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The train starts out at Emeryville: a modest bus terminal just north of Oakland. The Capital Corridor trains stop here as well as the connecting buses from San Francisco and other towns not served directly by Amtrak’s trains. An hour or two later, and the California Zephyr is in Sacramento. From here, we press East along the original route of the Central Pacific into the Sierra Nevada.

The Central Pacific was surveyed and championed by Theodore Judah, through the Sierra Nevada, as the first leg of what would become the nation’s first Transcontinental Railroad, once joined with the Union Pacific, which built East from St. Louis, to Promontory, Utah. It was built to accommodate the rail technology of the mid-nineteenth century. This means wide curves and grades of no more than three percent. As we traverse high fills that reveal to us ever more striking views of the valleys below, punctuated by the next tunnel through the next mountain, we also encounter the occasional highway, that is less concerned with gentle grades and bends, and thus less exposed to fantastic views.

The longest tunnel on the line, two miles through a mountain, stalled the Central Pacific’s progress out of the Sierra Nevada to the flat desert wasteland of Nevada for nearly two frustrating years. Teams of Chinese laborers worked around the clock, pounding drills into the granite, until they got a hole appropriate to fill with black powder. Evacuate, light the fuse, boom, go back and clear out the pieces, and start drilling the next hole. Sometimes progress was as slow as six inches a day.

The tunnel was drilled and blasted from both ends, and another team was sent up over the mountain to blast a vertical shaft, from which two more teams were lowered into the mountain to work, spreading progress across a total of four tunnel facings.

The railroad was at first skeptical of Chinese laborers, but many of the Irish and other Easterners they hired had a tendency to wander off to the coal mines. So, the railroad hired fifty short Celestials to see if they were any good, and they proved most excellent. Despite their small size, they were hard, steady, intelligent workers. They took the wilderness and rough weather with better health because they boiled their water to drink as tea, and instead of drinking whiskey, preferred the relaxing vice of smoking opium on their day off.

We also passed through the last few concrete snow sheds. Many miles of snow sheds were built along the line because the terrible winter blizzards had a nasty habit of tearing out long sections of hard-won trackwork, necessitating not only repairs, but delaying work at the end of the line, which depended on the track to deliver needed material. Of course, these original wood snow sheds had a tendency to catch fire from the original, wood-burning, steam locomotives.

I believe a paramount frustration of building the Central Pacific was that all of the engines, rolling stock, and iron rails had to be shipped from the factories of the East Coast, carried across the jungle isthmus at Panama, and shipped thence up to Sacramento, where they could finally be unloaded, at three or four times their original cost. It was this same voyage through the Panamanian jungle that granted Ted Judah the yellow fever that killed him before the railroad could be finished.

Abraham Lincoln had also been a long-time proponent of the Transcontinental Railroad, promoting it first as a lawyer, then a lawmaker, and finally as President. It was an assassin’s bullet that denied him his dream of some day seeing California.

I missed whatever scenery Nevada had to offer, as I sampled the expensive, high-quality dinner offered in the dining car. As table space is limited, each table is filled with four passengers. This makes mealtime a nice chance to socialize with fellow travellers, though the majority are from the expensive sleeping-compartment section of the train, which gets free meals as part of their accommodations.

I took every other meal in the dining car, as the prices were not too much higher than what I’m used to in the Bay Area, and I figured that since I’d scored my ticket with an Internet discount for only $60, that it was not unreasonable to make up a little of that difference in the dining car.

I stretched out across two coach seats at night, changing my clothes the next morning in one of the larger “changing room” bathrooms. Sprawled across a pair of coach seats is not the greatest way to sleep, especially at my height, but then it is not like you have really demanding days on the train, which tend to consist of naps between bouts of scenic appreciation, reading, and visits to the snack bar or dining car.

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It was a slow, relaxing, folksy evening at work. I chatted it up with a few parties, not necessarily mentioning my trip. Jessica and Lisa appeared, and shared an ice cream treat that I brazenly served without recording the sale, thus stealing $3.50 in goods and services from my boss. They were rightly jealous, and lingered over my pretty red bag. I showed them the goodies of plane tickets and Passport. Yum!

That night I was scheduled to work ’til close. I finished my last table at fifteen ’til, and gave Janet a call that I’d be done pretty quick. She was, for her part, a shower away.

As Lola departed, a colleague interpreted for me that she wished me well on my trip. We hugged, which is something that Lola and I don’t do, because most of the time she thinks I’m pretty unsettlingly loco, and I think she’s too low-key. All the same, I felt a sympathetic vibe from my migrant compañeros at the idea of wandering in foreign lands.

I’m the lucky one.

I made the modest gesture of tipping out double to my colleagues on my last night. This meant, for example, an extra $10 for Lola. The less you have, the more you value.

I made my second theft ever from the restaurant of a side salad with french, which Janet had requested on the phone. I also defaced the white board announcement in the break room proclaiming that server uniforms consisted of “black pants, black shoes, black socks,” to read, “lack pants, black hoes, black cocks.”

Janet showed up, and I presented her with her salad and expressed, once again, my gratitude for her strangerly generosity. That night, the only bed I had available was that of a woman I had met the day before. A woman in a long black skirt, slit high in the back. We had previously agreed that she had a great pair of legs. As I followed her up the stairs to her apartment, it was as if all that I could count on was the bag at my back and the woman whose fantastic calves led me up those stairs in the cool, dark night.

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Rebecca, Mary, and I stopped for gas. Rebecca paid for the gas, so I grabbed us each something to drink. Back on the highway, I noticed there was now something wrong with the car – when you push the petal down very far, it merely revved – no extra power. Rebecca explained that it was probably her fault, as her car broke just the other day and look, her cell phone just died too. I wasn’t about to freak over it because the car still mostly worked, even at highway speed.

We packed the last of my stuff at the house, and loaded the car with the Goodwill pile. I bade Brian a long good-bye, and the girls and I journeyed up to Palo Alto, where the Goodwill sits across from work. I bade goodbye to the girls at the Goodwill, leaving them to unpack the car because I was now an hour ten late for my shift. Their plan was to take those few minutes unpacking, in the unlikely event that I should be fired for my last day’s tardiness – this was not to happen, though, as I set my shiny new bag in the break room and Rebecca drove back to Mountain View where Mary had left her car at my now-former place of residence.

Just a few days before, I had dragged Mary along to a BBQ that Dave and Rebecca held for me as a little “Bon Voyage.” I was a little apprehensive that Dave and Rebecca’s less-than-super-clean house might offend Mary, but that is not how Mary is. Instead, she and Rebecca totally bonded, as each found a new good friend. So when I left them at Goodwill with my car, possibly ready to go kaput, I knew that since Mary and Rebecca were together, that Rebecca would do okay with the car. You’re in Good Hands.

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You see, I had figured bag selection as something that I could do at my liesure in Chicago. But at the last minute I decided that in order to get my room cleaned out thoroughly I’d need three piles – things that were going with, storage, and Goodwill. Well, the best way to guage that first category is to actually pack, so I grabbed the bag.

Mary came by to help. This was invaluable. She fawned over the bag, which was big and functional and modest and Swiss – “You will not look so American,” she exclaimed. “With your height and blond hair, you may even pass for Swedish, or Swiss.” While I realize the advantages of not being associated with my nation’s International Buffoonery, masquerading as a not-American never struck me as important, because I remain one patriotic SOB. I took her observations as flattery, though: the harder I was for an observer to pin down, the more of a sexy International Man of Mystery I could be!

In a few hours, we transformed my room in to the three piles I have described. Mary took the monitor and several peripherals that went with the desktop I’d given her to test out earlier in the week – hers had fried and she desperately wanted a system to write with. The car was loaded with storage boxes, and the futon that Dave and Rebecca had expressed interest in. Fully laden, with the AC turned on high for a hot California afternoon, I could feel the trickier handling as I pointed the wagon’s prow toward San Jose.

Dave helped me back up his driveway and unload. Dave was half a week into being layed off. Rebecca and Mary chatted, and since it came up that their car was still broke, Dave had been working on it as I drove up, I offered them the car, over which Rebecca seemed particularly ethusiastic.

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I didn’t want to spend the time and navigation to drive to REI or Mel Cotton’s, and Yahoo! told me that there were two luggage stores on El Camino. The first had a few specimens of what I wanted. The Asian immigrant who ran the place took me to the back and pointed out a few of the “convertible” packs, which means carry-on style bags with concealable straps, so they can transform in to functional backpacks. The idea is that a subdued carry-on style bag and decent clothing work well on planes and trains and particularly at customs, who find the backpacking hippie types way more interesting, but I can still schlep the thing on my back across town all day on public transportation without killing myself.

He had a few promising candidates, but none of them really sang to me. I ducked out and tried the next store, just up the street. They had one single bag of my description hanging up on the rear wall. The salesman was less interested in showing it to me than I was in hanging out in his store. As I walked out, a guy in a red backpack that basically looked like what I was trying to find crossed in front of me. Huh? Where’d he come from? Strolling casually about, I thought he might be trying the bag out from some secret stash. I followed him a few dozen feet, it was clear that he was on his own, but he had what I wanted! “Excuse me, sir …”

He was carrying his laundry. He bought the bag a decade back in Japan, where he’d been teaching English, and yes indeed his bag was a thoroughly wonderful thing. It had two sepereate storage areas, a day pack that came off of it, shoulder, waist, and sternum straps, and a pair of metal braces that gave the back shape, but that could be removed when it had to fit in to a train locker.

“I don’t know where you could get one around here …” He tried to figure out its moniker, but the only sign of product identity was the crosses on the zipper grips and the bag’s red color. “Victorinox,” I opined, “the Swiss Army Knife people.”

I though I’d give the quiet Asian merchant’s store a second look. This time, I wandered to his back room and looked for red. I found a squarish duffel bag with concealed shoulder straps that connected to rugged, concealable, metal hooks. I tried to determine if the shoulder strap could serve as the waist strap that the bag ought to have had. Nope.

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After waiting at Kaiser for my shot, between lunch shift and dinner, and receiving only Hepatitis B, because they were out of Hepatitis A, though I could come back next Wednesday, except that I would be on the train for Chicago, come Sunday, I dropped by home and explained to Janet that normally I’d wait a couple days to call a new number, in accord with the wisdom espoused in the movie “Swingers” but that, in a couple of days, it wouldn’t do any good, you see. Ahh, but have you any plans for this evening?

After an evening working the “middle off” shift, which closed with my new friend munching on our delicious stuffed mushrooms, and our delicious meatball sandwich, it was too late to flirt with ballroom dancing, as she had suggested. We settled instead for the late-night cinema of super-spy Vin Diesel dancing around Prague, holding hands, as we awaited the movie’s credits, which awarded us with a cool techno soundtrack and wacky computer-generated visuals for us to make out to.

I negotiated our way back to her place, a tangential piece of this negotiation involved the flipping of a coin, which suggested that among embarrassing venues, hers was the randomly fair alternative to mine.

I didn’t get much sleep that night. Janet appreciated my lack of urgency as I repeatedly fumbled over her body with hands and mouth. In the wee hours of the morning, after some hours of comingled snoozing, we awoke, and talked, and made appropriate use of a contraceptive device. After a shared shower, we ate breakfast together at a nice place on California Ave. I had a lot to do before getting to work at four PM. The first order of business was three or four power naps upon my own futon.

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She looked twenty two, or possibly forty three. Some women are inscrutable, in this manner. Her short black hair curled in a laurel around her head, a pearl necklace, and a comfortable, wool-looking black suit, modestly revealing the top of her chest.

She was chatty, as I took her order, hanging out with four going-on-middle-aged female companions, the young bachelorette of the group. When prompted about salad dressing, and presented with the standard answer – ranch, bleu cheese red wine basil vinagrette honey mustard thousand island soy ginger mild curry … and french, she asked about the french, and I allowed that it was the only dressing on offer not made in-house. She touched my shoulder, and told me that she wanted tangy. French, indeed.

At meal’s end, as the five women began the protracted negotiations over how to settle the bill, a heady peace conference that involved, tangentially, the use of a caculator, my tangy librarian friend offered me an envoy in the form of her credit card. This I dutifully swiped, and returned, in accord with my own diplomatic protocols, with a pen, and a “Thank you, Mrs. King.”

There was giggling, as she explained that she was the only single woman at the table. As I answered something like “Well, that’s too bad for the guys,” I was already kicking myself because the most appropriate answer was “Then you must give me your phone number.” Curse my propriety! And on my second-to-last, nothing-left-to-lose day on the job!

Having missed a great opportunity, this attractive lady became my quarry. I conducted my waiterly duties with a sense of her location in the restaurant, a buzzard casually awaiting the potential carcass. This was easy enough to do, as the lionesses of the table picked over the dismembered bill, wrestling over its appropriate apportionment. It was a reunion, of sorts, and there was no hurry to excuse themselves.

Bill paid, table cleared, there was no further reason for me to visit their table, nor any reason to visit them as they lingered on the porch. As they broke up, I saw her heading towards the back. After a moment, I realized that it was time to empty the recycling. This made a loud crashing noise out back, as my new friend turned to wave. Back inside, I figured it was high-time to fill the ice bin, which requires a few trips to the back of the kitchen, a few chances to linger casually at the kitchen door.

Just as I was finishing with the ice bin, a woman appeared in the kitchen, and gave me her friend’s phone number. I accounted for my timidity by explaining that I was actually heading out of town for a very long time, come Sunday, but definately, thank you very much for the number. You can give her mine …

A great friend will wander past the scary dumpster and in to a hot, noisy kitchen to pimp you out to the cute waiter.

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Recently unearthed rant that became a discussion:

What the fuck is this Krispy Kreme shit?

I thought it was some sort of California thing, at first. You know, to go with the 50s theme of In and Out, you wander over to the Krispy Kreme, and then you have your gay donuts to go with your gay upside-down hamburgers.

But like, my mom is all hip to Krispy Kreme back in the midwest. And everyone LOVEs the brand for some reason. Back when we used to get Dunkin Donuts, bigger donuts, very fresh, chock full of evil, people would be “hey, i got some donuts …” but now NOOOOO, it’s “HEY!!!! I AM SO COOLL!!!! I GOT YA SOME KRISPY KREMES!!!!”

Where the hell does this shit come from? Why are people our age keen on donuts anyway? Especially nasty little Krispy Kremes? They’re just little chunks of lard that aren’t all that tasty anyway … ?!

Well, one thing that’s cool about Dunkin Donuts, they don’t keep stuff more than four hours, so if you’re homeless you can go by the Dunkin Donuts and get lotsa OLD donuts. This only makes sense, because all the powerful medicine those donuts are stuffed with could go really evil after about four hours. Best to let the bums have them, for they have more powerful stomachs.

Anyway, where’s there a DunkinFuckinDonuts around here?

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Saturday I just chilled out. Relaxed around the house and made a run to Clarke’s as I’ve had a habit of doing on Saturday’s lately – GOOD, if expensive, burgers. I caught a movie called “Kiss the Girls” on HBO and had a nice quiet night to myself.

Sunday we went up to Lorah and Joe’s in Frisco for some home-made ice cream Lorah had made. Fun Illinois Alumni sausage party, conversation drifting from electrocution, to dreams, to IMAP implementations, to flying and on and on, it was cozy and Lorah had strategically served enough sweets to leave us all feeling happily sluggish.

Damned good ice cream.

And when I got home at midnight, I immediately got a call from Tammie …. could she get a big favor …. did I have jumper cables for her new motorcycle?

Yeah sure. What’s a big favor in her book I explained was a learning experience in mine. After puzzling the contraption over, finding the battery, and consulting with Doyle over the cell phone, we judged that she might very well have a 6 volt system which we’d rather not fry with my 12 volt charger.

So we took Joe’s advice and got it a push start. Now, this was kind of fun. “Oh, you mean I have to have the ignition on?” “Wait, am I supposed to let off the clutch?”

Tammie normally drives stick, but I guess it’s a new experience if you’ve actually been driving reliable cars. When I get Lucy running again maybe I can give informal lessons to those of my friends who are uninitiated in the black art of starting a car without using the starter motor.

But yes, for the record, after a few tries, the bike was purring like a happy, noisy kitten.

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Today we had an earthquake. It was a magnitude 5 and at this time there’s two reported aftershocks.

Of course, I’m far away from the epicenter so all I felt was my chair wobble a bit as I shook my leg. Angus remarked that we’d just been through an earthquake and Jim and Patrick seemed to think he was putting them on.

Many of us at Tellme are very recent transplants to the area.

Today is mom’s birthday. While I missed Grandma’s and Uncle John’s birthday, because I can’t remember so many things so well, I think it appropriate to be able to remember my mom’s birthday.

So I gave her a call, but hopefully she was out partying. Good.

Today I picked up a patch kit for my bicycle, which has a flat tire. I didn’t, however, get to the DMV. I’ve got two things to do there – register my car because it’s expired, and get me a California license. As a third I’m thinking to try and score me a motorcycle permit. Possibility of fun there, see?

You see, the other day I was driving along and I wanted to switch lanes so I turn on my signal and wait for the guy at my rear to pass.

He doesn’t.

I go slower and slower and realize he’s stopped.

Now, I’ve run into this thing where CA drivers will slow down and let you pass ahead of them if they see you have a turn signal going, but this was just moronic, so I cut over in front of him and went a lane extra to the left turn I’d been wanting, all the while thinking ill of the fucknut who stopped in the middle of the street because I had my turn signal going.

Then I noticed he was a cop.

And as I turned his lights came up.

So I got pulled over and did everything right and well, turns out it’s really illegal for me to drive right now:

• Expired registration.
• No valid California license.
• My insurance is registered for the wrong car in the wrong state.

But he just gave me a “fix it” ticket for the license plate stickers. Okay. Well, I’ll fix everything else this week too.

Anyone got suggestions for a young guy in California driving a beater vis-a-vis auto insurance?

Damn.

So, I guess the reason he stopped is he figured I noticed him behind me and so was slowing down to change lanes behind him but wait-a-minute, are those expired tags? Is that why he’s aiming to slow and pass behind me and make this turn?

And then nailing me for insurance … I guess that and the license are something that might be hard to prove in court if I put up a fight. You’re supposed to get a license within ten days of moving here, but does the state really want to go through the trouble of calling around and proving your residency just so they can fine you?

And same with the insurance, but I gotta get that fixed, for sure. If I plow in to somebody’s beemer I’d bet the insurance company would be more than happy to prove my fraudulence.

Makes sense in retrospect. I guess the moral is you never know when a fucknut is going to be a cop.

Ah well, let’s go tackle that tire …

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So, this week Jesse was in town, as part of his grand whirlwind tour of his civilian friends from across our great nation. This morning I dropped him off to the Airport, and North he rode to Portland, I think. Ultimately, he’ll be back on Okinawa. Back to the Marines for the balance of his enlistment.

But it was nice to see an old friend.

This week we went to the LinuxWorld Expo in San Jose. We attended the “Get Sloshed with Slashdot” party – free beer, and last night we went to a VA Research party, where you had to pay for your alcohol.

At one point, I was standing behind Eric Raymond, which was cool enough in itself, and noted he was talking to some guy about a message they’d exchanged the other day. The guy turned to leave, and I caught his profile and a little penguin icon popped up in my brain and I asked myself, “Is that Linus Torvalds?”

It was Linus Torvalds. I talked with Jesse and Dave and they’d both had similar experiences as I had of seeing this dude and realizing that it was Linus – this hero of computer geeks ’round the world. Not like we all think Linus is a God, but it felt like I’d been hanging out in the Silicon Valley, and here I am at this party and I see this guy who’s a great big celebrity, and I likened it in my brain to people who move to Hollywood and have similar experiences at parties where they turn and realize this movie star is a foot or two away from them.

(Thanks to Randy Loux for the photo.)

I thought it was really neat, anyway. Hollywood for geeks!

Anyway, as we were leaving, so too was Linus, to a cheering crowd as he entered a white limousine. Celebrity chiq, neh? Well, it blocked my way out for a minute or two and I bade a last parting glance at this attractive woman who after eyeing each other on the dance floor told me about one of VA’s new wonderful rack-mount servers. I think she said it was 2U with five bays, which I have to admit, impressed me. Well, if I get a call from her I’ll have to admit that Linux boxen were not the first thing on my mind when she caught my eye. I’m hoping the sales pitch was more a reflex action after a few days of conference, to some chatty party dude.

Not like any sane person goes to a geek party expecting to meet women.

Things are just weird out here.

As I was checking out the conference, a few different things went in to my head. The first was that it was interesting to see all these companies gathered with the intention of making money off a Freeware OS. Corel’s demonstration of their pre-beta distribution was the most poignant, for me. They had four graphical dialogs and after a point-click-click Linux was installed on a computer in four minutes, requiring no thought as to partitioning.

It booted in to a somewhat polished KDE desktop. It struck me as a rather hard sell aimed at users like my mom. I could give mom that Corel Linux CD and she could have Linux up and running as easily as any other program.

Of course, its a whole OS, so you have to boot it separately, but hey.

Another thing that struck me was that all those years spent as a geek child were somehow paying off. I was entering a conference of people with interests very similar to mine, along with living in a part of the world where computers is the thing – everywhere you look. It felt like I’d graduated some weird alien test and was entering the temple of the promised land.

But I don’t actually like computers that much. I wasn’t going nuts or anything, I just thought it was all kind of cool.

Revenge of the Nerds.

But what struck me as most interesting, in my mind, was how Linus must feel, strolling between the booths. A fun little project to write a useful OS back when he was a grad student has blossomed in to something huge, with growing momentum behind it. It must boggle his mind. He seems to keep it all in stride too, at least from what I can tell from an interview I recently read. I think without his attitude, Linus would have become a world-class dork by now. You know, like Bill.

One interesting thing about the attendees, was that most folks were young. Sure, there were the occasional scruffy-lookin’, old-school, Unix types, (Erm, you like that? I stole it from Sven’s site.) But most of the people there were twenty-somethings. Some were business types, and many were just geeks. there was definitely some undercurrent of revolutionary fervor. I proudly wore my FreeBSD tee-shirt, to show what flavor of geek I was. The FreeBSD people I ran in to tended to be older, and more scruffy-flavored.

Kickin’ it oldschool BSD at the Linux con.

Does this make sense to anyone? Only a select few, I’m guessing.

Heh.

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The other day it was the weekend and so I rode CalTrain in to San Francisco. On the way back I sat closer to this group of Japanese Stanford students who sounded like they were forcing themselves to speak in English. The effect was slow speech with very distinct words and a different tone pattern. It sounded like a sing-song text to speech engine.

That I should think a group of girls sounded like TTS sounded like I spend a lot of time at Tellme.

Apparently, Silicon Valley startups, or at least Tellme and Dave’s employer, Confinity, provide food for their employees. This is something of a fringe benefit or an incentive for working long hours. The result is that neither one of us ever eats at home – it’s either company food or a restaurant. The affect of this is that someday we’ll clean our kitchen nice, but neither of us is really eager to enter it without any motive that is greater than my own fear of what I might find.

You see, I speak for me.

I should probably go home. It’s 0041h on a now Thursday morning.

Maybe I’ll bitch about something later.

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