Went to World Mar­ket a few weeks back, and bought a mixed case. Among the var­i­ous and sundry vari­etals we assem­bled were four bot­tles not plagued with World Market’s ten­dency to cork­ing: McMa­nis Fam­ily Vine­yards Petite Sirah 2005. That’s five or six bot­tles of other things corked, four bot­tles of this not corked. Caveat lec­tor; maybe we’re just relieved.

Use all the wine-​​snobbery you want: it’s a kick-​​in-​​the-​​head, potent, herby, grapey, rather won­der­ful win­ter brew, with some tangy acid­ity but lots of com­pen­sat­ing prune-​​like den­sity. Not your sub­tle kind of thing, don’cha know. Drink with rel­ish… or ketchup, or what­ever. My advice, in gen­eral, is to drink it for the wine, not for the accompaniment—unless the accom­pa­ni­ment be robust and potent in its own right. Rose­mary, gar­lic, cap­sicum, black pep­per, 70% cacao—that sort of thing.

Get­ting a case.

Another in a long line of ideas for things I want but can­not afford to make.

I don’t want to have to break my blog into pieces, or estab­lish and main­tain sep­a­rate per­sonal brands for me-​​talking-​​about-​​difficult-​​family-​​issues, and me-​​talking-​​about-​​comix, and me-​​talking-​​about-​​Deep-​​Science. Nor, I expect, do many other blog­gers. And nor, I expect, do many read­ers of my and oth­ers’ blogs care to hear about ingrown toe­nails or local cui­sine, but rather would like to just hear the cool stuff.

Where “cool” is some func­tion of their diverse lit­tle read­ery heads.

So here’s a thought: Change the inter­face for my blog, and its feeds, so that there’s a lit­tle side­bar or footer or some­where with an AJAXy form, that says “Show/Don’t Show me this cat­e­gory when I visit”. And sets a cookie for each user, and lets them pick and choose which blogger-​​categorized frag­ments of the whole, ungainly cor­pus they want to read. With maybe a “Reset hid­den” but­ton, that would show all hid­den posts and let the user re-​​choose their filters.

Would it split the read­er­ship? Sure! Think they’re not already split? Maybe it would only fil­ter the Index and feeds, and would not work when read­ing indi­vid­ual posts. That way, a reader sent to a fil­tered post from a link in an unfil­tered source would still read it, and might want to un-​​check that cat­e­gory for future thread-​​following.

I can’t do it. Seems like it would be use­ful. Heck, maybe there already is one. Have you seen it?

This is the sort of thing one thinks about, when dri­ving long dis­tances on well-​​traveled and over-​​familiar roads, after the books-​​on-​​CD run out:

Sup­pose you take a cell phone—the one you use, or the first one you see some­body else using.

Become a cun­ning and crafty tech­ni­cian. Some­body who has a sol­der­ing iron… some­body who has a sol­der­ing iron in her purse. The sort of per­son who writes arti­cles for Make mag­a­zine. The kind who knows her vac­uum tubes, to be more specific.

Stand­ing there, with cell phone in hand and tools and vasty intel­lect at the ready? Good.

You’re prepped to answer these ques­tions for me: How much and which parts of the cell phone’s cir­cuitry could be replaced with non-​​IC hard­ware? Vac­uum tubes, macro­scopic dig­i­tal and/​or ana­log wiring, tran­sis­tors, resis­tors, anten­nas, relays, all that stuff.

And of course I’m imply­ing that the full func­tion­al­ity of the orig­i­nal cell phone is pre­served: the dis­play (if any), the net­work­ing, the stor­age, the phys­i­cal inter­face even.

How big is that? No, I mean, how big? What could you replace, and what couldn’t you, and how phys­i­cally large would the result become? No need to use Lego; just wires and stuff will do. Stuff my dad and his Ham radio friends would have had in their garages and base­ment radio rooms.

And the fol­lowup ques­tion, for the übergeeks who will rule our future: Could you use evo­lu­tion­ary design to re-​​miniaturize the ana­log cir­cuitry ab ini­tio? In other words, if you make the cell phone macro­scopic, build a soft­ware model of that, and then use it as a reverse-​​engineering basis for genetic design… will that work?