It was bound to happen eventually. I have finally pulled my first official “all-nighter.” It worked because I wasn’t tired, having slept 10 hours last night. I just stayed up and edited and re-edited my English presentation late into the night. Wow, this is going to suck this afternoon. Well, maybe I can sleep in physics.

Of course, all today’s television was crammed with Pearl Harbor docu-dramas to commemorate Memorial Day and, of course, tie in with the new supposed-blockbuster movie Pearl Harbor. I’ve made a concerted attempt to avoid television today, with some success. Darn you CNN, MSNBC, and Fox!

Anyway, Kel and I have fixed her computer’s psychological problems through intensive counseling and an effective use of fdisk to basically obliterate all old data whatsoever. Add to that some open-heart surgery as we removed conflicting boards, and finally the thing has reached some semblance of equillibrium. Meanwhile, I slave on my Calculus AP take home test that he somehow expects us to not “cheat” on by consulting others. Well, I won’t say if I did or not, but suffice to say not all of the time spent at Kel’s house was working on her computer.

Work up at 11:00AM today, only because Kelly called me for help on her computer. Ah, bliss. Pure bliss. Too bad there is school tomorrow. Helped her with her evil Wintel system for an hour and a half, in exchange for some pizza. Her computer is muey el screwedo, as it refuses to do basically anything, alternates between seeing the CD drive and not, and messes with its partitions so that drive letters constantly change. Typical Windows crap. I’m glad I have a Mac.

Anyway, the Brownsteins have a Memorial Day barbecue today, but I’m skipping it both because I don’t know any of the attendees and I have a boatload of English and Math homework to complete. I’m working on an audio-documentary-thingy in multi-genre form about my memories of high school. I’ve interviewed my grandparents and Aunt Linda about their high school days and its interesting what they remember and what memories conflict. I hope to cut it all together into a nice program today, and then probably put it online.

I predicted it long ago but finally it is becoming a reality. Curious as to what cell phone rates are these days, I visited my local mega-corp (Verizon) to check on the pricing. It seems that my antiquated plan at US$25/month can be upgraded for another plan at the same price that gives me more minutes, and makes all of them nationwide. So yeah, I did it, even though it meant renewing my contract for another year. I know I should have checked out the alternatives, but the lack of standardization in the American cellular phone market means that all my current equipment would have been useless.

What I see here is the move, not only to a world without wires, but without conventional borders. Think about it – I can be anywhere in the 50 United States, you can call me, and I’ll get it. Once this expands, as I know it is doing across Europe, we will have a dream – no more tapestry of conflicting services, no more multiple standards. Just one phone, taken with you everywhere you go, with your own personal number that you can keep for life, and communicators costs dropping to near nothing. Voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology is doing this. PCS is doing this. Most of all, mega-mergers are doing this. ::sigh:: With every advancement comes a price. This time, we get a lack of options, bad support, and no real way to use market forces to vote. As we become increasingly reliant on a single phone number or IP address or whatever for all global communication, we will be reluctant to change services. I mean, think about it – who likes changing ISPs these days? you lose your e-mail account, and there is no real redirection option. Now think if ALL of your communications went to one point, and suddenly you switched companies – everything gone. Poof!

My solution? I’m not sure, but I think a mandated call-forwarding option, reasonably priced, should be required. Also, I’m hoping that alternative services for routing communications, similar to Hotmail, can be created in the VoIP space. And no, I’m not quite sure how this would work just yet.

It might be prudent to elaborate on the ducks, so that I will do. See, for a while two ducks would land off-and-on in our pool and swim around a bit. We would always chase them away so as to avoid duck dropping and the mess that they entail. So one day, my dad found the remains of a duck, presumed eaten by coyotes. Shortly after this the other duck disappeared into the bushes. A few days later, presto! Ten new baby ducklings crawled out.

These little cuties swam around the pool all day, taking time out to walk around on the deck, following their mother’s lead. Of course, this sightseeing required the physical act of getting out of the pool, and thus the phenomenon of a few bent beaks and many damaged ducky egos as the poor creatures continually banged against the walls of the pool as they attempted to jump out. They did eventually make it though, and had fun wandering through the bushes and quacking at me and hiding behind their mother when I came too close.

So anyway, four days ago all eleven of them disappeared, which is odd since I don’t think that ducks can learn to fly that quickly, and they certainly weren’t any good at scaling hills on foot. I can assume either that they were somehow all eaten, that they are in hibernation in our bushes, or perhaps they all climbed on momma’s back and took a plane ride. Perhaps there is some deep significance to the ducks, but it will be left as an exercise to the reader. Anyway, I keep a lookout for them, just in case they choose to return.

If everyone else is doing it, why not me? Seeing as I’m leaving for college come the end of summer, right now seemed (seems) like an ideal time to start a weblog of my pursuits for all interested parties. So I did a bit of searching, grabbed a little PHP script, modified it a bunch, and voila! I am joined by my cat Sammy (on my lap), who is providing moral support. For those of you that don’t get it, the name Silverman is composed of two parts – silver, and man. Now, the chemical symbol for the element silver is Ag. There is no chemical symbol for man. We shall ignore that and just focus on the silver, making this, thus, the AgBlog, the weblog/journal/thing of Danny Silverman. Make sense? Okay then.

I expect the grandparents and my Aunt Linda this evening for a nice barbecue. We were planning on something exciting involving fish, but we decided chicken and hotdogs would be easier, even though none of us really likes hot dogs much. Well, take that back, I think Sammy likes hotdogs.

The ducks in our pool have now been gone for four days, and it doesn’t look like they are coming back. ::sigh::