She thought about it for a minute and then told me a remarkable story about her relationship with technology during the last 40 years living up the mountain a bit east of where we stood. She did not exactly answer my question, but made a point nonetheless.

“I pretty much stayed on the mountain. There are no phone lines. There is no electricity,” she said. “I have my iPhone and I can get 3G and I can get what I want and I have a little solar panel and propane and candles. I’ve been off the grid forever. Now, I have the small solar panel and I can turn on the light and charge my cell phone. I’m not used to it. My daughter tells me, ‘You can plug things in!’ And I say, ‘I don’t have anything to plug in.’ Blow out the lights, not turn out the lights, is my thing.”

Her boss, the chef Michael Jones, filled in the rest of Liz’s story on his blog (punctuation all his). “Liz lives in a trailer on the mountain with no power and no water…two horses, a goat and two dogs. Cats don’t count. She carries water in plastic buckets to the critters….and to her own self,” he wrote. “She pays child support to a scumbag in Missouri or one of those other M states or square states…..Her daughter that I know is an honor student at Davis…….Because she has no power or water, Liz hangs with us after working her 10 hr shift at The Store. We are her TV.”

I’ve ridden my bike out past Cachagua Road and I can attest to the beauty and isolation of the area. It was very near Jamesburg that, climbing a long hill, I passed a man in a cowboy hat and boots, his back to me, urinating. The two cyclists coming down the hill had a much better view and the man made no attempt to stand behind cover.

This particular excerpt reminds me of the photos I’ve seen and the stories I’ve heard about my mother-in-law’s family when they lived in the mountains above Big Sur – a kind of lifestyle that seems almost extinct.

Now I live two blocks away, one block off the Haight, and my apartment complex has this awesome, fancy doorbell system that calls my cell phone to buzz open the lobby door. When I see the right number calling, I answer the call, press “9″ and in goes the delivery man. It works great.

So a few days ago I had my iPhone in the back pocket of my jeans and, oh!, it fell in a coffee shop toilet when I sat down to pee. After a couple days of the rice trick failure, I surrendered myself to fate and late last night I ordered a refurbished iPhone from AT&T.

Just over 12 hours later it dawns on me: I need a cell phone if I’m going to buzz in the delivery of a cell phone.

A recreation in HTML and JavaScript of Historic Tale Construction Kit, a now-defunct Flash application.

There’s a description of the original (ein Authoring Tool basierend auf dem Teppich von Bayeux); it’s auf Deutsch.

I definitely just lost complete contact with people that normally would have been part of my life. I mean it’s also an interesting metric for your life to see who some of your closest friends are, you know, and who’s willing to take the time.

I find it an interesting thought experiment to contrast this idea with Clusterflock, which is the clearest example in my life of the relationship-building power of the internet and social technology. The internet made it possible to seek out an entirely new tribe of people – people with which I have so much in common and so much to talk about, but that I hadn’t realized existed.

But then there are social networks like Facebook, which at their worst takes all of the people who are already part of your life – your co-workers, your school chums, your family – and hands them a level of intimacy about our lives that they haven’t really earned and don’t particularly deserve. I think that’s why it’s so interesting when these online relationships predicated on intimate knowledge but passive communication go bust when one party pulls out of Facebook – we’re just learning a hard lesson about the differences between that kind of intimate knowledge and true friendship, which for the longest time I thought were one and the same.

A couple relatives recently found me on Google Plus (I use it primarily for the sad remnants of what was once Google Reader). I hadn’t even acknowledged their existence before they were already commenting on every single piece of information attached to my name. This, I’m told, is keeping in touch.

From the Canada Science and Technology Museum, sounds of the Algonquin hand-cranked Geiger counter detecting low-level emissions from another Atomic Age artifact, the Algom Uranium Marketing Sample.

Sounds like geckering to me.

Literally.

Cristóbal Vila created a beautiful CGI fly-through — from construction to completion — of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.

(thanks, Chris)

The trailer for Matt Lenski’s Meaning of Robots:

The benevolent Mike Sullivan, age 65, has been shooting an epic stop-motion robot sex film in his apartment for the last 10 years. Obsessed with constructing the miniature robot porn stars, his apartment now overflows with thousands of them.

(thanks, Sarah)

Update: Tim has a good analysis of what it all means over at Wired:

Now both individual authors and trade and textbook presses can be drawn into a development and publishing ecosystem that begins and ends with Apple. Amazon may offer more eyeballs, but Apple offers an easier workflow. And the multimedia enhancements baked into the new iBooks will tempt everyone creating an e-book to add bits that will be specific to Apple’s platform — creating accidental exclusives.

Under the current wording of the measures, the Attorney General would have the power to order ISPs to block access to foreign-based sites suspected of trafficking in pirated and counterfeit goods; order search engines to delist the sites from their indexes; ban advertising on suspected sites; and block payment services from processing transactions for accused sites. If the same standards were applied to U.S.-based sites, Wikipedia, Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, Google and Wired could all find themselves blocked.

Such requests would need to be reviewed and approved by a judge. But accused sites would get little notice of a pending action in U.S. courts against them, and, once blacklisted, have little effective means of appeal.

As you probably know, sites like Wikipedia, Wired, and BoingBoing are going black today, or censoring their content in protest, but for those in need @FakeWikipedia is going strong on Twitter.

Update: If you would like to register your discontent, Google can point you in the right direction, or simply call your representatives.