The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for the ‘General’ Category.
Last night I reported how “it was on fire when I got here“. Well today, I get to report how my neighbor’s apartment caught on fire, nearly burning my building down.
Yipe.
I’ll write more later but the short form is:
I called 911 at 11:23am
The first thing they brought out was a smoldering mattress
nobody hurt
fire limited to 1/4 of one apartment, surprisingly little, maybe 1/4 the stuff in the place is smoke damaged.
Ok, they’re rude. But they’re funny. They are.
I’ve loved this list for years. I remember when Luke Sullivan started quoting them at me with funny faces. I laughed and laughed! Though, truth be told, I was and am jealous that he has such an awesome memory… he could quote most (all?) of this list from memory!
Don’t explain, just tell these to your friends, one at a time with a slow wry grin until they make a disgusted face at you.
My friend Marcus, the founder of the Berkeley Revolution is at this moment in New Zealand with his unicycle basketball team having a blast playing against all the best unicycle basketball teams in the world!
local version:
He is at Unicom, The 15th International Unicycling Convention and Championships held in Wellington New Zealand this year!
I just read news and see that they are doing quite well in the standings. Of course, it’s much more about the journey and having fun, but it feels good to know that Berkeley is representin’!
From their website:
We won our second game 44-2 over NT Cyclones, and we won our 3rd game 32-6 over RSD United, a German team. RSD United gave us a game for a while, we were up just 6-4 at one point–they have some of the world’s fastest unicyclists. But things are going well so far. Tomorrow morning we play probably our toughest prelim, …against a French team (CYCL’HOP), and in the afternoon we will have our first quarterfinal game.
Marcus is 4th from left in the photo
Christmas trees burning on Ocean Beach
As I stood on one side of the street, a cadre of Christmas tree bearing revellers trotted across the street, passing the ranger’s police car. He came on the PA and meekly said “Put those trees down, we’re going to be arresting people real soon.” The last two words trailed off in that “I wish it were true” tone of voice. He might as well have ended with upspeak. I’m sad that I’m the only person that heard him say it. Corey was in with the cadre and he only heard the first half of the plea, taking the tree I gave him over the hill to the already raging bonfire.
I want to thank Michael Prados for the beer, Jon for the happy wave, Jean and Ben for the conversation, Corey for his blatent disregard for the law, Rick for his balancing tree act and Charlotte for everything.
I wrote this little guide for my aunt. Her email password got hacked a while back. If you don’t currently do something similar, you should!
First, here is how to make a bad password that will get hacked:
Now here is how to make a good password that is easy to remember and won’t get hacked:
Change all your passwords to follow a pattern. Make the pattern something you can easily figure out but a password thief could never do.
That’s it!
Your final password should be between 9 and 12 characters. (some websites stupidly limit the length of your password, and you don’t want to have to use a different strategy on those sites, lest it be harder to remember.
You now have a REALLY GOOD PASSWORD that is REALLY EASY TO REMEMBER and REALLY HARD TO GUESS. And it’s DIFFERENT ON EVERY SITE so when one website gets hacked, the bad people don’t know your password on other sites!
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If you have gmail, I strongly recommend you turn on 2-step verification.
How to enable it.
A friendly video that walks you through it.
Yes, it takes a little effort, but so does locking your front door when you go out.
Short story: last year I sat down at a public computer at City College. As I typed in my password, I got this chill, wondering if there might be a virus on the computer, sending my password off to some nefarious Russian hacker den or somesuch. So the first thing I did was enable 2-step verification.
Flash forward 3 months to this ABC News article that starts out “A computer virus found at the City College of San Francisco may have been part of an elaborate international scheme stealing students’ personal information for more than a decade.”
Yes, the bad people got my password. But my password strategy and 2-step verification protected me. Nuff said.
I’d like to teach a class with the Institute of Urban Homesteading. To do to the class, I need a space in or around Oakland that can handle a bunch of people playing with bread dough. Can I use your kitchen? If you have a large oven and some space in or near the kitchen, I’d gladly pay you and/or have you attend the class. Call me!
Here is the tentative class description:
Bread in the Oven
3 hour weekday evening class
Cost $30-50 plus $5 supply fee to be paid on day of class
The focus in this class is making an excellent French bread with just a few minutes of effort. Making bread is easy. It doesn’t have to take a long time or be a lot of work. You can make fantastic bread every day or every week for well under a dollar a loaf with less than 10 minutes of effort including cleanup! We will talk about instant yeast and sourdough, refrigerated dough, crust, crumb shaping, ammendments, the chemistry and biology of bread, and the thousands of varieties of this staple food. Once you have the foundations, you’ll see bread recipes as suggestions instead of steps to be followed. The sky is the limit! We will eat and bring home what we make in class.
There’s a million things I can’t do. But what bugs me is that there’s a million things I could do given the chance. I feel pigeonholed by my work history.
I’ve been fiddling with my blog format for as long as I’ve had a blog. I keep thinking that I’ll develop some sense for how to make a nice layout. I haven’t. I won’t. That is sad. I should move on.
So what should it look like? Or is it fine how it is?
I had a very excellent Christmas eve dinner with the Kosas last night :-)
Erin got me a Christmas present :-)
I baked 2 apple pies :-) The gluten free pie was very well received by the gluten intolerant family members, thanks to Charlotte for suggesting I bake it.
There are times when things just don’t go that well for long stretches of time. When that gets me down, I tell myself “I just need a win”. It’s a way of reminding myself that if I can change one thing about my situation, then the sky is the limit. It’s also a bit of a wake-up call for myself. When I find myself muttering, “I just need a win, just anything, anything!” I know that my frustration level has peaked.
Well, I’ve needed a win for a while. And I just got a couple. They’re small, but real.
I spent much of last night trying to diagnose people’s computer problems on JustAnswer.com; I recently signed up as a paid Expert. The signup process has been a bit of a chore and after hours of trying to answer questions, I came up empty.
Win: I woke up this morning and one of my Answers was accepted. I’m now a couple dollars richer. And he even left a little bonus for me. I now have a rating of “1” on JustAnswer instead of a rating of “0”.
I’ve been throwing my heart into making a web site and video for the T. Pen. I realize I have no graphic design skills… web page layout, color schemes and such. I’ve stared for hours (embarrassingly, literally hours) at blank sheets of paper and blank screens trying to drum something up. And the video I’ve been working on has taken waaay too long to make.
Win: Last night, I did the video. This morning I’m putting some finishing touches on it and it looks pretty good. I got to exercise my video production and editing skills and my endurance for pushing though technical problems (For instance, did you know that while you can record a 30 minute video on a Canon Powershot SD1000 Elph, there is no way to get the resulting 1.3 gigabyte video onto your computer? Just reshoot it. And WTF is up with Adobe Premiere dropping partial audio during WMV renders?).
I’m going to take these wins and run with them.
Today’s todo list:
Ok, I won’t get through the whole list today. But I’m on a roll, I can feel it.