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| Wednesday, July 11, 2001 |
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Coasting 
| | This time tomorrow I'll be in asleep, I hope, so I can get up at 2am and drive to LAX with Jeffrey in the back seat before we take the 6am flight to Chicago and another flight to Raleigh where I'll rent a car and drive another 5 hours to The Beach. |
| | Needless to say I've got a lot to do in the meantime. That includes finishing the October issue of Linux Journal tomorrow, plus catching up on all my bookkeeping (at which I extremely suck), plus helping Joyce get the new house ready to rent (perhaps, not sure) for the rest of he summer while we maximize use of the apartment near the beach we'll be leaving when school starts. |
| | All that and I can't get the @#$% Palm software to work with the Handspring Visor. In fact, it hasn't worked since I transferred everything over to the Titanium. Not sure why. |
| | Anyway, bear with me in the meantime. I'm neglecting many emails right now, including the latest bulletin from the TDCRC, which contains evidence that what I said the other day about bladerunning repicant companies may have awakened in some of you a gonzo calling. |
| | Isn't it kinda funky that the best metaphors for what's actually going on are the two greatest noir sci-fi pix of our time? |
I'm ready too
| | Brent has switched from Eudora to Pine. I'm hearing more about OS X users, even non-hackers, starting to discover the advantages of a command-line console. Speed and being able to leave stuff on your server are two real big ones. In my case, OS X/Linux integration is another. Althouth "integration" is really the wrong word. It's interoperability. Good thing to have. |
Overheard Cams
| | Ever notice that Cam's list of "Sites I vist often" look like names of bands? |
A bigger orchard?
| | I just heard that Apple bought Spruce Technologies, the DVD powerhouse. But I don't see anything on either company's site about it. |
| | And yesterday I heard that Linus had left Transmeta, which turned out to be a joke. |
Astrologically speaking, tomorrow is a wild time to be born
| | Every evening Jeffrey and I sit outside to read stories and watch the stars. Lately Jeffrey has tossed the kiddie stories in favor of star charts and science atlases. He knows about black smokers, trenches and accretional wedges. His favorite expression is "abyssal plain." Partly this is because we can't see much of the sky with no less than three lights on the apartment's deck and two more in the driveway, not to mention all the other sources of terrestrial illumination on the beachy side of downtown Santa Barbara. Our one 'star' is Mars. It's bright in the Southeastern sky every evening. |
| | But now we've got something coming up I just found out about at BlackHoleBrain (whose proprietor, Mike Donnelan, designed this very weblog): an alignment of Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn and Venus in the morning sky, starting tomorrow morning, with a cresent moon pointing to the rest of the crew. The show goes on through the 17th. Should be perfect, since through most of that time Jeffrey and I will be staying at a beach house looking east over the Atlantic from the coast of North Carolina. |
So whaddaya say? 'Shhh!" or "Duh!"
| | By far, the leading metaphor for the Internet, in the public¹s mind, is not "a shopping mall" or "banking and investment office," but rather "a library." Despite the popular depiction of the Internet as a channel for commerce, the public mostly views it as a source of information, and these uses appear to explain its popularity much more than its utility as a way to shop, bank, or invest. |
Just don't read this while you're driving, okay?
| | One of my favorite Southern expressions is "call bullshit." I first heard it from an old client of mine — a guy who ran a little computer printer company in North Carolina — who used to say stuff like, "I gotta call bullshit on Oki. Their printers aren't half as fast as they say." |
| | So here's Click & Clack calling bullshit on the AAA's study on the comparative saftey of using cell phones in cars. They point to another study that says cell phone use while driving is even more dangerous than the AAA findings suggest. Here's its main conclusion: The use of cellular telephones in motor vehicles is associated with a quadrupling of the risk of a collision during the brief period of a call. |
| | While I don't like the findings (I like talking on the phone in the car, although I usually use one of those earpiece/microphone deals), I love Click & Clack's take on the AAA's response to the bullshit C&C called on the association, expressed in the form of a personal letter from the AAA's Director of Research: ...we still think he's got his head up his keister. |
Clink
| | Ask for change at the Santa Barbara transit center and you get a pile of these new golden dollars featuring the pretty face of Sacagawea and her papoose. I'd never seen them before, and now I've got a pocket full of them. When I bought something at Taco Bell with one yesterday, the kid at the cash register didn't know what change drawer to put it in. He kinda went into brain lock. |
| | Anyway, I like 'em. They don't have the pleasing heft of a pound, but they feel unlike anything else in your pocket — which was not the case with the failed Susan B. Anthony and Eisenhower dollars, which (as I recall) felt like a mutant quarters. |
Driven to satisfction
| | For the second morning in a row I took the bus to work. It's a great little bus system. It's a short and pleasant walk past the train station to the nearest #20 bus stop on Guitierrez, where I can grab a coffee and a pastry and sit outside and wait for the bus to arrive. I give the bus a buck, ride up Chapala to the Transit Center (the downtown bus station), and pick up the #11 bus out to Hope Avenue, about 200 feet from my office. |
| | I kinda hafta take the bus because my old and much-hated Subaru wagon is in the shop. We dropped it off there yesterday when we swapped it for Joyce's old and much-loved Infiniti, which crapped out on July 4, which was especially inconvenient given its point-of-failure location a couple blocks from our apartment near the beach on the biggest party day of the year. The streets were all but impassible, with revelers drinking and setting up beach chairs in mid-street to watch the fireworks. |
| | Anyway, our friend John, a local, insisted we have Joyce's car towed or followed (running on battery power, since it was the alternator that had failed) over to his favorite garage. John drove Joyce's car while I drove mine. On the way, while trying to keep up, I actually hit the police roadblock that John threaded through at a much higher speed. After getting blessed out by a cop who quickly pulled me over on his motorcycle (but thankfully did not arrest me, or even give me a ticket, even though he said I was guilty of "hit and run" and could "go to jail"), I caught up with John at the Pacific Coast garage, which is hidden behind a building in Santa Barbara's industrial section. |
| | The two mechanics at the garage are kind of the Click & Clack of Santa Barbara. Galen & Brian are two guys' guys: crusty, funny, and extremely knowledgeable about cars. Brian is a Kiwi who loves both Infinitis and Subarus. He not only put Joyce's car in the best shape it's been in years — for a fraction of the price she would have paid at a dealer — but is in the midst of restoring the Subaru lovingly to the best state it's been in since I bought it. We should have it back this afternoon. |
| | Finding a good mechanic is one of a Driving Guy's most important purposes in a transplanted life. Discovering a fine public transit system at the same time doesn't suck either. |
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