Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/08/29/what-happened-earlier-in-the-month/
So, early in the month of August was Grandma’s seventy-fifth birthday. Not my Grandma Howard in da Yoo Pee of Michigan who died in May, who had previously turned ninety herself, but my Mom’s Mom in Chicago, who is pretty healthy and quite spunky. Anyways, since August is a big month for birthdays in our family, we had a big party at Grandma’s house in Chicago.
I also had to move out of the apartment that I was subletting from Dan. Moving myself out of an apartment is easy, because all my stuff packs neatly into a dozen or so boxes that fit into my station wagon with ease. The trick is, that I was also obliged by the terms of the sublease to clear all of the junk that had accumulated over the years in the apartment and store it with Dan’s Uncle Marty, who lives three blocks away. So, it wasn’t enough for me to just pack my stuff in my car, drive up to Chicago to attend Grandma’s birthday party, then continue a little farther North to start a new life at Mom’s house, but I’d have to come back to Urbana and clean out Dan’s apartment. By Tuesday. So I drove up Friday evening with the intention to return Sunday. But I’ll get to that later.
Friday, August 8
Now, being as I don’t drive much and my car is old and I value the occasional Confucian ethic of ritual, I keep a mileage log in my car of every time I fill up for gas. As I drove North toward Chicago with all my belongings and stopped for gas I noted with pride that I had not stopped for gas since May. The car has a fourteen gallon tank and gets a little over twenty miles per gallon on the highway, so you can see that I’ve been putting a lot less carbon dioxide into the air we breathe than your average meat-eating red-blooded American is obliged to. And that made me feel quite good about myself. All the same, since I was low on cash, I paid for the gas with my Busey Bank Visa debit card.
Saturday, August 9
The party was wonderful. We had old ladies, and neighbors, and family, and friends of the family, and plenty other people I don’t really know who they are show up. I invited a few friends myself though none were able to attend. There was lots of food and my sister Jessica brought lots of fancy pastries she home-made herself, and I brought some booze I’d found in the apartment that Dan doesn’t drink, and Aunt Linda brought a lot more booze, to add to Grandma’s booze collection, which was augmented by other gifts of booze, not to mention beer. And I was sent out to purchase ice with the neighbor lady who suddenly decided that we needed eight 22 pound bags of ice instead of 8 pound bags, which struck me as a bit excessive at the time, but what with all the beer and soda pop, there were many many coolers hanging around the place yearning for ice. And well anyway Aunt Linda, twenty-first century Renaissance woman that she is, is studying bar-tending, and was thus mixing drinks in Grandma’s basement. I don’t have to tell you all that we had a good time.
Anyway, I just tried to relax because the apartment was going to be tough, but I pitched in with getting the place cleaned up whenever I was asked. Uncle John and Mom did me the favor of driving my stuff up North in Mom’s mini-van. We pulled our tailgates together and shifted my boxes from my blue Ford station wagon to her blue Ford mini-van. And I proceeded to drive back South on Sunday, and carted several carfulls of Dan’s stuff to his Uncle Marty’s house.
Sunday, August 10
Now, Uncle Marty’s a good guy with an extremely beautiful house, and a good heart, near as I can tell. He asked was there any help we needed and I said maybe you have some boxes, and he said yes, he had some at work, which was in some agricultural research building on campus not far from Allen Hall, which is where I lived many years, so we drove over that way, and I noticed the University Police behind me, and then they were flashing their lights, so I pulled over across the street from Campus Visitor Center, where incidentally a friend of mine recently started working.
Now this here is where the story starts to get a little upsetting. I’ll share with you what I wrote to MikeyA about it:
You know when they pull you over, you have to go to court? They don’t just send you a fine in the mail and stuff. Well, I don’t even remember getting pulled over in Palo Alto, but the other day I was pulled over in Illinois on account of the license plate on the back of my car had no tags, because it was the license plate from the front of the car, because the license plate from the back of the car had been stolen while I was travelling in foreign lands.
Well they ran the plates and found my registration was expired. I’ve been putting off worrying about that because I’ve been kinda broke and not sure do I wanna change the registration to Illinois or renew in California or what. Anyhow, they pulled me over and asked for my license and insurance card. I have insurance but I don’t drive so often so I hadn’t gotten around to putting the new insurance card in the glove compartment yet and the one that was in there was two months expired.
Well, they ran my license through the computer and you know it was suspended!? I did not know that it was suspended. Well, so anyway, they asked if I knew why and I recalled them pulling me over in the Mission District one night when I was driving around, missing my back plate, looking for parking, and they had two cop cars then and they asked me to keep my hands on the dashboard because they didn’t know if I was really there to snuff anyone out, and they seemed nonplussed to find out that I merely had a missing license plate. I’d drove around the peninsula for two months or more and nobody ever wondered about my license plate, and the only reason the cops got excited in the Mission was because they thought I might have been up to something else.
I’ll interject here to explain that the Mission District is one of the less yuppified parts of San Francisco, where I was staying with some friends my last few days in California back in April before I went and drove through the blizzards back to Illinois. The cop told me that the license plates were a fix-it offense, and I’d receive a thing in the mail that I could send back to them after I showed my license plate to an Illinois cop and he signed off on it. For some reason, these past few months, this has not been foremost among the things that I’ve been worried about.
“They do it differently,” the Illinois cop told me. I had the front plate on the back of the car because in Illinois one day I was pulled over twice because I had no license plate and the second cop said put the front plate on the back for cryin’ out loud.
There was much more discussion about my shady story as to whether I live in Urbana or do I live in Chicago and the last time the University Police pulled me over in 1999 I said I was a student just about to leave town so it seems awfully suspicious to them that I had the same story in 2003, except that this time I wasn’t a student. Anyway, they said that since I must have lost my license because I had Failed To Appear that they couldn’t trust that I’d appear there. So they arrested me. The back seat of the cop car was split in half and I had my own little plastic bubble to myself.
Another aside here, but the cop who frisked me wanted to know if I had any Bad Things on me. I forgot about my tiny pocket knife, and he never found it. He examined my cell phone and castigated me that if I had enough to purchase a cell phone, but not to keep my car registered, that my priorities must be awfully screwed up. I couldn’t think of anything to say to that at the time, because I was more preoccupied with getting arrested. In my defense I’ll point out that the cell phone cost me $50, and was purchased when the car didn’t even have a working transmission, which was another piece of really foul fortune that I ran up against early this year, and that anyway, I do use the cell phone a lot more than I use my car, and have a greater need for it, as it facilitates job hunting.
At the Champaign County Jail a guy with a moustache and tattoos who looked like he had experience in such matters smiled and waved at me in the back of the cop car as we waited to go into the secret garage. Then another guy who had been working too long and was slap-happy took all my stuff, and my shoelaces, but then let me keep my credit card so I could bail myself out. I never went in a cell, but got my mug shot taken and fingerprints scanned and then my hands covered with ink so they could have an old-fashioned paper record of my prints.
When it finally came around time to bail myself out, they had me call this service that processes credit cards for people who are getting bailed out, and as soon as I was off the phone a fax came through verifying the payment. But they were confused because it was already signed. Huh? Dan’s Uncle Marty, who had been in the car with me, had bailed me out on his credit card. So we called the service up again and asked that Uncle Marty get refunded and I signed my own piece of paper and I was released.
Now, to get back to the story here, and the task at hand, which is that Uncle Marty had come with Milly, my subletting-from-Dan roommate for the summer, and I thanked Uncle Marty for being such a noble character here, and we drove all together in his Volkswagen Golf and picked up boxes from his office. I had a dinner date to catch up on that evening because Yayoi had baked an Apple Pie that she had wanted to share with me, but she’d been pretty confused when I didn’t show up, why didn’t I call? Because I got arrested. But then, why didn’t you call? Because they don’t let you do that, when you get arrested. And she said oh, because my friend Yayoi is from Japan, and maybe they do things differently over there when you get arrested. I don’t know. But I finally got to her place and we made curry rice together and it was delicious.
Monday, August 11
The next day I dropped by the bank to clear out my account. They had the $220 charge from Sunday recorded as deducted, and I hadn’t wrote any checks lately, so I took the remaining $400 or so in cash. I felt somewhat glad that even though I had had to post $200 in bail, I was leaving Urbana with a little more money than I had when I left Oakland.
Milly’s Dad and Little Sister came down in their own mini-van to help with the moving. Together, we loaded up the rest of Dan’s stuff and made a few more trips and completely filled Uncle Marty’s living room with stuff. Mom and Uncle John were nice enough to register my car in Illinois on short notice when I explained that the title was in a box of my stuff in Mom’s van in Chicago and I was down in Champaign without a license, but the Police Officer wasn’t satisfied to hear that the car was registered, he bitched about “plates on the car” that he never was going to look at anyway so I hopped the Greyhound to Chicago. I told Milly that I’d say that I felt bad about leaving the remainder of the apartment cleaning to her, but that I’d be lying, because I really wasn’t eager to scrub the apartment’s naughty bits, and anyway, I’d already hauled a dozen heavy bags to the trash in removing, among other things, cans of soup from the mid-nineties, and numerous other mysterious things, and all of Dan’s stuff, and I felt somewhat done.
I have my proof of insurance, which was actually in a box that I’d kept in the car when I was originally pulled over, but I hadn’t thought of that at the time, but I can’t get my driver’s license so quick. I called California DMV about twenty times and finally I got through and the lady said two FTAs, here are the docket numbers and telephone numbers in San Francisco and Palo Alto to call. Of course, the San Francisco number went to an automated system that only worked if I had my Courtesy Warning Notice with me, and the Palo Alto number played some new-age space music and said please leave a message. So I looked on the Internet and found an e-mail address for San Francisco that told me that they wanted $250 over the missing license plate, and an accurate phone number for Palo Alto informed me that they wanted $300 for a “traffic-related fine” and a $7 fee for a copy of the abstract that I could send to DMV to get my license un-suspended.
Tuesday, August 12
Anyway I rode back to Champaign the next day, though the surly Greyhound bus driver threatened to not let us on the bus because we must have been deliberately ignoring him when he said Champaign people move to the front of the line to get first crack at the local bus but because we hate his guts we deliberately stood at the very end of the line ignoring him, but he eventually swallowed his resentment, because we never met the guy and hadn’t had anything against him and had never even heard his voice before even when he told us to get at the front of the line, so he moved some people from the local bus to the bus that would get them wherever it was that they were going faster anyway, and drove us down to Champaign.
I needed proof of registration and two licensed drivers so we could all go over together in one car and return with two, but I wasn’t a licensed driver. I got Raad, who is another great guy with a white heart, and Yayoi, who has a great attitude about life, to join me at the Public Safety Building, where I showed them the sticker and my two friends driver’s licenses, and then Raad drove us over to Tatman’s and I got my car out of the towing lot. It had been $75 to tow and $15 / day to store. And since it was two days to get everything together, he wanted $105, but he didn’t have any change, and none of anybody else was around had any change, but the boss was around and said make it an even $100.
We dropped the car off at Yayoi’s and then Raad took us to his place for dinner. We ate a delicious, hand-made, vegetarian pizza, because Raad’s a vegetarian, and drank beer and wine, and Raad shared with us what he believes is the greatest movie ever, Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” which I admit was pretty good, but Raad was probably uniquely able to relate to it most vividly because he grew up in Iraq and I don’t think Yayoi got much out of it, but it was a nice way to punctuate everything else that is going on, and I got to see Raad’s paintings and his cats. Yayoi likes cats. And I got to see a picture of his girlfriend in Malaysia, and he was flying to Texas to see his son next week. It was all extremely homey in that comingled diaspora kind of way that makes me smile. Such distances we all have to go to live and to love!
And then as I had further written to MikeyA:
So, I got my car back but I couldn’t legally drive it. My Japanese friend, Yayoi, drove it back to her place, where I stayed for a couple of days, coaching her driving skills. You see, Yayoi grew up in the enchanted land of public transportation infrastructure. And she was kind of scared of the Interstate, but she wanted a ride to Chicago, on the next Friday, so we got along well enough.
Eventually the big day came and we drove up North. We got started kinda late though, and when it got dark I took the wheel, brazenly driving without a license, on the story that it is better I drive than Yayoi deal with my unreliable headlights while driving into Chicago for the first time at night. No troubles … no troubles.
Ugh.
So, you can see, I’ve been kinda slow in getting around to updating my web site. :)
/danny
Post Script
I returned to Urbana for court the other day, and I was the first called. I was charged with insurance, and I showed them my proof-of-insurance card. I was charged with driving without a valid license, and I showed them my driver’s license. The charges were dropped. I’m waiting for the $200 to show up in the mail.
Why did that go so easily? Because driving on a suspended license implies that you were busted for a DUI. It’s a really big deal that I think you actually do go to actual jail for, so unless the cop thinks that you deserve a Really Bad Day, they just charge you with the technically incorrect, but inconvenient offense of driving without a valid license. Apparently my license is valid if you show it to a prosecutor in a court room, but suspended if you have it run by a traffic cop. All the same, I have the CTA at my disposal, so I’m not driving until some unemployment comes through.
Two weeks after I filed for unemployment in Ilinois I was told that I had to re-open my existing claim in California, which had previously been determined invalid, but was subsequently validated when I showed them my earnings from the Coffee Shop. Since I was terminated, I had to do a phone interview, and the lady was able to just pull my account of the story right off of the Internet via a private URL. She was very pleased to have this, because it turns out the Owner lied to her about what had happened, but the burden of proof is on him to show gross misconduct. She has ten days to make a determination in the case, and that was a week ago, so I’ve been anxiously watching the mail for word, and likely cash from the State of California so I can pay off the State of California and drive around Illinois.
Anyways, Busey Bank later called me because they received the charge from the gas station for $19.24 on Wednesday. And they wanted that and $25 fee for overdrawing the account I no longer had. Gah! Anyways, I had put off paying them until I have a bank account, but the other day they called and said, really, the $19.24 would make them happy, so Yayoi said she’d take care of that on my behalf and I get to pay her back. After that call I returned a call from a recruiter who thought I was in California but wanted to present me to a very prestigious University in Chicago. The job sounds good and we’re working to tune my resume, so … things are looking up for a change.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/06/05/solitude/
One constant has been loneliness. On the one hand, this is my fault, because my natural tendency is to ignore other people for the fascinating isolation of my own mind. Despite my best efforts, I don’t have an innate sense of self-image, of self-perception from the outside. For this reason, I find Ego Cultivation to be an endlessly fascinating challenge of a hobby. What to say, what to wear, how to act, it can all be a great kick to get those things right. But the second I switch off or start neglecting these balls I’m juggling, they all fall on the floor, and I revert to my naturally quiet self.
This makes me a bit schizophrenic, perhaps. Both identities are me: the quiet geek lost in his own thoughts, and the happy jester who wants to put a smile on everyone’s face, and be loved for it. It is the quiet geek I care about, and the jester is left to take a beating by the public just as he receives accolades. Since the jester is an external ego, I really don’t mind what animosity gets spilled on it. That stuff washes off. On the other hand, the jester is a derivation of the inner geek, so if people like the jester, and I have the time, I share a little more of the inner personality lurking behind.
When I get to walking, in the quiet solitude of nature, I am most naturally in geek form: quiet and thoughtful, less concerned with my impression on the world because I feel connected to it. I think the word solitude in that last sentence is key here: in a world where most of us are caught up in the internal combustion joyride from one dark air-conditioned chamber to the next, us walkers are few and far between. I think that maybe most people are more lonely than they like to admit: I used to hurry home for the satisfying social stimulation of the television. I liken this to a sugary cereal, which while delicious at the moment, doesn’t really leave much nourishment.
My mom brought me up on Cheerios and low-fat milk. She bought wheat bread because the digestive challenge is healthier. Now I have forsaken the hyperactive diet of sugar-coated human experience on TV for the harsh, thick dietary loaf of the ancestors. When my ancestors walked around, they weren’t alone in doing so. Everyone was hanging around outdoors, and greetings and gossip would pass. In my age, I am alone with my thoughts, my geek and my jester. I can take notes to exchange words with people around the world when I make it home.
A trade-off, a deal I have no choice in striking, because I live in the world I was born into, and I can no longer stomach commercials.
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/06/05/walking/
“That is a long way to walk,” she said.
I nodded and smiled, about five or six miles, round trip. Not really a lot. But I know where she’s coming from. We are bipedal hominids, born to walk, but we grow up indoors, watching TV in an air-conditioned room, and at the age of sixteen we are handed the keys to the car.
She asked how I’d gotten to walking so much.
I said that when I’d moved to California, I had to drive everywhere. I got fat, because I’d lost what little exercise I had been accustomed to in my life: walking to the L, often through harsh weather. There was no L in California. I felt unhealthy.
So I moved. I took an apartment close enough to work and walked or rode my bicycle to work. Over time, and a few different jobs, I came to rely on walking, biking, and whatever public transit was available. I came to love walking, as a sweet, slow experience of the outside world that was an excellent complement to whatever it was that I did in the dark, air-conditioned indoors of my employer. Walking gave me a space to myself, to think, and to feel a connection to the beauty of the world – trees, flowers, squirrels, fellow walkers, and all the infrastructure of the human world that I could observe carefully from the outside.
We’d gotten on the subject of walking because she wanted to know how I’d gotten around during my travels. Planes, trains, and my own two feet. I was pleased that just as I walked around this town now, I had also walked around towns in different countries all over the world. Walking was one of my constants, which is important to a life that feels more variable than most.
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2002/10/30/microserf/
I went down to the patio and listened to some Australians and Kiwis talk about bungee jumping. I bought some yogurt and a pain au chocolat from the convenience store, and I was joined by Yiling and two friends she had made in the women’s dorm: Andrea, a Dutch after-school art teacher, and Tran, a brash, butch, Korean-American Microsoft contractor. We walked back in to town together so Andrea and Yiling could have some food.
Tran interested me, as her boisterous external personality reminded me of a part of my own personality that needs refinement; At first she struck me as uncomfortably, stereotypically American, until I dug the common connection that was rooted in the lonely world of being different as a kid, and subsequently embracing weirdness as a strength. If you are then recruited away from the normal social realm into Microsoft or the Silicon Valley, you work long hours with similarly freaky people, and it takes that much longer to notice that you haven’t made that many friends, since you still haven’t had much call for trying to relate to other people on a more basic human level.
Or was that the theme in _Microserfs_, which I finished reading just before Italy? Either way, I think this adventure has done me some good in that regard. I’m pretty sure this is one reason why Mary told me “Just Go!”
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/08/23/chillin-dannyman/
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.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/08/17/quake-moms-birthday-dmv/
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 …
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/08/13/penguins/
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.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/07/29/i-should-probably-go-home/
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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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/07/20/movies-i-seen-lately/
The Adam Sandler movie where he adopts a kid is really funny. Wild Wild West I enjoyed because I knew darn well to ignore the plot, and there were scantily-clad ladies, though not too much of it. The acting was great, but the movie was dumb. Uhmmm, oh South Park is a total blast – go see it! And I saw Eyes Wide Shut.
Well, it’s Stanley Kubrick’s last film, and I’m not sure he finished it before he left us. I found it interesting, but rather long and seeming to lack a point. Maybe its the sort of thing like 2001 where it’ll be more appreciable down the road after I’ve had a long time to digest it and have read the book. There’s some interesting stuff in there about eroticism and sex and relationships between men and women and sex and sex and so forth. Probably a good late-night getting-to-sleep-dozing-off-on-the-couch sort of affair.
What other movies have I seen lately?
Run Lola Run kicks complete butt. It’s this German film where the red-haired protagonist spends most of the plot running desperately to get 100,000 marks to save her boyfriend from buying the big one inside of twenty minutes. It’s very fun and the techno/industrial soundtrack sounds really good, and I’m not even in to that sort of thing.
It’s the kind of movie Goth Dan and Brijeet would really enjoy together.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/07/20/pictures/
So, I checked out Tellme’s web site yesterday in the morning and what did I
see when I clicked on Join Us
?
Well, it made my ego swell ’til I realized that my picture was selected at random from a bunch of pictures. Cool,
said I.
And well, we take some stuff from Tellme, we take some stuff from Beth:
And now we quiet down those of you who complain that I aint got enough
pictures around the place.
So uhmmm …
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/07/17/pigeons-pizza/
So this morning I slept in good and hard. I like sleeping in and while I still plan on building a real bed, money allowing, the sleeping bag on the floor … so firm, really really comfortable, if a bit chilly at night.
Today I jumped in the car and hit San Francisco all by my lonesome. I got off the highway as soon as I hit a traffic jam. I headed through some streets, over some hills, though a few neighborhoods. By sheer chance I passed right by Brandon Long’s apartment, and later I’m pretty sure I was really close to Joe and Lorah’s.
When I hit Market Street I found some parking on Larkin between Golden Gate and McAllister. I’ll tell you this, as a young driver parallel parking isn’t the easiest thing in the world. As a young driver from Illinois, parallel parking on a hill is a real pain in the ass.
Fortunately, it was an SUV downhill from me with this big pedestrian grater on the front, so my bumping against it left no visible damage. It’s good to know those things are good for something – parking practice.
I walked down the Street, and saw the gold-gilded City Hall … a very nice building with a rotunda that looks more like a state capital than anything else. Chicago’s City Hall is this large, square, concrete building that takes up a city block and extends right to the sidewalk. This contraption has state flags and well-kept palm trees all in a row up front of it.
I had to pee and so stepping in to the nearest municipal building realized I was entering the library. Well, after finding the bathroom, which reminded me of this bathroom I think it was in a Terminator movie, where there was a center kiosk with sinks and mirrors, then some urinals, and toilets. Well, I recall this movie where Arnold, I think it was, was hiding in the bathroom, and he and the bad guy shot it to shreds and scared this poor dude on the toilet who was reading as he went about his business.
I also registered for my Library Card. I figure it’d make mom proud.
I spent some time checking out the library. The architecture is very modern, lots of metal and glass. Nowhere near as big as the University Library (I think Illinois has the largest Library in the country.) or the Harold Washington Library, but a nice place all the same.
Leaving the Library, I found myself in a BART station, marveling at the eight or so transit systems in the area and thinking to myself what a nice thing it is that they saw fit to unify the transit system in Chicago back in 1945. BART isn’t a normal subway – it doesn’t go around the city, it goes through it. It’s a regional system. But then to call San Francisco a city would be to consider Chicago to stop at Fullerton. Errr, well, I really can’t compare. If you think of the Bay Area as a whole as a city, it starts to make sense, only you have to see the business district – the downtown areas, spread out among a few urban centers instead of one single one.
And interesting place.
Walking back toward the car, (I’d left late and downtown San Francisco was a bit dead.) I came back by City Hall and its surrounding government building comrades. There were these fat pigeons sitting casually on the sidewalk. Well, I had to stoop and study them. Haven’t seen pigeons for a while. I walked closer, and closer, in a non-threatening way, interested what sort of personal space they wanted. Hard-core street pigeons aren’t afraid of people, they just like to have enough distance to get out of the way and not get squished. Well, turning away from the pigeons I found myself talking to this writer / sometimes homeless guy named David.
We talked about pigeons, about how they feed cooperatively, without fighting. He said he’d seen a lady feeding a blind pigeon earlier on. A blind pigeon is a severely fucked animal. Since they bob their heads for balance, I guess using their eyes … well this guy kept falling over as he walked. She kept throwing the food close to him, so maybe he could smell it and get at it. Was that a cruel thing to do, David mused?
Looking at that question now, I suppose if you can’t put the thing out of its misery, there there’s nothing cruel in trying to help it find life comfortable.
Anyway, I headed back, through the streets, finding myself on the highway, and back. I’m at work now, trying to help clean a few ends here at Tellme. Joe’s having a pizza party at his house at seven. It’s 1808h here. This is no ordinary pizza party though, he says they’re FedExing pizza from several pizzerias in Chicago and they’re going to compare to some pizza home made on the part of his roommate.
All I’ve eaten today is a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, so I’m certainly in the mood for pizza!
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/07/08/dannywagon/
Twice to Berkeley in as many days past. Yesterday Joe Doyle and I drove out to Berkeley to check out this 1983 Volvo Station Wagon. It’s maroon with a few rust spots, good engine, as far as we can tell, good brakes, new muffler, odometer broken at 135,000 miles, a good interior, missing front grill. Oh and its stick, the overdrive connector relays are broke, the fan doesn’t seem to work, and there’s some problem with battery drain. There’s a loose bit of trim over the windshield and sufficient evidence of duct tape having been employed to compensate for it. The clutch is very easy and the transmission sticks after some good driving.
I paid $800.
Then we drove to Zach’s Chicago Style Pizza in Berkeley – the only good pizza in California. And we headed home.
Today, Rene and Erik were keen on visiting Berkeley, but we don’t have BART, and CalTrain is not that cool. Well, what the heck, I drove them.
I was inclined to lend the car out, but not having it insured yet, I thought it better if I drive, because if anything did happen, I’d rather curse myself than my friends. Berkeley is nice. The campus is hilly and wooded, like I remember Indiana at Bloomington when I used to visit Jeong out there, only with more architectural variety. We walked up and down transit street. For lunch, in the Berkeley spirit, I had the healthiest meal I’ve had in a while – half a roast beef sandwich and a cup of split pea soup, and lemonade.
And we drove home. Three one-ways between Berkeley and Mountain View and there’s still plenty of gas left, so I know she’s not a guzzler.
And what to do with poor Lucy? Dunno, hang on to her for awhile. She’s still insured for Urbana, so I guess I’ll hold on to her until I know better. I feel bad at the possibility of neglecting her entirely, she got me out here well enough, and boy was that a trip! I felt guilty just removing my tassel from her rear-view mirror and moving it to the Volvo.
For Sale, to A Good Home … when I have cash to toss around, I could buy a Thing, a convertible, or just another really nice bug. I hate to love her and to leave her. Analyzing this philosophy, perhaps what I really need is a woman or a girlfriend, so I can handle the cars in a less anthropomorphic fashion.
Lotsa nice vehicles around Berkeley. Lotsa fine women too. I really like getting out of the Silicon Valley. Too many geeks around here, making San Francisco or anyplace else in California seem all the more wonderful in contrast. The Stanford Campus, about a mile away, is also nice, but it’s Stanford – expensive private school. I come from large state University folk.
On the way home we dropped by Alameda. I found Aunt Joyce’s place on Wood Street successfully, but they weren’t home. We returned the map we’d borrowed from Erik’s mom. The Gillings recently bought a new house in Alameda and will be moving from their rental some coming weekend. There will be college students on hand to pitch in for pizza and beer.
Mmmm, Chicago Style Pizza and Beer.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/07/06/party-party-time/
And so, Rene and Heather are visiting, breaking in the new sofabed, making some use of the new DSL connection, putting some mileage on my shower, and leaving a nice female influence on the apartment. Not that these ladies are poster children for any female stereotype, running around crusading against the messiness that has encroached on the apartment, but things just seem cheerier with them around, for whatever reason.
This Sunday we had a party – a good handful of folks came to eat dead cow, and we made nice with neighbor Bruce, who has a grill that we used. It was a good party. Max was there, as well as Joe and Jason. Jason I’d never met before, though we’ve both given each other considerable shit online in the past. He was not at all unlike I might have pictured him, had I ever bothered to picture him. So that was kind of neat. Pat and Jay appeared from Tellme, others from Confinity, and Joe and Brandon Long from EGroups. Little Dave, who is also a neighbor, works for Hotmail, making him a FreeBSD administrator in Microsoft‘s employ. He mentioned that Microsoft was hiring. Somewhat tempting, and if I didn’t already have this Tellme gig, I just might be hip to it. You see, it would be working for the Devil, but from the way Dave tells it, their FreeBSD operations are exceedingly hard-core.
As an illustration of how close the connections run between professionals out here, I met this guy, Sanford, who I think works for EGroups. At one point he was on the cell phone and mentioned that he was at a party with some Confinity people. He was talking to Rod, who works at tellme, who realized Sanford was at my party, and thus conveyed his greetings.
Uhmmm, yeah, so we hung around ’til sort of late mostly talking a lot. Joe had some cool stories about his life in his fraternity, something the rest of us had never bothered with. Then Joe and Jason told some other impressive tales of exploits from their undergraduate days.
And on Monday we rode CalTrain into the city. Joe picked us up and we bummed around Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf for a while, and visited the Ghirardeli chocolate factory for some Sundays. I got much flack for ordering a cheeseburger at a seafood place, but I stuck to my guns, as I just didn’t feel like seafood, and wasn’t hungry enough to spend more money on it. I had a cheaper dish at the sushi bar on Saturday for the same reason – sushi is fine by me, but I wasn’t hungry for it to justify the expense, though in both cases both the seafood and the sushi looked awfully good.
And yet, I hate to see food go to waste, so I was stealing leftover fries from Erik and leftover potatoes from Joe, even though I was as full as they were. I guess I’m funny about food. I remember when I interviewed MikeyA took me out to the same area, and while I had already had a “meal” at McDonalds, I ordered a steak, to be a good guest, you know? Well, as we started eating, I paced myself nice and slow. Mikey thought I was not going to finish. Well, I just kept eating a way, getting it down. Yum yum, eat ‘m up. I finished before him, and he was startled.
Vern has observed to Sharon that I’m funny about food. I’ll have to get introspective about that and write up some bullshit about it here some time.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/07/06/severe-rust-damage/
So, what has happened since last here I did spake? The biggest thing is Lucy is not feeling well. I adjusted the brakes, and while they work, I’d like them better – tight adjusting stars, you know? Well, she doesn’t idle anymore …
So i figured I’d take her to this impressive sounding place – AutoWorks, for the royal treatment.
They called me back saying she had severe rust damage and couldn’t be racked, or given the things they really should do it would be just way more than the car is worth fixing.
Oh woe is Lucy. Poor girl. Too long in the Midwest.
But I need a car that’s happy enough to get around, and so, searching the Excite classifieds, I found a Volvo station wagon.
Now this is the car I need – an old car with a solid reputation, that never dies, and being a wagon it can haul shit around. I could buy lumber to build my bed and other shopping ordeals without having to drag anyone else, like Dave, along with it.
You see, shoping with Dave is not a good thing. He’s even more of a guy than me, and the conclusion tends to be the first, nice, expensive sonsumer item. Well, by bedroom needs much more personality than that.
So, once I score a ride, I’m going to check this puppy out. It’s stick shift even, and the $1,000 is right in my price range.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/06/22/the-webers/
Friday morning I slept in, having stayed at work ’til 0330h the night before setting up a FreeBSD box to support Windows printing. So on Friday I bought a suit and came in to work and took it easy. Later in the evening me and Erik and Joe met up and we rode out to San Jose to catch the 11PM redeye flight to Chicago. There we met Erik’s grandparents, and I met up with mom and we ate breakfast during our layover.
As we flew in to Urbana, I started to look around the little Turboprop as it smelled like someone had cut a nasty one. Nope. Rene picked us up at the airport, and I relayed a story about how once the NetDev guys picked up some Cisco guys at Willard, and the first question one of the Cisco guys asked was “What is that smell?”
Agriculture. Shit. You no longer notice it after about five or ten minutes. But this was the first time I had flown in to town, at least during the growing season.
We went shopping. The Webber grill that we wanted to buy the Webers and the knife set were taken. Instead they got some nice pots and stuff. We wrapped these in Curious George wrapping paper and found a card with a couple with a child on the cover dressed as jesters. On the inside we got it to read “See what happens when you fool around? Congratulations … on getting married!”
There had been talk of wrapping presents in porn, but there was concern that the in-laws might not be impressed.
We dropped by h0l and got dressed. there were pictures aplenty being snapped of individuals who you would never see dressed up or in a Catholic church – and there we were, dressed up really nice in a Catholic church.
For the ceremony, the Priest talked about web development, because Rache is a web developer, and proceeded to explore the idea of marriage through the principles of good web design. He did awfully well and the sheer absurdity of it was elicited many chuckles from the computer geeks in the crowd. Normally, this sort of stuff would just seem stupid, but the wacky metaphor was in keeping with the wacky couple. Besides that the advice was sound – old common-sense wisdom repackaged in something a little more entertaining.
And I could feel the emotional climax of the ceremony. I nearly shed a tear myself as Rache shed her own kissing the parents. I’m so glad for them.
After that the reception was at Jumer’s. We waited around awhile, visiting a kitten shower thrown by the Champaign Humane Society. Cute little kittens. I donated $20 and felt like a rich, well-dressed out-of-town pimp and was told that my generous donation would fix a cat.
Cool.
So on into the reception. We were all chugging White Russians. By all I mean many of the Allen Hall crowd. Well, I had plenty of White Russians because I figured as much as I spent to be there, I would certainly make the open bar worth my time. I was good and drunk when dinner rolled around, and that buffet sobered me up startlingly well. The heavy consumption of Caucasians was attributed to the Big Lebowski by many. For my part I know that movie certainly made them seem appealing. Weird.
And then did the music start. During the dollar dances DB ran out of people to dance with him. I emptied my pocket of change for the privilege. When the bouquet was tossed, Chris and another gal struggled over it for a minute or two. It was an impressive site and a tie was declared when the bouquet was ripped in half.
Ya gotta respect motivation and tenacity sometimes.
And then the garter was tossed. I ended up up front, which is kinda weird and that thing flew right for me. Well, I musta fumbled or missed it and a spun on my heels and saw that sucker on the floor with a ring of shoes around it. The guys in this crowd are are mostly as timid as I’ve ever been and after the ordeal for the bouquet I think they were a little spooked, as I managed to spin around and dive to the floor and back up the six feet entirely uncontested.
Now I have a collection – one from prom.
And as the night wore on and the dancing got down, I met up with Miss tall, blond and slender in a nice blue dress. We danced and she macked the digits outta me. Jennifer is DB’s cousin, she stands at 6’2″ and could look me in the eye. Perhaps what I really need is to go dancing where the tall women of California do? Anyway, later Moshen told me that her dad had made inquiries about me. How flattering.
Around 10PM we danced arm in arm to the strains of Miss American Pie as is a midnight tradition among the Allen crowd. I headed back to h0l and as I never did get to hear from Chad or Scott, my old roommates, I spent the night on the couch there.
The next morning we had brunch at Yen Ching’s which was not a great idea but then nobody had great forceful opinions. G0ff talked us into playing this game called Cosmic Encounter – “The Game that Breaks Its Own Rules” – and you know, it was a lot of fun. Good party game for a bunch of smart geeks. It is … something else indeed.
Beth came over but only for a short while. Lasagna was cooked and we settled in to watching “The Pirates of Silicon Valley” which showed three times on TNT. It was the early days – Steve Jobs and Woz versus Bill Gates. You could tell the god guy was acid-dropping, blue box-making, Thing-driving, long-haired Steve Jobs at Berkeley, as opposed to the high-strung, dorky, conniving, fast-car driving Harvard snot Bill Gates. It was a fun movie to watch especially in the presence of geeks. Though I missed some plot points on account of the noise.
The next morning was breakfast at Perkins. Erik then went to discuss his academic career with the CS department and I went to the Quad to hang out on a nice day and await Beth’s call for lunch.
Which never came.
Damn phone.
To my pleasant surprise the CCSO Lab at the Union let me in, so I spent a few hours responding to old e-mails when Beth finally got through, and we got to meet for about a half hour. Better than nothing.
Back to the airport, barely catching the plane. Erik’s grandparents were at O’Hare again, and Erik’s grandma kept offering us junk food. I fit what I could, figuring somebody back out here would eat it, though probably not me. And again we were in the air, on a less-crowded flight than the one we had come on.
Joe picked us up, and I spent some time trying unsuccessfully to help him get a bastardized old ‘486 box to boot … FreeBSD. It’s not going to work … but Joe … eh, I made him drive me home.
Where the news is that yesterday Dave left Taos Mountain to go and work for Confiniti. Today at Lunch I was eating with Rod, Hadi, and Scott Banister, a UI alumnus who I knew through his early early early creation of Submit-It. Anyway, it was all good because Scott knows the guy running Confiniti and had heard just yesterday that they were looking to fill that position.
Small world. He knows the UI eGroups crowd too, and told me that the repeated interconnections between everybody will get weirder and weirder the longer I’m out here.
The Bay is sucking people out here, and the computer friends you may remember from the old days may well be out here.
Anyway, It’s like 2134h and about time I rode home and played with the printer I ordered and should be here today.
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