I have been a Sidekick user since the black and white days. Prior to receiving my G1 on Tuesday evening, I had used my Sidekick 2 pretty heavily for nearly four years. I loved its solid feel and the membrane keyboard. The applications mostly worked together pretty well, though the web browser was butt-slow. I have high hopes that as the spiritual reincarnation of the Danger team, the Android team will spawn a worthy successor to the Sidekick 2, which I regard as a peculiarly satisfying pinnacle in the evolution of the mobile phone.

I have been playing with my G1 for three days now. Here’s how it has been so far . . .

Setup

I fault the Quick Start guide for going over what the buttons do and the user interface, then half way through the booklet it tells you how to put the battery inside the phone. That was somewhat annoying because the very first thing I wanted to know is how do I get the battery in the phone and turn it on. Transferring the SIM card was easy enough, and the “tap the Android” process worked rather well.

Unfortunately, the night I tried to first use the phone there was a bug that surfaced in Google’s internal systems so I could not log on to the phone through my hosted domain account. It tossed out a bizarre error code and as usual Google’s support was no help: another customer with Premier hosted domains was incorrectly informed that the G1 didn’t support domain logons.

In retrospect, I should have tried T-Mobile technical support, who have through the years done a solid job at escalating Sidekick issues appropriately. I give the device an extra bonus point for putting the “factory reset” feature within the options panel, rather than making it a voodoo process that involves a paper clip.

Hardware

I wish the Android could be incarnated within the Sidekick 2’s hardware. The Sidekick 2 is built like a tank, with a solid feel and rubber bumpers. You could bash a fool in the skull with a Sidekick 2 if you had to, wipe off the blood, and get back to writing an email on that awesome rubber membrane keyboard.

The G1 is smaller in each dimension, and feels more rickety. It is solid enough, but it is no Sidekick 2. My biggest gripe is that the keyboard, while not truly awful, leaves something to be desired: there is little tactile feel and it took a little retraining to hold my right thumb further out over the keyboard in order to clear the right-side wedge. I am not sure how that will do for prolonged typing. The space key is also narrowed and at least once I have typed an ‘@’ instead of a space.

I like that it charges through the Mini USB port. Yes, I would prefer if it had a proper headphone jack, but that’s not a huge deal for me.

I really look forward to the day that the screen rotates based on how you are holding it.

Gmail

The Gmail client is very nice: it integrates really well with Gmail on the web and my contacts list. If you compose a new message it can check not only your contacts list but also other addresses that you have corresponded with, which is nice. When I read a message on the phone it is marked as read in Gmail and vice versa. It is also easy enough to switch between tags.

Camera

The Sidekick 2 takes muddy pictures on a good day. The G1 has a 3 megapixel camera that takes some pretty nice photos under decent lighting conditions. Unfortunately, the G1 fails a few things the Sidekick 2 got right: the lens is right where I’m apt to put my thumb, there’s no flash, the shutter lag is substantial. The Pictures application is decoupled from the Camera application, so you need to switch from the one to the other to review your photos.

Contacts

I was at first disappointed that there is no practical way to export my contacts from the Sidekick 2. I went through my Gmail Contacts list and cleaned everyone up, integrating phone numbers to email addresses. I had a lot of fun finding pictures of everyone on the web and cropping them into my contacts list. There seemed several instances where updates I made on the phone or on the web didn’t make it across. And one contact I swear got eaten and had to be re-added.

One feature lacking from the Sidekick 2 is the ability to put friends in groups. At the very least it is nice to be able to pull up a group of coworkers versus the rest of your friends. Maybe there is a “tag” feature I have overlooked, or things will improve in the future.

Another unfortunate bug is that in the Gmail interface, you can not add a photo to a contact who has only a phone number.

Web Browser

The Sidekick 2 web browser was horribly horribly slow, and would tend to get upset if a page had too much JavaScript. The G1 web browser is fairly zippy.

That said, the interface can be extremely frustrating: wide web pages require a lot of dragging up and down and back and forth. Sometimes columns of text will be shrunk to page width, but not always. You can not easily resize text. (You couldn’t do this on the Sidekick 2 at all.) The Google Reader app works well enough but there is no way to make the font larger. (I hate squinting.) I am not yet used to the zoom feature: you need to hold your finger down on the screen, without clicking a link or scrolling, then you need to go catch the + or - button that appears and hold that down . . .

The Sidekick 2 allowed for bookmark folders: the G1 web browser has no folders or even a provision to reorder the bookmarks. This is really frustrating because one of the great features to me was to have a folder of Nextmuni bookmarks so I could quickly pull up information on approaching transit vehicles. I look forward to this being fixed. It would be even more awesome if bookmarks could be synced with say a Firefox subfolder on my computers.

The web page links are often quite tiny, and my big beefy man fingers are constantly clicking on the wrong thing.

Messaging

The G1 data plan includes I believe 400 SMS, whereas the Sidekick data plan was $5 cheaper and included unlimited SMS. I like that the SMS application groups messages by sender as in Gmail: tapping a thread brings up what amounts to a conversation with a contact. Deleting SMS messages is a little annoying: you get to confirm that you will delete an entire thread.

The Sidekick 2 supported AOL instant messenger and you could add a Yahoo instant messenger application. What it did do well was to proxy the connection through the Sidekick service so that if you lost reception temporarily messages would queue on either side and be delivered asynchronously. I do not know if the G1 does this.

The G1 supports Google / Jabber, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL within a single IM application. I prefer the way Pidgin works where contacts are grouped together regardless of their protocol. This IM application seems to require a lot of navigating up and down the hierarchy: I have no idea if it will be much fun if you are chatting with a friend through Google at the same time as you are chatting through Yahoo. Anyway, I don’t intend to use instant messaging much.

Maps

The Sidekick 2 had no navigation features. The G1 Maps application so far has been slow, inaccurate, and unstable: it crashed once and other times it would take a long time to inaccurately figure out its location. GPS is disabled by default to conserve battery power. There’s no turn-by-turn navigation. The first time I tried to grab directions the service was down, and the next time it took some fidgeting to figure out how to tell it that I wanted directions to the destination from my current location. (Click on the destination label on the map and then hit Menu > Directions.) Another frustration is that if I go to my location and then switch to Street View, I still have to click on the map near my location, and then figure out how to navigate the street view back over to the original location.

Map searches are very slow (often 10 seconds or more) even on the 3G network.

The Maps app could use some polish. I also need to get used to it. I am very disappointed that there is no transit support.

Calendar

Yay! My mobile phone now syncs with my calendar! I can not really offer a thoughtful review of the Calendar application, because whenever I launch it the user interface makes me want to vomit. I guess it will take some getting used to.

EvilFidgety Touchschreen

The “desktop” pans across three screens, which offers some possibility. It is easy enough to trash the analog clock widget on the middle screen. Alas, the touch screen takes some getting used to. For example, the first dozen times I tried to trash the Google Search widget I failed and concluded that Google had hard-wired it so that I was required to keep that widget on my desktop. I didn’t want the widget, and I hated having it forced upon me: how evil! After ranting about that here I gave it another try and successfully trashed the thing. I’m sorry I doubted your integrity, Google! Unfortunately, the wide Google search bar on the right screen can not be trashed. I google-search from within the web browser. I do not need nor do I want a Google search bar widget on my phone “desktop”. Forcing it upon me is evil and Google should apologize.

Android Market

Both phones have a marketplace where you can shop for and install additional applications. The Android Market is new and somewhat sparse. Apps download and install in the background, and have ratings and reviews so you can avoid the schlocky ones. The “Translate” app is kinda cute and potentially handy. And “cab4me lite” promises to help you map out your location and then call a local cab company, which sounds awfully neat.

What I really want is a nice note pad–I was always scribbling notes on my Sidekick. I also want an SSH client: preferably one that supports key authentication. Give it some time. I guess if I urgently desire a notepad I should jump on the developer tutorial.

Summary

People ask me what I think of the G1. I answer that it is okay and it will get nicer with time. the conventional wisdom that it is “good for a 1.0 device” works for me. If pressed I say that I miss the solid feel and membrane keyboard of my Sidekick 2. I like to think that in the next two years the Android platform will mature and someone will release a model with a form factor more to my taste.

I headed out to the Tennessee Grill for brunch, it getting on towards 11:30. The Catholic church a few blocks downhill was ringing their bells: the call to mass. I detoured towards the Church . . . followed a lady in. Mass had just begun, and I followed other late arrivals into an adjoining little altar area.

They had votive candles burning, which had been what I had in mind. I lit one in Tunji’s memory and sat through mass. I enjoyed the community spirit, some of the songs. The liturgy was pretty light–the priest explained that temperance was avoiding excess. During one song I was overtaken by the beauty and the spirit and I cried quietly for my friend: the lives he had touched, the lives he would have touched had not fate taken him young. I lit a second candle for the lives Tunji touched: his family, us, his friends, and the people he would have served had he become a doctor.

A lady sat in front of me with two young sons. One she held in her arms and the older son, maybe four years old, played with her hair, casually trying to braid one side. I like the harmony: she was there for her purposes and he managed to entertain himself in a manner that hopefully felt pleasant to her.

The priest explained that Jesus had passed the bread around, take it. This is my body. By taking the bread you will spread the word. I figured out that people were getting up for Eucharist, and followed. I savored a Jesus Wafer to take communion for Tunji.

I walked down to the Grill, and had some French Toast and coffee. I had really wanted sausage. Yum!

Back home, read about bonobos in the New Yorker. Then scrubbed the shower out and bathed again after the dirty work, to head out to a date in the East Bay. I met the lady I have been dating the past three months, and she dumped me. I could see it coming and we settled things amicably. She paid for dinner. Classy lady, and too bad . . . I walked away feeling alright for having made a good effort and for having participated in some good times these past three months, and thought about how to work my next approach to dating.

Back home, I’m listening to the Avett Brothers. Surprisingly good bluegrass. They are singing now:

And I love you but I can’t remember why
And I’d love to find a reason to deny
I was a one hit wonder in my own home town

And I guess I might have made a few mistakes
But maybe that’s exactly what it takes
To get a little happy in this big sad world

How many have you made?
And which of those have you laid on down to die?

Well didn’t I say I need you?
I try to move on but I can’t
I try to think of bad times
Good memories are all I have

Not the most apropos excerpt for the moment, but a good tune anyway.

And so it goes. To bed soon, and up around 7am tomorrow to head off to the new job. The new company is about the last place I would ever have thought to look for work, but with an open mind and no agenda I went to interview, and I got on well with the team, and they got on well with me. I have good feelings, and I must make a sincere effort. :)

Tunji was a friend of mine back at Allen Hall. He came to school from Nigeria when he was sixteen, so he was always younger than everyone else. He never lost his deep accent or dark sense of humor. A one-of-a-kind kid who liked to play chess online and was studying to become a Doctor. I don’t know if he made his MD or not . . .

Tim notified us that Tunji’s body was found in Lake Shelbyville Friday. It sounds like he fell off a boat and wasn’t recovered for fifteen minutes, by which time the CPR could do nothing for him.

Last time I saw Tunji he just happened to be passing by when he saw me getting arrested by the University Police.

Tunji was truly a one-of-a-kind man, whose uniqueness was only magnified by his distinctive accent. I never met his family, but I can only imagine how hard it is for your intelligent son and future doctor to die suddenly, and far from home. . . I have great sorrow for his kin.

I will update with additional information or reaction as I learn more . . .

Addenda

Tim Skirvin: His parents live in Chicago, not Nigeria

Darren Hron: Really in shock . . .

The News-Gazette.com: Autopsy: Tunji Drowned also narrates more about the fatal accident:

“They had been out there all afternoon and were there into the evening. Apparently (Mr. Toogun) had been in the water in the afternoon with a life belt on. At this time, he was on the boat with friends and lost his balance and fell into the water,” Green said.

Contrary to earlier reported information, friends noticed immediately that he fell in.

“We noticed after a few seconds that Tunji did not surface and immediately six or seven of us dived in to attempt to find him. It was not until 15 to 20 minutes later that we did,” said fellow student and friend Lauren Jakubowski in an e-mail to The News-Gazette.

Tim Skirvin: Tunji Toogun Album, Tim is compiling of photographs of Tunji.

Tim Skirvin: Tunji is now Dr. Tunji Toogun. His degree has been awarded posthumously.

So, I moved last Sunday, from the 100 degree heat of Walnut Creek to the 70whatever of the inner sunset of San Francisco. Due to the heat wave, there was no fog in my new neighborhood, so I could see the ocean!

Whilst waiting at the toll plaza to cross the Bay Bridge for my big move, a car of girls pulled up next to me to rave on my “Bin Laden Used Your Gas Money” bumper sticker. I noticed the passenger was toking off a glass pipe, and next I looked, the driver was getting her own hit, waiting to pay the toll. “Ahhh, welcome to San Francisco,” I thought.

Since then life has been quite a hustle of the new job, unpacking, going out . . . I’m not keen on giving a lot of details online, but let us just say that my first week in San Francisco features two first dates, and I haven’t even unpacked everything yet! So, I’m off to a good start and work is groovy too. It’s a sexy little dot-com downtown, and I get to ride the Muni L to work, which is cool for a Chicago boy like me.

I showed up at maybe 9:15 on Monday. Turns out the engineers tend to drift in around 10. So, I have been sleeping pretty well this week. Flex time, how I have missed you!

Let’s see. On my block there’s groceries, laundry, sushi, and a few blocks away is a bar filled with Irish people.

I also got to ride in Kaya’s Prius, which is totally Citroen inside! Anyway . . . I have no business with such an expensive cool car, but lately I have thought that if I were looking for a new ride, an older Cadillac convertible would totally be awesome. Basically, a sexy version of the station wagon?

In life, things are better. I confess that I have taken now twice to a dinner of cereal, with a dessert of beer, and that tends to put me to sleep way early. I’m going to try not to make a pattern of this. I admit, though, there is now a pile of unfolded laundry, a pile of un-opened mail, months of unread New Yorkers . . . and I keep missing my deadline to catch the morning bus and end up driving to work. Things to work on, but little symptoms that wake me up to the “don’t get into a bachelor funk” thing. I’ll fold the laundry tonight. The paperwork . . .

Ah, what else? Awesome lunch with Duncan yesterday, at the Rockridge Cafe, was it? Also, last Wednesday? Oh my gosh . . . I went to a party in the city, at a club called Roe, near Montgomery BART. Free admission, free vodka, free wine . . . . and hotties all over, who were completely cool about walking up to me, introducing themselves, and paying compliments. What’s up with that? It was a party thrown by yelp.com, which is this online reviews slash social-networking web site. Well, it worked for me. A dot-com party in San Francisco with free booze and beautiful people? Hell, I partied like it was 1999!

Once I built up a proper buzz, I spent much of the night dancing. The DJ was doing right by us, and it was so much fun to just do my thing on the floor, drenched in sweat, in such a friendly atmosphere.

And yes, a fair number of the ladies are spoken for, that’s fine, but it was a totally hot night to be single, and while I spoke to women who were clearly ready to exchange numbers, I just didn’t go there. I want to, but not just yet. Didn’t quite feel right. Maybe, sign the divorce paperwork first. There was one woman, just flown in to town, for the week, jetlagged, and fresh from a day of wine at Napa, big beautiful puppy eyes . . . damn . . . I rationalized my way away from her since I had the canoe trip, which would eat up my weekend. No time to show her a good time in the bay area!

But I am totally into writing more reviews for Yelp!

I have also given notice on the current housing situation, and am chasing various leads in Rockridge, which promises to be a much groovier place to live. The place upstairs from Duncan is available next month, but it not quite my style, and more than I want to pay. But, we’ll find an awesome pad!

So, my friend Jessica crashed at my place over the weekend. She’s getting past a failed engagement, so we are in a similar place. She also wanted avoid the heat wave of Mountain View. Somehow even without A/C my apartment isn’t so bad. I had promised her a leaky air mattress but that went with the ex-wife. So, she contented herself with the couch.

We went to the Crawdad Festival up north somewhere, me and three single Asian ladies. Well, it wasn’t that spectacular. The food was decent but the ladies couldn’t take the heat. Oh well.

We also spent some time checking out apartments in Oakland. Best as I can tell, I need to just give my thirty days notice and then cruise Craigslist every day, and pound on the first awesome deal I can score.

Today we saw a really nice place a little into the Berkeley hills. Nice nice nice just off 13, but, well, a mile and a half to Rockridge BART is pushing sub-optimal. Dang this lame commute!

In other news, my beloved grey/black fedora was not to be found at the Tunnel Top in San Francisco. Bummer. I left it there some weeks back when people were intent on getting me drunk on the occasion of my divorce. That hat had sentimental value . . . I got it in Italy and we’ve been halfway across the world together. But as I remarked to Clara, a pretty young lady who was at the bar and said she had lost her sunglasses the same way, sometimes you gotta let go and move on in life, ya?

Today, at church, I voiced my first “joys and concerns.” This is a ritual the UUs do at the beginning of services. Since it was Father’s Day, I talked about how Dad had had a stroke, but he’s young, and he’s getting better. Then, my second . . . . . I like to think I’m handling this pretty well, and my burden is light, compared to many, but when it came to dropping a load on a bunch of parishioners . . . . . I choked . . . . and, in a very shaky voice, confessed to a group of mostly strangers that I was getting divorced.

It was a good thing for me to do. Good for me. I felt a little selfish . . . I always feel . . . but, the people were of course, good. And supportive. After the service people approached me and told me of their own experiences. One man was divorcing after thirty years of marriage. Thirty years! Someone else had divorced and re-married the same woman then divorced again. There were those with kids. I said, sure, my little 1.5 years shouldn’t be such a big deal, relatively. But, no, it is never easy. Never.

Tonight, I started a tally of the community property . . . the big question mark is what date do you use to calculate the balances of accounts. Anyway, there are some other complications as well. There may be some need to consult lawyers. No word from the ex-wife. I hope this doesn’t get messy, but if it does, well, no regrets.

I’m also looking to get some therapy. I’m mostly okay, but as friends bid me “don’t think too much” and the poor little brain goes spinning off more frequently than it should, seeking to understand things that I am not entitled, well, maybe I am entitled, but, things that I must accept that I may never understand, about what happened, what her intentions were . . .

“She will have to prove to immigration that she married in ‘good faith’ except that she couldn’t stay faithful for even two years.”

That sort of thing.

In time, I began to feel uncomfortable. As she spent more time with her “girlfriend” I began to complain about the lack of attention, affection, and respect. In the weeks before she initially left her eyes turned black and she would spend most of even the weekends with Colin. This hurt me, and I complained more, and asked what she needed from me. I was unhappy with our relationship. I wanted better.

But she left. For Spring Break. She finally had sex with him “because I felt so lonely.” After a week, she was ready to come back. But after what I assume was intense emotional manipulation she showed up 90 minutes late only to tell me she had changed her mind, and was going to stay with Colin.

This broke my heart, and ripped my soul in two. I bawled harder than I had ever done in my life. But as I lay in bed, I could feel the pieces of my soul drifting back towards me. I rose again, to express my love, my willingness to change. Please, remove yourself to a neutral environment! After the encouragement of Colin’s mother, she did just this, and spent some weeks with a mutual friend from church. She said that she had not meant to shut me out, and I continued to express my desire for reconciliation. We attended some counseling together.

But she did not want to sacrifice her friendship with Colin. I assume he became increasingly desperate because Yayoi became increasingly irrational and hostile. She said many irrationally hurtful things, and it took a great deal of strength to fight for my love for her and our marriage through that. I perservered. Some days were better than others.

When I left for Colorado, I invited her to stay at our place. Take some time to figure things out. Some space to think. Don’t do anything awful that you will regret, and remember that we have had a good life together. When I returned, I went to stay at my friend’s place. An hour and a half commute in exchange for some time and space for my wife to know her heart seemed worthwhile. She wanted time to finish finals and think things over.

But I came home one day, to pick up some underwear, and when I left her a note I turned the note over to find the outlines of a trip to Canada, where shitface is from, immediately after finals. I confronted her and she said that by “taking time” she just wanted to double-check her assumptions to leave with him. She felt it “would be mean” of her not to give me “a second chance.”

I gave her an ultimatum: she had to stop hurting me and choose her path in life. I returned home and we spent a tender night together. The next morning at school Colin focused his intensity back upon her. She came home at night and once again said she wanted a divorce. I talked through everything with her, and she admitted that I might be right about everything, but that she had to leave, she didn’t know why. Colin came and picked her up, for the last time.

Since that night, last Thursday, I have been sleeping well. Vik and Becky took me to Napa with another couple for the weekend. Friends, family, coworkers, and my employer have all been wonderfully supportive through this ordeal. Now it is down to paperwork, and a six month waiting period. So far, we have managed to avoid lawyers.

This has happened to women and men before. This will happen to others again. I have learned a lot and through the pain I have emerged stronger. I know the path ahead will not be easy, but I’m glad to at least know that I am moving ahead. I wish the confused, damaged woman that is my ex-wife well, and I know that Colin Rhodes, Canadian-American, night-shift security guard, Diablo Valley student, aspiring technology professional, and comically self-righteous prick, will face his own karma in time.

To those that have supported me in these dark times, I love you. You have my deepest gratitude. For those just reeling from the blow of reading these words, I am sorry that you did not hear from me in person. I have retold this story a thousand times lately, and I need to put it behind me. And to any of my people who feel that it has been awhile, or they want to renew our friendship, or would enjoy seeing me again, do get in touch. I’ll be doing what I can, introverted though I am, to be better at reaching out to my friends, but I am kind of shy.

I feel blessed. I am lucky. Bad things have happened, and they break my heart, and test my strength. But I have the strength, and I have it in me to learn from this experience and some day it will be to my advantage to have lived this trial. I wish everyone the best in their own relationships, and if you can use an ear in overcoming some darkness, I may have something useful to share.

“This too, shall pass.”

Last Wednesday around 8PM, my Dad experienced a stroke. I flew out here to Pueblo, CO on Thursday. He is getting better, but there’s plenty of rehabilitation ahead. My better half is back in California doing finals week. We have been having a rough time the past couple of months, to say the least. While things have tended to look pretty bleak, I continue to learn new strategies I can follow to effect positive change. I continue to be driven by the image of a better marriage. We shall see if that vision can be attained . . . for now, it is nice to be around family, where I can be a positive influence. It builds hope.

I haven’t been doing nearly as much computer stuff lately. Instead, I have been spending much more time working on personal concerns and talking to friends and family. My employer has been good about giving me some space to work things out, as well as some time off to visit Dad. All the same, I like to update the “blog” every once in a while. There is some entertainment to be found in pictures.

Regards,
/danny

So, yeah, we are totally looking forward to our new digs. This morning we found a “goodbye” gift in front of our door, of a half-drunken bottle of Miller Lite. Our neighbor down the hall got an even bigger surprise, as someone vomited a spaghetti dinner all over his newspaper. You’d think we were back on Walton!
Also, I am super big in Turkey! I have been getting a lot of heartfelt comments letting me know that Allah, who is great, is watching me . . . and that good Muslims will have sex with Danish cartoonists. It is all very exciting. The best part is that the Turks, in addition to leaving nice comments, also click on my ads. So, my AdSense revenue is up a good deal this month! I think that these Mohammed cartoons will eventually buy me a sandwich, so while I don’t really approve of disrespecting anyone’s religion, I gotta admit–blasphemy pays!

This might be a neat time to demonstrate the niftiness of Google Analytics. Here is a pie chart of traffic on this web site for the past week, showing us that, this week, at least, my audience in Turkey is larger than my audience in the United States:

The Turks, they just love me and leave me, though. Only twenty percent ever click past the cartoons. On the other hand, someone in Iran found my web site pretty engrossing:

. . . must be my technical articles on Uranium enrichment.

Man, work has been busy. I had found a nice $1,500 five-day vacation in Mexico for the two of us next weekend, the only holiday until . . . May? But, well, can’t do it. Damn. I’ve also noticed that when I get home these days, I feel all the lazier. The burn out is creeping in, but at least I know it when I see it, and know to watch out. And while I feel bad about skipping Mexico, for now, well, maybe we should be packing up some next weekend anyway.

Lift every voice and sing
’til Earth and Heaven ring
Ring with rejoicing sounds of liberty!
Let our rejoicing rise,
High as the listening skies!
Let it resound
Loud as the rolling sea!
Sing a song . . .

Yes sir, I grew up in the public schools of the Chocolate city. Unfortunately, I’m working in the vanilla suburbs, so this cracker doesn’t get King day off. Oh well, that’s alright, I have work to do, you see.

And on Wednesday, I’ll be thirty years old. Neat, huh? I’ll have to start acting like a grownup.

If you haven’t received Yayoi’s e-mail invitation, and you would like to help us celebrate on Saturday, drop me a line and I shall send you details.

“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”

–Martin Luther King, Jr

Work is going to get really busy in the next several weeks, and my coworkers are going to be cranking for the next few months, even if my particular role will not be constantly challenging. I’m digging it, really, because even though I’ve been far more vigilant regarding the work-life balance than I was in my younger days, its is nice to have a challenging project that . . . pushes the envelope . . . of my capabilities. I have to hustle and be sharp, and while it is not great, there is a reasonable risk of, maybe not failure, so much as disappointment.

Red Meat. Drama!

And so, with the home life . . . things have been pretty quiet, content, satisfying. We have been enjoying the good life, and trimming spending somewhat to improve our long-term finances. A little give, a little take, nothing too crazy. Some day we expect there will be children and we will have less free time to burn, but for now we are enjoying the mostly easy life, playing games . . .

But that goes back to being content . . . it is the Sunday afternoon when you realize that while you are really enjoying your weekend, you actually have some homework due tomorrow. I have this feeling that pretty soon I should start getting even more serious . . . fewer games and more growth-oriented projects.

But not just yet . . . not just yet.

Especially since Civ 4 is coming next month. If I’m going to slack off and enjoy games, I might as well do it in the midst of a crack epidemic. Hopefully as a geeky reward for a job well-done at work.

When Yayoi came out, everything was beautiful. I rented a car from Thrifty but they cajoled me in to spending a little extra for a convertible. Normally, I might frown at the excess, but what better way to welcome my new bride to California? She has school and can not join me out here ’til December, but she was able to spend a few days out here. The first two days I had to work, and she trudged around Walnut Creek in the rain evaluating housing options. On the weekend it cleared up and we decided on a two bedroom place with a pool and a hot-tub for the modest rent of $1200.

Then, as the sun was shining on the newly verdant hills, and the leaves were turning colors, we hopped in the convertible and drove to the top of Mount Diablo. We surveyed the land as man has surveyed this territory for hundreds of years, if not more, from the tallest peak in the land. It was quite the honeymoon, for it is about a week after we were married that I had landed this job in California.

I haven’t had much time for the Internet lately. At work, I have much bandwidth, but I have a sophisticated environment to learn from the guy I am replacing. We are cut from very similar cloth, in terms of technology preference, age, and cultural inclinations. I am taking over an environment that is very similar to something I would have built — a lot of the pieces I have used before, but it is one thing to know the pieces, and quite another to understand what has been composed of them. It is a formidable task, but I am uniquely suited to it.

One difference between my predecessor and I is that he prefers to work in a cave-like environment. Whereas now that he has handed over the office to me, the shades are drawn upon a beautiful view of Mount Diablo. It is more impressive then the view of Mount Diablo from our apartment in Walnut Creek, which helped us pick the place. Yayoi says that since she spends a lot of time studying at home, it is favorable to have a nice view.

But the apartment has been more frustrating than not. They haven’t fixed any of the glitches — I’ll write up a formal request once I get some free time at work — it has taken them all week to get the maintenance guy to take a crack at wiring the phone jacks, which he did wrong, concluding that I have to call Pacific Bell to activate dialtone on the line. Well, that should happen today — they can activate from the CO. I re-wired the jacks and I only hope the maintenance guy at least knew enough to try and incorrectly wire the correct pair. (There are six pairs in the wall, and I am on orange-white.)

Meanwhile, I have 6Mb DSL coming from Speakeasy, courtesy work. They sent a self-install kit, which was received by the building office on Thursday. Except that they don’t have the package. She tried blaming UPS. I called UPS and then I dropped by this coffee shop and payed a few bucks to use their wireless . . . the package was indeed delivered on Thursday, so I’ll have to go back there and give them a polite hard time about it.

The DSL installer will be by on Tuesday. I am wondering if I’ll have DSL before I manage to get the local telephone service. At any rate, I need Internet access at home, not merely for my own geek lifestyle, but because I’m on-call with my employer. Why else would they give me such insane bandwidth?

But it is nice to get out of the house. Here at the cafe I got not only a cappucino, a pain-au-chocolate, and some Internet access, but I had an opportunity to quietly admire a cute, too-young-for-me woman who wore white tights with the hem on the back of the leg, tracing the way up to her short, white skirt, which she used to quietly brag at me about her deliciously beefy thighs. It is the sexiest thing I’ve seen since I had Yayoi with me, and a nice break from my recently monkish existence.

Today is Saturday. I did the laundry yesterday, so what else to do today? Time to head home, try and call some old friends, and hopefully ride the BART somewhere more interesting than Walnut Creek, which is a decent town, but as a co-worker confessed to me on Thursday, a little too “soccer mom.”

At some point during the weekend I went out to warm up my car, and Madeline was by the back door, and it was still not too cold out, so I let her outside, in case she wanted to do her thing of eatin’ some grass. But this time she took off down the steps, and left the yard, which she hasn’t done forever, and hid under my car. Mom brought a flashlight and I lay down on the ground and pulled her back, though she didn’t want to come home.

On Monday we took her to the veterinarian. She was a pound lighter than when we took her in the month before. I learned a new word, “uretic” which is that smell you get when your kidneys don’t function well.

With some forced feeding and steroids and she might perk up feel better. We vacillated. Was this, perhaps, her time? The vet didn’t want to take a position, and offered both that cats can be suprisingly resilient, and that many owners have felt regret after the fact that they’d kept treating their animal past a certain point.

It took a long time to decide. Mom and I are both thoughtful people, and we both tried to clear our judgment of whatever prejudices we could find and arrive at the best answer. The veterinarian acknowledged that even if she did start feeling better, that she’d need to have fluids injected, daily at first, and at least a few times a week, going forward.

Madeline had herself quit at some point in the weekend, and the question was if we could get her feeling better maybe she’d feel differently. She’s a cat, and as cats go, she has a pretty strong sense of autonomy. She really disliked getting fluids, and she wasn’t getting any better.

She’s been Mom’s companion for seventeen years.

I finally voiced my conclusion that, I think it was time for her to go, and Mom repeated this position. It was kind of like in the movies when they fire the nuclear missle, you get both of the guys in there to agree and turn their keys at the same time before the terrible thing can happen.

We brought the vet back in. Madeline drifted off to sleep in Mom’s arms, her heart going ever slower. I learned another word, “agonal breath” which I think would better be termed “terminal breath” which for Madeline was two or three loud sighs. Sounded like sneezes or coughs, but with a special quality to them. I can get why people believe in souls, escaping the body at death.

The body, and the towel that we had brought Madeline in, we left with the veterinarian. The former turned to ashes and the latter turned to the business of whatever use animal caretakers can put it to. We grabbed some take-out, and found that Uncle John had stocked the kitchen with a coffee cake and beer.

Grandma sent some e-mail:

She’s so charming, on little cat feet,
She’s so lovely, incredibly sweet.
And it proves you’re a sap
If you don’t make a lap
For Maddy, because she’s so neat!

Sweet Maddy was really a lover
When over your book she would hover
She’d curl up in bed
And tuck in her head
And snuggle up close as a cover.

Time with Maddy was quality time,
She was always so warm and so dear
And it’s hard to make up a good rhyme
When writing while shedding a tear.

Mom had retired for the evening when it arrived, so I read it to her in bed.

I also had to move out of the apartment that I was subletting from Dan. Moving myself out of an apartment is easy, because all my stuff packs neatly into a dozen or so boxes that fit into my station wagon with ease. The trick is, that I was also obliged by the terms of the sublease to clear all of the junk that had accumulated over the years in the apartment and store it with Dan’s Uncle Marty, who lives three blocks away. So, it wasn’t enough for me to just pack my stuff in my car, drive up to Chicago to attend Grandma’s birthday party, then continue a little farther North to start a new life at Mom’s house, but I’d have to come back to Urbana and clean out Dan’s apartment. By Tuesday. So I drove up Friday evening with the intention to return Sunday. But I’ll get to that later.

Friday, August 8

Now, being as I don’t drive much and my car is old and I value the occasional Confucian ethic of ritual, I keep a mileage log in my car of every time I fill up for gas. As I drove North toward Chicago with all my belongings and stopped for gas I noted with pride that I had not stopped for gas since May. The car has a fourteen gallon tank and gets a little over twenty miles per gallon on the highway, so you can see that I’ve been putting a lot less carbon dioxide into the air we breathe than your average meat-eating red-blooded American is obliged to. And that made me feel quite good about myself. All the same, since I was low on cash, I paid for the gas with my Busey Bank Visa debit card.

Saturday, August 9

The party was wonderful. We had old ladies, and neighbors, and family, and friends of the family, and plenty other people I don’t really know who they are show up. I invited a few friends myself though none were able to attend. There was lots of food and my sister Jessica brought lots of fancy pastries she home-made herself, and I brought some booze I’d found in the apartment that Dan doesn’t drink, and Aunt Linda brought a lot more booze, to add to Grandma’s booze collection, which was augmented by other gifts of booze, not to mention beer. And I was sent out to purchase ice with the neighbor lady who suddenly decided that we needed eight 22 pound bags of ice instead of 8 pound bags, which struck me as a bit excessive at the time, but what with all the beer and soda pop, there were many many coolers hanging around the place yearning for ice. And well anyway Aunt Linda, twenty-first century Renaissance woman that she is, is studying bar-tending, and was thus mixing drinks in Grandma’s basement. I don’t have to tell you all that we had a good time.

Anyway, I just tried to relax because the apartment was going to be tough, but I pitched in with getting the place cleaned up whenever I was asked. Uncle John and Mom did me the favor of driving my stuff up North in Mom’s mini-van. We pulled our tailgates together and shifted my boxes from my blue Ford station wagon to her blue Ford mini-van. And I proceeded to drive back South on Sunday, and carted several carfulls of Dan’s stuff to his Uncle Marty’s house.

Sunday, August 10

Now, Uncle Marty’s a good guy with an extremely beautiful house, and a good heart, near as I can tell. He asked was there any help we needed and I said maybe you have some boxes, and he said yes, he had some at work, which was in some agricultural research building on campus not far from Allen Hall, which is where I lived many years, so we drove over that way, and I noticed the University Police behind me, and then they were flashing their lights, so I pulled over across the street from Campus Visitor Center, where incidentally a friend of mine recently started working.

Now this here is where the story starts to get a little upsetting. I’ll share with you what I wrote to MikeyA about it:

You know when they pull you over, you have to go to court? They don’t just send you a fine in the mail and stuff. Well, I don’t even remember getting pulled over in Palo Alto, but the other day I was pulled over in Illinois on account of the license plate on the back of my car had no tags, because it was the license plate from the front of the car, because the license plate from the back of the car had been stolen while I was travelling in foreign lands.

Well they ran the plates and found my registration was expired. I’ve been putting off worrying about that because I’ve been kinda broke and not sure do I wanna change the registration to Illinois or renew in California or what. Anyhow, they pulled me over and asked for my license and insurance card. I have insurance but I don’t drive so often so I hadn’t gotten around to putting the new insurance card in the glove compartment yet and the one that was in there was two months expired.

Well, they ran my license through the computer and you know it was suspended!? I did not know that it was suspended. Well, so anyway, they asked if I knew why and I recalled them pulling me over in the Mission District one night when I was driving around, missing my back plate, looking for parking, and they had two cop cars then and they asked me to keep my hands on the dashboard because they didn’t know if I was really there to snuff anyone out, and they seemed nonplussed to find out that I merely had a missing license plate. I’d drove around the peninsula for two months or more and nobody ever wondered about my license plate, and the only reason the cops got excited in the Mission was because they thought I might have been up to something else.

I’ll interject here to explain that the Mission District is one of the less yuppified parts of San Francisco, where I was staying with some friends my last few days in California back in April before I went and drove through the blizzards back to Illinois. The cop told me that the license plates were a fix-it offense, and I’d receive a thing in the mail that I could send back to them after I showed my license plate to an Illinois cop and he signed off on it. For some reason, these past few months, this has not been foremost among the things that I’ve been worried about.

“They do it differently,” the Illinois cop told me. I had the front plate on the back of the car because in Illinois one day I was pulled over twice because I had no license plate and the second cop said put the front plate on the back for cryin’ out loud.

There was much more discussion about my shady story as to whether I live in Urbana or do I live in Chicago and the last time the University Police pulled me over in 1999 I said I was a student just about to leave town so it seems awfully suspicious to them that I had the same story in 2003, except that this time I wasn’t a student. Anyway, they said that since I must have lost my license because I had Failed To Appear that they couldn’t trust that I’d appear there. So they arrested me. The back seat of the cop car was split in half and I had my own little plastic bubble to myself.

Another aside here, but the cop who frisked me wanted to know if I had any Bad Things on me. I forgot about my tiny pocket knife, and he never found it. He examined my cell phone and castigated me that if I had enough to purchase a cell phone, but not to keep my car registered, that my priorities must be awfully screwed up. I couldn’t think of anything to say to that at the time, because I was more preoccupied with getting arrested. In my defense I’ll point out that the cell phone cost me $50, and was purchased when the car didn’t even have a working transmission, which was another piece of really foul fortune that I ran up against early this year, and that anyway, I do use the cell phone a lot more than I use my car, and have a greater need for it, as it facilitates job hunting.

At the Champaign County Jail a guy with a moustache and tattoos who looked like he had experience in such matters smiled and waved at me in the back of the cop car as we waited to go into the secret garage. Then another guy who had been working too long and was slap-happy took all my stuff, and my shoelaces, but then let me keep my credit card so I could bail myself out. I never went in a cell, but got my mug shot taken and fingerprints scanned and then my hands covered with ink so they could have an old-fashioned paper record of my prints.

When it finally came around time to bail myself out, they had me call this service that processes credit cards for people who are getting bailed out, and as soon as I was off the phone a fax came through verifying the payment. But they were confused because it was already signed. Huh? Dan’s Uncle Marty, who had been in the car with me, had bailed me out on his credit card. So we called the service up again and asked that Uncle Marty get refunded and I signed my own piece of paper and I was released.

Now, to get back to the story here, and the task at hand, which is that Uncle Marty had come with Milly, my subletting-from-Dan roommate for the summer, and I thanked Uncle Marty for being such a noble character here, and we drove all together in his Volkswagen Golf and picked up boxes from his office. I had a dinner date to catch up on that evening because Yayoi had baked an Apple Pie that she had wanted to share with me, but she’d been pretty confused when I didn’t show up, why didn’t I call? Because I got arrested. But then, why didn’t you call? Because they don’t let you do that, when you get arrested. And she said oh, because my friend Yayoi is from Japan, and maybe they do things differently over there when you get arrested. I don’t know. But I finally got to her place and we made curry rice together and it was delicious.

Monday, August 11

The next day I dropped by the bank to clear out my account. They had the $220 charge from Sunday recorded as deducted, and I hadn’t wrote any checks lately, so I took the remaining $400 or so in cash. I felt somewhat glad that even though I had had to post $200 in bail, I was leaving Urbana with a little more money than I had when I left Oakland.

Milly’s Dad and Little Sister came down in their own mini-van to help with the moving. Together, we loaded up the rest of Dan’s stuff and made a few more trips and completely filled Uncle Marty’s living room with stuff. Mom and Uncle John were nice enough to register my car in Illinois on short notice when I explained that the title was in a box of my stuff in Mom’s van in Chicago and I was down in Champaign without a license, but the Police Officer wasn’t satisfied to hear that the car was registered, he bitched about “plates on the car” that he never was going to look at anyway so I hopped the Greyhound to Chicago. I told Milly that I’d say that I felt bad about leaving the remainder of the apartment cleaning to her, but that I’d be lying, because I really wasn’t eager to scrub the apartment’s naughty bits, and anyway, I’d already hauled a dozen heavy bags to the trash in removing, among other things, cans of soup from the mid-nineties, and numerous other mysterious things, and all of Dan’s stuff, and I felt somewhat done.

I have my proof of insurance, which was actually in a box that I’d kept in the car when I was originally pulled over, but I hadn’t thought of that at the time, but I can’t get my driver’s license so quick. I called California DMV about twenty times and finally I got through and the lady said two FTAs, here are the docket numbers and telephone numbers in San Francisco and Palo Alto to call. Of course, the San Francisco number went to an automated system that only worked if I had my Courtesy Warning Notice with me, and the Palo Alto number played some new-age space music and said please leave a message. So I looked on the Internet and found an e-mail address for San Francisco that told me that they wanted $250 over the missing license plate, and an accurate phone number for Palo Alto informed me that they wanted $300 for a “traffic-related fine” and a $7 fee for a copy of the abstract that I could send to DMV to get my license un-suspended.

Tuesday, August 12

Anyway I rode back to Champaign the next day, though the surly Greyhound bus driver threatened to not let us on the bus because we must have been deliberately ignoring him when he said Champaign people move to the front of the line to get first crack at the local bus but because we hate his guts we deliberately stood at the very end of the line ignoring him, but he eventually swallowed his resentment, because we never met the guy and hadn’t had anything against him and had never even heard his voice before even when he told us to get at the front of the line, so he moved some people from the local bus to the bus that would get them wherever it was that they were going faster anyway, and drove us down to Champaign.

I needed proof of registration and two licensed drivers so we could all go over together in one car and return with two, but I wasn’t a licensed driver. I got Raad, who is another great guy with a white heart, and Yayoi, who has a great attitude about life, to join me at the Public Safety Building, where I showed them the sticker and my two friends driver’s licenses, and then Raad drove us over to Tatman’s and I got my car out of the towing lot. It had been $75 to tow and $15 / day to store. And since it was two days to get everything together, he wanted $105, but he didn’t have any change, and none of anybody else was around had any change, but the boss was around and said make it an even $100.

We dropped the car off at Yayoi’s and then Raad took us to his place for dinner. We ate a delicious, hand-made, vegetarian pizza, because Raad’s a vegetarian, and drank beer and wine, and Raad shared with us what he believes is the greatest movie ever, Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” which I admit was pretty good, but Raad was probably uniquely able to relate to it most vividly because he grew up in Iraq and I don’t think Yayoi got much out of it, but it was a nice way to punctuate everything else that is going on, and I got to see Raad’s paintings and his cats. Yayoi likes cats. And I got to see a picture of his girlfriend in Malaysia, and he was flying to Texas to see his son next week. It was all extremely homey in that comingled diaspora kind of way that makes me smile. Such distances we all have to go to live and to love!

And then as I had further written to MikeyA:

So, I got my car back but I couldn’t legally drive it. My Japanese friend, Yayoi, drove it back to her place, where I stayed for a couple of days, coaching her driving skills. You see, Yayoi grew up in the enchanted land of public transportation infrastructure. And she was kind of scared of the Interstate, but she wanted a ride to Chicago, on the next Friday, so we got along well enough.

Eventually the big day came and we drove up North. We got started kinda late though, and when it got dark I took the wheel, brazenly driving without a license, on the story that it is better I drive than Yayoi deal with my unreliable headlights while driving into Chicago for the first time at night. No troubles … no troubles.

Ugh.

So, you can see, I’ve been kinda slow in getting around to updating my web site. :)

/danny

Post Script

I returned to Urbana for court the other day, and I was the first called. I was charged with insurance, and I showed them my proof-of-insurance card. I was charged with driving without a valid license, and I showed them my driver’s license. The charges were dropped. I’m waiting for the $200 to show up in the mail.

Why did that go so easily? Because driving on a suspended license implies that you were busted for a DUI. It’s a really big deal that I think you actually do go to actual jail for, so unless the cop thinks that you deserve a Really Bad Day, they just charge you with the technically incorrect, but inconvenient offense of driving without a valid license. Apparently my license is valid if you show it to a prosecutor in a court room, but suspended if you have it run by a traffic cop. All the same, I have the CTA at my disposal, so I’m not driving until some unemployment comes through.

Two weeks after I filed for unemployment in Ilinois I was told that I had to re-open my existing claim in California, which had previously been determined invalid, but was subsequently validated when I showed them my earnings from the Coffee Shop. Since I was terminated, I had to do a phone interview, and the lady was able to just pull my account of the story right off of the Internet via a private URL. She was very pleased to have this, because it turns out the Owner lied to her about what had happened, but the burden of proof is on him to show gross misconduct. She has ten days to make a determination in the case, and that was a week ago, so I’ve been anxiously watching the mail for word, and likely cash from the State of California so I can pay off the State of California and drive around Illinois.

Anyways, Busey Bank later called me because they received the charge from the gas station for $19.24 on Wednesday. And they wanted that and $25 fee for overdrawing the account I no longer had. Gah! Anyways, I had put off paying them until I have a bank account, but the other day they called and said, really, the $19.24 would make them happy, so Yayoi said she’d take care of that on my behalf and I get to pay her back. After that call I returned a call from a recruiter who thought I was in California but wanted to present me to a very prestigious University in Chicago. The job sounds good and we’re working to tune my resume, so … things are looking up for a change.