My new toy is due to arrive on Wednesday. This morning I asked myself “where is my G1?” I cast about on the ‘net for answers. T-Mobile’s web site explained to look up the tracking number on at UPS’es web site, so I wrote them and asked where’s my tracking number? Then I peeked at the forums and saw that I can use my cell number as my tracking number! Pretty slick!
The next thing I did after that was to get my real tracking number from the UPS web site, stick that in Google, then bookmark the link to that page so I can just check that bookmark over the next couple of days to see if my widget has arrived yet in the mail.
One thing I have begun to do is leave low-value cards at the fare machine. That way I don’t have to screw around with "add fare" in the train station which can suck if you’re caught without change. I figure someone purchasing a new fare card can use the buck I leave behind.
The other day I saw someone leave a $0.05 at the machine in San Bruno.
Trivia: this is the 1,004th post in my WordPress installation. And of course, that represents only a portion of my journal from the past decade. I surpassed 1,000 posts earlier today while migrating some of the travel log from HTML into WordPress, which is one of my less exciting ways to kill time on a weekend.
I had previously bought some stock at $2.10 a share, you know, as a gamble. First time I ever bought stock in an individual company. Well, I lost on that one. No biggie.
I like how amid the financial turmoil, that my bank can fail, and that immediately, I am a customer at some other bank. That’s really swell. We call that “graceful degradation.” Go go FDIC!
Still, I am a little sad. I liked Washington Mutual. Now my bank matches my credit card. Enh.
I hate mobile phones. I have had a Sidekick2 forever because it lets me jot down notes and do e-mail and IM and check things on the web. But I fricking hate talking on mobile phones! I have been tempted to ditch the expense and hassle of carrying a device around all the time and move back to index cards and save myself $50-$60 per month. Alas, a mobile phone is basically required of any SysAdmin. In the past year I have had the good fortune of working at a larger company, where I’m only on-call for two weeks every other month. So, I have begun to leave the mobile device not-on-my-person when I’d like to relax. It is kind of a bummer for people who want to call me, but the tranquility does me good.
Anyway, the HTC Android “Google Phone” was announced yesterday. I bit the bullet and pre-ordered an upgrade for my trusty old Sidekick2. After all, a lot of the same team who designed the Sidekick went to work on Android, and the large company I work for is sending out the bonus checks this week. I’m starting to get a little excited at the idea of having a GPS device, because mapping is so hot. But the other win for me is to annoy the iPhone people.
Because I am a cantankerous old mobile-phone hater, I’m also naturally annoyed at the whole iDong Mac fanboy spectacle. The iPhone is that first fancy phone, but my soul reviles at the thought of paying a premium to get locked into the whole iTunes racket and . . . ugh. It is a toy! The open development platform is going to be a nice improvement on the Apple-mediated iPlatform. Anyway, the other reason I’m looking forward to getting the new Android is to steal the self-satisfaction from my iPhone comrades. “My phone does all that janky stuff too, but it costs me somewhat less and I have greater freedom.”
What is neat about mobile phones and other “micro-computers” is that there is no dominant operating environment yet. Apple and Google are trying to get in early, and doing a better job at it than Microsoft, and it is refreshing that Google’s device emphasizes open source and platform portability. We’re going to get to replay the “OS Wars” of the 1980s and 1990s all over again and I honestly think the Android platform has a lot of potential to dominate. I personally believe that in the next few years it will have surpassed Apple a great deal, because much as MS-DOS was licensed to a growing horde of PC makers, Android seeks to live on many devices, and Apple, just as in the old days, will become that special province with 10% market share of loyal Apple weenies. I liked Apple weenies a lot more when they were persecuted oddballs. These days they’re just irritating.
The following bit of advice, while not of my creation, has been well-received of late:
You’ve been meeting folk but there are those who you’d rather avoid, and you delete them from your phone. Later, they call and you answer because the number looks familiar: maybe it is a family or coworker! Awkwardness ensues.
Solution? Keep the number, but change the name to “Do Not Answer” — especially if you may have a tendency to get drunk / lonely.
I do not actually use this strategy, but I read it a couple years ago and its re-telling was recently well-received, so I thought I’d share.
/d
Me? I recently changed my voicemail to explain that I tend to avoid my mobile phone altogether and that e-mail works far better. I really dislike talking on the damn thing. It makes my brain warm and leaves me feeling anxious. Yeah, I’m weird.
Lately I have taken to reduced caffeine. During the week, I drink tea. On the weekend I head out to the cafe and enjoy a chocolate croissant and a black cup of coffee, which leaves me bold and reckless. Last weekend I picked up some paints at the hardware store, with no clear goal in mind. I used up the yellow painting the wall of my dining area, then felt inspired to render a Swedish Flag with the blue. I’m pretty pleased with the result. I think there may be a bit more to come.
Just kidding. I recently got inspired to draw a fairly absurd cartoon:
Dating is an adventure, for sure. I went for a more “informal” feel here, doing the text all freehand. I have mixed feelings about the result, but it is better to produce than to procrastinate.
And since you bought the DVD, here’s the bonus material–the “making of” the above comic:
A few weeks back I trekked over to Japantown to pick up some good pens at Kinokuniya. I pencil the thing in, then go over it with ink. In this case, I settled on a 0.7mm Zebra Hyper Jell for the text and a finer 0.5mm Sarasa Stick for the figure. I have a 0.8mm Uniball Vision Elite but that is complete crap compared the the fancy Japanese pens.
And yes, let the ink dry before erasing the pencil. Unfortunately with these finer pens it takes some off the ink out too.
I spend a few minutes most mornings at the bus shelter at 19th Ave and Taraval. In July, they featured this public-service ad on the street side of the shelter, encouraging black youth to “stay alive and free” eating mama’s home cooking, rather than the cuisine associated with orange jumpsuits:
Cheesy, but well-meaning. I encourage all youth to “stay alive and free”.
The shelter side of this shelter usually features bizarre fashion advertising. In July, on the flip side of the above poster was this bizarre lady: a white woman seductively holding handcuffs. In addition to promoting “fashion” I guess she was trying to explain that temptations can be crassly grotesque:
To be sure, my neighborhood is dominated by Chinese families. Red is the color you wear on your wedding day.
Meanwhile, over on the BART, I see this strange poster in the distance:
I got up to take a closer look to discover a black man in his underwear, barricading the door against the sodomy we assume accompanies a prostate exam. “If you’re over 50, or an African American over 45, get your prostate exam!”
No comment.
So, yeah, there are some provocative posters, questionable imagery, but look beyond advertising to real folk, and you’ll see some soul.
This week I upgraded the guts in my desktop. For the video card I jumped up to an ASUS EN9600GT silent graphics card. It is pretty “bleeding edge” as far as Linux goes, and it is a double-wide card with a massive heatsink where others would have a fan. I like to reduce the white noise.
Unfortunately, it is too new for the currently-supported Ubuntu drivers. I used Ubuntu’s NvidiaManual docs to manually upgrade to the 173.14.12 drivers from NVidia’s site, and then things were happier. Except video playback. Files and DVDs seem to work okay, but the colors are off, notably, people get rendered with blue or purple flesh. (more…)
This is the first contemporary “doodle” that I’m posting. I hope there will be more. I have long had a crush on the word “iconoclast” which basically means non-conformist, someone who marches to their own drumbeat, conventions be damned. I like it because it kind of sounds like “ironclad”. The “ironclad iconoclast” chugging along the seas blowing up wooden preconceptions!
Yeah, anyway, that crazy guy with the mug is me. Seriously, I can drink coffee from a paper cup if I have to but why should I have to? So, if I’m headed to a cafe I pack my own mug. Of course, Starbucks will still hand me my pastry in a bag, like I’m some sort of cretin.
I don’t actually talk as much as “Mr Iconoclast” but I have smiled and answered “MUG SIZE!”
Also, that overly-wide middle line could be considered a bug, which I could have fixed on the computer, but have chosen to preserve for posterity. Nyah!
I love sleeping. I have a peculiar fondness for that lazy part of the morning drifting in and out of consciousness, especially if the sun is shining through the window upon those parts of me where the sun don’t shine. I can hit the snooze button for hours.
I have put away the alarm clocks, and lately I have set my mobile phone and watch on the far side of the room. I’m getting back toward childhood when waking up in the morning meant stretching and scampering out of bed to discover what the world has in store. The mystery of not knowing what time it is sort of helps this.
That, and sunshine fills me with hope. Overcast, chilly days trigger my hibernation instinct.
This morning I walked to the post office to send a book to å£åº„. Along the way I considered the relative merits of relaxing a bit at the coffee shop versus just heading straight to work because Wednesday is Donut Day. Then I recalled that Wednesday is also street cleaning day where I last parked. So, after the Post Office it was back up the hill to hop in the car. It was a pleasant drive with a great breeze because I lowered the back window. All the same, my heart is in public transit.
When I arrived at work, I found a donut, and headed upstairs. “I smell bacon,” I thought. I wondered at this, and then saw out front of one of our training rooms that breakfast had been served! Now, this food is not intended for me, but when our clients have fed themselves the employees take it upon themselves to clean up the leftovers. Because I had driven to work I was standing in front of the bacon . . . and eggs, and orange juice, at that critical time between when the customers have had their fill and the employees have cleaned up.
Saturday morning was volunteering with Mount Sutro Stewards via One Brick. A contingent of Cisco employees appeared from their haunts across the region as part of some sort of New Hire / outreach program. Nice kids. “I work for IronPort.” We were clearing a path for a trail re-alignment. The first step is removing the “duff” which is the top soil and its organic matter. Organic matter decays over time so it is not the best bed for a trail. Clearing the “duff” is harder than it sounds because the aforementioned organic material is layers and layers of interconnected, knotty roots. It is good, hard work.
I napped in the sunshine for the afternoon.
Later, after seeing Someone Special I was waiting for the L-Owl on Market St. A motley crew — the guy who asked if he could borrow my phone but since his own phone was dead he couldn’t retrieve the number. There was a “crazy homeless woman” and a short guy with a case of Modelo Especial. This guy checked the next bus on his cell then popped open a beer. He continued drinking on the bus, which was raucous.
Still waiting, I noticed a pretty gal in high heels on the corner. I had a moment of hope that she would join our party but pretty girls in high heels do not belong on the night bus. She very subtly hailed a cab. Another guy showed up smoking a joint. He offered to trade with the beer drinker for a cigarette after the beer guy offered the joint guy a can of Modelo Especial.
My personal drama involved the “crazy homeless lady”. While shifting around to pull on her gloves, I noticed a ragged slip of paper drop to the ground. I figured it could be her transfer and in another time with a different passenger I probably would have said something. But this evening I rationalized my disgust towards the homeless woman as wanting to be a fly on the wall. “Writers are parasites watching the lives of others” or such was a line in the movie I had caught earlier in the evening with Someone Special.
A bit later the lady was shifting around again and rummaging through her stuff with increasing agitation. She was clearly upset and looking for something important. I wondered what would happen to her if she couldn’t board the bus. I wondered if I had a $1.50 in change to help her out, if it came to that. I took a look around and spied that ragged little slip of paper in the street. I fetched it, found that it was not merely ragged but soiled, and I handed it to her. She was grateful and remarked that hers was a ragged slip of paper. She kept it firmly in her gloved fingers and as far as I know she had a good night.
MikeyA’s recent comment got me thinking about how to bring this web site back to a more personal feel. I’m trying a slightly different tack the last few days. The following was originally written long-hand.
June 6, 2008
I recall in my Tellme days that more than one person expressed enthusiastic enjoyment of my online journal. “It is so damn funny!” I of course appreciated this praise but it left me wondering because I wasn’t trying to be funny. I just figured that my sense of humor shone through and that everyone has their own experience of a text.
Later I came to the awful realization that the humor was in my playing the awkward “straight man” in my own life and that to an extent the humor was along the lines of David Sedaris dressed as an elf. They weren’t laughing with me, they were laughing at me, but they thought I was in on the joke.
At any rate, over time I dropped away biographical detail from the journal. The difference between a journal or a diary and a modern blog is that a blog isn’t about the author. My web site has evolved that way.
Still, the maxim for good writing is to “write what you know” and the biggest subject that anyone may be an authority on is themselves. How do you write about yourself without giving yourself away?
Paul Theroux provides a clue. I have read a few of his novels about train travel. While traveling he talks less about the places he goes and more about his experience of travel and his experiences of people met along the way. In this way you learn something that he cares to reveal about his character without really talking about himself.
And he doesn’t lack for interesting material.
So, my mission here would be to talk about some of the adventures I have in my life, with some focus on those where I interact with interesting strangers or at least “public figures” or at least people who don’t mind or even like being written about. I can share my own thoughts and reveal something of myself along the way.
