Sounds like Dave Winer wants in, doesn’t it? Dave, I’ll be in the Bay Area in a few weeks, if you want to get coffee, lemme know!

Elz and I hit up the Uniqlo flagship store opening in Soho today. As expected, it was almost overwhelmingly crowded, but it was well-worth navigating the masses of people that were packed inside. It’s more or less like a Japanese H&M, which is pretty much all you can ask for in a masstige clothing chain, right? PSFK has some pics from last night’s launch party.

If this spoiler-laden summary of tonight’s episode of Lost is at all accurate — and it sounds like it is — then I really don’t mind so much that the show won’t have any more new episodes until February. Why is it proving so hard for them to crank out a decent episode?

Well, that was fast. It took me about six hours before I cancelled that Verizon DSL service I’d signed up for. I needed technical support because of an issue related the wiring in the building (my apartment is wired up, but isn’t properly connected to the local loop) and instead of getting someone to help I was merely passed from person to person. After the EIGHTH person passed the buck, I told them to connect me to someone who could cancel my service. After that person transferred me to someone who could actually do that — no joke! — I cancelled. One interesting factoid: if you tell them you’re going to cancel, even if you’ve only been a customer for a few hours, they’ll offer you two months of free service (obviously I didn’t bite).

Ah, yes, five days without internet access at home, all because someone disconnected the one cable feeding our entire building. Guess it doesn’t help that the junction box is easily accessible from our roof — or that it’s just a rusting piece of junk. It didn’t help that my EV-DO backup totally crapped out, too — I couldn’t get connected for more than 30 seconds at a time. The solution? I just did something I swore I’d never do: I signed up for Verizon DSL so that I’ll always have a backup.

I’ve been kicking it at Tokion’s Creativity Now conference this weekend, and so far it’s been disappointing. All of the discussions today have been meandering and pointless, with nearly every panelist (apart from Cory Arcangel) seemingly to the oblivious to the explosion of creativity that’s taking place online right now, with few insights into where the real energy is today. It’s as if the past five years of the internet never happened. Not that there aren’t tons of smart, interesting people at the conference; it’s just that most of them are in the audience, not up on stage.

One other thing I couldn’t help but notice: this is the first conference I’ve been to in years where there isn’t a single laptop out — no one in the audience is blogging anything that’s going on. I suppose that’s fitting.

Alright, I can’t be the only one who was disappointed with last night’s episode of Lost. The first five minutes or so weren’t bad, but the rest of the episode was just a meandering mess. I can forgive the occasional drab episode in the middle of February — it’s hard to keep the momentum going for 23 straight episodes — but they sort of have an obligation to nail the season premiere if they expect people to stay interested and keep watching, don’t they? I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they’ll pick it up and move the plot forward over in the next couple of episodes.

Just got back yesterday from my trip to Boston and Cambridge, my first in nearly five years.

Ryan and I were in town for a conference, but we figured since we were so rarely in the same place at the same time that it made sense to hold an Engadget Reader Meetup. Something like 400 or 500 people showed up at Jillian’s this past Thursday — stay tuned for a big post about the event on my “other” blog.

The next day Jill and I trekked around Harvard Square to visit some old haunts, including my old dorm. Amazingly enough, it turned out this kid Sean Li who came to the event lives next door to my old room!

Next up was a trip to In Your Ear records (a very High Fidelity-esque record store where I used to work – best job I ever had), and then to WHRB, the college radio station where I DJ’d and worked first as the general manager and then as music director.

Later that afternoon we took the T to Kendall Square to meet up with Jamie Zigelbaum, who gave us a tour of the MIT Media Lab. We got a sneak peek at some of the crazy new stuff they’re working on, but since it was just an informal visit I wasn’t allowed to blog anything. We spent the rest of the afternoon geeking out with MIT comp-sci professor Erik Demaine, who showed us around the new-ish Frank Gehry building where he works and then took us to see that dorm Steven Holl designed. There’s a good chance you’ve read about Erik. Besides being one of the nicest, smartest, most interesting persons I’ve ever met, Erik’s also the youngest professor in MIT history (he landed the job at the ripe old age of 20) and the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. He’s also an OQO user, so you can guess why we got along.

Bruce Sterling documents teen love in the year 2026. The Smiths reference at the end is genius.

The new Engadget – About freaking time, right?

Loomstate Vans — Even though I don’t like Rogan jeans much.

The Science of Sleep – Michel Gondry’s latest. It’s even more abstract and surreal than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s better, too, and not just because it has Gael Garcia Bernal as the lead rather than Jim Carrey.

Sunday brunch at Babycakes with Jill from Inhabitat, Andrew from The Morning News, and Melissa from Poppycotton.

The season premiers of Lost and The Office – I broke down and signed up for cable just so I could watch these in high-def.

Had a close encounter with Kanye West at Barney’s this evening. He played it cool and pretended not to recognize me. Still way better than sharing an elevator with Denise Richards and Richie Sambora on my way to a meeting with Sonos at the Trump International last week. That was a little freaky.

Ian Svenonius brought his irreverent irreverence to the Bluestockings bookstore on Monday evening. I’m not sure I’d actually go see him perform these days – those last couple mAKE uP records were already on the tired side – but it was hard to resist the prospect of a reading from his new book, The Psychic Soviet. (Especially since the reading was a mere two blocks away from my apartment).

Rather than actually read from the book, Ian spent about an hour or so expounding on his pseudo-(conspiracy) theories about the connections between rock music and the Cold War. The neo-Debordian in me loved it, but should anyone who wasn’t a fan of NOU or the mAKE uP really care?

Ian’s the master of projecting an aura of self-seriousness, but after years of making a career out of both declaiming and mining nostalgia it’s almost as if he’s become little more than an object of nostalgia himself. Even setting aside any debate about his bands’ musical merits (some songs hold up, some don’t), as the guiding force behind Nation of Ulysses and the mAKE uP, Ian had an underappreciated influence on the style, taste, and sensibility of an entire sub-culture of kids, myself included. Ian’s sounds, clothes, and oblique references pointed towards the parts of Sixties culture that you didn’t hear about much ten or fifteen years ago. Digging Godard, the Situationist International, and Arthur Lee might seem like obvious moves these days, but at the time they were revelations.

The Psychic Soviet encapsulates what he’s all about (and really has always been about): a revolutionary stance disguised as an ironic take on revolutionary stances. And maybe that’s why it makes sense for the former Sassiest Boy in America to be writing books rather than songs; rock music is so overwhelmed by the sort of retroness he pioneered that a shift in medium was almost inevitable.

[And now I remember why I decided not to go on and get a PhD.]

It’s not often that I get to go see a major motion picture directed by someone I know (in this case, Gil Kenan, husband of my good friend and former roommate Eliza Chaikin), so this past Friday I coughed up $10.50 to go see Monster House, that new computer animated kids horror movie. It’s definitely a cartoon for kids — even though it’s ostensibly a horror flick, it never gets too scary or intense — but what made it watchable was the movie’s clever sense of humor (they don’t rely on making grown-up pop culture references in order to appeal to adults) and the fact that the theater we went to was screening it in 3D (you have to wear glasses and everything). 3D’s been a movie gimmick for decades, so I was a little skeptical walking into the theater about how good it’d be, but they’re using a relatively new technology called RealD, and I walked out impressed. There wasn’t a whole lot of the “stuff floating out in front of you that you try and grab” kind of 3D (remember Captain EO?), it was more about using the 3D to add texture and depth to everything, something which made Monster House seem like more than just yet another computer-generated cartoon. Best of all, I didn’t leave the theater with a headache.

Coincidentally, I’m supposed to see a demo of Philips’ new 3D television system this week. 3DTV is still years, if not decades, away from mainstream adoption, but I’m very curious to see how it compares with what I just watched.