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.
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.
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.
The ambulance arrived, and the paramedics started treating the bleeding man for shock. A police officer took my statement, and the knife. I washed my hands at some point. Then my date and I got in a Lyft to the Palace Hotel.
We walked into a scene reminiscent of Versailles. A pair of models in red gowns stood in banded hoops from which one could pluck a champagne flute. There was food, dessert, wine, music. Dancing pandas. Live bands. A silent disco. Women in gowns, men in suits and tuxedos. A casino, with the buy-in going to a local charity. The night glittered. This time next year, I whispered, our heads will all be in baskets.
In many ways, the train crews practice railroading as it was done a century ago, from assembling the train in the yard and coupling one car to another, to climbing down to the tracks to maneuver heavy hand switches. As they lumber along through the dense urban landscape, passing highways, parks, cemeteries and shopping centers, the freight trains draw curious stares.
“The surprise on people’s faces when we go through their L.I.R.R. station — they’ve never seen anything like it,†said Alex Raia, a 50-year-old engineer, as he worked the throttle and brake on a 2,000-horsepower diesel locomotive to thread it between tight rows of sooty freight cars in the Glendale yard. He likened the task to “playing a game of chess every day.â€
The railway also handles so many cars of flour and beer that Mr. Bonner has nicknamed it “the pizza-and-beer railroad.â€
During peak beer drinking times — think St. Patrick’s Day and the Super Bowl — that can mean 30 rail cars of beer a week — each car can hold 3,500 cases — including Modelo Especial and Corona that has rumbled by train all the way from Mexico.
I would prefer if I could take a bus to work, because then I would have a great swatch of time for reading. I have instead, on the bicycle, been listening to podcasts, which is sometimes difficult amid heavy traffic, but whatever.
On 99% Invisible, I was digging on the story of Froebel’s Gifts. Froebel pioneered the idea of kindergarten in the 19th century. Along the way, he developed the first educational toys. Starting with a soft ball of yarn at 6 weeks old, and progressing to more and more interesting objects, along with an educational curriculum where the objects could help teach a kid important concepts of how the world works. Before Froebel’s gift, kids basically played with whatever leftovers the adults had: the carpenter’s kid played with scrap wood, for example. When the idea was brought to America, our Capitalists seized upon this idea that parents and schools might be willing to pay money for objects that children would play with. Froebel gifts are cool and all, but how about an endless buffet of TOYS!?
Anyway, they claimed that early 20th-century design was influenced by Froebel, as Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, and Le Corbusier each learned important geometric concepts in Kindergarten. Fuller conceived of the buckyball in kindergarten and Wright kept a set of blocks on his desk to inform his creativity.
The fact that I most dug is that around the time kindergartens were taking off, the very first playgrounds were created. And the very first playground was a “sand garden” where they got a huge pile of sand and dumped it in a vacant lot for the kids to play with over the summer. Over time, the “sand garden” became a smaller component in playgrounds which featured other things like swings and slides. Today the giant pile of sand is maybe a sandbox. When Tommy was a baby, there was a sandbox down at Murphy Park. I found it a nice place to lie down as I was often sleepy back then. They took the sandbox out when they fixed up the park. We have come so far … but, I feel that in one respect, Max has been cheated.
On Monday the Planning Commission recommended redevelopment of the old AMD HQ into 1,051 luxury units. A fellow asked me if it would help the working class. I explained that the folks who can afford the new units won't be competing with workers for more modest accommodations. https://t.co/z4iKpzEJ9Y
The last election seemed to go “choose between the politics of the late 90s, where we are super careful not to take any positions based on strong principles, just middle of the road stuff that doesn’t offend or inspire anyone, or vote for the guy who will tell you whatever you want to hear, lie to you with a straight face, while he grabs your pussy.”
Why did that second guy do far better than anyone believes he deserved? Because he speaks “straight” to the concerns of a lot of Americans and he doesn’t give a fudge whether his solutions offend your delicate moderate middle of the road do nothing sensibilities.
Now we have Warren and Bernie and AOC and dozens upon dozens of other Democrats who have taken the clue that the electorate is hungry, not for some kindly sooth-saying grandparent, but for someone who is willing to speak up for their beliefs, even if they make some folks feel uncomfortable.
I voted for Clinton. Both of them. But even in the 90s, I yearned to vote not for some warmed-over middle-of-the-road do-nothing compromise, but for leadership that spoke to and acted from convictions. Uncle Joe used to appeal in those days, but now he’s the warmed-over establishment.
I’ll vote for him in the general, if that is what we got, but Trump is good at beating up on the establishment, and I think we’d do better to ride with someone who isn’t afraid to speak truth to power, to have a point of view that doesn’t focus test well with every last median-income household in Nebraska, someone who has plans to make up for all the time America has lost bending over backward to accommodate the right wing.
Remember Obamacare? That’s Romneycare. The uninspiring mush of consensus. It is adequate for liberals and hated by conservatives. Well, you know what? Screw those ungrateful jerks. If we’re going to have a system of universal healthcare that offends them, we might as well have at the very least a Public Option. (For example.)
I’m tired of compromise. Tired or compromise with right-wing extremists. And when it comes to the collapse of our planet’s climate stability, there’s no room for compromise and consensus anyway. We are decades behind on preventing a disaster that is beginning to truly unfold upon every last man, woman, and child on the planet and we have to stop Appealing to the Middle for the Politics of the Possible and engage instead in Policies of Necessity to make our planet and our country better for everyone.
The registered owner of the 2010 Toyota Corolla is Isaiah Peoples of Sunnyvale. Law enforcement sources confirmed Wednesday that Peoples, 34, was still in police custody.
An extensive thread regarding a tragic incident in Sunnyvale on April 23: 8 folks were deliberately hit by a car driven by an Iraq war vet, who is allegedly suffering from PTSD, and was allegedly targeting the victims because he thought they were Muslim.
Warren explaining the wealth tax: "How many people here own a home?" Most hands go up. "You’ve been paying a wealth tax for years. They just call it a property tax. I just want their tax to include the diamonds, the yachts, and the Rembrandts."
The thalidomide tragedy was averted in the United States because Dr. Kelsey, alone and in the face of fierce opposition, did her job. Her perspective was educated, fresh and unique. If there had been no thalidomide crisis, the United States, with the rest of the world following, would still at some time have brought pharmaceutical regulation into the 20th century. But thalidomide created one of those moments when something had to be done. It could not be ignored in 1961-62, and it led immediately to a better and stronger regulatory system. Maybe someone else would have stopped thalidomide in the United States had Dr. Kelsey not been assigned the NDA, but, interestingly, no one else stopped it anywhere else until it was too late. Dr. Kelsey was the only person in the entire world who said no. She said no to a bad drug application, she said no to an overbearing pharmaceutical company and she said no to vested interests who put profits first. She was one brave dissenter. In the end, the question is not what made Frances Kelsey, but why aren’t there more like her?
I don’t know what to do to help. There’s an informal memorial at the corner. You could leave some flowers there. A family member passing by will have another sign of love.
I think that driving with a bit of love, as posted above, is good advice. As a bicycle commuter who carries kids on a bike in mixed traffic, seeing the pictures of twisted bicycles and backpacks in an intersection I travel often was really disturbing. We need better bicycle infrastructure in Sunnyvale so that people can get around safely. Until then, when you’re behind the wheel of a car please do take a moment to appreciate the folks around you. Slow down and in a moment of frustration try to take a deep breath and count your blessings.
The girl in the coma, and all the victims, and I think even the perpetrator are all carrying different kinds of wounds. Please share your prayers and compassion with them and also for everyone on the road.
-Danny
A note I posted on NextDoor
I am now sending @ewarren a few bucks a month. She's my favorite. Her web site barely mentions Climate Change but aside from that, she's been grinding away on progressive policies forever. She has a laundry list ready to go, and frankly, I just LIKE her.https://t.co/Xe48jwPLWb
The Earth’s climate is usually very erratic. Decades of drought, then decades of flood, for example. Humans have existed for a few hundred thousand years but only after the last Ice Age, when the planet hit an unusual period of climate stability, did humans manage to achieve agriculture and civilization.
I keep trying to rationalize an optimistic outcome, but as best I can read the situation, we are at a crucial point in history where humanity understands that we have an existential challenge that can be solved only through a spirit of shared sacrifice and cooperation. We know what adaptations we need to make to maintain these stable climate patterns, but so far we have not demonstrated a collective will to make these adaptations. The window of opportunity is shutting more and more rapidly. Mainly due to complacency, we’ll miss the opportunity, the climate will continue to deteriorate, agriculture will fail, and the long and delicate supply chains required to sustain technological civilization will fail. All in the next few decades.
Maybe I am wrong. Maybe civilization will make it through the century. The last century was pretty dire, too, but we managed to avoid the worst outcomes. But my feeling is that civilization will collapse, in my lifetime, and that most of humanity will die, at first through war and tyrannical government but mostly of starvation. Humans, as a species, will survive. A few of the remaining hunter-gatherer tribes will adapt to the crisis. They will be joined by several new tribes peopled from refugees of our failing civilization.
Humanity will muddle through on a hostile planet amidst a mass extinction. Tens or hundreds of thousands of years will pass before the Earth enters a new stable phase. Agriculture and civilization will re-emerge, perhaps a bit faster due to whatever technological clues we leave behind, perhaps a bit slower and more sustainably, due to our having robbed them of the easiest fossil fuels. Perhaps there will even be a memory, perhaps uncovered through archaeology, and an understanding of The Fall of our First World Civilization. If we fail to survive this century, it is my hope that our distant descendants will avoid repeating our mistakes.
Tens or hundreds of thousands of years from now, our descendants will re-establish technological civilization, and they will find these well-preserved artifacts on the moon.
The video of Vasquez looking up from her phone in horror, realizing that Herzberg had just been hit while she looked away from the road, is a glimpse at the terrors that the future may hold. Until full autonomy is completely validated, human-in-the-loop automated driving will encourage us to take ever more liberties with our attention while failing to protect the next Elaine Herzbergs. This is a limited problem in the context of autonomous vehicle “safety drivers,” who are now increasingly well-trained and partnered up while testing, but it shows the problem that seems to be underlying the deaths of drivers using Tesla’s Autopilot. Now that Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” system appears likely to be released to some customers before it’s even validated, another company seems ready to put its own customers in the position of being untrained and unsupervised safety drivers.
Yes, Vasquez had a level of responsibility behind the wheel, but Uber also had a responsibility not to put a single individual in a highly automated car for 10 hours at a time with no supervision. Because full autonomy is taking longer to deliver than promised, the temptation to deliver nearly-full autonomy while telling drivers to maintain awareness will be hard to resist but Vazquez’s look of horror should be a reminder to everyone of the risks of such systems. It certainly makes the prospect of Tesla’s customer testing downright terrifying.
Why do AV testing in Phoenix? Because identifying pedestrians and cyclists, especially at night, is difficult for self-driving vehicles. In Phoenix, “not only is the weather consistently good, but there aren’t many pedestrians or cyclists on the road as there are in other cities.” The article then goes on to endorse the adoption of thermal image sensors.
By masking its bikes as TVs, VanMoof, a Dutch manufacturer that exports bikes to customers overseas, has seen the damages reduced by 70-80 per cent. Taco Carlier, the co-founder of VanMoof, told The Independent: “We came up by the idea because we had lots of damage, especially with shipments in the USA.”
For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons. Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane’s operations.
Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the can be of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.
“They’re critical, and cost almost nothing for the airlines to install,†said Bjorn Fehrm, an analyst at the aviation consultancy Leeham. “Boeing charges for them because it can. But they’re vital for safety.â€
I can understand that new and advanced safety features, which may cost a lot of money to develop and install, might cost extra. But if you’re throwing in a computer that will read a sensor to take over control of the plane, it seems insane to charge extra to indicate when the sensor might be malfunctioning.
The conventional wisdom is that comfortable middle-class middle-aged people who have achieved a degree of financial security–people like me–should become more Republican at this point in their lives. I think this is reasonable, because after all if the system has worked well for you, then it must be a pretty decent system, and you’d like to maintain the status quo.
But I do not see that the system works. I made it through college, and after some trouble, I have found a career that pays well. California’s Real Estate market–the fact that I could never afford my own place–left me feeling disconnected from where I lived. This influenced a certain recklessness in my personal life. We only own a house through due to thrift, good luck, and the near collapse of the American economy a decade ago.
The system is broken and with the bombastic, militant, anti-government Right Wing, it feels like we are drifting ever further from solutions to increasingly urgent problems. Climate Change being the biggest of Big Deals, but we really should provide everyone with healthcare, basic welfare, access to education, and generally spend less effort on military might and more on working collaboratively with the rest of the world to improve the lot of humanity. If anything, in my comfortable years, I am growing more radical in my lefty sentiments.
Even if I wanted to maintain the status quo, the Republicans are no longer the party for that. The platform is to bankrupt the government through tax cuts and excessive military spending, in order to teach Americans the gospel that Government Isn’t The Solution. The only good Republican President I have known in my lifetime was President Clinton. He winnowed down government spending, especially military, to the point of a balanced budget. Then there was Welfare Reform, which is a thing Conservatives like. He didn’t start any (major) wars. (That I can remember.)
The status quo barely works for me just barely. And Climate Change is a growing burden that is going to hurt my kids far more than it already hurts my generation. The stable pattern that I value most is that the Earth will continue to provide for humanity. As a middle aged, middle class, uncomfortable person who supports the status quo, it is the radicals speaking out for good stewardship of Earth, and the radicals speaking out for the idea that people should be free from want and free from fear that most appeal to me.
Back in the 90s I bought a modem off a guy in California. In those days if you bought something from a guy on the Internet it was a leap of faith that you’d send off a check and get what you expected in return. Well, I sent this guy my money and he sent off the modem and the next day he sent this apology that he had forgotten to pack the power brick, which he had sent off in a separate package. No sweat. The modem showed up at my house a week later.
But the power brick … well, we kept up correspondence but it never showed up until a couple months later the guy said it had arrived back at his house without explanation, covered in mysterious markings from the Post Office, so he packed the mystery package into a bigger box and mailed that off to Illinois and it showed up a few days later and I had a working modem.
In those days I was in college, and when I got tired of school I worked at an ISP, and when I got tired of working I finally finished school. One of my hobbies was keeping an, ahem, online journal. I would have my fairly banal young guy adventures and sometimes when I couldn’t sleep or just needed to talk about things I would write things up in my, ahem, online journal. In those days, the universe of people you knew and the universe of people who read your online journal would barely overlap. There was a certain anonymous freedom, but whatever.
After I paid for my modem, it became the pattern that when I would post another update online, some hours or days later I would get a long rambling email from this dude in California, who was excited to read what I was up to, and he’d tell me about his own adventures, some from his youth … he once had a girl who smelled like cardboard, which he never could figure out … or more often about how he had just biked down to Pismo Beach with his wife Dana.
I had a fan.
And for years, whenever I would post about my life, this guy would write me back, with his own stories.
As my school wound down I got an interview in the San Francisco area, at a start-up. The start-up flew me out and after the interview, the co-founder drove me up to Pinole so I could crash at MikeyA’s place. I finally met the man. Mike Austin. I slept on his couch. He took me over to Fisherman’s Wharf, where I impressed him by eating a second dinner. He drove me around Pinole and San Pablo, showing me his spots and his friends, the liquor store where he sometimes worked.
He put me up another time, years later, on my second move to California, that time with a new wife.
He was a former cop, who worked odd jobs: liquor store, truck driver, but mostly it seemed he was having his own adventures, touring the States on his Harley, or small adventures close to home with innumerable friends. He told me a lot of guys had taken turns sleeping at his place. A lot of cop friends, who had been thrown out of the house by their wives. He is that kind of guy.
I was impressed by his ZZ Top style beard. The story he told me, and I prefer to believe it, is that he’d shave it down once a year but it always grew right back in proud and long. So it goes.
Another time he told me about how he upset his doctor. He went in for a regular checkup but his labs came back off the charts for diabetes. They drew another set of labs and he was normal. What? Well, what did you eat before the first visit? This, that, and two liters of Mountain Dew … his doctor delivered a lecture on how one should not drink two liters of Mountain Dew at lunch … or ever.
Anyway, MikeyA, Mike Austin, my Number One Fan, well, he passed away last week. In his sleep. At 65 years of age. These are hard times for his wife, Dana, no doubt. I’m going to miss the guy, too. I don’t tell rambling stories about my life on the Internet these days, and it has been a while since I got a good rambling email from Mike. I’ll still have the occasional late-night heart-to-heart with the Internet. No more emails from MikeyA, though.
Anyway, I thought I would “remember” him in the way I knew him. By just writing up some thoughts and sharing them here, with you, and with Mikey. If there is an afterlife, I assume he’s read this by now. I miss you, Mike!
In 2006, Sunnyvale applied for funding to add bicycle lanes on Maude Ave from Mathilda to Fair Oaks.
Maude is a two-lane road with a center turn lane. It serves as a main thoroughfare for the immediate neighborhood: residential, commercial, and Bishop Elementary. It also serves through traffic. It is very congested at peak. In the past three years there have been a few dozen accidents: mainly between vehicles, 3 involving pedestrians, 1 involving a cyclist.
W Maude Ave: filling in a gap in Sunnyvale’s bicycle network
In March 2016, a community meeting was held at Bishop school. Three main alternatives were proposed: Option 1: remove parking along Maude, replace it with 5′ bike lanes with 3′ buffers Option 2: retain parking, remove left-turn lanes, add bicycle lanes between driving and parking lanes Option 3: do nothing except add some signs and paint sharrows on the street
At the community meeting, many residents from the SNAIL neighborhood to the North took turns berating the city for any number of reasons. There was a lot of upset that Maude is already congested and that people might park in front of their homes. There was a “voting” board and the community poll came out something like:
Option 1: 35%
Option 2: 15%
Option 3: 50%
On April 21, 2016, the Sunnyvale Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Committee (BPAC) reviewed the proposal. Some observations from BPAC:
Further detail desired regarding the causes of vehicle collisions along the corridor — details were not included in the present study.
Project should extend the last half block between Fair Oaks and Wolfe Road — staff remarked that this was an oversight on the original grant request, but that this could be included for future improvement projects to the bicycle infrastructure on Fair Oaks or Wolfe.
Drivers might park in buffered lanes.
If left turn lanes are removed, drivers might use the bicycle lane to pass vehicles waiting for turn.
Maude has many driveways, and it is safer for bicyclists further from the curb, where they are more visible to drivers utilizing driveways.
Traffic impact analysis will be performed subsequent to the city selecting a preferred alternative, thus no traffic impact studies have been performed to distinguish the current proposals.
1 mile between Mathilda and Fair Oaks 10 intersections 1 grammar school 3 pedestrian crosswalks
Community feedback:
I spoke first. I live adjacent to Bishop school:
I remarked on the lack of pedestrian crosswalks, asked the City to look at adding more as part of the project.
I noted the advantages of using the parking as a buffer lane for cyclists: route bike lanes at the curb.
I thanked BPAC for noting the desirability of an extension to Wolfe.
One gentleman who used to live in the neighborhood spoke in support of bike lanes.
One gentlemen from SNAIL explained his opposition to bike lanes, due to present low bicycle traffic.
One lady from Lowlanders spoke in support of a bike lane:
Leaning toward Option 2
Asked if there had been any Spanish-language outreach, as this is the population occupying the rental housing and attending Bishop who would be most impacted by the project, especially removal of parking.
BPAC made a motion to:
Support Option 1, per staff recommendation
Request 6′ bicycle lanes with 2′ buffer
Request project extension to Wolfe Road
Request inclusion of additional crosswalks
The motion passed with two dissenting votes. The chair, who lives on Murphy, stated his objections:
Removal of parking would adversely impact the neighborhood
Removal of left turn lanes would inconvenience drivers, and thereby discourage through traffic
I had the worst experience at work today: I had to prepare a computer for a new employee. That’s usually a pretty painless procedure, but this user was to be on Windows, and I had to … well, I had to call it quits after making only mediocre progress. This evening I checked online to make sure I’m not insane. A lot of people hate Windows 8, so I enjoyed clicking through a few reviews online, and then I just had to respond to Badger25’s review of Windows 8.1:
I think you are being way too easy on Windows 8.1 here, or at least insulting to the past. This isn’t a huge step backwards to the pre-Windows era: in DOS you could get things done! This is, if anything, a “Great Leap Forward” in which anything that smells of traditional ways of doing things has been purged in order to strengthen the purity of a failed ideology.
As far as boot speed, I was used to Windows XP booting in under five seconds. That was probably the first incarnation of Windows I enjoyed using. I just started setting up a Windows 8 workstation today for a business user and it is the most infuriatingly obtuse Operating System I have ever, in decades, had to deal with. (I am a Unix admin, so I’ve seen things….) This thing does NOT boot fast, or at least it does not reboot fast, because of all the updates which must be slowly applied.
Oddly enough, it seems that these days, the best computer UIs are offered by Linux distros, and they have weird gaps in usability, then Macs, then … I wouldn’t suggest Windows 8 on anyone except possibly those with physical or mental disabilities. Anyone who is used to DOING THINGS with computers is going to feel like they are using the computer with their head wrapped in a hefty bag. The thing could trigger panic attacks.
Monday is another day. I just hope the new employee doesn’t rage quit.
Apple ships some nice hardware, but the Mac OS is not my cup of tea. So, I run Ubuntu (kubuntu) within VMWare Fusion as my workstation. It has nice features like sharing the clipboard between host and guest, and the ability to share files to the guest. Yay.
At work, I have a Thunderbolt display, which is a very comfortable screen to work at. When I leave my desk, the VMWare guest transfers to the Retina display on my Mac. That is where the trouble starts. You can have VMWare give it less resolution or full Retina resolution, but in either case, the screen size changes and I have to move my windows around.
The fix?
1) In the guest OS, set the display size to: 2560×1440 (or whatever works for your favorite external screen …)
Now I can use Exposé to drag my VM between the Thunderbolt display and the Mac’s Retina display, and back again, and things are really comfortable.
The only limitation is that since the aspect ratios differ slightly, the Retina display shows my VM environment in a slight letterbox, but it is not all that obvious on a MacBook Pro.
