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unstoppable white ghosts
Saturday, September 8 2001
Because of limited space in this Brooklyn apartment, I've got three computers hooked up through a switchbox to one monitor, keyboard and mouse. But the quality of the video I'm getting through this arrangement is crappy. I have little white ghosts just to the right of every black form on the screen, making text harder to read than it might otherwise be. So today I decided to do something about it. I wove a series of ground wires around the various noisy signal wires in the switchbox. In theory this should have cut back on the noise within the box, and it might well have. But the ghosts remained. All that work and nothing to show for it! Well, I did have one thing to show for it. In the process of scraping off paint from the inside of the switch box I managed to slice into the end of my left thumb, leaving a half inch gash parallel to the end of the thumbnail and gushing blood everywhere. This intersected and ran perfectly perpendicular to another brutal gash this same thumb took back in the spring of 1998 when I notched the end of my thumb with a Black and Decker circle saw.
When puttering around with these projects or nursing grievous wounds, it's always good to watch cable teevee. I had HBO on and was watching Subway Stories. It wasn't television, it was AOL/Time Warner HBO. One can learn a lot about subway protocol from watching this show, though they tended to make excessive use of the plot device of people being caught in the subway doors. New York City Subway doors don't act anything like elevator doors. When the doors clamp down on you they hold you and you're trapped until the guy operating them releases you.
Meanwhile Gretchen was off having a slumber party with her girlfriends.
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