyo.

It wasn’t the healthiest of snacks: not so much because of the yogurt, but rather all the toppings: chocolate chips, M&Ms, etc. But it’s very tasty.

After Cocomero, we hit the game room in the Illini Union basement. We never actually play anything there; Jake & Sam – mostly Sam – just works the controls & pretends. (This time, though, he found a pinball machine with a free game on it, so he got to play for real. All I can say is, his technique needs work.)

And then we took the bus back to the train station, got in the car & drove home.

I think the kids had fun. If not, at least they got some froyo for their time.