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05.31.05 if you need help staying organized, or your a productivity nerd, and (key) you spend the better part of your day staring at the computer, check out the freebie backpack service, from those keen 37 signals folks. it's neato and well worth the 2 minute registration. # 05.30.05 my newest dream-app: spotlight tagging assistant. in my perfect world, this program (taking advantage of the new "spotlight comments" field in the file system) would be a floating window that would display all the tags used on my system (really, any word appearing in the spotlight comments field). selecting a tag or series of tags would open a custom search window, which i could save as a smart folder if i so desired. when i select a file (or mp3 in itunes or photo in iphoto or document in word or contact in address book, etc. etc.) it would show me the spotlight comments for that file and allow me to add new comments. it would be like del.icio.us for my desktop and i would give it with all of my nerdy love. # 05.27.05 nerd alert: does anyone have or know where to find a simple applescript for reading in text from a txt file up to a defined delimiter? dumb for sure, if you know what you're doing. which i don't. # threadless is having a $10 t-shirt sale until june 6. go buy that shirt you like but never bought now. also of interest: their tee of the month club. but do i trust them? # 05.25.05 found on the yahoo group bay area transportation news this evening is a piece from KCBS radio (here if you belong to BATN) about muni's fare hike. looks like muni's stumbled on yet another windfall, this time killing the planned fastpast increase (the last cash infusion spared us the parking meter increase). the regular, one-ride bus fare will still increase to $1.50, however. money well spent, i say! save muni, save money, buy a fastpass. # 05.19.05 pitchfork roundup! i read it, so you don't have to.
# 05.16.05 the always faithful fresno bee (free registration) is reporting on proposals to convert the beleaguered highway 99 into an interstate. the move would force much needed upgrades to the state's other north-south artery (not 101 or 5, thanks). to the tune of $25 billion. upgrading the worn out, dangerous and over-crowded stretch of road to 6-lanes, without the changes interstate designation would mandate, would cost $6 billion. but how will notoriously disconnected, self-interested valley polticos scrape together even that much? in the meantime, individual counties continue to fight for and make minor patchwork upgrades, thereby solving their leg of the problem, and forcing traffic in and out of tricky, troublesome bottlenecks. have you ever seen two semi's doing battle with a rickety old van full of migrant laborers, or a beat-up old school bus pulling a portapotty? on a beat-to-hell two lane highway? it's a miracle anyone drives that road and lives. # 05.15.05 the phone rang as i was getting ready for work on tuesday. this never happens. moreover, jessie's still asleep at this time (i have to get up early to work the mines) so i kind of get freaked out by abrupt loud noises like ringing telephones. garbage trucks and sirens notwithstanding. caller id says it's my mother, which freaks me out more. "you need to help your mother buy a mac." first, her pc at work quit working. go figure, since it's running NT 4.0 and has to burn the dust off it's processor at boot time. after the old windows 98 desktop at home ground to a halt from the combined weight of too much time and too much spyware (stay off kazaa next time, mom), i told her to just get a mac. on this recommendation, even jessie begrudgingly agreed. even my sister was using her ibook over her old pc by now. and we're the kind of family that buys together. but her school bought a bunch of new laptops, without buying security cables or locking cabinets (public school, natch), so she brought that home every day. it had a wireless card in it, so she went out and bought a wireless hub to plug the cable modem into. i swear to you, my parents did this themselves; i was impressed! but wednesday morning, the laptop froze up. then it refused to boot. BSOD. finally, she'd had enough. she wanted me to help her find a good deal on a mac. and she wanted one today. i inherited my patience. i suggested a mac mini (anticipating an uphill battle), but she already had her heart set. now my mother has a cute little ibook and plays online java games ("safari wasn't loading it, so i downloaded firefox."). but i'm not getting off that easy, it seems. she has insisted that i come visit soon and install all the right programs for her and help her get her mp3s off of the old computer. so she can burn mix cds again. # two years later, i'm totally falling for sufjan stevens. what was i doing before? # 05.13.05 when i was 16 years old, i tried to find a job. it wasn't easy — these soft hands just weren't made to flip burgers. i sat in ms. alstrom's (later mrs. cook) journalism class, lamenting the wages i was surely losing as i scavenged the classified ads. she suggested, in what would come to be seen as both the most benevolent and loathsome gesture ever offered me, that i could work for her father. charles alstrom is the bluntest old man i've ever met. i thought, during my interview, that he must hate me. clearly that was a qualification. "do you know where any of these are?" he asked, handing me a rusty metal basket with three tiny white bags; each had a small label stapled to it with a name and street address hand typed. his big hand held out a key, dangling from a cracked-plastic yellow keychain. i grew up on the west side of fresno, out in the county where we didn't have sidewalks or sewers or stoplights. the one-way streets and alleys of the tower district were a foreign country to me. i'd had my driver's license for less than 6 months. i was given a big, detailed map of fresno, a 30-second lecture on map-reading and more trust than i was owed. for two years i stocked shelves, swept floors, rang customers and drove a little yellow datsun pickup (manual) all over the city, bringing medicine, gifts, liquor and sundries to the pharmacy's aging customers. i learned more about my hometown, it's history, and general navigation in those two years than i've compiled in the 22-odd years that surround them. charles never got any easier to get along with, although i adjusted to his unique sense of humor, as well, to some extent, to his unique style of customer service ("TELL MRS. JEFFERYS TO HAVE A SEAT, PLEASE!"). the college pharmacy was a small, quaint little store, situated on a tiny quarter-block of businesses on an otherwise breezy residential thoroughfare, just a block and a half south from the city college. charles and linda alstrom owned not only the pharmacy itself, but the building it resided in, making them landlords to a small video store and a smaller dress shop. both building and pharmacy were inherited from the senior mr. alstrom, and both were ran more as a hobby than as a business. linda puttered to her heart's content, an always available supply of nicknacks to re-arrange, gifts to wrap and under-tended souls (both customers and employees) to tend to. charles would work hours on end, chewing his unlit cigar until it was just a tiny, spit-soaked nub. he worked from open to close (often later) every day except for sundays (closed) and saturdays, when he would leave after lunch, driving around the block twice to check on us. saturdays, always slow, we were left to the care of the "assistant manager" ryan, a substitute teacher who spent his day playing hand-held electronic bass-fishing or drawing elaborate diagrams for me, illustrating exactly how to build a keg-erator. i worked there when the alstrom's decided to subdivide the store, building a new rental space out of a third of the otherwise expansive pharmacy. they built the new wall first. two days were spent piling merchandise (wine and liquor bottles, mostly) into an old unused shopping cart, pushing it out the new front door and down the street, where i tryed to find a home for it all in the new, smaller space. linda brought a cooler from home and made me a sandwich, which i ate slowly while charles gleefully pushed the rickety cart at high speed down the sidewalk, piled dangerously high with bottles which clanged against each other so hard i expected them all to explode in a shower of glass and bourbon. i worked there one christmas eve, when a van pulled across an intersection in front of me, on my last delivery run on the day. i remember the crisp, cold valley sun bearing down on me as i stared at the crumpled hood of the truck, and the impartial click of the receiver as charles hung up on me when i called to explain. linda, always the dotting-mother side of the business, showed up at the scene of the accident (my first, and most terrifying) with her triple-A card and a basket of homemade christmas cookies, which she cheerfully distributed to everyone in the vicinity (police, tow-truck drivers, the other driver, the hookers who came by the watch the show). for a long time, i suffered as the only delivery driver for the store, which offered home delivery to most of it's customers. (charles insisted that certain customers ought to "GET UP OFF THEIR ASSES AND COME DOWN HERE" instead. they were denied delivery privileges, due i'm sure to some age-old slight that was never forgotten.) in the beginning i was only one-half of the delivery and stock department, until sanjay's father was killed in a car accident while traveling in india. sanjay and his new wife were in the car with him, and when they returned, he wasn't so interested in driving old lady's pills around town, much less taking shit from a crotchety old man. eventually, i reached the same conclusion, with less enthusiasm and a great deal more sorrow. the college pharmacy, family owned and operated for 68 years, closed on tuesday of this week. i hope linda convinces charles to travel more with her. i hope the mr. knapp's widow is able to find a friend or neighbor to pick up her prescription down the street at the rite aid. i hope the new owners of whatever business takes up residence still choose warm, summery saturday afternoons to wash the windows. # if you stumbled onto my blog last night (or into my apartment), you might have noticed weirdness. weirdness and frustration. that's the general result of my awkward attempts to enable dynamic archiving in movable type. basically, the instructions for turning it on are just the tiniest bit confusing; in addition, they assume that your archive directory is a subdirectory of your root weblog folder. confused? so was i. there could be better support around that feature (esp. transitioning into it from an old, non-dynamic setup). but i figured it out. the upswing of this is that now i can fearlessly utilize individual archive posts, enabling a breezy "click here to read more..." feature. frees me up to go on longer tears and frees you up to better ignore them. see how we both win? # 05.12.05 google buys dodgeball. great things to come. # In the last four years, Kamikatsu has halved the amount of incinerator-bound garbage and raised its recycled waste to 80 percent, town officials said. Each household now has a subsidized garbage disposal unit that recycles raw garbage into compost.japan, a country that incinerates almost 80 percent of it's garbage (no land to fill, you know?) is wrestling with the task of advanced recycling. advanced? try sorting your household trash into somewhere between 10 and 40 different categories. try old ladies patrolling your neighborhood, scouring your improperly sorted garbage for bills or papers that might be used to identify you as a gross offender in the task of garbage classification. sweet jesus. while their ambition is admirable beyond belief, americans will never (at least not in our lifetimes, or even the next generation or two) be persuaded to make such a grand effort. which is a shame. now, excuse me while i take my trash to the park. # a federal judge has struck down nebraska's far-reaching anti-gay-marriage ammendment that was passed in the last election. likely because the ammendment also precluded nebraska public sector agencies from offering support and benefits to partners of gays, the ruling stands a chance of being overturned. where does it go from here? what's the next court up? and when will the supreme court come in and save the day already? as if there's any hope. # 05.07.05 the totally, totally stupid broadcast flag is dead. god save tv! # san francisco's really a small town. we had a totally great time out tonight with byron, bumping into everyone. at dinner with kate and jen, we ran into shani, then met john and went to the pilsner. there, we met christoph, and saw tim, met up with evan, his friend mitchel (from new york), and dan. we collided with mike sullivan and i saw cj and a handful of work boys (a few that i ogle but none that i know). and i'm trying to tell byron that this is how it is all the time. # the best part about this article on san francisco's selection for the stem cell research center? the final selection meeting was held in fresno, "a neutral site chosen for the stem cell board's meeting." yeah, because every single person in the entire state knew that there wasn't a chance in hell that fresno would ever be considered. # 05.06.05 this looks like it might be really good. which is a rather delightful surprise, from gregg araki. (his movies always suck in some really fascinating and slightly beautiful way. but they still suck.) # 05.05.05 oh, are you still here? i've been kinda busy. plus, we've had visitors. # 05.03.05 it's the spoon mp3 you've all been waiting for. enjoy heartily, and go buy the cd the second you get the chance. # « April 2005 | archive index | June 2005 » built with movabletype |
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