dannyman.toldme.com

So, Walnut Creek and San Ramon are in the valley between mountains. It is tricky to tune in San Francisco’s public radio station — I can usually get a better signal from Sacramento, which is scary. Anyway, I had to drive to work today and on the ride back, I found that KPFA, just over the hill in Berkeley, has a plenty good signal for me to tune in to. Pacifica makes NPR sound like Fox, but this evening they were talking the history of United States relations with Iran.

Beats the crappy jazz coming out of Sacramento after about 8pm. KPFA insted switches to Greatful Dead covers on Wednesday nights. What this may lack in quality is made up for by its eclecticism. I hope the morning show helps me come around to consciousness tomorrow morning. They ought to have more edge in the voice than Bob Edwards or whomever is calling out the NPR News now that I haven’t been paying too much attention anymore.

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My fancy new Dell laptop and FreeBSD are a bit of an odd couple. I haven’t tried yet, but apparently I could get the trackpad, nub and mouse keys working through something called “Project Evil” that supports Windows drivers under FreeBSD. Entering suspend mode causes the computer to reboot, this in part because apparently Dell has messed up their implementation of standards-compliant power management, but whatever. (more…)

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I drove down to Mountain View to lunch with Brian this weekend. He mentioned that Amazon.com has Free Sidekick IIs these days. I checked it out this morning, and after some discussion, found that I can not get this through work because we already have a bunch of cell phones under contract with Verizon.

So, I e-mailed my predecessor, who has to return his old phone yet anyway, asking if maybe he wouldn’t mind taking his contract with him? He writes back that his new employer just gave him his new Sidekick II and it is sweet, so, no thanks. I’ll have his old phone, which is nicer than the loaner I’m on right now, pretty darn soon.

I could potentially get one for Yayoi, and then trade phones with her. But then it is her turn to have the awesomer cell phone anyway, so … hey, free Christmas present for someone not wedded to Verizon! :)

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It is weird, because I have never had a manager before who spoke with me on a daily basis about what I was doing at work. At first it seems intrusive, but really, this is the way it should be. Especially for a new employee, it is good to have somebody providing direction. And, for the first time, I have a job where communicating what I am doing is simply a part of routine.

Hopefully this new adventure will turn out to have an even better pay-off than I had reasonably imagined.

Oh, and I have DSL at home now. And off-line e-mail on the laptop, so I can catch up whilst riding the bus. I bought a desk and a very good chair the other day, with adjustable back height and almost-high-enough lumbar support. I have to assemble the desk though, which I’ll do after work this evening before some heavy network maintenance tonight.

Things are coming together. And Yayoi can probably make it right after Christmas, which is good.

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whois -h whois.cymru.com <IP Address>

Thanks due to a colleague at CacheNetworks.

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Yesterday, I took the BART. I got off at Oakland City Center, and began to wander. I first found a gaming store — what a fortuitous start! And the rest of it was Oakland Chinatown, which I told Yayoi about later … Asianania is just a BART ride away!

The highlights were:

• Bananas for 40c/pound. This is Devon Avenue prices. Walnut Creek is 80c. I bought some Bananas just because.
• A black lady taking a break from her salon complimented me on my hat. Actually, on Thursday, Bill remarked that it looked like an old Italian guy’s hat, and I told him that actually I did buy it in Italy.
• I had a decent cheeseburger in a Korean-run, downtown lunch cafe.

I made my way back to Walnut Creek, and still had a Saturday Evening to kill. I wandered downtown, where there is a movie theater. Unfortunately, it is mostly crap. They were playing “Ray” on one screen but I would have to wait two hours. I settled on “The Grudge” which was a horror movie in the “Lost in Translation” genre, meaning it was about Americans in Tokyo — I think the Japanese government must be promoting this stuff — and it was with the hard-to-follow a-linear plot format. The nice thing about that, from the producer’s point-of-view, is that you can hide the problems with the plot that way. Anyway, it was a fairly scary mess of a movie. I watched it because Yayoi might enjoy it, except it would probably be too scary for her, so it is okay if she missed it, if that makes any sense. Really I was just bored and lonely.

After the movie I walked past crowded bars that revealed to me the awful flip-side of Walnut Creek’s Soccer Mom Weekdays — Frat Boy Nightlife! That was creepier than monsters running around a suburban Tokyo house. One drunkish guy eyed me and my old Italian guy’s hat and French sweater and muttered “fag” . . . I could only take that as a compliment. (more…)

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Walnut Creek 20/Nov/04 — Highs and lows in the rugged terrian around Mount Diablo. I took a new job in San Ramon, which is known for being a nice, quietly dead town. Fifteen miles up the road is Walnut Creek, where Yayoi and I have selected an apartment very close to the BART.

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. (more…)

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Back … online … at least at work.

The new company is a bit thrifty, and I have had much to learn, so it is only in the past few hours that I have a graphical web browser at my disposal. On a nice nice laptop. DSL arrives at home in the next two weeks. I’ll have 6Mb down! Dang!

But now it is time to head home and see if I can get online via modem there. Darned apartment doesn’t have any jacks wired up to SBC.

For the most part though, these past several days have been wonderful!

-danny

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Well, a job came through in California. This time I haven’t even time to load up the wagon and creep across the continent — I fly out Tuesday and start on Wednesday.

More money, more responsility, more suburbia. Yayoi’s keen on the weather and the great abundance of Asian culture. I’m keen on taking over the reigns at a tightly-run, open source enterprize.

But I will miss Chicago.

-d

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As posted by me an a mailing list:

I really liked Kerry. I think he is a great leader, but he failed to
pick a message and stick to it, which is what Bush did. Bush also tried
to paint Kerry as an unprincipled flip-flopper, and because Kerry kept
changing his motto, it kind of worked.

I like Kerry because I read a lot about him, most notably a long article
in the New Yorker. But then, when you’re trying for mass appeal, that’s
not the way to get it.

People like Bush becuase if nothing else, he is a known quantity who
doesn’t seem to waste his time trying to be agreeable. That’s why
Howard Dean was so sexy. But the candidate was picked by mild-mannered
midwestern folk scared of offending rednecks with the hint of a
possibility of civil unions, which Americans don’t really object to.*

And for a while, as it came down to the wire, back in Iowa again, of all
places, Kerry’s careful strategy of inoffensive inclusiveness seemed
like it would work. Except that there is a lot of uncertainty these
days, and Americans admire some certainty, even if it is a touch
dishonest and dumb.

And its not a post-9/11 mentality. Bob Dole ran the same way against
playboy Bill Clinton. It might have worked but Dole was so careful not
to show too much enthusiasm that Americans stuck with their dishonest
sex fiend of a Commander in Chief. John Kerry is George Bush’s Bob
Dole. It makes me sad.

-danny

* Polls would seem to indicate that Americans don’t want gays getting “married” but that they should have the rights that married people have. Taking a principled stand against defining marriage as anything, even arguing that it is best left to people’s churchs, and the states can move more toward legal licensing . . . I think that is the right solution. But Democrats, unlike Republicans, are too cowardly to challenge popular opinion.

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As seen on IRC, Kerry Calls Bush To Concede.

Personally, I would wait until all those provisional ballots in Ohio were counted . . . I have been trying to get to grips with this. I was really upset at first, but the United States has a long history of being slow to get its shit together in times of change. Our challenge now will be to figure out how to engineer a better Democratic Party.

But my challenges right now have to do with backing up data and altering messed up tables in our ticketing system.

There goes safe, legal abortions, the environment, any hopes of health care. The national debt will balloon, and taxation will be shifted even more on to poor people. We will probably be hit by Terrorists again, because we are neglecting our National Security in the interests of looking tough and taking the easy reactionary path . . .

But like I said, my more pressing problems today are more virtual that all of that.

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It is so exciting to watch the votes roll in. I actually had a hard time working today because, frankly, I am just really really excited.

Good web sites for watching results:

• CNN — Quickest results.
• Yahoo — Nearly as quick as CNN, more links.
• BBC — Very pretty, but slowest.

Yayoi’s off with the Christians. We had pita for dinner and I’m stuffed now after corn on a stick, with hot hot chili powder! Ouch!

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