I have long been excited at the idea of self-driving cars, because they should make the roads a lot safer. I have had the chance to ride Waymos and I think they are pretty great. I have been following the r/waymo subreddit. Lots of discussion about new rollouts, and videos of the robotaxis avoiding tragic situations. Lots of Good News.
I am not one to set cars on fire. But you may have heard that Los Angeles has been fighting against the Trump Regime this past weekend. Along the way, some Waymos got torched. The subreddit has been spammed with burning cars. Someone posted “why oh why would someone torch a poor little waymo car they are totally innocent and have nothing to do with ice” so I take the bait.
[Why?] Trump administration is sponsored by Google. Waymo is owned by Google. Waymo is an instrument of the Fascist State.
For me, pictures are worth a lot of words. Since they appeared front row at the inauguration, Amazon, Whole Foods, and Google are on my “avoid” list, though I still check on the swamp that is Facebook to keep up with the dwindling handful of friends there. I’ve made an exception so far for Waymo, as it is novel and potentially very good. People want to see through the shades of grey for a world of black and white, but every day we make choices. Waymo is good because it can reduce traffic deaths, and Waymo’s corporate parent is a sponsor of the growing horrors of the Trump Regime. Enjoy the ride, but don’t even feign shock that folks are willing to torch a few Waymos.
Of course, I got a message from Reddit.
“Hello, You have been permanently banned from participating in r/waymo because your comment violates this community’s rules.”
Rules, you say?
r/waymo rules: no luddites, no trolls
“No people who provoke … on purpose.” That’s me. Being provocative. Calling out bullshit. “I wouldn’t ever want to join a club that would have me as a member.” I take this penalty as a badge of honor.
In closing: Fuck ICE and Fuck Complicit Tech Companies. We all need to be feeling at least a little bit uncomfortable.
I took three days of PTO, starting last Thursday. Grandma was is town because this weekend was the older son’s Second Degree black belt testing and graduation ceremony. We are all very proud of him.
The first flat tire was on Friday. The Wife got one on the newer EV on her way to work, so Grandma and I went down in the older EV to help out. Along the route, some guys were in the street picking things up. I slowed down and drove wide around. One guy looked at me, leaned forward a bit, and yelled “NAILS!!”
It only occurred to us later that these were likely the same nails that caused the wife’s flat tire. Good on these guys for cleaning up.
Modern cars don’t ship with spare tires. The new EV doesn’t even have a donut. Instead, there is a kit with an air compressor and a bottle of goo. You plug the goo into the compressor, plug the compressor into the cigarette lighter port under the center console, power on, and wait 5 minutes. The theory is the goo will seal a small puncture, you drive a few miles to circulate the goo, then re-inflate, and then drive a few miles more to the tire shop, perhaps. In our case, the tire was off the rim. I later moved the car for the tow truck and that caused the tire to pop back on to the rim. So, next time, I will check if the tire is on the rim and move it to get it back on the rim before I try the goo inflator. At any rate, a tow truck eventually took me to the tire shop, which confirmed that the tire had been properly lacerated in such a way that goo would not have worked. They sold me one tire, which they had to order, and then re-order because they had misordered. The good news is that shipping consisted of sending a guy down to San Jose, and I had towed to a place near the house so I was able to walk home and then have lunch at the taqueria across the street, and then pay $220 plus tax. The tow truck was an $8 line item for roadside assistance on our auto insurance, who I believe will charge us a $50 fee.
Monday I snuck in a short ride on the cargo bike before school pickup. While filling in a bit of my Wandrer, I looped over to Lawrence Expressway for all of one block, and found the rear tire was suddenly flat. I pushed over to a gym which had a bike rack out front, then got a Lyft to school, and the younger son and I rode the bus back home. I later fetched the cargo bike in the minivan. And, given that the rear wheel is an unusual size and I am pretty sure I do not have the right inner tube I’ll probably just take the bucket off and bring the bike down to the shop to mend the flat. I’ll likely attempt a patch in the driveway first, because I’m somewhat handy and thrifty.
2025-05-22 Thursday
The conversation about cameras turned to flashes, and one guy shared that when he was as kid, the flash on the camera made a neat high-pitched noise as it recharged. Everyone agreed that was a neat memory.
I remember as a kid, touching the wall outlet and getting electrocuted. It was a weird sensation. Not pleasant but not exactly painful. I did it again. Yup. I cataloged the experience and moved on with the business of growing up.
We weren’t big on going outdoors. Our generation was the first with Cable TV and the strict admonition that the most dangerous thing a kid could do was speak to a stranger. We weren’t big on sunscreen either. I just took it for granted that whenever we visited the beach I could enjoy peeling dead skin for the week after.
A lot of us died in 2020. In 2025, a great many of us struggle yet to really be alive.
Everything in life is temporary. Except temporary fixes. Those are usually permanent.
Today was pretty intense at work. Debugging federated authentication with vendors? Not my favorite activity. I was hoping to knock off early and work on water rocket derby kits for the Cub Scouts but by the end of the day Cory Booker was breaking Strom Thurmond’s record in the Senate and that was good enough for me.
“My Beloved Monster” by Caleb Carr
I finished a book yesterday: My Beloved Monster by Caleb Carr. At times, I thought, “This is a book about an old man living with his cat,” but it was really a good story about a man’s life and a cat’s life and how, if you care to pay attention to another soul, you can connect. Ambassador Carr spends a lot of beautiful words on a relationship with someone who does not communicate with words.
As I was finishing the book, I made the mistake of checking Mr Carr’s Wikipedia page, which gave a spoiler of the date of Masha’s death, which isn’t too important, really. The book was published a month before Mr Carr’s own passing. He was a good companion, sharing the joy of his journey with Masha. As he finished her story, he noted that she was “already traveling.” I thought of our beloved Maggie, whom we saw off together at the end of 2023.
When the veterinarian makes a house call . . .
Love your sentient companions.
2025-04-09 Wednesday
I just finished “The Life of Fredrick Douglass” by David Walker. It was a Thank You gift for supporting KPFA, but due to trouble with their app I received three copies. I’ll have to donate.
“The Life of Frederick Douglass” by David Walker
Slavery is a hard topic and not one I think I’d want to endure through a prose novel. (We read “Beloved” in high school.) A graphic novel is a nice approach. What was new for me was some of the history. The first people brought over in 1619 weren’t slaves for life. To my understanding, slavery has a long history in civilization as a temporary status. In 1640 three indentured servants ran away from their masters in Virginia. They were captured and the white men had their servitude extended some years while the black guy, John Punch, got his servitude extended to life. 1662 is when Virginia declared that children of slaves would also be slaves.
Frederick Douglass’s story is of a happy childhood with Grandma, then being turned over to cruelty at the age of five, then of learning to read, fighting The Man, and escaping and devoting his life and talents to Emancipation. In the middle of the book he has his freedom, a job, a house in Massachusetts, a wife and a child. In the words of the book, “I knew not then that my freedom was incomplete. If asked at the time, I would have been incapable of expressing the lingering notion that clawed at my soul: as long as one was enslaved, all were enslaved.”
It is not enough for things to be good for the individual, unless things are also good for people generally.
2024-04-14 Monday
I still need to do the taxes. Pretty soon I’ll be at a decent break point at work. While babysitting batch jobs, I catch up on online reading. Darrell Owens is sharing good stuff:
The reason why men with degrees are disproportionately voting to the left globally isn’t due to the content of the education, but primarily the campus experience where you engage with women on a professional, social and personal scale.
[ . . . ]
The main reason the gender war stuff only spanned two years for me was because I made adult friendships. When I was 19 years old, I first discovered the then-new pro-housing movement, and my local organization was founded by a trans woman and a non-binary person about 10 or 15 years my senior. I didn’t even know what a non-binary person was, and I didn’t know any trans people at 19 year old. But because of my exposure to these awesome people — who tolerated and corrected me when I occasionally said ignorant stuff — the right-wing YouTube videos of “Trans people gone wild” never convinced me the way it has millions of Americans.
My work with local political groups exposed me to men of all types: seniors, wealthy men, poor men, fathers in their 30s and 40s, depressed men, gay men, happy men. And of course a lot of women of all ages, too. My friendship with these people, especially men at different stages in life that had already gone through what I was dealing with, taught me that this nihilistic, dating nonsense, gender wars was just a phase. It wasn’t even explicit speeches but just clear observation. The married men were generally nice people. The middle class men made money in realistic ways and they kept telling me to stay in college. The depressed and poor men were open about their issues to me in a way that made me comfortable. And having female friends, especially older ones, made it so that I didn’t just see the opposite sex as just for dating.
. . . having male friends in their 40s casually remark when I was slacking around in my early 20s to go finish my education helped me tremendously. To be friends with older men with the lifestyles and families I wanted had a much greater impact than curated social media feeds of influencers.
“I mentally reprimanded my wife for disappearing to the candle aisle; it was impossible to keep track of two kids in this orgy of affordable consumerism.”
–Peter Stenson, “Bone Frag” The Sun Magazine, October 2024
2025-04-19 Saturday
The week has been difficult. It started with hard work, which really isn’t hard. On Wednesday I took the wife to a nice restaurant for her birthday. On Friday I watched the press conference with Senator Van Hollen. I can’t let Kilmar Abrego Garcia out of my heart. A father with a loving wife. A guy who works for his family. He’s anyone in America and he and others get snatched off the street by The Government and sent to a foreign Gulag.
I made the mistake of learning more about CECOT in El Salvador. There’s at least one awestruck influencer video on YouTube marveling at the Security Measures. Okay, sure. There’s also the understanding of 23.5 hours lock down, never going outside, bodies stacked 100 to a cell, zero contact with the outside world. And an admission that these inhumane conditions for “the worst of the worst” are applied to many innocent people because The Dictator gleefully brags that rounding up innocent people is just what you have to do to make the streets safe.
And the President of the United States, after “whoopsie” sending a guy here without due process and then digging in and insisting that Kilmar will just be deported again if he returns, and that he wants to treat US Citizens the same. The Constitution is Dead, in his eyes.
I debate whether CECOT is a concentration camp or a death camp. It is a one way trip off of this earth into a mass grave. They haven’t added the gas chambers and ovens yet. The conditions are more horrific than what I read from Alexander Solzhenitzyen and the fuck of it all is is that if you’re having to parse your national policies in comparison to the Soviet Union or the Third Reich, you’re already in deep shit.
I’m stressed out. I have friends who have pre-arranged their emigration strategy. The wife and I look at each other: we’ll stay and fight. I wish I was being hyperbolic and overreacting but it feels like the United States is Wile E Coyote having run over the cliff, pausing in mid-air, then daring to look down. It isn’t a Done Deal that we have lost our Democracy and I have some Faith that we’re going to Keep It Together but I am totally freaked out.
The photo of Senator Van Hollen and Mr Abrego Garcia was a relief. The man fled gang violence in El Salvador. A US Court found his fears to be credible and allowed him to stay. Then he’s dumped into the prison with all the evil gang members and all the officials involved are bending over themselves to deny any agency at all. The dots connected themselves for me to imagine that President Bukele felt embarrassed at the prospect of having to dig a body out of his mass grave to repatriate to America. A bad look. Fortunately, they had the good sense to keep the deportees separate and then send Mr Abrego Garcia to a less atrocious facility.
These are the standards of April, 2025. Which we would have found unconscionable in 2024. The Pendulum needs to swing. The current trajectory is hard towards a collective national tragedy.
Anyway. What I post to Social Media is Not The News. The World As We Experience It On the Ground is the reality we need to appreciate.
My America is the one where plastic dinosaurs frolic on public fountains.
Nobody reads my blog. And that’s okay. Nobody read my blog when I started back in 1996, either. For about a decade, blogs were a thing. Now they’re quiet again.
Now I am middle-aged, and life is full with family and work. There’s no time and need for a blog. But sometimes I feel the itch. I give it a scratch. Sometimes I look back on what I’ve written recently. It pleases me. That’s all we need.
An excellent headline. This shop is “just around the corner” from where I grew up, at least in Suburban terms. I went to a closer bike shop, though mainly I had access to an on-site mechanic I call Uncle John.
Ross found himself in the city because he fell in love with a Chicagoan and left his old life behind for her. Although she died two years ago, Ross can’t return to the Amish community he grew up in because he was shunned for choosing to marry her, he said.
“I was so blessed to have her in my life,” Ross said. “Even knowing how things turned out, I’d still make the same choices a thousand times over because I had never experienced love like that before. But, it’s challenging to live here without her to protect me. … I miss her constantly.”
Ross has remained committed to his faith and still follows many of the Amish traditions he grew up with. His wife helped him learn to use a phone and navigate public transportation, but she “respected that [he’d] always be Amish,” Ross said.
The couple’s strong bond “developed naturally,” and they easily found ways to co-exist, Ross said. For example, Ross won’t take any photos that show his face, but he got pretty good at snapping pictures of his wife. When Ross proposed, he gave her a ring as she expected. But instead of wearing one himself, he honored Amish traditions by growing out his beard.
Fixing electric bikes helps Ross “keep his mind off things,” he said. He also finds a lot of joy in caring for his dog, Lucy, who he brings everywhere with him.
“I just keep to myself and let others deal with people,” Ross said. “My favorite part of my work is designing a concept, then bringing it off the page into reality, and seeing how happy and surprised the customer looks when they pick it up.”
Relatable guy.
2024-04-08 Monday
2024-04-09 Tuesday
Sometimes your local Planning Commission is a forum for personal frustrations. We call this Democracy.
2024-04-12 Friday
Some people’s best angles are behind them.
2024-04-12 Friday
I was walking to the train station but it rolled up early. The gates came down and the train rolled into the station. A few young women went around the down gates to make their train. I wanted to Follow The Rules and wait for the gate, but experience has taught me that Caltrain can not be trusted to wait. I looked both ways and joined the crowd rushing to board the train. We got up the steps and the train was rolling ten seconds after the scheduled departure time. I have read that in Switzerland the trains depart at 59 seconds after. (I can not verify this information … Swiss trains appear to depart at the top of the minute.) I found an article that in New York, trains unofficially depart one minute after the official time. But I learn Caltrain doesn’t treat the timetable as a schedule and that passengers are recommended to arrive ten minutes before the posted time because trains will totally leave early. (A coworker shared a story of missing an 11pm train that had left early. Ouch!)
Then there was a 35-minute delay at California because of a “trespasser” incident. Someone had died on the tracks. Probably a suicide but I was upset that the railroad’s practices induce reckless behavior. Had I waited for the gate to raise, I would have missed my train, and had to wait 45 minutes for the next train, which was itself delayed another 20 minutes.
My train home departed 30 seconds before the timetable. In Japan, this would warrant an apology. But with Caltrain, passengers could have just waited around for another twenty-ish minutes for the next train. After all, it is rush hour! The train “ran hot” down to Mountain View, where the conductor explained that you could get off the train to catch the express to San Jose, because as early as our train was, it was going to have to wait at Lawrence for the express to pass.
So … why?
After the stress of running across the tracks in the morning, because the railroad doesn’t care about the passengers and then catching sight of someone’s Last Day, I needed to take a walk. I did spy a diesel train pulling an electric trainset up the tracks. The progress made me happy. We’ll soon be running Swiss trains. Maybe we can run on Swiss schedules.
2024-04-13 Saturday
The taxes are done now, which is important because we are having a nice overnight trip with the in-laws on Sunday.
Thursday was nice. Older kid graduated across the Arrow of Light into Scouts BSA. What we called “Boy Scouts” in my day but now that girls can join “BSA” is like “YMCA.” I’ve volunteered with the Cub Scouts so I went down to the Scout Shop and picked up a tan shirt and patches to wear at the ceremony. Baby Adult Leader. The guy at the shop said if I volunteer with Cub Scouts and BSA I can get velcro from the craft store to facilitate swapping-of-patches without having to buy two shirts.
I googled and found lunch at the nearby Uncle John’s, which is a pancake shop in this hip San Jose neighborhood. I ate and walked across the street and visited the Bike Store, called Upshift, formerly La Dolce Vella. They had Bianchis out front but I was curious to “ask about bikepacking” and so I did and the deal is you roll up with a sleeping bag and $100 and they’ll roll out to the State Park in a group and spend the night and feed everyone. I need to get on that.
On my way out through the gorgeous mansions adjacent to the hip shopping district I saw what I thought was an Estate Sale but turns out it was a rummage sale for the local Neighborhood Preservation association. If you weren’t a registered NIMBY it was $5 admission. I had somewhere to be anyway so I left peacefully.
We had Pho for dinner, because it was across from the Auditorium, and because we love us some Pho. My belly is still full from drinking the broth. Elder Son walked across the bridge, and the guys from his new troop adorned him with a fancy new bi-color kerchief. It’s weekly meetings from here on out, but led by the boys, and I have some Tigers to lead. Life is good.
2024-03-13 Wednesday
Last night on the TV, a “man on the street” Trump supporter explained that yeah he would love for Trump to be a dictator for four years. I had to pause the video and rant. “That’s not how dictators work, dumbass!”
I think the majority of Americans still figure Democracy is good and worth keeping but this is going to be a year that tests our faith.
2024-03-14 Thursday
Pi Day. Yesterday, in “Ministry for the Future,” a Science Fiction novel about Climate Change, I got to the chapter where they saw the first anthropogenic YoY drop in Carbon Emissions. They achieve sequestration at 475 ppm. What’s that from where I sit? I looked it up. We’re at 420 ppm, going up about 5 ppm per year. At a constant rate, that is … eleven years from now? 2035? Maybe if emissions start to slow, but they seem to be picking up. (The book notes a decade of levelling, so 2045.) What I saw yesterday was that we’re at 1.6 degrees C, or about 80% to the 2.0 C threshold where we become more likely to hit tipping points that lead to an irreversible transition towards a jungle planet. An uninhabitable zone around the equator, and a truly massive extinction that takes a few million years to recover from.
And the refugees! There are so many already and we’re trying to keep them “under the rug” but the number will only grow.
I live in one of those cool bubbles where … we are trying. I saw that near 40% of new vehicles sold in the San Jose metro are EVs or at least plug-in hybrids. That’s something. Incentives to electrify your house. There are trends around the world that may cause the tide to flip. But will it happen in time?
Last century had the Pandemic at year 18. By year 45, they had concluded The Ultimate Battle Between Good and Evil. Their First Battle started in year 14, and that’s when Putin took Crimea. If the Ukraine Invasion counts as the start of our Ultimate Battle … 2028? This century has been gentler than the last, so far. So far.
In year 45, I’ll be an Old Man, if I am still around. I hope to be. I hope along the way to be a force for good. It is my Sons I worry about. They’re growing into Interesting Times and I hope The Ancestors can guide and comfort.
We have been watching “The Bear” which is, imho, incoherent and overrated, but the scenes are spliced together with L trains and skyscrapers. I get a nostalgia for the Old Country. RJ says that people from Chicago who settle elsewhere always feel an instinct to return. The instinct is not found in suburbanites or people from downstate. The instinct is for the children of the city. I count myself among them. I feel the pull. But I’ve also settled in California. Married. Bought a house. Once I suggested we look at a house in Chicago, just to see. My son was not having it. “I don’t want to switch schools,” he said. Fair enough. I am a Californian. There’s a sense of The Future here. The air and the politics tend to be clean, and there’s little crime in my suburb. But not much character, either. The sprawl has a monotonous consistency that reflects the weather.
But today it is raining, so anything is possible.
2024-02-02 Fr:
There’s a sense that educated, middle-aged people who buy houses and raise families in the suburbs should naturally become more conservative and vote Republican. The bread and butter of the GOP. But it turns out all us would be Republicans like stuff like healthcare, racial diversity and bodily autonomy, so there’s a bunch of missing Republicans, more Atheists, fewer white people, and now pop stars are corrupting our football heroes!? If this keeps up the only people left who can be relied upon to vote Republican will be racist basement trolls, evangelical Christians, and crypto Libertarians.
This demographic is the bread and butter of any fascist movement. Donald understands this on an intuitive level and he lacks the capacity for shame. He will take this group as far as he can. The adoration of a culture’s worst people is one hell of a drug.
2024-02-05 Mo:
It has been rainy and windy. Yesterday, our power went out. On a tip from a neighbor, I walked down to where the line had failed. It was easy to spot, thanks to the fire engine and the tape. There was a burning smell in the air and a spot in the park strip that was smoldering at the end of what had at some point been a live wire. I stood nearby with a couple of other onlookers and we caught video clips as the man in the bucket was lifted into the air, then carefully trimmed back the remaining pieces of the broken wire.
I correctly deduced that, because there were a lot of power outages, this crew was just a first responder, clearing away the danger, and another crew would come out for repairs when they could. I got home, dug out the flashlights, and as the evening came on, we went downtown for dinner. The street where the line had fallen was open, and I pointed out the missing wire. On the way back, the street was again closed and we saw two bucket trucks and two light trucks getting ready for action. The lights were on a couple of hours later.
2024-02-06 Tu:
At first they were just itchy spots. We could feel them here and there, with greater frequency. Too small to see. But before long I could see flocks of the buggers scurrying across the floor. There was nothing we could do to get rid of them, we knew. There would just only ever be more of them. I found a fly in my drink. I tried to ignore it, knowing the futility, that little grubs were surely suffused throughout the glass, like so much microplastic. When I decided to try and fish it out, it had become two flies, thrice the size, just floating contentedly on the surface, confident in their inevitable triumph.
When I awoke, I figured the dream was about cancer. I feel a tender spot beneath my eye, and I choose to believe that I recently got bumped in the face at some point I don’t remember. Stray elbows in the night.
2024-02-14 We:
I noticed this mild-looking guy had a large, black tattoo shaped like Texas on his forehead. Then I remembered it was Ash Wednesday.
2024-02-23 Fr:
Q: Anything else you would like to tell us about the check-in process for flight number 1093 from DEN to SFO departed on 02-22-2024?
A: I got hit with the “carry on bag fee” which I have avoided on previous flights. Since enforcement is lax, opting in to the fee is pointless, and when you do have to pay you just feel like Frontier Airlines is overall this weird gamble for people who are trying to save money but maybe have to occasionally and randomly cough up an extra $200 because they wanted to read a book on the plane, and because their kid’s plastic carryall is an inch larger than the sizer. It feels like some weird immigration checkpoint designed to remind people who don’t have a lot of money that they will always be subject to random cruel indignities.
To be sure, this reminder is probably appropriate given our xenophobic tendencies and flirtation with fascism.
Q: Anything else you would like to tell us about your experience at the gate at the DEN airport on 02-22-2024?
A: Oh shit this is not about the carry-on fee but the actual check-in. I travel with my kids, and every time I check in, we are seated apart, then the gate agent has to go and fix the seat assignments. You don’t make any money on this: you are wasting labor. Program the damn computer to “randomly” seat children with their parents and you’ll be a more efficient and profitable airline.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here in 2020, I share an office with my second-grade son. This morning they were talking about Hannukah and making paper dreidels. He got frustrated making his paper dreidel. After lunch, I tried my hand at making a scrap wood dreidel. I used the miter saw to cut a 1×1 stick of wood, then mitered one end into a top. A 1×1 is too small to clamp in a miter saw, and I wasn’t going to stick my hand that close, so I used a “push stick” to hold the piece in place as I mitered it out.
“Oh dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, I miter sawed you out today!”
Of course, imperfections can be fixed with the miracle of sanding. “I made it out of clay,” I kept thinking as I sanded it down.
“Oh dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, I sanded you this way!”
I popped the top into a bench vise and carefully drilled out a hole. A drop of glue and a dowel rod and the boy had a dreidel. I set him up to paint the letters on. He was a little underwhelmed with the quality of his first time painting Hebrew letters on a small wooden object, but I assured him the point of making a dreidel wasn’t to be perfect but to have a simple toy with which to play.
“When it was dry and ready, with the dreidel he did play!”
Through the afternoon, he practiced his top spinning technique.
I enjoy building things. I learned a few things in my uncle’s basement and Boy Scout activities, but my high school didn’t offer shop class. In college, I discovered computer programming, which allowed me to build computer programs quickly, with a fairly low cost-of-entry. Information Technology is also a lucrative career choice.
A few years back, my IT career, aided by the mortgage crisis, helped me achieve the impossible: we bought a house in Silicon Valley! Our one-car garage is just about perfect for anything but parking. I enjoyed puttering on small weekend projects, but soon we had first one kid and then two, and with that, no more free time for extended puttering.
My ambition has still been to have a little workshop where I could build some things. I found a local woodshop that offered classes. I got to build a spice rack. Then their rent went up, and the workshop closed. The classes moved to a local community college, whose administrative procedures leave much to be desired.
Besides, what I really wanted was to get set up at home. For the years of early parenthood, I lacked the time and energy, and often, the budget. The bootstrap from a messy garage to a functional workshop is daunting. After the kids are in bed, sit back in the rocking chair, and flip around YouTube videos.
YouTube served me up some woodworking videos. There’s a lot of dudes out there making things with resin. Whatever. Then Steve Ramsey came along, explaining all the bits and pieces of basic woodworking. Along the way, he gently hawks his online courses. You know, if his regular YouTube videos are so informative and engaging, maybe the $150, what you might expect to pay for a weekend workshop or two at the local shop, might be worth a shot.
With my COVID haircut, flannel shirt, and eyeglasses fit over safety glasses, I am ready to rock the shop!
I am now about 2/3 of the way through the first day of building what Ramsey calls the BMW: Basic Mobile Workbench. The online course is nicely laid out, including diagrams, materials, how-to videos, and cross-references to skills. On my first day, I made a trip to Home Depot for supplies, but the actual work got hijacked by a busted kitchen faucet. Priorities! I spent time poring through the miter saw manual. Anything that can chop fingers off is worthy of a solid understanding.
A week later, today, I made another trip to Home Depot. Having reviewed the materials again during the week, I figured I could use clamps, squares, and, most critically, an extension cord. I carefully unpacked and assembled the miter saw, made myself comfortable with its operation, and got to work trimming 2x4s.
Bootstrapping a workbench: miter saw on a folding table in the driveway.
To build the legs, Steve glues two 2x4s together, then clamps them steady and secures them with screws. Things got frustrating when I tried to screw the 2x4s together. The screw wouldn’t go all the way in. Okay, I can drill a pilot hole. The drill bit got wedged in the wood. I worked it out with my vise grips.
The humble vise grip is an indispensable tool!
Google led me to a link that explained that one needs to tighten all the holes with the chuck to really secure the bit. That helped. Another video had a guy explain that in addition to a pilot hole, you want to drill a slightly larger hole through the top piece of wood. Experience proved this out. So, to drill a leg would require multiple bit changes. I was tempted to run to Home Depot for nicer tools, but it was getting dark. Fortunately, I had enough clamps that, after I struggled through the first leg, I could do the next three legs in a batch. I only had to swap bits three times for the batch instead of for each leg.
Ramsey touches on most of this information in his course material. He shows how he uses some fancy star-bit screws and links to a video that explains how to screw things and what a wonderful thing an impact driver is. I thought maybe his materials could be more explicit: “you should really consider an impact driver, and these cool star bit screws.” However, I appreciate that all the information isn’t served to me on a silver platter. An important part of building things is overcoming challenges along the way. And in an age where many basic problems are quickly solved by asking a smartphone, working through an efficient process to get the legs drilled “the hard way” was very rewarding.
What one lacks in fancy tools, one can make up for with a degree of cleverness.
The Silver Platter was a concern I had with learning basics at a professional woodshop. “Here kid, take this fancy wood we got you and run it through the planar like so before we get to the nice Saw Stop table saw. We’ll make sure you folks get to use the drill press, too!” That is a nice way to put your toe in the water and taste the possibilities, but I am not going to have all of these things in my little garage, so … Steve’s course has the first few projects relying on the miter saw. At the end of the day, the online course puts more responsibility on me as a student. It is more daunting than an off-site shop class, but it teaches me more of what I really need and want to know.
Since I am a Tall Dude, I made my legs longer than in Steve’s plans. I started with 44″, but after squaring off the leg ends, I had to settle for 43 1/2″. This means I need to pick up one more 2×4 to finish off the frame. While I am at the store, that might be a good time to pick up an impact driver, possibly even some fancy star screws.
The garage is a mess, but the BMW project is stacked nicely for the next work session.
As I said, it was getting dark, and my better half had dinner cooking. I couldn’t finish the “Day One” process of screwing the frame of the workbench together, and it will probably be another week before I can pick this up again. I stashed everything neatly away, and I am looking forward to finishing off my first project … before the year is done, for sure!
In my career as a Boy Scout, I could have died at least twice, that I know of.
One time in the Boundary Waters, I got a tent that required stakes and guys, but we were effectively camping on ROCKS with a little bit of moss. So, I rolled a few boulders into the right spot to anchor the lines.
This was during the summer AFTER the worst of mosquito season.
I took a canoe out to paddle for fun one afternoon in this little lake but started to get sucked toward a waterfall. Luckily, there was someone nearby to toss a rope and haul me to shore.
Another time in Michigan, I stepped out of a canoe near a landing, and turned out it was deep water that was sucking me DOWN except for my life vest was secure and buoyant. Scoutmaster was near to haul me out of the water.
Honeymooning in Hawaii, I waded out on a beach to ride the waves to shore in shallow water, as I had often enjoyed in Lake Michigan. The surf picked me up, rolled me, and slammed me hard, skull into the sand. Coulda cracked my neck. I took it as a hint from the local deities that this continental tourist should stay onshore, as is my place in the world.
My mom fainted the first time she set foot in an American supermarket. I stood transfixed in the cereal aisle. After six long years on Earth, here was a place that understood me. These were cartoon characters, made of pure sugar, that you could eat as a meal. Every box had a toy inside. How could I possibly choose just one?
I ask forgiveness of Hong Kongers if at times I am still that six year old kid, dazzled by what to you is ordinary. You live in a kind of city we Americans can only aspire to, and it’s no wonder you love your home so much you will take any risk to save it.
—Maciej Ceglowski
A man driving a dump truck the size of a house put my son’s life in danger.
The details of what happened unfortunately aren’t that remarkable. It was a perfect storm of road rage, reckless driving, terrible street design, and total lack of any kind of recourse, so basically a normal Tuesday on a bicycle in DC.
The dump truck driver drove aggressively and blasted his airhorn over many blocks on R Street NW. He was just feet from a half dozen other people on bikes who could do nothing but cringe and hope he didn’t mash us into pulp.
Oliver was terrified, asking me if we can ride on the sidewalk, asking me if we can stop, almost in tears.
After we turned up 18th Street and jumped the light at S Street to get away from this reckless man, Oliver turned and asked, “Can we take the Metro instead?†And that was it. I decided I can’t subject my son to this traffic violence anymore.
The most infuriating thing about this particular incident and many others is that this is how it’s supposed to work. R Street is supposed to be shared by cement trucks, tractor trailers, monster SUVs, dump trucks, and squishy fleshbags on two wheels.
They call it an unprotected bike lane, but in practice, it’s a little bit of extra space that people on bicycles can use as long as no motor vehicles are using it. It’s a design that squeezes us into sharing a narrow road with literal dump trucks.
—Peter Krupa
No protests were authorised in China, the world’s biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, but Zheng Xiaowen of the China Youth Climate Action Network said Chinese youth would take action one way or another.
“Chinese youth have their own methods,” she said.
—Al Jazeera
On Children Kahlil Gibran
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children are living arrows sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’
–Bob Dylan
I took Tommy down to the San Jose Climate Strike on Friday. He enjoyed reading the various signs and trying to make sense of everything. When we got to City Hall, he quickly lost interest, and after a pee break and some ice cream, we headed home.
I’ve been to a lot of protests that blocked a lot of street traffic. The Climate Strike is the first time I recall any motorists Freaking The Hell Out. We were near the head of the march and cars had to sit through a light at a four-lane off-ramp. (Because the South Bay is the kind of place with four-lane off-ramps…) A dude slammed on his horn, we all raised our fists in solidarity, then he jumped out of his car and came running, maybe four car lengths down to the crosswalk, and started arguing with people.
I didn’t stick around for details, as I was with a six-year-old who wanted to read signs further up.
I was thinking. Don’t Go to War? Don’t Hate Gays? Most protests I have been to haven’t asked much of the public. Climate Change is a different beast: if we’re going to make it work, we’re all going to have to make adjustments to bring our energy use into a sustainable place. Some folks find this threatening. But does it have to be threatening?
It does have to feel threatening, not out of necessity for stopping climate change but in order to avoid making systemic changes. We need to make big changes at the level of national policy and international treaty. If you find that threatening, then you need to shift the discussion to the tragic impractical sacrifices the climate extremists are asking of you. Greta Thunberg is looking down on you sternly, in your internal combustion car, getting off the freeway. These youngsters waving signs about saving the Earth are Your Enemy.
The way I describe it: we need to change our policies so that people can live closer to work, and to give them the option to walk or bike or take transit. Sure, we need to electrify our buildings and raise energy prices to discourage careless consumption. When Greta gives us a stern disapproving look she isn’t getting on Your case about Your sloppy recycling habits, her stare is fixed at Donald Trump, and the myriad other world leaders who want to keep strip-mining the planet to burn the carbon out of the ground and into the atmosphere, who want to keep you buying cars and driving on wider and wider roads and highways to get anywhere because that is where the money is at. She’s looking down on shitty land-use policies that perpetuate wealth inequality.
We have to do our parts. For regular folks, it is merely a question of trying to live better. The heated rhetoric is for the Powers That Be that Profit from The Status Quo who are willing to fight stern-faced teenage girls in the name of the Almighty American Dollar.
Save your ire for the protestors, Off-ramp Dude. It ain’t about You. It is about all of Us, and especially the High and Mighty, who will need to surrender some Power and Convenience for the sake of our Children.
Last night, the Mountain View City Council enacted an RV ban.
Unanimously.
If I were a Mountain View resident I would make a mental note to "toss all the bums out" at the next election. https://t.co/KM8gdN96OY
For what it is worth, as a bicycle commuter, RVs are not a problem, as long as they aren’t obstructing the bike lane or sight lines, which they rarely are.
