Before leaving my apartment this morning to confront the citywide shutdown of all public transportation, I turned on my TV to see if there was any useful info on NY1, New York’s lovably ramshackle 24/7 news channel. I tuned in just in time to watch the anchor read a handful of viewer e-mails off of a laptop. As the anchor read each viewer comment, the director switched cameras to show a shot of the laptop screen, on which the comments were displayed in Microsoft Word. And here’s the excellent part: The copy of Word was configured to underline grammatical and spelling errors. Of the six or seven comments that were shown on the air, Word flagged problems in at least three. Oh, NY1, you are so low-rent, and it’s charming.

In 1979, when I was 10, my father bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 for my family. The TRS-80 was an attempt by Tandy, Radio Shack’s parent company, to enter the burgeoning home-computer market. It was a rickety, cheaply made little thing that totally earned its derisive nickname, “Trash 80.” But I was fascinated by what it could do. Those were the days of Asteroids and Space Invaders; my friends and I were part of the first generation of children to grow up obsessed with videogames. When my dad brought the TRS-80 home, I was convinced it would be like having an entire arcade of awesome videogames in my bedroom. That was not, um, the case. My version of the TRS-80 had something like one kilobyte of memory—no joke—and didn’t utilize a disk drive; you loaded programs into its memory using a standard audiocassette player. But I still had fun with the thing. I remember programming it to play back a funk-free rendition of “The Hustle” comprised entirely of staccato eighth-note ticks and bleeps. God, I was so fucking cool.

Anyway, getting to the point: I was assigned an oral report in my sixth-grade English class a year or so after we got the computer, and I chose to talk about my TRS-80. I still have the notecards from that oral report—see below—and they’re pretty hilarious, and not just because my handwriting is totally freakish. In the last few years, I’ve re-created this speech in front of New York audiences three or four times, most prominently at a 2003 installment of my brilliant Upper West Side neighbor John Hodgman’s Little Gray Book series. I read two oral reports from my childhood and adolescence that night; the other one was my 10th-grade Led Zeppelin report, which I posted about here.

(For the record, my computer-geek period only lasted a year or two. By 1981 or 1982 I had lost interest in computers—though not videogames—and I didn’t really start using them again until the early ’90s, right after I graduated from college. During my undergrad years I wrote my papers by hand in notebooks and then stayed up late typing them on my electric typewriter while listening to every Van Morrison LP in my collection—and reaching for Liquid Paper when I made a mistake. Ah, good times.)

Here are my two favorite lines from the report:

[Y]ou can buy a line printer that prints the information on the screen onto paper, which can be quite useful if you don’t want to copy something by hand.

[…]

Another way to save and/or load in programs is with floppy disks, which are square disks that are floppy.

Here are the seven notecards. I’ve posted a full transcript at the end of this post, in case you find my freakish handwriting unreadable.

[Continue reading "My Sixth-Grade TRS-80 Speech, 1980"...]

Here’s the coolest thing I’ve seen online in weeks: an astonishing eight-and-a-half-minute reel in which an incredibly agile young man demonstrates his skills at parkour, a physical discipline of French origin that’s equal parts extreme sport, urban dance, and life philosophy. Parkour really took off in Europe a few years ago, thanks partly to a fantastic 2002 promo ad for the BBC that starred the founder of parkour, David Belle, as a man who traverses dozens of physical obstacles—roofs, walls, fire escapes, people—as he rushes home to watch his favorite BBC1 shows.

The dude in the video below is apparently Russian or Latvian. You can watch the video here (a decent-quality Flash version) or here (a lower-quality streaming version). The first two or three minutes are a little slow, but then it really takes off. The bleak postcommunist landscape is somehow the perfect setting for this guy’s amazingly graceful moves.

Lots more info about parkour here.

While putting together the item I posted last night about Ravi Jain’s videoblog DriveTime, I googled my friend Dennis Crowley’s name to find an appropriate link or two to include. And I noticed that Dens has set up a little joke for himself on Google. This is one of the text ads that appears in the upper-right-hand corner of the results page when you google his name:

It was probably easy for Dens to set up this joke ad, because he works for Google.

The weekly videoblog DriveTime is a talk show with an excellent gimmick: It’s filmed during the work commute of the host, Ravi Jain, who lives in a suburb of Boston. I found out about the show because my very cool and charismatic friend Dennis Crowley was a guest recently. Dennis is the founder of Dodgeball, a free service that combines MySpace-style social networking and cellphone-based text messaging.

The format of the show, from the pre-guest chatter to the depositing of the guest at the curb at the end of the interview, is totally inspired. In this episode Jain’s wife plays the role of the sidekick, and their banter is pretty entertaining. Check it out.