dannyman.toldme.com

The article “Teenagers’ accidents expose e-bike risks” published on July 30 is a master class in victim blaming. We are provided several examples of someone riding an e-bike who is then injured or killed when being forced to mix with motorized traffic.

The problem isn’t e-bikes, the problem is that we have chosen not to provide safe routes for people to get around on bicycles. E-bikes magnify this failure by making it easier for more people to ride.

E-bikes can also lead to the fix: as more people ride bicycles, there will be more pressure to build safe routes for people to get around on bikes. More bicycles means fewer cars on the road, reduced Carbon emissions, and less road congestion.

We need to stop blaming our children for our failures and get to work.

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The cat is okay.

The night vet … the night vet is okay.

I wait in the lobby, sprawled on a bench. At one point there’s more of a crowd. I sit up and set the carrier on the floor.

I wait. And I wait. Staff have called in sick, but the triage nurse is on top of things.

I watch the parade. A family comes in with a dog. The dog is in trouble. They go back right away.

I wait. And I wait. Another family comes in with another dog. This dog is in trouble. They go back right away.

I wait, and I watch the families return, one by one, teary eyes. No dog.

I wait. The front desk quietly chatter about clients selecting urns.

I wait. The front desk staff leave.

It is 2am. I see the Doctor. We run through The History together. I am not very good answering questions. My middle aged mind doesn’t run full tilt at 2am. The bulb on the cat’s nose that is filled with puss, one can squeeze like a zit. “Your cat is not very happy with me now.” Fair enough. A prescription for something that can stimulate appetite. Wear gloves and rub it in the ear. Alright.

We get home. The cat is hungry. I feed her. I may not need to rub medicine in her ears.

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Surrender

I have friends who in 2023 have occasion to leave their house and they return with breathless reports of how few people at the airport were wearing masks. They cluck to each other at how sad it is that humanity seems to have given up the fight against the Coronavirus. Meanwhile my prison friend says that he’s probably had Coronavirus a half dozen times. He says he doesn’t want to get a vaccination because he really doesn’t trust the government.

Rags

Time Magazine likes to talk about how great it is to have been Time magazine in the past. An attentive reader is in and out in fifteen minutes.

The New Yorker Magazine will explain that living in New York today has it’s moments, but that the world is full of meaty goings on and it can be fascinating to explore a few of these things in depth if you have a few hours to kill. Or just look at the cartoons. This is New York, after all.

Detour Spiral

Public Transit advocates are concerned that because of a lack of funding and a lack of riders, public transit could soon enter a death spiral which means they cut back services so fewer people ride so they cut back services, etc.

This morning, the highway was closed down on both sides because of a multiple car pileup. Death Spiral. My children and I rode our bikes to school. On the way back some douchebag in a truck felt obliged to honk his horn at me because he had to detour around the Death Spiral and what kind of jerk rides a bicycle down a narrow neighborhood street?

SFO Outbound

On our way to the gate, we saw a pack of soldiers, dressed in fatigues. I got excited, a tingle, to see they were Ukraine soldiers. “Slava Ukraine,” said I. I noticed at least three prosthetics among them. A nice blade foot and two guys with claw hands. My guess is that they hadn’t come to the US for training, but for some leave, earned hard.

They got their bearings, turned around and returned in the direction they had come. Were they coming or going? When people are surviving a war, the future is especially hazy.

Any Questions?

“Any questions,” asks the waiter.

“… why is it so expensive?” Asks our older son.

“Questions about the food,” we prompt him.

But his is a good question. The food is expensive, but we have money. But when I was growing up, we wouldn’t eat at a place this expensive. We had money but not the kind of money his family grows up with. He is aware of his privilege. We want him to grow up not to be an entitled jerk. If he is occasionally questioning the Price of Things, I guess we aren’t doing so bad?

He knows he has Privilege. Why does his family have more money than others, I ask myself. Shouldn’t we all make the same … shouldn’t we be equal?

I think to myself, I have said it before, for the same money, I would wait tables. Computers are engaging but helping people is emotionally rewarding. The market economy says pay the computer technicians more to incentivize them to use the rare skills we all so desperately need. You can’t have all the computer guys wandering off to serve in more emotionally rewarding roles!

Or can you? Necessity .. invention ..

Ursula Le Guin. I think of the novel about a planet where the people have no gender, except for the brief periods where they need to mate. Their planet is Socialist. Or was it Anarchist? People are assigned jobs for a period of time by a computer. A fair system. Maybe not as efficient as we prize.

I think I would enjoy not doing the same career forever. But the money … I can not complain too loudly. This frustration is enviable.

Helping people is a reward in itself. Early on, I preferred IT. Or, as I called it: Information Services. But the economic path of the profession seeks to divorce itself from the “cost center” of “helping people work more effectively” to the prestige concept of “Engineering” … Systems Administrators call themselves DevOps now, which is a nonsense word that connotes “Developer Operators,” I guess?

I was thinking about National Service the other day. I have long thought it would be maybe not such a bad thing if we “earned” the right to vote by demonstrating our personal commitment to our collective success. But it needn’t just be a year or six months in your youth. The tree of liberty needs constant watering. Every decade or so, spend a few months helping out. In the classroom. In the streets. On the land. Cleaning a public restroom. Doing what needs doing. Helping a family with paperwork at the hospital or the funeral home. Learning the skills we will all need at some point.

The people who run the computers. The people who run our businesses. The people in charge. The People with Privilege. These are all folks who could use some better context in their “day jobs” just as anyone and everyone could use an open pair of eyes. To ask the questions worth asking.

Under Water

I have a friend who posts trench warfare videos on his Facebook. I see a lot of Russian soldiers get killed each week. I take a dose of joy and sadness at the same time.

My sympathy for people who had everything and paid a bunch of money to a charlatan and signed all the disclaimers for the adventure of riding in a janky submarine … good for them. They died as they lived. Lives of privilege. They have no need of my sympathy.

Some guy from a rust belt mining town in the Ural mountains who signed up to die in a shit-stained trench in a propaganda video on Facebook. He made a bad choice among bad options. My feels for that guy, and his family.

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I wondered about the name “Las Vegas.” I am a California resident who dabbles in Duo Lingo. “Las Vegas” means “The Meadow,” named by a Spaniard who enjoyed stopping over at this grassy meadow in the desert. A meadow fed by natural springs. Later, the Americans would come and build pumps, draining the springs, and leaving the city to sink several feet into the desert sand: vegas no más. Other minds beheld this sunken place near the Hoover Dam, nodded at the lack of prohibitions on gambling, and began building casinos. The casinos begat a nice airport. Other minds contemplated diversification: cheap power, cheap land and easy logistics are all good for the datacenter business. The party will last as long as the Colorado River flows. It is a visit to the dimmed lights of the datacenter that brought me.

When America allows itself to take all its worst instincts and run with them, we get Las Vegas. The City feels like any suburb in America: a series of large shopping malls in the middle of town sealed in to their own reality, surrounded by humbler strip malls where the locals satisfy their day-to-day commercial needs. All generously connected by a grid of six lane roads and choked highways. The area leading to the Buy N Large datacenter is rocky desert strewn with trash. A developing country missing its stray dogs.

It was from the driver of the rental car shuttle bus that I gleaned a potential use for Las Vegas. As we rode from the Airport Terminal to the Car Rental complex across the street, he took to the mic to entertain and inform. The weather was in the fifties that day, but in a few days the forecast called for ninety. He then explained that the airport had recently been renamed from “McCarran” to “Harry Reid” and fortunately most of the signs have been changed, but for the first year a lot of folks had been confused. Our driver then informed us of a list of national parks and how many hours of driving they were from Las Vegas: Bryce, Zion, Death Valley, and the North Rim and the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Ah, I thought: as an air hub, Las Vegas could be a good spot to fly to with the family to rent a car and explore. Coastal Northern California is surpringly far from The West. Perhaps I would be back.

An early morning line at the airport Starbucks, where I’m pretty sure I won’t be served.

The morning was long. I had been up at 5:30 to shower, drive, park, and catch my flight. I had hoped for a pastry and coffee at the airport Starbucks, but the line was long and moved at zombie speed. I stood patiently for a few minutes until the airport loud speaker announced that my plane was now boarding, and I had the length of the terminal to cross. On the plane, the pilot announced that due to the unusual presence of Weather in California, the flight could be choppy, so no “service” would be attempted, for safety. At Harry Reid’s rental car terminal, there was a big Starbucks in the middle, but I had an orientation to get to at the Buy N Large datacenter, and at that point I had achieved my “cruising altitude” for the morning and didn’t need anything. I made my way to the cars and picked the Blue One. When asked to choose a rental car, I try to go for the most unusual color, in hopes of remembering which car I was driving.

Driving rental cars is its own pleasure for me, because at any given point in my life I am probably driving an older car. Behold, the crisp video feed from the backup camera! How does the cruise control work? Lane keeping! That’s neat. Where do I put my phone for easy navigation. Once I discover that I can pair my phone to the car’s video screen I am in a good place. At some point I ask myself whether I might want to be the kind of person who always drives a newer car. And I explain to myself that sounds nice but what is even better than that is to be the kind of person who doesn’t spend enough time driving for car quality to be important.

The Buy N Large datacenter has several entries in the Maps App. Because I had shipped some hardware last month, I recognized the street name of the one I needed to get to. I met my colleague and an armed security guard gave us the orientation, and guided us through our navigation of the sectors. Buy N Large is the largest data center I have ever worked in. It is one of those monuments which people in my line of work are likely to visit at some point in our careers. I recalled an old colleague who gave up living in Oakland, because The Company was content to have him work remote near the datacenter. He was content to rent a Large House to share with his cats, and drive out into the desert some nights to look up at the stars. Las Vegas was a home base from which he could visit The Universe.

Between orientation and getting work done I needed to eat. I asked The App for Brunch and settled on a place called “Mr Mamas.” A diner in a strip mall. Clean and efficient and delicous, with American portions. I had French Toast and eggs and a lot of coffee and was in a great mood for an afternoon of Moving Cables Around. At one point, I realized I would need More Cables which can be a problem because after all, Fry’s Electronics is no more. But the app suggested that Kiesub Electronics was on the way to Grainger. I hopped in the Blue Car and found The Cables that I needed at Kiesub. I had wanted to buy Extra but they had exactly Enough for my purposes. I got to chatting with the guy and he noted that while Fry’s had come and gone, Kiesub had stood for fifty years. We chatted some more. He inquired about me and I enumerated my blessings, and noted that for me, everything was pretty great. For Now. I’ll always remember the Lean Years after 2001. The guy had been married some decades and explained that while Marriage is Work, it really helps if you don’t take yourself too seriously. Amen.

Back at Buy N Large, I got the cables moved around and around 5:30pm, I called it A Day. I checked in at the hotel and asked for advice regarding dinner. The clerk kindly explained her favorite options which I duly checked out but I just wasn’t Feeling It. I wanted to sit at The Bar, somewhere quiet. I resorted to asking The App for Irish Pubs. After all, that is our comfort in Sunnyvale, which is the name we settled on when the Post Office told us we couldn’t call our town Murphy. The first on the list was in Mandalay Bay, which is a massive golden cube. I drove up to it, and pulled into a driveway. I passed a line of taxis wondering what the parking situation would be. I was deposited back out onto another six lane street. I asked The App again, and scrolled West into the Sprawl. I found my way to an Irish Pub in a Strip Mall. The parking lot was full, but a local vouched that the No Parking Tow Zone filled with parked cars was a place he parked Every Week. For tonight was Trivia Night.

I sat at the bar and the menu bragged that the Fish and Chips were the best in the US in 2019. I had travelled to an inland desert and I ordered The Fish and it was tasty. As suggested, I filled out the trivia cards. Brian the Owner stood near and we chatted. I told him about Buy N Large and he recounted a friend who was gifted in the ways of computers who had a confidence that he could talk himself out of anything, who had met a violent end from a neighbor who had mental problems. It was Halloween, and another Body in the yard had initially been mistaken by the kids as a decoration.

Come morning, I surveyed the Hotel Breakfast. Eager guests fed themselves off styrofoam plates, as is The Custom at American Hotel Breakfast Buffets. I allowed myself to recoil and to drive back over to Mr Mamas to enjoy the same damn meal I had enjoyed the day before. It did not disappoint. I dropped by Buy N Large to check on my colleague. My work done, I dropped in at a local coffee shop, which was okay. Back to Buy N Large, to bring my colleague to the Rental Car Return and on to the airport, where we parted ways, to our different airlines serving different sectors of the Bay Area.

I had a few hours to kill. I walked the length of the terminal, studying my options for sustenance and souveniers. I eventually settled on a $4 Nathan’s hot dog and discovered another Irish Bar next to my gate. A guy left a Blue Moon at the counter, which the barkeep acknowledged would be an insult in Ireland. I took this neglected pint under my care, which I nursed alongside my own Goose Island IPA. Another Illinoisan from Naperville who had matriculated from the same High School as the girl I had once dated from Naperville asked the Irish Bartender what he thought of the mixed drink known as an “Irish Car Bomb.” The bartender named a woman who he had known who got blown up in the early eighties. “It wasn’t intended for her, but her boyfriend, an English soldier.” If an Irish Pub promoted “Car Bombs” you could tell it was run by Americans. Conversation passed well through a third beer.

“Nevada” means “snow” and this year the “Sierra Nevada” lives up to its name.

The flight home was pleasant. I was served a Coke and a snack and had time for the buzz to recede so that I could drive home safely from the Long Term Parking, and help my sweetheart put our boys to bed.

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Part of my day job involves looking at Nagios and checking up on systems that are filling their disks. I was looking at a system with a lot of large files, which are often duplicated, and I thought this would be less of an issue with de-duplication. There are filesystems that support de-duplication, but I recalled the fdupes command, a tool that “finds duplicate files” … if it can find duplicate files, could it perhaps hard-link the duplicates? The short answer is no.

But there is a fork of fdupes called jdupes, which supports de-duplication! I had to try it out.

It turns out your average Hadoop release ships with a healthy number of duplicate files, so I use that as a test corpus.

> du -hs hadoop-3.3.4
1.4G hadoop-3.3.4
> du -s hadoop-3.3.4
1413144 hadoop-3.3.4
> find hadoop-3.3.4 -type f | wc -l
22565

22,565 files in 1.4G, okay. What does jdupes think?

> jdupes -r hadoop-3.3.4 | head
Scanning: 22561 files, 2616 items (in 1 specified)
hadoop-3.3.4/NOTICE.txt
hadoop-3.3.4/share/hadoop/yarn/webapps/ui2/WEB-INF/classes/META-INF/NOTICE.txt

hadoop-3.3.4/share/hadoop/common/lib/commons-net-3.6.jar

There are some duplicate files. Let’s take a look.

> diff hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
> ls -l hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 djh djh 1640 Jul 29 2022 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 djh djh 1640 Jul 29 2022 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd

Look identical to me, yes.

> jdupes -r -m hadoop-3.3.4
Scanning: 22561 files, 2616 items (in 1 specified)
2859 duplicate files (in 167 sets), occupying 52 MB

Here, jdupes says it can consolidate the duplicate files and save 52 MB. That is not huge, but I am just testing.

> jdupes -r -L hadoop-3.3.4|head
Scanning: 22561 files, 2616 items (in 1 specified)
[SRC] hadoop-3.3.4/NOTICE.txt
----> hadoop-3.3.4/share/hadoop/yarn/webapps/ui2/WEB-INF/classes/META-INF/NOTICE.txt

[SRC] hadoop-3.3.4/share/hadoop/common/lib/commons-net-3.6.jar

How about them duplicate files?

> diff hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
> ls -l hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 2 djh djh 1640 Jul 29 2022 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 2 djh djh 1640 Jul 29 2022 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd

In the ls output, the “2” in the second column indicates the number of hard links to a file. Before we ran jdupes, each file only linked to itself. After, these two files link to the same spot on disk.

> du -s hadoop-3.3.4
1388980 hadoop-3.3.4
> find hadoop-3.3.4 -type f | wc -l
22566

The directory uses slightly less space, but the file count is the same!

But, be careful!

If you have a filesystem that de-duplicates data, that’s great. If you change the contents of a de-duplicated file, the filesystem will store the new data for the changed file and the old data for the unchanged file. If you de-duplicate with hard links and you edit a deduplicated file, you edit all the files that link to that location on disk. For example:

> ls -l hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 2 djh djh 1640 Jul 29 2022 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 2 djh djh 1640 Jul 29 2022 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
> echo foo >> hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd
> ls -l hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 2 djh djh 1644 Mar 23 16:16 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 2 djh djh 1644 Mar 23 16:16 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd

Both files are now 4 bytes longer! Maybe this is desired, but in plenty of cases, this could be a problem.

Of course, the nature of how you “edit” a file is very important. A file copy utility might replace the files, or it may re-write them in place. You need to experiment and check your documentation. Here is an experiment.

> ls -l hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 2 djh djh 1640 Mar 23 16:19 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 2 djh djh 1640 Mar 23 16:19 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
> cp hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
cp: 'hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd' and 'hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd' are the same file

The cp command is not having it. What if we replace one of the files?

> cp hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd.orig
> echo foo >> hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd
> ls -l hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 2 djh djh 1644 Mar 23 16:19 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 2 djh djh 1644 Mar 23 16:19 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
> cp hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd.orig hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
> ls -l hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 2 djh djh 1640 Mar 23 16:19 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/hdfs-config.cmd
-rwxr-xr-x 2 djh djh 1640 Mar 23 16:19 hadoop-3.3.4/libexec/mapred-config.cmd

When I run the cp command to replace one file, it replaces both files.

Back at work, I found I could save a lot of disk space on the system in question with jdupes -L, but I am also wary of unintended consequences of linking files together. If we pursue this strategy in the future, it will be with considerable caution.

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My preschool was in a decrepit VA facility. One day a pipe burst and one of the classrooms was flooding. So they worked around it but to me it felt apocalyptic and I cried accordingly.

Another time I made a bird feeder with a roll of toilet paper, slathered in peanut butter, rolled in bird seed.

Another time we helped the teachers unwrap hella taffy cubes that they melted in a pot and dipped apples in to make us taffy apples. That was excellent.

Another time they gave us eye exams and I was upset that half the exam I couldn’t see the promised capital E. I felt I had been misled.

We would walk as a class down the halls of the VA hospital to the playground, and broken men slept along the walls. We never spoke of them, that I recall.

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[I wrote this up in 2018 but never posted it. Since then, we have added bike lanes on Maude and approved bike lanes on Sunnyvale Ave. I think the contrasting approaches to street design are still really interesting. -danny]

I thought I would catch up on a little reading. I skimmed this article about an intersection in the Netherlands where a distributor road with bicycle lanes intersects smaller roads. The main road is similar in form and function to Maude between Mathilda and Fair Oaks: it is a local distributor with one lane in each direction and a speed limit of 30mph. The Dutch street has curb-separated bicycle lanes and no parking. Maude is slated to eventually receive bicycle lanes, and City Council decided to retain parking.

Graafseweg, as featured in Bicycle Dutch. This is what Maude might look like under Dutch design standards: bicycle lanes are buffered from traffic, and traffic lights are avoided in favor of clear markings and buffers for turning vehicles.

Here’s a look at these streets on a map.

E Maude Ave, in Sunnyvale

Graafseweg, in ‘s-Hertogenbosch

Both streets pass through a residential neighborhood with small businesses. There’s a main road to the West, and most intersections with the collector road are Ts. Because the bicycle lanes and sidewalks are separated from Graafseweg by parkways, the Dutch road looks much bigger on the map. If you zoom down on the satellite view, the roads, especially the travel lanes, are comparable in size. If you drop street parking and narrow the parkways, this design could fit in the Maude corridor.

Here’s a rough overlay of the intersection of Graafseweg and Pater van Den Elsenstraat overlaid at Maude and Sunnyvale Ave.

Maude and Sunnyvale Ave: Current Version

Maude and Sunnyvale Ave: Dutch Version

The street itself lines up perfectly, but the park strip would need to be trimmed to fit. The first difference you notice is the absence of slip lanes, which Sunnyvale plans to remove from this intersection. (The Dutch intersection does have a slip lane on the lower right for bicycle traffic.) The next difference you notice is the absence of turn lanes. There is no signal in the Dutch intersection: vehicles turning left pull into a succession of buffer zones yielding to oncoming traffic.

Consider the pedestrian experience: right now, pedestrians crossing Sunnyvale or Maude must press a “beg button” and wait a minute or two for a walk signal. (This can feel like an eternity and is especially infuriating when there is no oncoming traffic. This is why people “jaywalk.”) In the Dutch version, pedestrians make a series of crossings: a one-way bike lane, then a one-way vehicle lane, then a one-way vehicle lane, and a one-way bike lane. Each crossing is much simpler, and pedestrians complete each crossing in a few seconds.

Motorists also experience a series of simpler crossings. For example, a left from Sunnyvale onto Maude would require a yield to the pedestrian and bicycle lanes, then a yield to Eastbound traffic on Maude, and then a yield to Westbound traffic.

One distinction from the Netherlands is that in California, without a signal, pedestrians have the right-of-way at intersections. In this Dutch intersection, bicycles and pedestrians have the right of way across Sunnyvale Ave but would be obliged to yield to traffic on Maude. You can parse this out by looking closely at the placement of “shark tooth” triangle markings on the pavement to see who is being told to yield. I don’t know if that would be allowed under existing state law.

If you look closely at the Dutch analog of Sunnyvale Ave, you see something very interesting.

Many wish to see a cycle track along Sunnyvale Ave, Sunnyvale’s principal North-South bicycle route. The Dutch street looks like a parkway, but the street to the left is a separate street. The street on the right is narrow and two-way. The bicycle lanes are just under 5′ wide, and between those lanes is a 15′ wide road for two-way traffic. The standard speed limit for this road would be 30mph, but drivers likely slow down because they don’t have much room to maneuver. Also, check out that sweet bus shelter! Compare this with the scene on Sunnyvale Ave at Hazelton. Can you spot the bus stop?

What about parking? The American approach seems to be “put in as much road as possible, and use the sides for parking.” The Dutch approach seems to be “put in less road, more landscaping, and sidewalks, then carve out parking spots where you need them.”

Yes, that mom has enough confidence in the safety of this street to have a young child riding on the back of her bicycle.

The Right-of-Way for these streets is comparable, but the Sunnyvale Ave roadway is 40′ wide. The Doctor Poelsstraat roadway is 25′ wide. The Dutch street still accommodates parking, but the overall experience is more pleasant: pedestrians can cross a narrower street, and the narrow street is a cue for drivers to slow down.

The Dutch have also found a convenient use for their wide, separated bicycle lanes: they can double as parking lanes! Let’s take another look at the Dutch version of Maude Ave.

The 10′ bike lane has car parking along the sides. The nearest car on the right is a reserved spot for a disabled resident. Maude is 50′ curb-to-curb and could fit a 20′ roadway, two 10′ bike lanes, and parking on one side of the street. Parking on both sides might fit at the cost of removed park strips or smaller lawns. The parking-versus-landscaping tradeoff could be made at the block level by local property owners.

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I remember asking Adina about the Green Caltrain blog. Had blogs died, or is that still a way to reach people? Times have changed, she acknowledged, but a lot of people subscribed to the blog via email, and that made it, to this day, a very good way for news to reach people. One “obsolete” technology relied on an older, and even more “obsolete” technology. Video leans upon the radio star.

I put “obsolete” in quotes because while blogs had their day and receded some, people still use them. And email is still great at being email. Some of us are even daring to believe in distributed communication platforms again, thanks to Elon’s ongoing effort to drive Twitter into a wall.

When I was in college, I initially avoided Computer Science, mainly because it felt like Microsoft was eating the technology world, and that wasn’t a platform that gave me joy. But then I discovered Unix, and the ideals of an Internet built by different folks along open standards. Linux and FreeBSD and the ideal that software should be as free (to inspect and modify) as possible. In the early days, most web sites, like this one, were just people writing up HTML markup by hand, later with tools. Blogs came along: get access to a server and run some software, and you can publish your own thoughts for the world to see. And people would subscribe in Google Reader.

Then the Internet took a dark turn. All the content got hoovered into The Walled Garden. I can understand. The Internet is complicated, and Facebook serves some compelling, predictable, fast content. Why leave the restaurant when a visit to McDonald’s is sure to engage you in petty squabbles punctuated with pictures of cats and grandkids?

Twitter is dying. It will shuffle along in a zombie state, perhaps indefinitely. For me, the walled gardens are just so much ping pong distraction candy. Put the engagement machine down, quiet the mind, and let the inner Creation flow.

I’ve signed up for Mastodon. I get more “engagement” than I did on Twitter, and then I get bored and put it away. The concept is Social Media built on Open Standards. Blogs with open standards, shrunk to a Twittery microblog essence. It is nice to be trying a New Thing, especially when that New Thing isn’t built to contain us all in some weird psychology experiment where we are the product.

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A year ago I was finishing my second Steve Ramsey build. Or first, if you count the workbench as a “bonus” … I had fun doing the miter cuts and setting up a jig for square angles, sanding, gluing, assembling, screwing … the finishing and sanding and finishing and sanding and finishing was a drag, especially because it was cold out and I had to do the smelly stuff indoors and even put a little space heater in the garage just to keep the gooey stuff warm enough.

At the end of the day, I had a nice table. It has been sitting out in my yard all year, and the tabletop is still smooth as silk.

But as I finished that project, a mob attacked the US Capitol and tried to kill Congress, and we let it happen. We barely managed to keep our Democracy that day. I stayed up late to watch Congress certify the damn vote count. And a few weeks later I listened to Amanda Gorman’s poetry.

I look forward to rekindling my enthusiasm for woodworking. That’s been deferred a bit as I slowly erect a bike shed / fun fort in the back yard to store the bicycles so I can once again putter around the garage workshop.

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We bought our home in Northern California in 2012, which was great timing because that was about the last time after the mortgage crisis that we could reasonably afford a home, at a mere $605,000. At that time, the home had a floor/wall furnace from 1949 that had a hole that made it a carbon monoxide risk. We upgraded to central heating shortly after. Guys came out and ran ducts all over the attic and hooked them all up to an efficient gas furnace with an air filter. Topped it all off with a shiny Nest thermostat. It gets chilly out here on winter nights, and it used to be only a few days in the summer that anyone needed air conditioning, at which point you go to the office during the week or to the mall on the weekend.

In 2016 I added an air conditioner to the system. The local contractors seemed not quite comfortable with heat pumps, and the furnace was new, and we only run the air conditioner, well, now maybe a total of a few weeks each summer. A major construction project across the street involved asbestos mitigation, and we were having a baby, so the ability to shut the windows on bad days had some appeal. (I later gifted our old box unit AC to another expectant couple who had concerns with construction dust.)

Most of the time, we enjoy having windows open, day and night. Most of the time, our climate is blessedly mild—most of the time. The past few years have had a lot more smoke from all the fires in California. 2020 had an apocalyptic vibe when the plague was joined by a daytime sky turned orange. Shut the windows, run the AC, praise the air filter in the HVAC. For the Pandemic, I also set the air to circulate 15 minutes every hour during off-peak energy hours. (We’re on a Time-of-Use plan.) The idea is that if we had COVID-19 in our air, we would filter some of it out and help improve our odds.

This year has been less awful. The winds have been mostly blowing the fire smoke from the hellscape experienced elsewhere in the West, away from the Bay Area. As a result, AQI has stayed mostly under 200. But as I had gotten back in the habit of checking purpleair.com to figure out if the windows need shut, I got curious to better understand the air quality inside our house, so I ponied up $200 for an indoor monitor. It has a bright LED that changes color based on what it measures, and the boys think that’s a pretty great night light.

My first revelation was that indoor AQI was spiking overnight, starting around midnight. Since I first installed it near the dishwasher, I figured that was the culprit. After a week of A/B testing, I had ruled out the dishwasher and figured out when the wife goes to bed, she likes to run a humidifier, and the water droplets in the air can look like pollution to a laser. Mystery solved!

The other thing I noticed while keeping an eye on purpleair.com to see if it was time to shut the windows is that our indoor AQI would tend to have a lower (better) score than outdoor sensors nearby. That’s good news. Zooming in, I could see a jaggy pattern where the AQI would drop when the furnace fan circulated our air through the MERV 16 filter in the attic, then it would spike back up. The upshot is that we could have open windows most of the time and cleaner air inside the house, but how to run the fan on an efficient schedule?

Well, it is tied to a thermostat … I could implement an “AQI-o-stat” with a Python script that scrapes the AQI reading and tells the Nest to run the fan. The script took about 3 hours to write. 10 minutes to scrape purpleair.com, 2.5 hours to figure out Google/Nest’s authentication API, and 20 minutes to figure out how to set the Nest fan. The authentication part took only 2.5 hours because Wouter Nieworth posted a bunch of helpful screenshots on his blog.

I implemented the “AQI-o-stat” on the afternoon of Sep 3, at which point CatHouse A now keeps AQI around 60 or below, while the neighboring Zinnias outdoor sensor reads in the low hundreds.

There was some tweaking, but I now have a Python script running out of cron that checks the indoor AQI, and if it is above 50, it triggers the timer on the fan. I started polling at 15-minute intervals but found 5-minute intervals made for a steadier outcome. The result is that we can leave the windows open, and the indoor air quality hovers around 60. One less thing to worry about. (There are plenty of things to worry about.) I have been thinking that, in the “New Normal” (which really means there is no “normal” because the climate systems have been thrown into turbulence) that having an air sensor as an input to your smart thermostat will probably just become a standard feature.

So, “hello” from the near future, I guess.

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A few months back, everyone was talking about what it was like a year ago to enter the Pandemic. I never was much for that kind of nostalgia. I’ll say the Shelter in Place order came in on a Saturday and the boys cried because it meant their birthday party on Sunday was completely canceled after all. That’s metaphor enough to last me a few years.

I remember that early on, someone asked how long: 6-8 weeks? I suggested that we were looking at 12-18 months because that’s the fastest we could conceivably develop, test, approve, manufacture, and distribute vaccines. I didn’t want to be a bummer so I didn’t bring up my pessimism much. Everyone figured a couple of months.

When things opened up in June, I got us a plane trip to Chicago. We had a big party planned the year before that couldn’t happen, and the youngest had never been, and the older kid I really owed a fireworks show. I had worried about the logistics and whether everyone would have a good time but the trip was so immensely enjoyable.

“We need to have our fun now, before the next wave,” had been my thinking. Of course, I was thinking of the vaccine-resistant strain that has yet to evolve, not the wave that is currently hitting the vaccine-resistant population.

During the Pandemic, my employer figured out that our staff are really productive working from home, and the lease was up on the office so we took the opportunity to downsize. The new location is right next to the train, and on days when family obligations allow, I really love taking the train to the office. I think this is a pretty ideal commute: walk fast to the station, sit down, read a book, walk sorta fast to the office. Some light exercise for the body and relaxation for the mind built right into the schedule.

Lately, I’ve been coming into the office any chance I can get. As I explain, I really like working from home, and I have a good setup, but it also reminds me of the Pandemic, which I am happy to forget. Yesterday came the Public Health Order that we now wear masks in the office. I am here today and tomorrow. There is definitely a feeling of setback.

We had the technology and the money to free our country of the Pandemic this year. What we lacked was a cultural consensus that rolling up sleeves and getting a shot was worth everyone doing. I think this is just a warm-up for how our century will go. The planet is on fire again this year. Portland fried like it was Death Valley. We have, so far, been lucky in the Bay Area. No orange skies, no smoke … I haven’t run the air conditioner in weeks. Just the ongoing drought. This year, the Salmon fry will all be cooked in their natal streams.

We never took action to prevent the Climate Catastrophe beforehand. Even now, we have tools like electric cars and induction stoves and any number of ways we can reduce our Carbon emissions and … we make excuses. The new budget stimulus adds some money for public transportation, but the big money is in building more roads. In a few years, maybe, they say, there will be a few more electric cars you can buy. (And don’t bring up bike lanes.) The power grid is getting cleaner, at least.

I had a cheeseburger for lunch.

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I caught the opening of the impeachment trial today. The video from the House Impeachment managers was harrowing and damning. As a friend said last night, the US Capitol is sacred ground. Then Trump’s lawyers got up and rambled aimlessly. Bargain bin guys who came in unprepared to defend a guy who incited a mob to try and kill Congress. I wanted to feel that the case was so one-sided and the defense such a sham that the Senate would see through it and convict him and set a precedent that the United States will not tolerate anyone trying to take the government by force but I know better.

President Trump doesn’t need any defense better than a farce because we all know exactly what will happen. A majority of the Senate, all the Democrats, and some Republicans will vote in favor of Democracy. But not enough. Republicans are loyal to their party. Their Fascist will run again. He’s got a lot more charisma than Ted Cruz.

When the Insurrection happened on January 6, I was impressed that Congress picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and got back into session. I watched until they certified the vote. Every time the objections to the count were withdrawn for lack of Senate support, I cheered, and for the few hours that objections were required to be heard, I rode it out. Congress certified the vote towards 3 am in Washington, and I counted it fortunate that I only had to stay up towards midnight in California. I explained that as a SysAdmin, when the system crashes and people get upset, I feel like I need to keep an eye on the systems as they get back to normal.

I feel optimistic that Joe Biden could well turn out to be a great President. He’s got a lot of experience, a lot of rapport, and the challenges are substantial. I also feel dread that our flirtation with autocracy is only going to get worse.

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