Today:
My cousin called with Microsoft Word acting weird
My aunt called with an SD card problem and then a monitor issue
My dad called with a computer problem
And none of them will read this blog because they lack the computer literacy to do so.
Getting in early and installing Acrobat
Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0 is a 20 megabyte install. Firefox is only 4 megabytes. What’s up with that?
I left for work with my carpool buddy 30 minutes earlier than normal. The traffic was so much heavier at 8:30 compared to 9 that we only saved 15 minutes. What’s up with that?
Good Turkey
I’m back from Nashville. We had something like 14 family members in the house for Thanksgiving. :-) The highlight was donning protective clothing, heating 4 gallons of peanut oil to near-combustion and then dropping a 15 pound bird into it. Now THAT’S cookin’!
I’m loving the apartment. :-)
Black Rock City from space
Sent to me by Victoria
Black Rock City 2005 from space
Some barely visible remnants of
Black Rock City on Google Maps. Date unknown
I’ll be moving soon enough… I hope
[Written 9-6-05, but I delayed publishing to protect the innocent.... and the guilty]
A letter arrived on about 9-6-05 for Jane, she is in Oregon for the summer and I am living in her room. The letter looked to be quite official… coming from a local prosecutor’s office. I set it on Scott’s chair. When Natasha came home, the conversation went, as near as I can recall, just like this:
Lee: There is an important letter for Jane. Do you know how to get in touch with her?
Natasha: Where is the letter?
Lee: I wouldn’t open it. It looks important. It’s on Scott’s chair.
Natasha: [walks over to Scott's chair in his office quickly]
Lee: [calling into the other room] Don’t open it. It looks important.
Natasha: [walks slowly toward me, reading the opened letter]
Lee: Don’t read it. It’s not for you. It’s illegal for you to read it.
Natasha: [Looking up at me and then back to studying the letter] Who is this for?
Lee: It’s for Jane. Your housemate. [raising my voice slightly] Don’t read it. It’s not for you.
Natasha: But this is for Jane Jang.
Lee: Yes, that’s right, your housemate named Jane. Don’t read it. Do you know how to reach her?
Natasha: [still studying the letter carefully, going to page 2] But her name is spelled different. It is C-H-A-N-G
Lee: They misspelled it. But it’s still for Jane. Stop reading it. Does Scott know how to get in touch with her?
Natasha: But that is not her name. It is spelled different.
Lee: Yes. That letter is for Jane. Stop reading it.
Natasha: [walks back into Scott's office, reading the letter intently. A minute later, she comes out.] Maybe we should find Jane.
Lee: Yes, that’s what I said. How do we get in touch with Jane? You shouldn’t be reading it. It’s illegal for you to.
Natasha: You don’t have to worry. I would never read your mail.
Lee: [staring at the open letter in her hands] Yes you would.
Natasha: [standing in my room, studying the letter closely] I’m just looking for who the letter is to.
Lee: It’s to Jane. You can see that from the outside.
Natasha: Do you have any glue?
Lee: Huh? No.
Natasha: I want to put it back.
Lee: [holds out some tape]
Natasha: [puts the letter in the envelope and seals it with the tape. She then stands up and calls Jane's voice mail, leaving a message. I don't know where she put the letter.]
Moved in
I’m all moved in to my new place. Well, that’s not quite correct. I keep having to skip emptying various boxes because I don’t have shelving or a night stand or such. I haven’t figured out where to put my desk yet. It sure is big in this little room… But I’ll figure it out. I’m looking forward to spending some money on furniture. The last time I did that was moving to Jersey City with Shara. We split buying the giant Ikea shelving unit. When we left, she reluctantly bought out my share so I don’t have anything to show for it.
Happily, I found some wifi bandwidth I could steal from a neighbor. That’s what I’m writing this on now. There are machines called “joyce” and “beccas” on their “linksys” SSID network. It shouldn’t be too hard to find and thank them. Geeze, there are 9 wifi networks in range of me!
I can look out my window and see the well appointed market on the corner, complete with apples out front. My car is nestled comfortably in the garage 2 floors below,
The air smells nice here. There’s something like honeysuckle hanging in the air. It’s funny how as I was leaving the old place tonight, the street smelled of rotten garbage.
There is a reasonable amount of traffic at the intersection but traffic moves at a comfotably slow pace. There are a good number of pedestrians and bicycles (hey, maybe my stolen bike is going by right now). The street is well lit; hmm, I hadn’t noticed that the street at my old place didn’t have very good street lighting at all. It made the street a less nice place at night. But it’s only 0.8 miles away! It’s got the same political leaders, the same sanitation company, the same… everything. So why is this such a nicer place to live? Hurumph. I know why, but it’s still interesting to see and feel it first-hand.
I’m hungry. I think I’ll go down to my local taqueria. The burritos there are so California-style fancy that you have to eat them with a fork and knife. It warmed my heart when I saw that, despite all the differences, they still offered super burritos.
Partially moved in
Most of my stuff is at the new apartment :-). There’s just 1 or 2 carloads of little stuff and I’m done. I’ll be sleeping there tonight or tomorrow!
Now I have to think of how to decorate the place… Arts and Crafts maybe?
New York Pizza on Valencia
Someone told me long ago that Escape from New York Pizza near Haight Ashbury had real New York Pizza. Quite simply, no. It is not.
Arinell Pizza at 16th & Valencia, they make a New York slice. I was in the city (I hear that San Franciscans gingerly call SF “the city” but folks in LA know that “the city” is New York) in October and had Rosa’s Pizza in Penn Station. The two compare very well.
Synergy KVM-thing
If you have multiple computers with multiple monitors, Synergy is a great way to keep your hands on a single keyboard & mouse. It’s kind of like a KVM, but it’s not.
I have 2 monitors on 1 computer (my main desktop PC) and a laptop that I haul from home to work. Now, I can keep my hands on one keyboard and mouse while I slide my mouse from my big 19″ main screen, over to the right to my 17″ screen and then … magically to the right again onto my laptop!
You can slide from your PC to your Linux to your Mac. Keyboard input follows the mouse. You can copy/paste across boxen! It’s magic, and it’s FREEE!
Get Synergy
Read a good tutorial. (I thought it was overly verbose and then I needed to read it to figure out one concept)
I was up and running in < 5 minutes.
I took down the original post I made about Synergy a week ago because I wasn’t ready to recommend it; there were some crashing problems. I found out that the crashing issue was quickly fixed (1.2.5 was no good) and I had just come in at a bad time. I had written to the author when I saw the poor performance and he got right back to me, pointing out that he had very recently posted a fix.
C# books
Dearest Lazyweb, I’ve got to learn C# for work. I’m learning pretty much from scratch. Can you recommend any titles?
Are the IEEE Computer Society online books any good?
I did some programming in college (a million years ago) and I’ve written some automated test scripts not too long ago…
(In case you don’t know, C# is a computer programming language)
Macaroni and cheese at Home
To pre-celebrate my new place, Carmen and I went out to Home. The mac and cheese and the whole environment was really terrific. And then on to karaoke at The Mint. (And to answer your question, no we didn’t)
Not a bad red town painting forum Monday evening!
No robotic combat for you
I didn’t get to see Combots this weekend. That evening of dance, single handedly shutting down an entire gay club, and hanging out with Laura, Tim and George was quite enough.
But I -did- find a photo of a robot I’ve talked about before. I Saw Fighting Robots. :-)
Dancing in the Castro
Last night was a blast. Holly’s friend Laura invited me to an evening of dance and debauchery in the Castro with two of her friends.
We started out drinking Dirty Girls.. that’s Go Girl Energy Drink*, vodka and… I don’t know, something else. After the second glass, it started tasting really good ;-)
We walked on down to at Badlands. On the way, Laura excitedly pointed out The Glass Coffin and other sights. We made it to the club and danced until everyone got hit on at least once.
W
e went over to to The Cafe with it’s different vibe and danced some more, bumping (and grinding) into all manner of folks. The most exciting part of the evening happened in the bathrooms… or more accurately, just outside. Laura and I went down to go and we smelled natural gas. Thinking this a potentially bad thing, I ran up and told the bartender, who radioed the manager. The whole place was cleared out in 10 minutes! The fire department arrived after only about 5 (nice response time). I was -hoping- that our evening would end with a bang, but nothing doing (not injuries, or a burnt down club, just, you know, a cool ball of flame or something). Instead, it ended with banana pancakes at Raggedy Andy’s.
Weee!
(The terribly shakey photo is me pointing at one of the two fire trucks that I summoned)
*I had supposited that the taurine in Go Girl and Red Bull et all could not be obtained from non-animal sources. I did some research today and found that synthetic taurine is now available but I couldn’t find any info saying that it had replaced naturally occurring (meat-based) taurine in the marketplace. That’s right, your energy drink is probably made from meat.
I Love Nigerian Bank Spam
It’s true. I love Nigerian bank spam. It harkens back to a simpler time, when spammers put care and attention into their emails. Back then, you would hardly ever see a tawdry misspelled penis pill spam or one of those overwrought image-only foreclosure spams. Nigerian Bank spam writers would build exquisite bundles of lies that could sweep you up in a fit of excited hopefulness much like that thrilling, hopeful moment as you take your first swipe across a scratch-off lottery ticket. For a few elongated seconds, untold riches are within your grasp, riches that will wipe away all of the problems in your life, replacing it with that life you ought to have, that life you’ve been waiting for. Happiness hangs low on a branch for your outstretched hand to pluck and savor.
Today, I received such a letter. I present it to you without further comment
Signed the lease
I signed the lease on my new place.
Here are some shots of the place. The furniture belongs to the previous tenant.
(more…)
Grrr
Last weekend I was seeing a whole bunch of places to live. I saw this place near downtown SF. As I was walking to the building, I noticed a police officer in one of those little 3-wheeled parking meter cars blocking traffic onto Market Street. I asked what was going on and he said that there was a Veterans Day parade going through because the holiday had been last week. I thought it was strange I had missed the holiday but then again, I don’t get a newspaper and haven’t watched TV in a while, and I sometimes don’t go out for a whole day. When I got home, I saw that my Outlook calendar said that Veterans day was on the 11th. I though, “That’s odd, I entered the date wrong. Oh well.”
Fast forward to today. Today is the day I sign my lease. I started out and went to the post office to pick up a package and… hey, the door is locked. Oh! today is Veterans Day! I went over to the bank I was going to get the cashiers check from and…. :-(
I request that Trav not trackback this article with a snide “Boys in Blue” article. ;-)
Robotic Combat this weekend
Fighting Robots return to San Francisco!
Join us Saturday and Sunday, November 12-13th for The ComBots Cup and Robot Fighting League’s 2005 National Championships! See the metallic stars of TV gather to fight it out to decide who’s the champion - in robot weight classes up to 340 pounds. Thrill to the spectacle as robots fight only a few feet away from the bleachers!
The heavyweight combots cup competitors will be fighting for a $10,000 prize! The highest prize in the US history of fighting robots.
(Combots)
I think I’ll be going Sunday Sunday Sunday! Racewaaay Park!
How I voted
The will of the California people seems to differ somewhat from my own. Most of the Propositions I voted for failed and most that I voted against succeeded.
I found casting my semi-libertarian vote pretty easy. I voted for (in order, starting at #73) “warning labels” but not bans, competition in the workplace, informed consent, smaller government, unbiased government, open marketplace, open marketplace, open marketplace.
Bed recommendations?
I need a new bed.
In most every bed I’ve ever slept in for more than a few months, this divot forms where I sleep on my side. Yes, yes, I know that you’re supposed to rotate your bed every couple months. I do that but it only staves off the divoting for a while. I think it’s that I fall asleep stay in once place; I’ve read how people toss and turn in their sleep all night but I think I toss very little if at all.
I spent like $800 on this snazzy bed a few years ago. 4 years later, the divot became permanent. I’m sleeping on an Ikea mattress right now; for the first 3 months I thought I had found a mattress that didn’t sag beneth me. Nope. I put a good-ol’ divot in my family’s guest bed too. The destruction continues.
I didn’t have this problem with a water bed and Stevie points out that his Select Comfort air mattresses don’t get divots.
I’m thinking about getting a Select Comfort bed. What do you think?
I have a new home!
West Of mission Street - If you like it interesting and culturally fun, get a place also between Mission Street and the Castro, but closer to Mission street. If you can swing it, and if you like gentrified instead of funky, I would get a place between Mission Street and the Castro, closer to the Castro. The closer to Castro, the more wonderful, well-cared-for and personal the neighborhood gets. This area stops at Church street, which is parallel to Mission street. Church and Mission are about six blocks apart.
(source) (photos of the area by the same author)
I’m finishing the paperwork with the realtor on Friday! I’ll be moving into my new well appointed studio apartment in San Francisco on November 15th!
It’s a nice studio apartment in a very nice building, in a nice sunny part of town, near lots of things and culture and -stuff-, and (I grumbled at the realization that this had to be on my “must have” list) near 101 for my thrice-weekly carpool commute to Cupertino.
Now that I’m getting what I feel I need to thrive, I feel obligated to the universe to do something great with it!
.
Yipe, I have no furniture!
