dannyman.toldme.com

Pigeons, Pizza

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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dannywagon

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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Party Party Time

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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Severe Rust Damage

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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The Webers

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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Gettin’ the Job Done!

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/06/18/gettin-the-job-done/

Ah, so yesterday I drove over to Wal Mart and picked up some Liquid Wrench and a kit with a 2 ton jack and jack stands. And I adjusted the brakes. They’re better now, though not as good as I’d like … some of those adjusting stars are damned stuck. I’ll take it some place professional and hard-core perhaps.

Got to work around 3:30. Then I figured to punch down the Ethernet cables I could to the patch panel once and for all, while I installed FreeBSD on a machine to determine if Apsfilter and Samba could do a better job of sharing a printer than NT Workstation. Been bleeding my forehead trying to figure out how the freak Windows 95 clients were supposed to print to the NT Workstation that had adopted the printer before my arrival. FreeBSD and Samba proves to have better interoperability with Windows than NT Workstation does. The irony is not lost on me.

Since the machine I found happens to be a PentiumIII at 450 Mhz, and I was installing FreeBSD, and the graphics card looks pretty bad-ass too, I’m using the print server for my new desktop machine. It is too hard-core to be a humble printer server.

Left work around 3:30. My message about getting printing to work was well received, especially with the Windows 98 crowd. Slept in. Then I went to the Men’s Wearhouse and spent a lot of money. I bought a suit, shirt, two ties, socks, fancy shoes, some italian sandals, hell a belt, uhmmm. I even got a Men’s Wearhouse credit card. My first suit. Well, I bought about half a suit once for the Allen Hall formal one year, but this time I got all hard-core.

With the Men’s Wearhouse credit card, you get free pressing.

Anyway, then I did the laundry, eating at this chinese greasy spoon. Greasy food, but well, a big plate o’ stuff for $4.90, probably the best deal I’ve had yet in California.

Oh, I got the car washed yesterday too. There’s this big ol’ place on El Camino right by the house (like, a block or two away) where this army of Mexicans in blue shirts cleans your car inside and out for $13.25, I think it was. There’s a sign that says that they recycle the water, so going to the car wash uses less water than doing it yourself. And they give you lemonade and popcorn so it’s just really sweet.

I think the guy who gave the car back was hoping for a tip though. Next time. While they didn’t get all the little insect guts that had been pounded onto the hood at 75 MPH and then cooked on in the California sun over these past weeks, the car was really clean … I like it. Had that newish feeling.

Well, the plane leaves tonight at 11 PM. Mom is gonna meet me for tomorrow morning’s 4AM layover at O’Hare.

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Dark City

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/06/15/dark-city/

You’ve seen what we are. We use your dead as vessels.

Vernell and Eric are over here watching Dark City on our DVD. Dave’s watching it too. Great movie, and the woman is beautiful. She resembles my cousin Erin too, which makes it all the neater.

This morning I slept in some. Taking off for work I headed down El Camino and got my chain lubed up on my bike. I also bought a portable tire pump, and inflated the tires. Well the lube job was no help you see, because I still skip spokes when I push too hard, so I move nice and slow.

I live right down the street from Tellme, about a mile and a half. Unfortunately, this street, San Antonio, has no bike lanes, and the crossing of Central Expressway is exceedingly nasty. What I do is ride down California about half a mile to Rengstorff and then up. Then the ride is pleasant up ’til about Charleston where I lose the bike lane and the intersections get a little contorted. A wise bike commuter would invest in a helmet, but this commuter forgot in his haste to get to work.

The day was spent working. I started cleaning up on account of some investor stopping by tomorrow. Yesterday our new office manager, Vicki, started working. Today while cleaning I found the receipt for the cell phone and gave it to Andy. At that point he and Vicki wondered if it was too late to get a refund, as Vicki has connections with another cellular provider to get us a deal on these nice Nokia phones. Ah the costs of a hasty startup. This though, is just a minor inefficiency that pales in comparison to the FUBARs I’ve come to expect from other organizations I’ve dealt with. If this is the worst that Tellme can do, they are a righteous employer indeed.

Another cool story … we have some legacy ethernet cables that were made before I came to work here. They were made by Angus, who doesn’t actually know how to make ethernet cables, but is also red-green color-blind to boot. Since the process involves laying out orange, brown, green and blue wires in a specific order … well, an ethernet cable, botched, can still work. Sometimes though said cable will provide little troubles. Well … on the inevitable occasions that someone experiences network flakiness, I check the cable, and if it’s an Angus cable, I have one more variable to eliminate.

Fun, actually. I think the funness derives from the fact that Angus is pretty good-natured about his cables. He did his best under the circumstances, and now I can fix it. What is more frustrating is when you’re in a situation where your predecessor was simply incompetent, but passed themself off as an expert. Another thing that has been surprisingly pleasant about Tellme is that everyone seems to have a positive, cooperative, team attitude. This kinda stuff is found more frequently in a start up.

Well, later on I got the call from Eric. He and Vern swung by and we went out to this really good burger joint over on El Camino, and now we’re here, at the house, and Dark City is playing.

Sleep, yes?

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14 June, 1999

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/06/14/summatio/

Summation

So, to finish the story I was telling, after a night at MikeyA‘s, I spent some time with Aunt Joyce and Harlyn. They live in Alameda, near Oakland and across the bay from Palo Alto, where Tellme is located. Erik is spending the summer working for Cobalt, in Mountain View, near Palo Alto. Well, his family just so happened to move to Alameda as well, so the first week, we sometimes shared the long carpool from Alameda to the West Bay. I spent one night at his house, not wanting to wake Joyce and Harlyn, who live their vegan lifestyles on extremely early schedules which tend to clash with the extremely late schedules of Silicon Valley employees.

A Matter of Housing

That Sunday I accompanied them shopping at a food market, nice weather, nice food. I was extremely intent on finding a place, and it came down to me just about ready to move in to a small room in a nice house with three other interesting guys to the tune of $600 per month, covering utilities. At the very very last moment though, Dave found a place just down the road about a mile and a half from Tellme. Two bedrooms, two baths, pool, sauna, gym facilities. Well, for the $1650 shared between us, I jumped on it figuring this way Dave has a place too. Then it was a happy ending all around because I tipped Joe from the house with the $600 room and Erik Gilling with the shitty commute off to each other and you know, that was probably a good match as well.

Busy Days, Busy Nights

And since then, I’ve been working hard and getting things done at work at a pace that, while slower than I’d like, seems to have earned the respect of my workmates at Tellme. For social activity, I have a large peer group of UIUC alumni. This weekend there was drinking and dancing in celebration of Luther’s birthday. Before that, I recall helping to move Joe in to his San Francisco Apartment. Before that, a party at Brandon Long‘s, where we saw the most excellent movie, Dark City.

Now, by most measures this is a good peer group, a large number of very intelligent guys who have access to a shared body of history to retell and all working in similar professions – there is always something to talk about. Unfortunately, they are, almost to a man, all guys. As much as I enjoy them, the sausage parties have to be complemented by some more balanced activities.

So, always something to do during the day, or on the weekend. I eat out a lot, having made for myself and consumed maybe five breakfasts at the apartment. Due to ever-present phone delays and the busy schedule, I never get around to calling Mikey or Joyce. I need to adjust the brakes on the Volkswagen because the other day I involuntarily blew a stop light.

But, well, we have a phone at home now, DSL on order. The voice T1 at work is finally up, after repeated delays from Pacific Bell, and is not yet production thanks to another delay on the part of MCI Worldcom. Well, since the brake incident, I’ve been biking to work. The other day JG drove me over in his Land Rover and I picked up a cell, er, excuse me, PCS phone … funny little toy, but useful, and it keeps your SysAdmin on call. Since we have but one guy who is the CFO things have been rather weird around Tellme when it comes to buying things. Sounds though, as if purchasing stuff on one’s own credit card and then submitting an expense report is common practice in the Silicon Valley, at least among startups.

Back At The Ranch

So, I’m hoping to slow down a little here in my writing. Let’s talk about this weekend. On Friday Dave missed his flight to a Wedding out in Missouri, owing to bad weather delays in the Midwest. Well, he was rather bummed. I believe that evening was rather slow, because I don’t remember it. Saturday I met up again with Eric and Vernell, who are visiting from EnterAct. We rode up to San Francisco and visited Haight-Ashbury, checking out good music and drug paraphernalia. Eric and I wandered in to this park which was actually a wooded mountain within the city of San Francisco. At the summit was a wonderful view, and some person who had apparently enjoyed too much acid or something as he paced about in circles, speaking of our proximity to some galaxy and how one should either go over, around, under, or through a tree.

Ayup. Riding back to Palo Alto, we collectively checked our e-mail at Tellme. At that last moment I heard of the gathering over at Be for Luther’s birthday. We ate Pizza and walked over to the bars of downtown Palo Alto. Unfortunately, Palo Alto, being a rich college town around Stanford, is not the coolest place to party, but there was some enjoyable dancing and attractive women at a club called Q. Dave desires to go back, and I share that desire.

Sunday … slow day. Waking up around noon, we headed out and picked out a couch at Krause’s Sofa Factory. Neat place, you pick your style, you pick your fabric, you pick your options, like down cushions or a sofabed. Same comfortable sofabed as MikeyA’s place, lifetime warranty on most everything, ought to be worth the price, though we needed only pay a third down and the balance on delivery in two weeks. For some mysterious reason, perhaps our transient status, my credit report for six months same as cash didn’t quite work out. Then we headed over to Fry’s and picked up our Bose surround-sound stereo to complement our TV. Nice system, though we would have had it the week before except for credit problems. I think Discover raised the limit on my card since they received my last payment. In a few months, the considerable spending I’ve burdened it with ought to be whittled down quickly. Vernell had stopped by early with a pretty friend from Georgia. They were heading over to check out Stanford, and then, from what I gather, Berkeley. This left Eric alone at the hotel without a rental car. I borrowed Dave’s car to pick him up and off we went to eat at a Chinese place. We then spent the evening with Little Dave watching another cool movie, Zero Effect. At Luther’s party, I finally got to see The Big Lebowski, yet another great movie I’ve seen at somebody’s house since arriving in California.

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Sunday

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/04/26/sunday/

Sunday did MikeyA arise early by MikeyA standards, and trudge down with Dana and I to an inexpensive Mexican restaurant. They ordered each huevos rancheros, but being on an expedition, I ordered the huevos nopales, which is eggs with shredded cactus.

It did come with beans and rice and salad and tortillas. Perhaps owing in part to the night before, I called a truce, and stopped short of consuming the whole enchilada, as it were. But those were some damned fine tasty tasty eggs.

Mikey then took me to see some more sites. We returned to the shop we’d spotted the night before, and I procured the shirt I had spotted the night before. Then we drove up Market St, through the Gay district, past Castro, past old-fashioned cable cars that they bring into service during the summer, past several Volkswagens, including a handful of Ghias and two Things, and up to the top of the hill that overlooked San Francisco, where I did take pictures.

Mikey said that as a kid he and his friend would hop the Greyhound into the city and have fun and play, returning home in the afternoon, rubbing some straw on themselves and telling their parents what fun they had had playing in the grassy field.

For dinner I rode over to Alameda, and enjoyed some vegan cuisine with Joyce and Harlyn. They’ve got a good house with an excellent kitchen. I did heartily approve. Harlyn had some surplus N scale model trains he’d gotten a deal on at a garage sale, and so promised a “starter set” for when I chose to move out there. Joyce was of the opinion that I should head out there and thus serve as bait so my momma would come visit the area and they could hang out together. An interesting take on the living near mom argument.

For various practical reasons I was then returned to Mikey’s place. The next morning, Mikey’s extensive research had suggested that the most reliable method of hitting the airport on time would be to drive there, rather than taking BART, Cal Train, and other public devices with disturbingly inconvenient schedules. And so then did he and me and KennyK ride on down to the airport, and so then did I bid them farewell and did they return to the aforementioned big hill to acquire a plant or somesuch titillating story.

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MikeyA

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/04/24/mikeya/

After checking out the new office space that they’ll be moving to, which is a converted warehouse that Angus seems enamoured with, and that in its present state at least, failed to really impress me worth anything, we took off toward the city, running into possibly the worst traffic jam I’ve ever seen, across a bridge that was damaged in the last big earthquake, and up to my weekend’s abode, La Casa MikeyA de San Pablo.

Now, understand that before this weekend, I had never seen nor heard from MikeyA beyond the confines of the Internet. Mikey’s been readin’ this ol’ journal here since back in 1996 when I tried to buy a modem off of him and the power brick got lost in the mail.

MikeyA actually turned out much as I had expected him to, as far as I would dare to expect anyone to turn out as anything I would imagine for them over the Internet. He’s a big bearded biker dude wearin’ the Harley teeshirt and sporting a friendly, good-natured and occasionally mischievous attitude. He and Dana and I took to each other right away. The relationship felt like the distant young relative visiting a favoured Aunt and Uncle.

Mikey and Dana showed me the sights, fed me, and were thoroughly hospitable to the point of providing the most comfortable foldout couch I can recall having had the pleasure to rest on, and clean towels, telnet, coffee and pop and of all things, a good long ride all the way back down to San Jose International.

Traditionally the company will wine and dine and provide lodging and transportation. Well, always the unconventional one, I had departed company from the business professional and entered that of the fun professional.

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Volkswagen Does Stop

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/04/20/volkswagen-does-stop/

Last weekend I jacked the car up for the first time ever to adjust the brakes. I found no brake shoe pads up front so this weekend just past I jacked the car up again and replaced the front brake shoes, packing the wheels with bearing grease and everything. The brake warning light was still on though, so I pulled the rubber plugs off of the master cylinder and drained a whole buncha what looked like wiper fluid on to the ground. Now the car stops as well as it ever has under my care. I’m downright proud.

I got the speedo working again too.

Scott recently received a compression gauge for his car/motorcycle maintenance, ordered from a spare J.C. Whitney catalog I had. Between that and my recently purchased Dwell/Tachometer and a lot of help from John Muir and my other books, I hope to get Lucy properly tuned during whatever free time I muster in good weather for coming days. The philosophy has been that once I am confident of her ability to stop, I can look at her going faster than she has.

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22 March, 1999

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/03/22/22-march-1999/

So, over Spring Break I got very little work that I needed to get done done. Instead, once I got car insurance at a cheaper rate on account of living in Urbana, we drove up to visit Grandma in the UP.

Actually, we is me and dad, and since I still didn’t have the insurance Wednesday he drove us up there in my Beetle. He drove rather well, despite Mom’s misgivings. He even fixed the brake lights three different times, and replaced a tail light.

We got there I think about 0200h Thursday morning, and spent Thursday with Grandma and Uncle Bill. We drove back Friday afternoon so I could get a head start on working. Well, heh, I headed back to Champaign Saturday afternoon and have hunkered down pretty well as of today.

Grandma’s doing great. As someone had said earlier, she’s fine and her only health problem is old age. She’s tired and more forgetful though. It is so nice to spend time with her, even if it was one day. Every time I seen her lately she’d talk about stuff I knew little or nothing about. She’s a bit more random I think these days, and I listened to things she had to say about Grandpa, most of them critical, but she said everything honestly, not like some bitter old hag. Candor is a good trait. I’m glad to see it in my family tree.

And Grandma’s my ancestral lefty, though she had the habit whacked out of her as a kid.

Anyway, enough misty reminiscence.

So, today I woke up at around 0800h, and showered, and got to class on the bike in the cold around 0910h, and then spent the morning reading the DI and a good Vonnegut novel I ripped off of my sister. I sprang for a lunch at Zorba’s – medium gyros, fries and a coke, and sat down at eesn24.ews.uiuc.edu around 1300h. I spent four hours working on Greg Jackson’s control center, then I headed home, went shopping at Schnucks, downed two roast beef on toast with cheese and lettuce sandwiches, some chips, two cokes and headed to work, where I am now.

I’ve since had another warm coke and a Twix bar. I head home at midnite. At the end of the day, I’ll have earned about $125.

Yesterday I tidyed my room some. Found my tax forms. Must file taxes already dammit … didn’t bother last year. Didn’t really care and the refund I was probably in line for is piddly enough I figured I wasn’t about to get busted by the IRS or anything.

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back to skool

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/01/20/back-to-skool/

I just burned by thumb lighting a candle. Damn but it does hurt!

Funny thing happened to me today. I was heading for English 248, looking for room 111 in the English Building. I got to class, and the professor passes out the syllabus. Hrmm … funny … the books sound a little different … hrmmm, you know, I thought I was in English 248, not English 252 … hrmmm.

I sat through roll, and when my name was not called, I returned the syllabus and took off, looking for 111 wearing my glasses.

I passed in the hall a pretty gal named Lon, who I know from the time when I was sitting in the Allen Hall computer lab and Ravee dragged me upstairs to the Allen Hall Main Lounge to make an appearance as the only non-Asian at the Vietnamese Student Association semi-formal dance. Lon was in charge of taking money, and looked stunning in her green dress, and we got to talk some, so of course the face rang a bell.

Well, I found 111, and it had bars on the window and was locked, so I was very confused. Lon caught up with me and we got to chit-chat a little while. Very friendly. Friendly conversation with a pretty gal generally marks the high point of any day for me. I then headed down to the computer lab to double-check my schedule – English 249 is held in 115 – I had written down the wrong number!

The morning was fine too. I was late again to class – this time Geology 118 – Earth and the Environment. I didn’t feel too bad, as given that it was the introductory lecture, I managed to keep about five minutes ahead of the professor anyway – pedestrian stuff like the carrying capacity of the Earth in the face of human population growth, and the ways in which population will be contained, one way or another.

I ran into Morris heading up to DCL. He was working on a bottle of Pina Colada to help him through his days class schedule. I worry about the boy sometimes. I don’t think many bother to worry about him too much as he’s extremely smart anyway, but you know, maybe somebody should.

Work just sucked. I still don’t have a CS account, which got nuked while I was gone, and given the current state of affairs it is apparently non-trivial for Don to create one. I popped an X session off of one of our Sparc workstations anyway though, off of my old workstation back at EnterAct. Running X over a remote T1 connected through the commodity Internet is one of the more frustrating things one can do. I damn well better have a CS account this Friday.

In other good news, my advisor is consulting with the Dean to see if one of my old Linguistics courses can count as one of the English courses I need to graduate. If things work out, I can drop this class I’m taking on Racism, which requires much reading, grab a one hour somewhere, and cruise through the remainder of the semester on 13 credit hours.

Sweet. 15 hours labsittin’ currently. Figure $5x15x4 = $300 per month. I may get some regular work from EnterAct, for more money, as well as other jobs. When all is said and done, it sounds increasingly likely that I could float through the semester without any major financial trouble. Life is good. In fact, I think if I got some money saved when I graduate, I’m treating myself to a righteous vacation. :)

Well, for now … should probably get to sleep.

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23

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/01/18/23/

Well, today is my birthday, and at the last minute, all my Allen Hall friends managed to pop over to the house for a big ol’ Taco party. I think Scott, one of my roommates, was a bit perturbed by the sudden onslaught of people, but after proving themselves to be a mostly harmless bunch of geeks who then proceeded to watch a movie titled something like Cane Frogs: an Unnatural History, I think he was put far more at ease.

I bought a bunch of food, invited a bunch of people, and the rest kinda took care of itself. I tried to be helpful and unobtrusive to the numerous womenfolk who busied themselves in the kitchen preparing our feast, and made sure the place was clean afterwards, and tried to graciously accept greetings of Happy Birthday, which I still don’t know how to respond to too well. My usual inclination is to wish them a Happy Birthday right back, but you wouldn’t be surprised at the confusion this tends to inspire.

Anyhow, my plan for last week was kinda disrupted by the Beetle’s final decision not to put up with it’s Engine Oil leak problem, which as far as I can tell, had been bringing slush into the oil system. Setting out for Urbana in freezing weather, it decided that it’d sooner just stay at the Amoco station. Uncle John has since ferried me down twice in mom’s minivan, which is a lot of fun to come to Urbana in because of its fuel efficiency and its ability to travel at a pretty high speed safely. Still, I miss the Beetle, which if he has not done so already, Uncle will be taking to a place that Bill the Mover recommended in Evanston called Rolf’s.

My Secret EnterSanta gave me a black-light sensitive, trippy-looking Beetle candle for Christmas. I set it alight at the party and it’s on my desk right now, burning in vigil for my comrade, I like to think.

I’ve also to replace my Palm Pilot, which is still broken from the Spring. It is all the more useful during the semester though, with numerous contacts and a shifting schedule to track.

Today I also did balance the old checkbook. I’m using this rather overgrown Perl script called cbb, and it generates nicely-formatted reports. Here’s what it sums up for me, for last year:

Total Monthly Average Income   = 2652.46
Total Monthly Average Expenses = 2231.86

                      Total Credits =  23872.14

                       Total Debits = -20086.72

                            Balance =   3785.42

Not bad eh? Three and a half thousand dollars is about what I have available in savings to make it through the semester, never mind extra income from working. It’s a good thing, I believe.

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CTA Fucks Up

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1999/01/05/cta-fucks-up/

Life is not so much fun in Chicago these days, and a lot of the fun is credited to the CTA, for managing to suffer incredible equipment failure, forcing them to close the Purple line south of Howard, and running the Red line at maybe half capacity.

Yesterday, people came to work hours late after having waited in vain on train platforms for forty minutes or more, with each passing train packed full. And of course when a train is packed full, it runs a lot slower too, as at every stop you have people squeezing in and out in slow motion. They’re desperate for equipment, coz after the blizzard the temperatures dropped, and all the El equipment breaks below zero. Yesterday I rode home on a fully packed train in a dusty train car riding next to a door that wouldn’t open more than two inches even if you pulled the emergency handle and had five guys pushing as hard as they could.

/* To be sure, it’s that the snow does a job of shorting out the motors on the 2600 series cars that are used extensively on the Red and Purple lines, and the doors get fucked because ice and snow freezes in their tracks and has to be removed at the shop. */

It was great to ride free on New Years Eve, but when people can’t get their cars out, the CTA suffers a major disaster. The Blue line got closed down on its final leg into O’Hare Airport, requiring shuttle buses. Strong winds and drifting snow caused the tracks to shift. You can’t blame them for something like that, but given the half week’s advance notice we had regarding the coming blizzard, and how well the rest of the city has been doing, you’d think they could have done something proactive against predictable equipment failures.

Or at least have managed things better. Slowly, oh so slowly, have they addressed the troubles. Today I rode on trains down the Red line that normally run on the Brown line. Yes, shifting their motive power around to meet demand – there’s an idea! Tomorrow they’ll have trains that are packed skip stops – express service! There’s an idea. It’s a little different from shutting down their Purple line express service in a crisis.

Geesh!

Meanwhile … well, you can see the sides of my Volksy, it’s still there. but no way in hell it’s going to be moving anywhere in the next few days. It’s snowing a little bit still and will be all week, as another Canadian cold front moves in. I called the house I decided to live in in Urbana and had told them I’d intended to come down on the weekend. Well, assuming I can dig it it, will the car want to start? Then, if it runs, would I want to drive it? We’ll see. Luckily classes aren’t for two weeks.

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