Michael Castellon

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is gaining in geek cred, and it’s no wonder. Lisbeth Salander, the book’s hard-edged hacker-investigator, abandons convention to solve highly complicated problems.

In addition to her wits, Lisbeth relies on an arsenal of gadgets and toys that enhance her connectivity and efficiency on the job.

Engadget has a pretty great index of some of the 2002-era toys associated with Lisbeth throughout the book:

Apple PowerBook G4 – The author really delights in this one, listing the specs of this aluminum bad boy. It’s got (as noted in the novel) a “PowerPC 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 MB RAM and a 60 GB hard drive” plus Bluetooth and a DVD burner. Salander is also pretty stoked that the 17-incher has a 1,440 x 900 resolution and NVIDIA graphics. And can you blame her? She shellsout the big bucks for this one, laying out 38,000 Swedish kronor, not counting the tax — that’s over $5,000. (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, page 216).

The Delfin II arrived at the Freeport pier this afternoon, its hold containing about 4,000 pounds of Snapper.

The crew had been at sea for five days, fishing the waters 80 miles off the Texas coast.

I’m with Roberto San Miguel, who for years has made the three hour run between the Gulf and Austin to supply some of the city’s most popular chefs with Snapper, shrimp and Grouper. His skills have been documented by the likes of Anthony Bourdain and Rachel Ray. I’ve seen otherwise well adjusted young parents at the Austin Farmers’ Market fight for the bags of shrimp he hauls to town several times a week from this dock.

With us is Captain Mark Friudenberg, who watches his crew unload the largest, most beautiful fish I have ever seen. The crew works like an efficient machine, carting large containers of ice on an aging, wooden dock that buckles underneath our feet. Captain Mark owns a seafood market one block away that smells of fresh ice and crawfish seasoning. It is clean, bordering on immaculate.

I try to pretend that the August sun here isn’t oppressive, that it doesn’t feel like hot tar sticking to my skin.

Roberto and Captain Mark are concerned that there isn’t a distinction being made by big media between Texas seafood, which I see clean and robust with my own eyes, and the drama surrounding the oil spill hundreds of miles to the East.

That perception is having an affect on their business, which is frustrating considering the quality of the seafood they pull out of the Gulf. The images of the spill are at the forefront of the minds of tourists, and its hard to communicate through that message. It’s hard for someone who doesn’t work on these boats to understand how far the contamination if from Texas.

For a day, these men are my heros, and I look forward to telling their story more in-depth, and with some inspiration, the story of hundreds of people just like them, making a living on our coasts, nurturing the waters and its economies.

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649

The LA Times has a great anecdote about Andre Dawson, who tomorrow will be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

“In 1987, we worshipped at the altar of Andre Dawson,” WXRT’s Lin Brehmer said. “Dawson was a stoic crippled figure who had that glorious MVP season. All season long, everyone in the bleachers would stand up and bow down to him. In his last at-bat of the season, he hit a home run. We were standing on the slabs in the bleachers. After he took the field, Andre Dawson for the first time all year bowed down to the bleachers to thank us, and I wept like a teeny tiny little baby.”