Lee.org

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.

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?

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. :-)

Sent to me by Victoria
Black Rock City 2005 from space

Some barely visible remnants of
Black Rock City on Google Maps. Date unknown

[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.]

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.

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?

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.

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.

1-27-21 update:
I hadn’t been using Synergy for a while but with COVID, I needed a better computer setup. I’ve got 2 Windows computers with a total of 3 monitors. It’s wonderful! I paid $30 for it and it’s, no brainer, completely worth it!
I have 2 monitors on the bottom and 1 on top. So I used the custom configuration option to align the cursor movements better. Here’s how:
– Start Synergy
– export the current configuration with File | Save Configuration as…
– modify the configuration file with tips from Synergy (1)
Mine looks like this:

section: links
PSC-ALT-49:
up(50,100) = Tobuscus(0,100)
Tobuscus:
down(0,100) = PSC-ALT-49(50,100)
end

– Point Synergy at the config file with the “Use existing configuration” option.
– Profit!

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)