Rich McAllister

10:19 pm: Dumb driver
I suppose I should be happy this doesn't happen any more than it does.  On the way back from the local Mexican grocery store, Lin and I got to the intersection two blocks down from the house, saw an SUV turning off the arterial two blocks right, and strolled across the street.  The guy in the SUV coasted up to the intersection and *honked*.  We glared at him and continued on.  He decided he needed to educate us and yelled "you should *look* before you crossed the street!" I informed him (perhaps a bit profanely) that yes, we had looked; he had plenty of time to stop (obviously, since he in fact had stopped without any fuss) and we had the right of way.

Now that I've had a bit of time to reflect, I think he was probably just a recent immigrant; while every state does admit that pedestrians in a crosswalk have the right of way, California is the only place I've lived where pedestrians actually expect to get it...

RIch

10:03 am: Westercon Thursday
We're at Westercon.  We drove down, taking two days and somewhat unconventional route avoiding freeways.  From the Bay Area, out CA 120 to Yosimite and over Tioga Pass, stopping at Tuolumne Meadows for a picnic lunch.  Pretty, of course, but the bugs were biting and the altitude too high to do much walking around without spending a night acclimating.  Then continued CA 120 around south of Mono Lake, stopping at a cute historical display at the other end of the Bodie Railway (built to bring timber to Bodie, now a famous ghost town, which we visited earlier this year.)  East to US  6 to Tonopah, with a diversion to visit another ghost town, Candelaria.  (Metallic City, the "sin" suburb of Candeleria, was not recognizable.) 

Stayed overnight in Tonopah in a entirely adequate Best Western, ate at what was supposed to be the best restaurant in town, a not-very-good Mexican.  Tonopah does look like it's headed for ghost town status pretty quickly, and was generally uncharming.  I'd recommend Austin if you're looking for a nice out-of-the-way Nevada town.  Left Tonopah bright-and-early taking US 95 south through Las Vegas; generally pretty country but empty, empty; after LV took US 93 across Hoover Dam. 

Lots of construction around the dam, building a new bridge across the Colorado just south of the dam.   The bridge is a good idea; it's  really kind of silly to route all the traffic across the dam, but I'm glad I got to do it before the road is rerouted.  Given the amount of pedestrian traffic touring the dam, I expect they'll stop allowing vehicle traffic across the top.

Another long, lonely run on route 93 to Kingman, surprisingly running through several thunderstorms along the way. Stopped in Kingman for a much better Mexican lunch at El Palacios in downtown Kingman, and lin_mcallister even found a knitting/spinning shop a few doors down and bought a new  "Navajo" style floor spindle, in hopes Jirel is calming down from kittenhood enough to make spinning possible in the house again.  So Kingman was a much more pleasant stop than Tonopah.

Left Kingman on I-40, this being the one spot we couldn't avoid freeways, but shortly turned southeast on US 93 again, a surprisingly good road without much traffic; much more of it was divided 4-lane highway than shown on our reasonably-recent AAA map.  93 ended at US 60 in the extremely boring town of Wickenburg; then US 60 into the Phoenix freeway system  Spent more time on 60 than we should have, driving through SURPRISE! and Sun City when we should have taken 303 south to 10.  However 303 didn't exist when I first learned my way around the Phoenix freeways so I didn't think of it.

Arrived a the hotel and had even more trouble parking than we had when World Fantasy was in the same hotel; there were many spots closed off for construction, etc.  Finally parked and unloaded, finding out at hotel registration that valet parking was included; that will make it easier if we decide to move the truck again.

About all we had the energy for was having a beer and finding dinner.  We were sorely disappointed that of the three restaurants and pubs we remembered fondly from World Fantasy, all three were out of business.  Restaurants have a short half-life, but three for three was worse than I expected.  We ended up walking in to Caffe Boa, an Italian "bistro/wine bar" just across Mill from the west exit of the hotel.  Wasn't expecting much, but we were extremely pleased.  There were lots of high-priced bottles on the wine list, but picking through the specials yielded an interesting sounding Austrian Pinot Noir at a reasonable price, which turned out to be light and fruity, very nice for the hot steamy weather.  I had a cold-cut plate with sopressata, brasaole, and cotto; the sopressata was equivalent to what I'm used to in the Bay Area, but the brasaole (which is basically beef cured like ham) was as good as I had in Florence and the cotto was the best I remember.  Then I had ravioli stuffed with artichoke and cheese, served with two sauces, a red and a white.  The ravioli were great, obviously fresh pasta and light-but-creamy stuffing.  The white sauce was very good but not outstanding, but the red sauce contained a secret ingredient:  lots of very good olive oil.   Lin had an arugula salad and mushroom risotto, both of which she liked; the risotto was much lighter than what we had in Milan, and contained lots of morels which is always going to please Lin.

After dinner, Lin was too tired to do much; I managed to make it to the San Jose party for an hour or so but was out of energy by 10:30 or so.

Phoenix is apparently experiencing an early season version of the Arizona "monsoon";  it's not only terribly hot as one expect of Phoenix in July, it's humid.  Even the locals are complaining.

09:23 am: Occultation of Venus
I got up at 4:30 this morning to see the moon slide in front of Venus.  I hadn't realized just how low in the sky the moon would be; I ended up walking downtown and getting up on top of a 5-story parking ramp in order to see the start.  By 6:00 when Venus reappeared, they were up high enough to see from the front yard.  The reappearance was more striking, since Venus reappeared off the dark side of the moon; during the disappearance it was hard to judge the exact instant of Venus being obscured instead of just lost in the glare from the moon.

01:03 am: It's summer
Stratus clouds in the morning; great temp for a bike ride at 10-11 am; too warm in the afternoon so we have a nap. Yah, that's summer.

05:53 pm: Kindle and DRM
I decided to take the plunge and buy a Kindle, since we're doing an overseas trip soon and it would be nice to carry a selection of books without having to lug the weight.  I have some old e-books in DRM-protected Mobipocket format that I read on my Palm. Kindle basically uses the Mobipocket format(Amazon bought Mobipocket.)  I'm somewhat bemused to find that it's easier to simply strip the DRM completely off than it is to get the old Mobipocket software to give me a copy with the Kindle's serial number.

The Kindle 2 display is very nice, it's about 80% of the way to ink-on-paper; contrast is still a little low.  It is kind of like the old Tektronix storage tubes in that turning pages requires a complete erase; the display goes black for an instant, which is better than the Tek bright green flash, and at least there isn't the terrifying high-voltage pop that accompanied storage tube erasures.

According to my scale, it masses 290 grams.  A handy 390-page mass market size paperback is 192.  The hardback I'm currently reading is 982.

10:08 pm: Literature
Lin and I were talking over dinner about how hard it must be to be a freshman college English teacher. Come up with 4 novels each quarter than you are sure are worth the time it takes to read them, and which lead to interesting discussions in class; that requires them to be thematically linked.  Here's what we came up with:

--- Q1

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Beloved, Toni Morrison

-- Q2
 Catch 22, Joseph Heller
War and Peace, Leon Tolstoy
Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
The Lord of the Rings, J R R Tolkien

-- Q3

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin

11:20 pm: overnights meme
from n6tqs  -- places away from home stayed overnight, starred if more than one night.

Napa
Seattle*
London*
Whitby
Haltwhistle
Edinburgh*
Durham
Lincoln
Madison*
South Wales, NY *
Toronto
Buffalo
South Kohala, Hawai'i County, HI*
South Lake Tahoe, CA
near Bishop, CA
Calgary*
Oakhurst, CA*

01:08 pm: It's that bad, apparently
I fired up the new Turbo Tax in order to do a quick dry run and see if I needed to make my 4th quarter estimated tax payment (no, I don't.)  One of the early screens in TT asks about various events that might have taken place during the year, so TT can figure out which forms one needs. It's always asked things like "did you get married? or divorced? have or adopt a child?"  but this year it also asked "did you lose your house through foreclosure?"

12:16 pm: New cats
A couple of weeks ago we took a short 2-night trip to Yosemite, taking advantage of the late dry weather to see the valley without hordes of other people.  It was a fine trip, and I was looking forward to making an LJ post about it. But when we got home, our old cat Harry had obviously become very ill.  A quick trip to the vet emergency room made it clear it wasn't treatable for him, and we had him euthanized.  I don't want to go into the details, at least yet.

The house was terribly empty with no cats -- this was the first time since lin_mcallister and I started living together that we haven't had cats.  So we tried to visit the Palo Alto pound to see if there were new friends to be had.  They were having construction work done and the cat adoption rooms weren't open!  Finally on Monday we got in, and we had no trouble making new friends.

( Pictures and more after the cut... )

12:43 am: A meme
From marykaykare : Reply to this post, and I'll tell you one reason why I like you. Then put this in your own journal, and spread the love.

I replied to MKK's post so I have to propogate it. Happy to do so, and I think I actually do like everybody who is a current "friend" on LJ.

11:19 pm: First Hawai'ian president
I've been to Hawai'i enough times to see how the people who live there really do wear leis on important occasions; I think it would be really cool if Obama, as the first Hawai'ian born president, would wear a lei at his inauguration.  I mean a dignified leaf lei, not a showy flower one. I've already emailed my Senator, Diane Feinstein, who's apparently In Charge of the inauguration; any other suggestions for what we can do?

Tags: hawai'i

01:52 am: If..
Like a no-hitter, we're not supposed to talk about it. But if Obama wins, what would we expect to get out of it?  Here's my hopes for 2012:

• Less than 2000 American troops in Iraq
• Some sane national health plan
• National debt, as a proportion of GDP, no worse than 2008 despite the vicious 2008-2010 recession
• Guantanamo "terrorist" prison closed

That's not much, is it?

10:46 pm: Puzzles from The Daily Show
We almost always watch The Daily Show on Comedy Central.  For the last year or so, they always start with a pan in past a globe with city names in LEDs swooping around.  Usually I can figure out the names and what the connection is; but tonight's was really hard.  It was " TORDESILLAS", "GHENT" and "PORTSMOUTH".  

Got it ?

( Answers after the fold... )

01:37 am: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair
For more years than I care to remember -- at least 10 -- the light over the sink in the back bathroom has been out. It's a two-bulb fixture, and since both bulbs quit working at the same time, I figured it was something more complicated than just the bulbs being burned out. So I put off fixing it for a long, long time (there are two other lights in the room.) Finally, today I armed myself with volt-ohm-meter and test light and went off to Fix the Problem.

Unscrew the bulbs. Since I've got the ohmmeter out, see if they're OK.  Resistance is 2 million ohms. Uh, that can't be right; a cold bulb should be a few hundred ohms.  Wait -- I have my fingers on the probes, I'm measuring the resistance across my body, where 2 megohms is about right.  Move the fingers, get "infiinite" resistance. Uh, these bulbs are burned out.  Poke the test light into the sockets. Uh, these are live.  Put in two new bulbs, get two new lights.

Duh.  Just because two bulbs happened to burn out at the same time, I went without the light for a decade.

11:37 pm: Sausage making
Almost nobody can really be happy with the bailout bill, but I have to admire the political skill involved.  In its trip from the failure in the House on Monday to the approval today, they managed to change it so it picked up both Barbara Lee and David Drier.

(later:) Perhaps this is too opaque.  Lee  and Drier are about the farthest left and farthest right of the California congressional delegation.  So anything that gets them cooperating is truly amazing.

I compare it to Joe Gibbs' famous 'counter trey' play when he coached the Redskins. When done right, it convinced the right linebacker that the play was going left, and the left linebacker that the play was going right.  Result, they collided, and the running back could get an extra 4 yards.

Does that help?  I didn't think so.

07:19 pm: The Road to Serfdom
Nice one from Matthew Yglisias, who's too young to have lived through all these....

06:17 pm: Computer part 2
Well, it turned out to just be the video card.  I probably cooked it by not blowing the dust out of the heatsink/fan for too long. Everything's clean now, and I've got an old PCI (not Express) card in, which is sort-of OK but I'm down to one monitor which is not good for a pixel junkie.    Trouble is, by the time I get a new AGP card with dual DVI, I'm about a third of the way to a full brain transplant (new motherboard, memory, processor, PCI X video.)  I'll have to think about it for a day or two.

10:48 pm: Computers
A couple weeks ago the garage Windows machine, which is pretty much used only to play BBC World Service while I work on other stuff, died.  That was OK, really; it had been limping along for about 8 months; first Linux wouldn't boot, then plugging any USB devices in caused a bus wedge, then it refused to boot off the hard drive and only would come up if I put a GRUB CD in that chainloaded to the hard drive.  That wasn't bad, it was Linda's old system that I replaced, so it was kind of surplus anyway.  So once it died hard, I got a nice up-to-date AMD Phenom quad and new motherboard, built a nice new system with the plan I'd run the current garage mail-web server and Windows BBC-World-Service machines as VMs under VirtualBox.  This worked really well; $550 was enough to turn this old box into a server I would have killed to have three years ago.   Plus, I really like doing a build-it-yourself box every couple of years. I like learning where the technology is going, I actually enjoy dealing with the various annoyances (surprise ground faults, chipsets too new for the LInux distriubtions to be up to.)  This particular upgrade was extremely painless, everything came up first time, and it was just finding the workaround for the sound driver so World Service could be heard.

But then, I  decided to have a short nap this afternoon; when I got up I found my main Windows box had crashed and won't come up (no messages from the BIOS, HD light comes on hard.)  Haven't figured out what the problem is, but dammit I'm not READY  for another round of hardware debugging.

On the third hand, this is about the worst thing that's happened to me in three years.  Life's pretty good, y'know?

05:12 pm: food meme
OK, this meme fromholyoutlaw I have to do:

The Omnivore's 100 List:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

Like Luke, I'm skipping #4. Where there are links they are his.

12:52 am: Watchmen
If I'm going to mention "Watchmen", I suppose I should quote this from today's Wall Street Journal:

The biggest hybrid release this year will be "Watchmen," based on the 1980s comic and graphic novel drawn by Dave Gibbons, who is a consultant on the Warner Premiere project. "Watchmen," set in an era resembling the 1980s, tells the story of the murder of a costumed adventurer called "The Comedian."

That's like describing The Lord of the Rings as "four friends take a hike."