Every once in a while, I get inspired to take a look at my upcoming travel schedule and think, “Man, I am such an idiot.” Yes, those degrees are Fahrenheit.

Harrah’s really doesn’t want me to stay with them on Fridays or Saturdays….

Very weird: fatal shooting by Penn police at the Club Wizzards strip club.

Debate between Brian Greenberg and me on the state of Mac OS X security.

Pennsylvania requires people who eBay stuff they don’t own to get a state auctioneer’s license, demonstrating once again that they will be dragged kicking and screaming out of the 19th century.

New media douchebags explained. Extremely funny and surprisingly safe for work, provided reading this sentence out loud is safe where you work.

Thanks to Making Light: Jon’s Singer’s turkey algorithm is, “for a turkey of greater than ten pounds, the roasting time should be equal to 1.65 times the natural log of the weight of the bird in pounds, cooked at 325 F.” I’m amused to see a natural logarithm being used for anything. I also think this is the first time I’ve used the two words I always mistype, logarithm and algorithm, together in a paragraph.

Check out the most viewed articles at Conservapedia. Man, some folks need a hobby.

Brilliant SNL spoof of iPhone ads.

Now available until November 26: the One Laptop Per Child XO. $400 for US and Canadian residents only, which buys one for you and one for someone else. And you get a year of T-Mobile hotspot service.

If you wrote a novel about Atlantic City politics, it couldn’t be as bizarre as what’s really going on.

As a communications geek, I’m amused by this piece on the disappearing phone booth. First that people’s connections to it are from the Superman movies, when the “changing in a phone booth” trope dates back to the cartoons and comics of the 1930s and 1940s. Second that there are now phone booths without phones. Third that the kid quoted at the end has apparently never had a dead battery.

Brian pointed me to the Australian Santa Clauses (Santa Clai?) who can’t say “ho ho ho” for fear of deriding nearby women as harlots.

So let me get this straight: once a year, millions of people take their offspring to see a jolly fat messiah icon whose image was invented by the Coca-Cola company, who then bribes children with presents in order to get them to sit on his lap. The children are encouraged to be extra good in order to curry favor with this man, who then will visit their homes while they’re sleeping.

And the issue is the word “ho”? Seems to me that the goyim are missing the obvious.

Today is the 25th anniversary of my bar mitzvah. I could have gotten through today quite nicely without realizing this.

Was it just me, or did anyone else burst out laughing when they heard our Commander-in-Chief say the following?

I spoke to President Musharraf right before I came over here to visit with President Sarkozy. And my message was that we believe strongly in elections, and that you ought to have elections soon, and you need to take off your uniform. You can’t be the President and the head of the military at the same time.

So here we have the man who was elected through the result of not one, but two disputed elections, giving advice on democracy to a man who took power through a military coup and is now extending his rule via martial law.

But that’s not why this was funny. This was funny because no president before Bush has been so damned clingy to his role as Commander-in-Chief, using his titular role as head of the military to construe criticism of him as criticism of “the troops”. His presidency is all obout being president and head of the military. He’s the first English-speaking politician to wear a codpiece since Blackadder. And obviously, he had all traces of irony surgically removed at birth.

Making plans for an upcoming trip to Canada, and for the first time it hit me just how strange this is:

It took me several weeks of staring at this graphic on my screen (taken from iTunes) before I realized quite how amazing it was:

An icon of my iPod — no big deal, right? Except that they got the color right. Which means two things: first, that iTunes is shipping with icons for all iPods it might encounter. That’s nothing special. Second — that Apple took a purely cosmetic feature and coded it into the hardware so the iPod could tell iTunes, “yes, I am indeed a red iPod,” and post the correct graphic.

Tip o’ the hat, Apple.

Many of my blog regulars know that the reason the postings have fallen off of late is because of my father’s recent illness. He died in his sleep early Sunday morning; my heartfelt thanks to the many people who have helped me get through a difficult time.

A brief FAQ for the questions I’ve heard most often this week: yes, I am keeping both my Dad’s apartment and my apartment in Washington, with the expectation of dividing my time between my two homes; I am unsure what I’m going to do with my Dad’s candy store, but I’m inclined to keep it going as soon as I determine how; and yes, I’m doing pretty well this week, but email is always welcome.

Below I’m appending my father’s obituary and my eulogy for him, in part because I feel he deserves a semi-permanent tribute, and this website is about as semi-permanent as anything in my life.

David Porten, 74, a business owner known as the “Candyman” on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, died in his sleep Sunday. A native of Philadelphia, he was well known to many people through his series of stores in Philadelphia, Wrightstown, NJ, and for the past 12 years, Atlantic City, as well as his regular activities in local Jewish communities and chambers of commerce. His lifetime was marked by his unwavering devotion to his mother, Ida; his wife, Lois; and his surviving son Jeffrey. Memorial donations may be made to UPHS, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, 3400 Spruce Street, 5 West Gates, Philadelphia, PA 19104.

Eulogy, October 30 2007, 18 Heshvan 5768

Many of you already know that I’ve been here in Atlantic City for the past few months. Shortly after I got here, I learned something that I hadn’t really known before.

It wasn’t exactly a shocker that it seemed like everyone who has ever set foot on the Boardwalk knew my Dad — even if they called him the Candyman without knowing his real name. But what did surprise me was that, over and over, the people who I met — who only casually knew my father — didn’t merely like him. They actively cared for him. I’m talking about a hundred store regulars whose names I’ve forgotten, the postman, the UPS guy, the guys with the rolling chairs, the cops on bikes, ninety percent of the Tropicana workforce; even the folks I met in the Atlantic City Mercantile department.

Every time, I expected to see, perhaps, polite familiarity with my father. And every time, you could tell by the looks on their faces and the tone of their voices that they weren’t just asking after Dad to be polite to me.

If this is the effect he had on casual acquaintances, is there any wonder about how powerfully he affected the people in this room, the people who loved him? We loved him because he loved us, with unwavering intensity. And despite the constant sarcastic jokes my Mom and I both made about how the little white dogs came first—believe me when I say that we never spent a minute doubting that we were the center of my father’s life. He made that a wonderful place to be.

I had a great friendship with my father, and I once asked him how he had learned to be who he was, and especially how he had learned to be such an excellent father to me. He gave all the credit to his mother and to my mother, and refused to take any of it for himself. Which may come as a surprise to all of us who have trouble putting “humble” and “David Porten” in the same sentence.

But it’s true, and I spent many years telling him repeatedly what I’m about to share with you now, in the hope that when he hears it today he’ll finally, truly accept the honor due to him. So Dubbie:

for persevering through adversity and always, always coming through with that raw confidence you had in yourself;

for the number of times you achieved the impossible, because your self-confidence was so damn well justified;

for being a much better dancer than I’ll ever be;

for epitomizing and showing me what it means to be a true mensch and gentleman;

for being simultaneously the strongest and the most tender man I have ever met;

for all of these reasons, Dubbie, and many more, you are my hero, and you always will be.