dannyman.toldme.com

I was on my way out of the office when I noticed a bright green sticker on a car in the parking lot.

It looks like someone gets paid to drive around the parking lots at 2AM and keep track of how many days anyone has parked anywhere. I can not say enough good things about that. But I would note that while the car was promised to be towed on Thursday morning, I made my discovery on Friday afternoon.

Didn’t look like an abandoned car, either. A Shiny, pastel blue Volkswagen Beetle . . .

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On a recent dusky evening. I like the bit between the upper windows, where the ridged side blurs in to the smooth area around the windows.

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Looking East, towards the rising moon.

This is about half way home. More beautiful in person.

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In a nutshell . . .

The G2 is fast as heck.  It has all the cool new Android apps, and T-Mobile let’s you do tethering out of the box.  We moved our apartment last month and setting up a wireless access point on my phone was braindead easy and plenty fast while we waited for the DSL installation.  Everything works faster, and the battery life is better to boot.

The keyboards has a generally nice feel to it.  But . . .

The biggest drawback is the lack of a number row on the keyboard.  Really irritating to have to press ALT to type numbers.  Entering “special” characters is a bitch-and-a-half.  For example, to type a < you have to type ALT-ALT-long-press-j.  WTF?  Also, I miss the scroll wheel.  There is a button on the phone that sometimes-but-not-always works as a directional pad to surf through a text field but I have learned to stab my thumb at the screen until I manage to land the cursor where I want it.  (What I really miss is the Sidekick 2 direction pad.)

It is a very very nice phone with a short list of dumb shortcomings.

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Clearcuttin'

The NetOps guys are even weirder than SysOps people. Note the Cisco dunce cap.

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The market has been doing well lately, but even I am surprised.

Back in March 2009 when things were looking their bleakest, I scratched together less-than-my-usual-amount of cash and bought shares in a market index. On that occasion, QQQQ (Nasdaq 100) at $28.17/share. Today I noticed that, at $57, that stock has more than doubled in value since I bought it.

Three things come to mind.

1) Yay me! (Though, I have seen plenty of my money evaporate in stocks, so I won’t get too smug.)

2) Warren Buffet’s advice, to “be greedy when others are scared, and scared when others are greedy.” Since people are getting greedy, I shouldn’t feel too bad selling stock at this height to cover wedding expenses.

3) My perpetual ambivalence about the stock market as a gambling parlor that doesn’t reflect true economic value, but is really a bunch of rascals trying to trick each other. The real value in our economy is in the workers and the planet, and the stock market on a good day is an ethically blind attempt to influence the direction in which the workers will direct their work.

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Big thanks to Mei for baking a cake and hosting a party and putting up with me most days. Gratitude as well to friends who came by and made it a nice party last night.

The Birthday Cake

I had to open the patio door to help clear the smoke from the room. Next year I’ll ask for a fire extinguisher for Christmas.

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Ah heck let us try a photo-a-day thing, like Keith!

Even though they look like oranges

I’m starting on my 35th birthday, so . . . there ya go. Maybe I can keep this up all year.

Mei made lemon ice cream from the lemons, which you might have tasted at yesterday’s party.

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Last month I “cut and copied” the following letter printed in the Palo Alto Daily News. (Or I think its called the Daily Post now.) Now I shall paste, transcribe and share:

The text reads:

Bike changed a life

Dear Editor: A recent letter on “bikes vs. cars” stated that the over-50 crowd was “not about to go out and buy a bicycle” to replace their cars. Read on. Three years ago, I got in my car to go to an appointment and discovered that I had a dead battery. Frustrated (my wife had our other car) I slammed the car door only to notice right above me was my son’s old mountain bike hanging from the garage rafters.

I got it down — both tires were flat — pumped them up and rode off to my appointment.

Until that moment, I had not been on a bike in 40 years. After three or four blocks I wondered why it had taken me so long to get back on a bike. It was fantastic!

Several days later, I purchased my own bike on Craigslist and was soon riding to and from work — 15 miles round trip — taking the bus on days it was too cold or to dark. I’ve lost weight and never felt better.

After two months, my wife and I realized we could get by with one car, so we sold my car and used the money to put solar panels on our house. I now pay nothing for electricity. We’ve lowered our carbon footprint significantly. I’m 57 years old.

John Ummel
Redwood City

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I was up ’til 1am working on some diagrams to help illustrate a book. At 5:30am the cat started jumping on us for breakfast. That’s not right, so I expressed my disapproval and locked her out of the bedroom.

But I had to hop out of bed and engage her a few more times with the spray bottle before she stopped trying to dig through the door.

Then she started crying. And I worried that maybe the neighbors might complain.

I’m sure kids are worse.

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I have that uneasy feeling that I am forgetting something.  I guess it may have something to do with the fact that after having resigned herself to my loyalty to my beat up old round-the-world college backpack, Mei had me empty it so she could take it in for repairs as a birthday present.  Subtract that missing element from the new apartment I’m still unpacking in to after the holidays . . .

Or its that yesterday I spent some time at the hospital visiting a friend from older days, hanging out with his folks and keeping them company while their son, my age, drifted in and out of sleeping off the stroke he had on Friday.  I remember the time spent in Colorado when it was Dad’s turn to shake off his own stroke.

And then there’s the Congressman shot clear through her left lobe.  I listen attentively when they explain that, as with my friend and with my father, the left is where language is.  One question is whether there is motor control in the right hand, since the hand is controlled next door from language.

I worry about my friend, but I know he will be okay, one way or another.  One way he won’t be able to work, and may even need some personal assistance.  Another way is that between his youth, spirit, and clean living, he will rehabilitate so well that years from now he will have difficulty convincing people who hadn’t seen it that he had once had a stroke.

Only time will tell.  For now his folks are taking turns sleeping in the reclining chair next to his bed in the critical care.  The son is there to rest and cooperate with the Doctors.  The parents are there because there really is nowhere else in the world they can be right now.  They attend to the details of managing their son’s life and care while he is down.  I worry more about them, because I have some idea of where they are, and their needs can be better understood without a medical degree.

That may be it.  I feel like I am missing something because instead of the hospital I am headed to the office.  I would rather wait around at the hospital.  Fortunately my friend and his family are inundated by visitors, and dropping by for a while in the evening after work, I won’t be in the way.

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Thanks to Michael Sippey, I just watched a short film from Intel on Scott Schuman, better known as The Sartorialist.

The man spends a few hours in the morning posting to his blog, and the rest of the day wandering the streets of New York City, his senses keen for prey, which he captures with the bravery of asking a stranger if he can take their photo.

How does he pay the rent? The video doesn’t get in to that. For me it is enough to see a guy has found his particular thing, that he’s in his element, and that he is this human archetype, the lone hunter wandering his territory in search of a prize.

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