Since the fall of Twitter I have found that I enjoy visiting Reddit. Twitter was great for instant validation from like-minded folks for my half-baked quips. I can see why Elon loves it hard.
Reddit, on the other hand, I participate in different forums, each with its own culture. I can chime in and reply to a post with a half-assed snappy comment, and sometimes it lands. But there is a lot more listening and holding my tongue. People are often seeking advice and there is something to learn along the way. And if something is really just mediocre or worse, I can have the satisfaction of a down vote and move along.
Another nice thing with Reddit is that it isn’t as addictive. It is easier to browse for a bit and say “well, that is Reddit, let us do something else.”
The biggest Quality-of-Life advice I have for Reddit is to turn off the default feature where it shows you posts from forums that you haven’t joined but that the Algorithm thinks you might like. That might be helpful for new users, but pretty early on I was like “why is it showing me this stuff?!” There’s a fine interface for finding new subreddits when you want to go exploring.
I have had a home for my half-baked notions all along. It is this blog. Twitter was nice because it only wanted a sentence or two. Low effort. But you know I think it is kinda nice to say “okay brain, that is a cute idea, but let’s just share the ideas that grow into a few paragraphs.”
The other thing with posting to social media is it is about me and my need for validation. Me me me me me me me me! Whee! Aren’t I special? Do I need to interact with normies IRL? Yeah, fuck that. On Reddit, your profile is pretty low key. Every post or comment I read I read on its own merit: the author I barely notice. You are not your profile: you are your words! Where Social Media is about me me me me me me me me me, forums are about a group of people working things out together. Community. We can use a lot more of that.
This blog is about me. It has not been served to you on an algorithmic platter. You have to find and read what I have to say for your own reasons. And I would love to hear from you.
Last night my toe molted a thick layer of skin like a growing snake. I marveled at my human body and its capacity for healing. There are other animals who can re-grow whole limbs of course but if I can get my toe re-skinned in a few days I’m really just amazed. Also, self-interested. I don’t want to suffer a whole lot. A little privation here and there can be good for the soul but … anyway.
Saturday I joined the local No Kings protest. Locally, it was going to be protests along seven miles of El Camino Real between two Tesla dealerships. It sounded a bit flakey to me, and I was going to content myself with driving past and tooting my horn between kid errands. But on Thursday, my state Senator was forced to the ground and handcuffed in Los Angeles and that helped remind me that the Regime is always up to a new level of depraved WTFery.
Sometimes I feel like I need to do something. So I made a sign.
Wife handled the kids on Saturday. I crafted a sign and walked from our place down to one end of the protest and then I walked to the other end. I respect the idea of sitting on the sidewalk with a sign just fine, and along the way I exchanged joyous greetings with thousands of people, not to mention all the honking horns. But for me, I just needed to stretch my legs and move and get it out of my system. It was a One Man March. Well, there was another guy who paralleled me for about 5 miles. And some folks on bikes coming the other way to get amazing footage of the crowd.
I made a sign, then I wrote on the sign. Then I walked over ten miles carrying the sign around. I was granted flags along the way. And several blisters. I love my country. We have a lot of good people.
I have read that the ACLU claims a cumulative attendance of 5 million across 2,000 cities, which would be the biggest protest in American history. The energy that I experienced was huge and amazing. And this in the quiet suburbs. Owing in part to the fact that I walked the length of a line, I ran into a bunch of folks I knew, and missed plenty of others in my haste. But the energy, as I experienced it, was really unprecedented, especially for suburbia. And I have been to a few protests in my time.
2025-06-23 Monday
This morning I had to toot my horn at a Tesla driver who did not understand how a four-way stop sign works. A block later, I had to toot my horn at an ICE driver who did not understand how a green light works. (Put down the damn phone!) A mile later, feeling spicy, I went ahead and flipped off someone driving a blue Cylon Tesla, as they do not understand how Fascism works.
By way of explanation, a “Cylon Tesla” is a model of Tesla with a headlight that stretches across the front of the car. Like a Cyber Truck. This style became available to consumers after Elon’s “Roman Salute.” Most of the time I try to be a pretty chill driver, but I figure if you’re okay buying a car from a Nazi, (and I hope you got a really good deal) you can accept that people are going to flip you off from time to time. A little bit of social friction to make Collaboration less palatable.
I am listening to KPFA this morning. TIL Ralph Nader, 91 years young, hosts a weekly “Ralph Nader Radio Hour.” I caught a little bit of Bernie Sanders speaking in the past few days. When either of these guys or Elizabeth Warren gets going, I feel Grandma Marnie is present. She was old enough to remember the optimism that was raised in the New Deal, which got ground away with much of the rest of the century. These old folks remind me of that optimism, and that un-flagging will to keep fighting the good fight. But what I appreciate most is feeling Grandma Marnie around, and the spirit of her generation. It was that spirit of progress that “Made America Great” in its time, and that is the spirit of progress and optimism which America needs to realize its greatness anew.
I think this country is in a very precarious state at the moment. I think the escalating, accumulating power of organized wealth is snuffing out everything public, whether it’s public broadcasting, public schools, public unions, public parks, public highways. Everything public has been under assault since the late 1970s, the early years of the Reagan administration, because there is a philosophy that’s been extant in America for a long time, that anything Public is less desirable than Private.
And I think we’re at a very critical moment in the equilibrium. No society, no human being can survive without balance, without equilibrium. Nothing in excess, the ancient Greeks said. And Madison, one of the great framers of our Constitution, built equilibrium into our system. We don’t have equilibrium now. The power of money trumps the power of democracy today, and I’m very worried about it. And if we don’t address this, if we don’t get a handle on what we were talking about, money in politics, and find a way to thwart it, tame it, we’re in trouble. Democracy should be a brake on unbridled greed and power. Because capitalism – capital, like a fire, can turn from a servant, a good servant, into an evil master. And democracy is the brake on my passions and my appetites, and your greed and your wealth. And we have to get that equilibrium back.
I said to a friend of mine on Wall Street “how do you feel about the market?”
He said “well, I’m optimistic.”
I said “why do you then look so worried?”
He said “because I’m not sure my optimism is justified.”
I feel that way. So, I fall back on the Italian political scientist Gramsci, who said that he practices the pessimism of the mind and the optimism of the will. By that, he meant, he sees the world as it is, without rose-colored glasses, as I try to do as a journalist. I see what’s there. That will make you pessimistic. But then, you have to exercise your will optimistically, believing that each of us singly and all of us collectively can be an agent of change. And I have to get up every morning and imagine a more confident future, and then try to do something that day to help bring it about.
-Bill Moyers, 2011
There is a new coffee place in town that had a ribbon cutting this morning. I popped by to check it out. Not open just yet as the VIPs were still gathering and I had to get to work. I peeked in the window and saw some fancy coffee machines and no chairs or pastries. I hustled over to my Usual Place, where I was informed that all the chocolate croissants had been sold already, but the owner had set one aside for me. (A big fat one.) I quietly snuck an extra $5 bill into the tip jar.
A few weeks earlier, they served me this amazing specimen, who has so much character the smart phone rendered it in portrait mode.
I have long been excited at the idea of self-driving cars, because they should make the roads a lot safer. I have had the chance to ride Waymos and I think they are pretty great. I have been following the r/waymo subreddit. Lots of discussion about new rollouts, and videos of the robotaxis avoiding tragic situations. Lots of Good News.
I am not one to set cars on fire. But you may have heard that Los Angeles has been fighting against the Trump Regime this past weekend. Along the way, some Waymos got torched. The subreddit has been spammed with burning cars. Someone posted “why oh why would someone torch a poor little waymo car they are totally innocent and have nothing to do with ice” so I take the bait.
[Why?] Trump administration is sponsored by Google. Waymo is owned by Google. Waymo is an instrument of the Fascist State.
For me, pictures are worth a lot of words. Since they appeared front row at the inauguration, Amazon, Whole Foods, and Google are on my “avoid” list, though I still check on the swamp that is Facebook to keep up with the dwindling handful of friends there. I’ve made an exception so far for Waymo, as it is novel and potentially very good. People want to see through the shades of grey for a world of black and white, but every day we make choices. Waymo is good because it can reduce traffic deaths, and Waymo’s corporate parent is a sponsor of the growing horrors of the Trump Regime. Enjoy the ride, but don’t even feign shock that folks are willing to torch a few Waymos.
Of course, I got a message from Reddit.
“Hello, You have been permanently banned from participating in r/waymo because your comment violates this community’s rules.”
Rules, you say?
r/waymo rules: no luddites, no trolls
“No people who provoke … on purpose.” That’s me. Being provocative. Calling out bullshit. “I wouldn’t ever want to join a club that would have me as a member.” I take this penalty as a badge of honor.
In closing: Fuck ICE and Fuck Complicit Tech Companies. We all need to be feeling at least a little bit uncomfortable.
The article “Teenagers’ accidents expose e-bike risks” published on July 30 is a master class in victim blaming. We are provided several examples of someone riding an e-bike who is then injured or killed when being forced to mix with motorized traffic.
The problem isn’t e-bikes, the problem is that we have chosen not to provide safe routes for people to get around on bicycles. E-bikes magnify this failure by making it easier for more people to ride.
E-bikes can also lead to the fix: as more people ride bicycles, there will be more pressure to build safe routes for people to get around on bikes. More bicycles means fewer cars on the road, reduced Carbon emissions, and less road congestion.
We need to stop blaming our children for our failures and get to work.
A few months back, everyone was talking about what it was like a year ago to enter the Pandemic. I never was much for that kind of nostalgia. I’ll say the Shelter in Place order came in on a Saturday and the boys cried because it meant their birthday party on Sunday was completely canceled after all. That’s metaphor enough to last me a few years.
I remember that early on, someone asked how long: 6-8 weeks? I suggested that we were looking at 12-18 months because that’s the fastest we could conceivably develop, test, approve, manufacture, and distribute vaccines. I didn’t want to be a bummer so I didn’t bring up my pessimism much. Everyone figured a couple of months.
When things opened up in June, I got us a plane trip to Chicago. We had a big party planned the year before that couldn’t happen, and the youngest had never been, and the older kid I really owed a fireworks show. I had worried about the logistics and whether everyone would have a good time but the trip was so immensely enjoyable.
“We need to have our fun now, before the next wave,” had been my thinking. Of course, I was thinking of the vaccine-resistant strain that has yet to evolve, not the wave that is currently hitting the vaccine-resistant population.
During the Pandemic, my employer figured out that our staff are really productive working from home, and the lease was up on the office so we took the opportunity to downsize. The new location is right next to the train, and on days when family obligations allow, I really love taking the train to the office. I think this is a pretty ideal commute: walk fast to the station, sit down, read a book, walk sorta fast to the office. Some light exercise for the body and relaxation for the mind built right into the schedule.
Lately, I’ve been coming into the office any chance I can get. As I explain, I really like working from home, and I have a good setup, but it also reminds me of the Pandemic, which I am happy to forget. Yesterday came the Public Health Order that we now wear masks in the office. I am here today and tomorrow. There is definitely a feeling of setback.
We had the technology and the money to free our country of the Pandemic this year. What we lacked was a cultural consensus that rolling up sleeves and getting a shot was worth everyone doing. I think this is just a warm-up for how our century will go. The planet is on fire again this year. Portland fried like it was Death Valley. We have, so far, been lucky in the Bay Area. No orange skies, no smoke … I haven’t run the air conditioner in weeks. Just the ongoing drought. This year, the Salmon fry will all be cooked in their natal streams.
We never took action to prevent the Climate Catastrophe beforehand. Even now, we have tools like electric cars and induction stoves and any number of ways we can reduce our Carbon emissions and … we make excuses. The new budget stimulus adds some money for public transportation, but the big money is in building more roads. In a few years, maybe, they say, there will be a few more electric cars you can buy. (And don’t bring up bike lanes.) The power grid is getting cleaner, at least.
This Sunday, Tommy and his Mom went to see the new Lego movie. I took the baby to a train show. He alternated between wanting to be carried and wanting to push the stroller around the crowd. We had fun.
A lot of the layouts on display are modular, and each at a different height. Some are up high, where an adult can comfortably manipulate the trains while standing, and others are down low, where kids can more easily see. The lower ones often have plastic barriers around the edge, or are roped of, to reduce the fingerpoking. I steered Max toward the lower trains, where there was also more room for him to push the stroller around.
I got to chatting with one of the guys running a large-scale railroad that was about two feet off the ground.
“Back when we started, back in the 80s, we had it at a height that was comfortable for old men. (I was young back then.) We went to a show and a bus full of kids in wheelchairs got out and they couldn’t see the trains. We felt awful about that. So, we got out the saws and have had shorter legs ever since.”
“You don’t have plastic barriers along the edge?”
“Well, the biggest thrill for the kids is to put their face on the track and pretend the train is going to run them over. We’ve also found that the manufacturers really understand that train shows are the best marketing they have, so when a train hits the concrete, they’ll often replace the damaged equipment, no questions asked.”
“Oh that’s nice! Still, maybe you run the more expensive trains on the inside track? I mean that one looks like it cost a few bucks.”
“That’s the theory. Though, at the end of the day . . . its only a toy.”
I am a successful IT professional. I got my start in the 90s, answering phones at an independent ISP and getting folks online with their new modems. This was a great age when folks had a choice of any number of Internet SERVICE Providers who could help them get up and running on AT&T’s local telephone infrastructure.
To this very day, I use the DSL option available from the local Internet Service Provider (Sonic) over AT&T’s wires. I use this despite the fiber optic cable AT&T has hung on the pole in front of my house. Fiber would be so, so much faster, but I’m not going to pay for it until I have a CHOICE of providers, like Sonic, who has always been great about answering the phone and taking care of my Internet SERVICE needs.
Competitive services were the foundation of my career in IT. I believe they were a strong foundation to get Americans online in the first place. Competitive services are, in my opinion, REQUIRED, if you want to get Americans on to modern network technology today.
The scooter proponent answered that since the scooters are a handy way to save car trips, San Francisco can continue its efforts to convert car lanes to bike lanes, where the scooters could safely scoot apart from pedestrians. That sounds great to me. The helmets, though … as I pulled up to the office, I emailed in a brief opinion. I then hung back from going into the office for a couple of minutes to catch the very end of the show. I’m glad I did. Michael Krazny closed with this:
We’ll leave it there! Well, except for one more comment about helmets that I want to read here, from Daniel, who says: “We should revisit the helmet requirement. Helmet use is a cultural convention. For example, they don’t wear helmets in Amsterdam or Copenhagen, which makes bicycling even easier in those places. It is safer to wear a helmet when riding in a car, yet we wouldn’t expect anyone to wear a helmet as a requirement to ride in a car.”
I think it would be nice to see these scooters in Peninsula suburbs, where we tend to lack good “last mile” transit options, and where there are fewer pedestrians to upset. Rental electric scooters sound like a better option than rental bikes in a lot of cases because they’re cheap to deploy, require less knowledge to ride, and require less storage space. And I suspect that the helmet requirement is probably unworkable.
I was in Chicago this week. There was a death in the family, so it was good to be among my kinfolk with our adorable, loving child.
Chicago is famously corrupt and moribund and the State of Illinois is mired in perpetual scandal. It is a magnet for immigrants but it is also a city from which many of us Californians are originally from. I’ve gotten used to the California way and I generally prefer it but what I noticed this week in Chicago was all the construction.
For a city that is corrupt and moribund, there was an awful lot of demolition and rebuilding going on. On the way to the L in the evening we stopped and stared over a fence as a variety of heavy machines worked under brilliant stadium lights. The star of the show was a yellow machine with a huge claw on the end of a boom arm reaching several stories up, to the top of a building, it was tearing down from the top, girder by girder, as another machine sprayed down the dust with a water hose. The claw was at the very end of its reach, it felt the machine was on tippy toes, as it tugged away, girder after girder, waiting for torrents of debris to fall, pulling the pieces out and dropping them into piles to be dragged into more discrete piles by lesser enormous machines. It was like watching dinosaurs go about their business. Father, Son, and Grandmother: none of us could take our eyes off the marvel. “They should sell beer and peanuts,” said I.
The neighbors of this derelict house in Sunnyvale are terrified at the prospect of it being replaced with housing for families.
We don’t get this in Suburban California. What little “history” we have is viciously guarded and any attempt to replace the old with newer and better is often met with resistance and exaggerated speculation as to the intentions and end results of new development. You don’t see that so much in the old country–In Chicago, and in any place with some history under its belt, everyone knows that they are surrounded by at least a century of continuity–Everyone is merely links in a great chain. The city is inherited and bequeathed and the hope is to leave it in a little better shape: Urbs in Horto.
In Dublin, I saw them building a light rail line, right down an ancient street. It made the Northern Californian in me jealous.
They say that University Politics is the most vicious because the stakes are so low. I get a sense of that observing some of the political rhetoric in Sunnyvale. Out here the city is so new and raw that the idea of changing it implies that those who built the city and have lived in it until now are being completely rejected by the hordes of newcomers flooding the city from the Midwest and the Far East. But in the ancient lands where the immigrants come from, there is no such sentiment: the cities are naturally timeworn, and the idea of redevelopment is an intuitive component of the cycle of death and rebirth.
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle
The land in which I live would be enriched if it embraced a bit of the poetry of the land in which I was born.
I recently started using sslmate to manage SSL certificates. SSL is one of those complicated things you deal with rarely so it has historically been a pain in the neck.
But sslmate makes it all easy … you install the sslmate command and can generate, sign, and install certificates from the command-line. You then have to check your email when getting a signed cert to verify … and you’re good.
The certificates auto-renew annually, assuming you click the email. I did this for an important cert yesterday. Another thing you do (sslmate walks you through all these details) is set up a cron.
This morning at 6:25am the cron got run on our servers … with minimal intervention (I had to click a confirmation link on an email yesterday) our web servers are now running on renewed certs …. one less pain in the neck.
So … next time you have to deal with SSL I would say “go to sslmate.com and follow the instructions and you’ll be in a happy place.”
I was watching Larry Wilmore and the panel asked itself why are young liberals not excited about Hillary Clinton, and they jumped straight to the thesis that the cause is sexism. I know that there is no shortage of hatred against Hillary rooted in sexism, but for young liberals, I don’t think that this is what is turning them on to Sanders. I think that if there is a prejudice at play, it is against going back to the past.
Many of us who can remember the 90s remember it as a pretty good time, (as long as you weren’t big on equal rights for gays) especially in contrast to the George W years. Sure, the Republicans hated everything about the Democratic president but at least that could be rationalized by his obvious moral shortcoming. Younger liberals don’t remember those years. They came of age under a president whose political credentials were rooted entirely in his relationship to a 90s president. That was a train wreck. Eight years ago, we considered Hillary Clinton but decided that whatever nostalgia we felt for the 90s was trumped by an inexperienced Black Guy with a funny name. Say what? Its like progressives were less than eager to embrace the past.
And you see how that works out. Like Clinton, the Right hates Obama. Alas, Obama’s greatest moral failing is that he enjoys an occasional cigarette, so the Right is left to invent moral failings: he’s Muslim! he’s foreign! he’s Socialist! He’s … whatever … meanwhile the Left is trying to figure out the degree to which the Right hates Obama because they’re just plain old racist or do they simply hate any Democratic President?
Anyway, you look at your options: Hillary would be a perfectly competent President, like Bill was. Sure, the Right will hate her but she’s been dealing with that bullshit longer than most of us have been alive. That she hasn’t been crushed by hate and still seems somewhat human is a testament to her strength of character, and sheer, pragmatic, calculating ambition and political savvy. She’ll know how to work a hostile Congress to eek out incremental progress, much as Obama has.
Or, if they’re going to hate your president anyway, why settle for a pragmatic, shrewd centrist who will eek out incremental progress when you could just vote your Socialist ideals and send the Right wing our own tough New Yorker who says out loud what we’re all thinking anyway: that the banks are too big, that the rich get away with murder, and that Socialism is not an evil bogey man that will hand victory to the USSR.
And … I for one remember the 1990s … I don’t remember Clinton actually achieving anything. Healthcare reform went down in flames. Gays could be allowed in the military as long as they kept it in the closet. We deregulated the banks while sticking the evil Welfare Moms with red tape. We really didn’t move the ball forward much … if at all. When we later swooned for Barack “Hope and Dreams” Obama, we got some health care reform, women now serve in combat, and gay people can get married in all fifty states. Sure, we haven’t closed Guantanamo Bay, and there are still some troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Osama bin Laden is dead and we aren’t fighting any new wars. Not bad for voting for the unlikely young guy who had more rhetoric and possibility to offer than the Clinton option.
So, yeah, when it comes down to another Clinton administration versus taking a chance on Idealism, a lot of us figure voting for an Angry Old Brooklyn Jewish Socialist could be the better option.
Yesterday, on Martin Luther King Junior Day, a national holiday, Black Lives Matter protesters briefly shut down the San Francisco Bay Bridge in one direction. I smiled at that. A traffic snarl on a holiday commemorating a great activist caused by today’s ambitious activists: what is not to love?
But today on the drive in they were discussing it on Forum and people kept calling in to complain about how yeah sure they support black people and they think it is okay to protest but not, heck forbid, if it is disruptive. “Who do these people think they are? They’re not going to win me over with tactics like that!”
“Hooray for Our Side”
Dan Brekke, also of KQED, posted a piece with some historical perspective, and recounted how his Uncle Bill Hogan, once a Catholic Priest, had participated in a very similar protest in Chicago, blocking a highway into the city, on a Tuesday, May 9, 1972. He remarked that the Vietnam War ultimately ended, but that the protest in question was only one of very very many.
I got to thinking of the first time I ever engaged in a protest. Just a few days over twenty five years ago, on January 16, 1991. To quote an article by Charles Leroux in The Chicago Tribune:
“Cara Brigandi, 16, a junior at Lincoln Park High School, said she led a movement of Lincoln Park students to walk out of school and protest. Organizers gave students their marching orders when they came to school Tuesday morning. Fliers were passed out urging students to leave classes about 10 a.m. That effort mushroomed into a march down North Avenue to Lake Shore Drive and then to the Loop. Along the way, Lincoln Park students say they picked up students from the Latin School of Chicago, and William Jones Metropolitan High School. By about 12:30, approximately 200 students were in front of City Hall.”
I remember getting the flyer at the school door. I remember that moment when the time came and every student had to ask themselves whether they were going to stick with class or step outside. I remember looking out the window to see a growing crowd inviting us to join them and then the moment I decided to join other teenage kids running down the stairs to break a first taboo. After some cheering and whatnot, the crowd headed down the street. The cops managed to break the crowd in two, with the folks in the back returning to school. Those of us toward the front were soon walking through a Chicago winter day down a highway on-ramp and on to Lake Shore Drive: two lanes of students, one more lane of police cars, buffering us, and another lane of mid-morning traffic squeezing by, many cheering us on.
“Hell no, we won’t go,” the protesters chanted. And: “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your (bleeping) war. Five, six, seven, eight, we will not cooperate.” Among the crowd were many non-students who had protested the Vietnam War. With that war, “it took years before there was this kind of protest,” said Lester McNeely, 37, of Oak Park, a member of the West Side Peace Coalition.
I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”
Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
I’ve come a long way from being a chanting high school kid walking down LSD … I own a house in the suburbs!? I guess I’m in a place where I can suggest to others of my social class that there is a time for order, but there is also a time for action, however messy, disorganized, inchoate, and perhaps even self-defeating.
If it is Martin Luther King Day, and your trip across the Bay Bridge from the Chocolate City of Oakland into the Liberal Mecca of San Francisco gets delayed by people who are angry about cops murdering black kids, well, I would suggest that whether you agree with the protest or not, this is a perfect time to roll down the window, raise your fist in the air, and express your opinion.
Today marks the completion of the 40th trip of this body around the local star. A momentous milestone for the resident being. I spent the weekend with my wife and son, riding the train down to Santa Barbara and back, a pretty little beach town where we visited the zoo and ate ice cream together.
Most likely, I’ll be around another 40 years, or more, but really: who knows? Every day I wake up with my health and my loved ones is a blessing.
The trip has been good. Tommy did pretty well, and the scenery along the way has had a lot of that intense emerald green the dry parts of California get after some good winter rains. The view along the coast near Santa Barbara is worth the long train ride.
I am grateful to be alive. I am grateful for my family. I am grateful for my friends. I am grateful for my job and ability to earn a living. I am grateful to be living at what honestly seems to be a very promising time in the history of our species. Life will not always be so great for this being, and in time, my life will end. I am grateful for the time I have had, and the time I have yet, and that I get to experience a little part of our collective adventure.
It was about twenty years ago, I was in college, up late in the computer lab writing an email to President Clinton asking him not to sign the “Defense of Marriage Act” into law. Today, I am proud of my country, and the speed with which we have “evolved” to better recognize more of the civil rights of our people.
Thank you, Justice Kennedy, and to the countless advocates who have helped us all open our eyes.
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.
I think the El Camino BRT could be a great project to transform El Camino Real from a ghetto of 1950s strip malls into the sort of place where people would go to enjoy shopping. Maybe. Anyway, the news that a dedicated lane from Santa Clara to Palo Alto could make the bus faster than cars excited me. I’ll try to be at the Sunnyvale meeting this evening, and I also submitted my own enthusiasm to our governments via Transform’s handy link:
I used to commute along El Camino from Mountain View to Palo Alto. I switched to the bus out of environmental concerns. El Camino has the best transit service in the county but it still took 2-3 times longer to take the bus than it would have taken to drive. Now it sounds like you could get BRT running on El Camino FASTER than cars? YES!! If the cars get slowed a bit that’s not such a big deal, especially since any driver going any distance knows that Central Expressway / Alma is a much nicer car trip. Even though I now live 1.5 miles off of El Camino in Sunnyvale, if there were excellent transit services I would be tempted to hop on the 55, walk, or bike to enjoy the transit corridor, especially for trips up to Mountain View or Palo Alto or Stanford Shopping Center. What a pleasure it would be to not have to hassle with parking, traffic, or the Caltrain schedule. If it were sufficiently fast, I would totally use that as a commute option up to Menlo Park.
Also, I’d probably be more inclined to visit Santa Clara.
