Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in util's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, August 30th, 2008
3:01 pm	Projects Hm. I actually live in Sunnyside. (My street was named after a German-born entrepreneur, apparently by himself: Joost.) Sunnydale is about 50 minutes away on foot, according to Google Maps. A few articles on Sunnydale: Kilo's comeback: In the housing projects, an ex-con offers wisdom - and haircuts. The Sunnydale Barbershop is a satellite of the Bayview Barber College, a city-funded project aimed at creating careers for employment-challenged dudes like Kilo. While enrolled at the college, Kilo is accumulating the 1,500 hours of work experience he needs to get his barber's license from the state Board of Barbering and Cosmetology... At this juncture, Kilo is just barely surviving financially. He's still on parole, and will be until mid-2006. And he's got one looming concern about his transition from con to citizen: He's afraid the state cosmetology board won't grant him a barber's license because of his criminal record. It's a valid concern, according to board spokesperson Miles Bristow, who says the board has the discretion to bar ex-offenders from the profession if they've been busted for certain felonies or are guilty of crimes involving "dishonesty, fraud, or deceit." Kilo isn't overjoyed with the situation. As he puts it, "I'm trying to make myself acceptable to society, but I don't know what society wants." (1500 hours -- over 26 work weeks! I guess it is essential to protect people from bad haircuts though.) Life at the bottom: S.F.'s Sunnydale project (February 3, 2008) Private management of S.F. golf courses urged (August 29, 2008) (It seems obvious that public funding for golf courses represents a transfer of wealth from poorer to richer, even accounting for the very bottom not paying any income tax.) Hunters View - not Sunnydale - ranks as S.F.'s worst complex (August 30, 2007) Fixing mess at Hunters View won't be quick, easy or cheap (September 17, 2007) Map (Google Maps says it would take almost 2 hours to walk there, but the suggested route looks pretty indirect.) The metro is planning on building some low income housing at the current site of the Glen Park station parking lot. With luck they'll produce something that's as successful as the HUD projects. //夜凉如水 - the night is as cool as water (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 24th, 2008
7:52 am	etc YouTube: NBC NEWS November 27, 1978 George Moscone & Harvey Milk Dead The comments are amazingly grammatical. Former location of the People's Temple. (Now the site of a post office.) Search the San Francisco Ballot Propositions Database * free (Free WiFi is on its way... hurrah? (The people who can afford devices capable of using this can also afford to pay for their internet while everyone will pay. Another transfer from the poor to the less-poor.) "Nuclear free"? (Do X-ray machines and smoke detectors within the city limits run on magic?) But thank goodness they took a stand for free speech. (That seems to have no hidden downside. But what prompted this? Isn't it entirely redundant? No level of government gets a pass to violate this anyway, right?)) * marijuana (Are the police required to respect "Marijuana Cease Arrest for Possession"?) * pizza * Proposition to require the acquisition, construction, completion and equipment of a telephone system * Rent control (1994) (It seems obvious this would decrease the amount of rental property available. Has anyone tried to estimate what things would look like without this? How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing -- I guess many people will note the source and ignore this.) * Allowable Rent Increases (1992) * Compulsory School Busing, Elementary School (1970) Hm. Here's a quote from How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing that caught my attention: Excluding Outsiders The exclusion of newcomers may even emerge as the main purpose of rent control, particularly in small, self-identified cities. Many of the small New Jersey municipalities with rent control are close-knit ethnic communities that do not particularly welcome newcomers. One of their major fears is apartment complexes that will bring in large numbers of outsiders and "change the character of the community." Rent control has proved an effective tool for making sure that small, exclusionary-minded communities do not have to undergo change. Santa Monica is a beach community near Los Angeles that was discovered by urban professionals after the construction of the Santa Monica Freeway in 1972. These newcomers, many originally from New York, immediately set about trying to limit new construction, pulling up the ladder to keep out those that would follow them. In particular, they opposed a series of high-rise apartments proposed for the beachfront. The newcomers soon discovered that imposing rent control not only guaranteed themselves cheap apartments but hampered further development as well. The result has been a virtually closed community. It is almost impossible for newcomers to find apartments in Santa Monica. As Mark Kann, a Los Angeles newspaper columnist, reported in Middle Class Radicalism in Santa Monica, a book that celebrated rent control, "I knew one professional woman who tried to get a Santa Monica apartment for more than a year without success, but she broke into the city, finally, by marrying someone who already had an apartment there." [8] The city is also famous for its homeless population and is often called "The Homeless Capital of the West." His observations in general seem quite plausible to me. I'd especially like to gather more data on rental prices to confirm his observations about the differences in distributions in rent between rent-controlled and non-rent-controlled cities, also including cities outside the U.S. Distribution in San Francisco Distribution in Chicago (I don't quite see a "nice bell shape" in the Chicago data -- log-normal? Weibull? -- but the discrepancy in the distances between the medians and general shapes of distributions is quite noticeable. But now how should we account for other differences between the cities other than rent control in explaining this?) //Also, are there any sites that do some fact checking on Persepolis? I guess that would be almost sacrilegious, but for example, I see some sources claiming that it was religious extremists who torched the Rex Cinema in 1978 rather than the Shah... well, Satrapi says, "But the people knew it was the Shah's fault!", but, of course, the people "know" many things which are false. //Another YouTube video but with less grammatical comments. //Defienda el control de renta (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 17th, 2008
9:58 pm	Mt. Davidson, Ocean Beach My bad sense of direction here threw me off again today. The bus I thought would take me home after walking up Mt. Davidson instead took me out to the beach (past the zoo and a garden center which I'll return to). It was a happy accident in a way although I might've gone to a jazz show or done some more useful writing if I hadn't been walking past dead jellyfish. The top of Mt. Davidson was sold, a sign informed me, so that the giant cross there could be preserved in the face of a court ruling finding it unconstitutional. On my way to this sign, I saw two, three or four hummingbirds, but at least two because they occasionally chased each other, at other times zooming up and hovering, letting out a ch-ch-ch, before darting back down. Green, shiny, tiny. I didn't see any red sparkles. One garter snake slipped off the path. Then further up another. I should go to sleep. I cannot write straight. From the sign I just barely made out the cross shrouded in fog as it was. Before it I stepped into my first mud in California. In fact there were puddles. Everything was damp. Ferns grew from the trunks of the trees. I loved it almost as much as I loved getting blasted yesterday by the damp wind atop Twin Peaks. I do not understand the attraction of wine tasting or lattes. I did tell someone which way to go for "foreign cinema" though. What a disappointment that place is! I was eating a street vendor hot dog when I gave the directions. The hot dog was also a disappointment. I think the people asking for the directions were amused by my slobbiness. Maybe they will get eaten by an anarchist. It happens. The sand was gray and packed. Here and there flies worked on rotting bunches of kelp. Here and there too were clearish blobs. Destroyed jellyfish I guess. I only saw one bird try at them. Walking north, the beach was more and more littered with pebbles and shells, in particular sand dollars and halves of crabs. One sand dollar was still purple and hairy. When I turned it over, I could see its little arms rippling. I took it to the edge of the water and tossed it in. I'm not sure if that was helpful. The second most delightful thing on the beach were the shorebirds scurrying nervously about, following the water out to poke about with their beaks and then running back again as the next wave came in. Oh, yes, and yesterday I watched as the San Francisco Mime Troupe finished packing up its truck in Glen Park. They were talking. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
12:22 pm	Jimmy Wales Jill sent me a link about Mark Phelps, which led me to wonder about whether Mark Spitz was alive, which led me to his Wikipedia article, which led me to discover... which led me to wonder... about Jimmy Wales... (He's a Hayek-loving Objectivist?!)... which led me to this awesome article in Reason on Jimmy Wales. My walk yesterday led me to the top of one of the Twin Peaks and then to the other. Today, I plan to walk up Mt. Davidson. I also got terribly turned around, making two loops, one that took me past the San Francisco Police Academy twice, and I passed over the the intersection of 30th and Noe at least thrice. But now I know that Chenery's another not unreasonable route for walking/biking to Church and onto downtown San Francisco. From the Studivz group "Ich war Atheist, bis ich merkte, daß ich Gott bin!" [I was an atheist until I noticed that I'm a god.] ...gibt's dazu noch irgendwas zu sagen? Ich bin Gott, du bist Gott, wir sind Götter und wenn wir zusammen speisen gibt's Götterspeise....yeahaaaaww PS: When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself. by Johannes D. [Is there anything else to say about that? I'm a god, you're a god, we're gods, and when we dine together there's jello.... // speisen -- to dine, die Goetterspeise/der Wackelpudding -- jello (I thought "jello" meant something sexual in British English, but I have not found any confirmation of this.)] I was really on Studivz just now looking for this though: "Nett" ist die kleine Schwester von "Scheisse"! ["Nice" is the little sister of "shit"!] (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 16th, 2008
3:13 pm	dalet vav dalet Maybe someone else will have fun with this: Hebrew romanization. Very incomplete and questionably correct. It served the purpose I was looking for though, which was getting the names of the characters used on http://www.linguanaut.com/english_hebrew.htm A much neater script going in the opposite direction for Arabic: Arabic Transliteration Now I'm going to go eat something and get some exercise. (Comment on this)
Friday, August 15th, 2008
7:40 pm	Comments As I ran up the stairs to the DMV, a man smiled and called after me, "Hurry! Hurry!" I pushed through the doors and found myself at the end of a slow moving line. On the way back, a train arrived just as I reached the top of the stairs to descend to the platform. I ran down and jumped through the doors as they were shutting. "Nice," said a man in a suit sitting just inside. Then I thought about it another second and realized the train was going the opposite direction from what I needed. --- I'm amazed by the inefficiency I saw at the DMV. (I've heard other people complain, but it's another thing to see it in person. My first interaction with them was the phone system -- no obvious Web form (how could that not be way cheaper and more accurate than a phone system?) -- through which I tried to order a form to be delivered to my address. It never arrived.) I think what got to me the most is that not only is the test not computerized, they actually have a human correct it right there, a human who is in charge of several other functions leading to a couple of lines of other humans intersecting at this one human who pauses and causes everyone else to pause while he corrects. Who the heck designed this process? On my way out, a boy and his father were trying to get into the bathroom. There was a sign in English on the door telling people to ask the guard for a key. They seemed to speak Mandarin but not English. I didn't remember the word for key though. 钥匙 (yao4 shi)? Would it've been helpful to say "Ninmen yao4 yao4 shi"? Well, someone else was going off to get the guard for them as I left. I was really not so irritated when I was there, just bemused. But I'm hungry now. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
8:14 pm	Today at lunch we heard about a poor girl with the name of Bích Ho. She changed it once she left high school. Definition of bích: "Bluish green"? What? Or should that be "bich": Official Home Page of singer Ngoc Bich Ngan No, I guess it is "bích": Vietnamese Names for Girls: "Bi'ch: jade" Also, this phrase just came up in conversation just now: 如虎添翼 Using DimSum from here, I find: 如 ru2 = if, 虎 hu3 = tiger, 添 tian1 = to add, 翼 yi4 = wing. "If I can speak English like a native speaker, I will be a tiger with wings." (Google Translate translates the characters as "Become more.") Also from lunch today: 龙 long2 = dragon Something to mine for ideas: Zhongwen Development Tool. I would like to make a Web app using some of the logic that must be in there (naturally with a compatible license). I'm very tired. I'm not sure if I'll fall asleep soon. Tomorrow I will shower at work since my landlady has put some fresh caulk in the shower. A good time to start exercising. Mooo. So far this week, I have done zero push-ups. [Diese Woche habe ich keinen Liegestütz gemacht?] (Comment on this)
9:46 am	This morning A line of men along Cesar Chavez - Army in groups of two, three, and four, chatting and occasionally waving at cars going by. Waiting for work for the day? A crew was at work on a house down the block from me, the roof covered in people tearing it up and exposing the black. Two cops walked by as I walked to the Glen Park metro. One was gesturing with his nightstick around the corner of the building. "We often get called here to..." On Mission I saw a new seahorse had popped up. "... knows that no one is illegal." The alley has a mural. I forget its URL. The address listed on the school's mural was http://www.josefnorris.com/ The kids painted portraits of various activists. One of them was a muralist with "Evicted" under his job description. I don't remember if that one was Josef Norris. Also seen: A black button lying in the sidewalk. A woman looking freshly showered who said through the iron bars of the fence, "Which way to the main office?" A man crouched over at the top of the stairs scrubbing at the gum stuck there with a toothbrush and turpentine. A Heineken truck. The curb lined with recycling bins. Other mornings I have seen: A mustached man on a moped with an American flag waving above the poodle looking out of the back basket. A pepperoni pizza sitting on the huge grate by the metro. Chinese restaurant menus on every door. (Comment on this)
Monday, August 11th, 2008
9:07 pm	Popping up to public. Poppen, poppen. Marys Shoppen. Blanc Sie schlank und weitermachen bis die Elefanten den Eisschrank tanken. Mangels to Miramar over Monterey. Nothing but houses all the way but didn't see the one that fell. Whoops! I guess the hole is the other way. The joke I was looking for: "How do you get an elephant into an oak tree?" Answer: "Have him sit on an acorn and wait." * The first set of jokes I found: Wikipedia Oh gnos! [I wish I knew more so that I could fix this travesty.] //Suspect booked in Glen Park slaying (August 8, 2008) //There's an SF Ren Faire this weekend! I'm strongly thinking of going to this. I think this is compatible with being morally straight somehow. (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 10th, 2008
3:09 am	Today walking up the hill towards home, the sun was catching the clouds overhead and making them glow. They were low ones moving fast, twisting round in swirls as they went. The jumbo jets, bigger looking than I'm used to on account of their approach to SFO seemed to stand still, their movement cloaked in that of the faster moving veil. I got propositioned for the first time tonight. "Come on. Give me fifty cents. You want a date? I've got a condom." Fifty cents! I kind of wonder if it was a cop. Getting arrested for paying fifty cents seems almost like it'd be an accomplishment. "Cheapest bastard in San Francisco"? (Somehow this seems in the same league as getting arrested for speeding on a bicycle, a real dream of mine.) Well, I have a feeling the transaction would not close so cleanly if it was not a cop. I also saw and smelled someone smoke what I guess was crack for the first time. He sat a seat over from me at the bus stop, brought a little glass tube out, and heated up the end up of it with a lighter, filling the shelter with an acrid smell (not pot, which I also smelled on someone else tonight, woo). (I remember Jake talking about guys coming into the convenience store he was clerking in Minneapolis who'd buy up ornamental roses packaged in glass tubes. I got the impression they stocked these with an understanding of the use they'd be put to.) Our local library has what seems to me a really weird (but wonderful) selection of books including Penrose's Road to Reality, something by Sartre, and a guide to writing open source video games. There's also a large section on sex. I'd say close to half of the DVDs are in Mandarin only with a significant portion of the remainder Spanish only. (Well, maybe I'll check the online catalog somehow to verify this. But probably I won't bother.) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 9th, 2008
11:14 am	I wonder if this is understandable to Mandarin speakers: 2008 Beijing Olympics Torch Ceremony Song-In My Heart. Compare it to this: Beijing Welcome You [MV] 2008 Olympic Game 北京歡迎妳 (Of course, with the latter, it helps that they repeat the same words over and over for almost 7 minutes.) A translation: Weekly Chinese Song Learning – “Beijing Welcomes You” //I'm heading out now to look for a Vietnamese restaurant. This has inspired me to spend a few minutes studying Vietnamese. Quốc Ngữ (national language) was developed by missionaries in the 17th century and has today nearly totally displaced an earlier system based on Chinese characters -- Chữ-nôm. Truyện Kiều -- "an epic poem in Vietnamese written by the 18th century writer Nguyễn Du (1766–1820), widely regarded as the most significant work of Vietnamese literature." Cảm ơn -- thank you Không sao đâu. -- you're welcome Vâng -- yes Không -- no cá -- fish bò -- beef gà -- chicken trứng -- eggs xà lách -- salad (Is this based on a Roman language?) bánh mì -- bread cơm -- cooked rice nước trà -- tea (trà = chah = chai) nước -- water * danh từ -- noun Xem Trang Đầu Tiên Tìm Được -- I'm feeling lucky Tôi nhớ bạn lắm -- I missed you so much. Cái này giá bao nhiêu? -- How much is this? Cài này là gì? -- What is this? Chúc may mắn -- good luck Tốt / xấu / bình thường -- good / bad / so-so Tôi đói / khát -- I'm hungry/thirsty (Tôi = I) Gì cơ? ở đâu? -- What? Where? * [cá -- fish, cơm -- rice, sà lách -- salad (uh-oh, which spelling is right?), nước -- water] No Values Voters cá -- fish, cơm -- rice, nước -- water, bò -- beef, gà -- chicken, vâng -- yes, không -- no, cảm ơn -- thank you (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008
1:59 pm	Thanks to Snapz, maybe this is a manageable list of photos. Maybe that irritating pop-up will actually be useful for once? [The answer is no. Looks like Photobucket is either stopping them from picking out the content in question or they're even worse than I thought.] a urinal in the Museum of Modern Art a cell phone tower by the Glen Park metro station someone who walked in front of me while I was trying to take a photo "But you should know that..." some pine cones palm trees the pair of scissors that doesn't work very well (and some fish that may have made me sick) greenish water under a bridge greenish water in the open whitish water on the sand a container ship so small that it's hard to see I guess I should not speak in terms of hating things, especially things given to me for free. But there are a few things that I would like to see in a photo uploading program that I am missing. I would like it to put photos into a sensible order by default (sorted by file name?). I would like it to make it easy to label several photos at once (or at least talk to a program that let's me do this). It would be especially nice if it would allow me to sort based on the time data embedded into the photos. (I'm looking forward to the day when cameras will embed the location as well as the time. Does the latest iPhone do this?) Does Picasa do a good job with all this? How hard would it be to write a program to do these things? It doesn't seem incredibly hard. My goodness... I need to get the heck out of here. There are people starving. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
10:27 pm	It's really unfortunate that Danhua and I didn't get to eating this fruit while she was still around. I had the mango tonight, and it was delicious, maybe the most delicious mango I've had. Sweet, tangy and almost creamy in texture. I imagined it was something like durian is supposed to be like for people who like it. Then I got to trying the papaya, and it is like how I remember durian actually being, that is, retch inducing. Maybe it's supposed to smell like vomit? Traveling within the space of Western foods, I very rarely have hit things I cannot stand. I guess I do not have to venture too far to have my stomach turned though. (Last week I tried seaweed. Hmm. Bleh.) We got to Baker Beach this weekend. My nose is peeling a bit. I shouldn't have refused the sunscreen. We saw two wee-wees going whee whee but only heard about female nudity. (A girl was talking on her cell phone on the bus about getting help cleaning some sand off from her chest from a high school classmate she hadn't seen for years who might be gay since his nipples are pierced and he was looking buff and he was casual about touching her chest.) In Haight we saw a band of people dressed in Hindu outfits handing out pamphlets and beating drums while they danced down to a park full of homeless men wearing leather who had tattooed leathery faces and who seemed very amused by their visitors. //wretch, a scoundrel (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
2:12 am	A squeak of wheels. Wheels clicking. Sand crushed against the pavement. Metal rattling. A shopping cart I guess. Silence. A clink of glass bottles. A plastic bottle bouncing on the ground. Silence. A squeak of wheels. Someone going through the recycling bins lining the street looking for redeemable bottles I guess. I should've been asleep hours ago. Made it to Chinatown on Sunday but not to the parks or to the beach. I count this as a failure. I was in a hurry though because my landlady invited me to share supper. Her grandson caught a fish out in the bay and gave it to her. It was tasty. (I wonder if it made me a little ill on Monday though.) Found out that a family friend died Monday. I'm not sure if my letter made it in time. I'd like to think she read it though. Time to try sleeping again. (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 20th, 2008
9:54 am	My wanderings yesterday eventually took me up to Bernal Heights. (Snapz makes narrow links unusable, doesn't it? I think I may quit this place.) Around the base, twisted layers of rock stuck out from the material the paths were cut through -- red soil packed with broken stone, blue-green and brown. What is this stuff? Wikipedia doesn't say (yet)? I'm surprised. But this makes up for it: List of hills in San Francisco I guess the fact that this makes me laugh means it's time for breakfast. I will try walking to Dolores Park soon and hopefully also Baker Beach. (I'm not sure how I'll get there though.) Recent acquisitions: library card (and yesterday books from the library: Plants of the San Francisco Bay Region, Trees of the San Francisco Bay Region, Black Elk Speaks), sheets, a towel, dice, paper, envelopes, pens, a brush and dustpan, headphones (way overpriced... crap!), a bike lock, a bank account. Somewhat less recent: playing cards (I'm learning to shuffle), a wastebasket, Lysol, tile cleaner, a brush, sponges, a bed cover, a shower curtain, books on Spanish, Hindi, Korean, and French, fluorescent light bulbs, a throw rug, spoons, toilet paper, soap, terrible scissors with a loose blade, a couple Chinaware bowls for decoration, a foldable hamper. Still remaining to buy: a bicycle, a helmet, a bicycle pump, exercise shorts, shoes that aren't falling apart, a blanket, paper for drawing, watercolor paints and a brush, a hard drive for backups, a couple warm shirts (I'm shivering). I went to a party Friday evening at the kind invitation of a coworker. Didn't really talk too much. I'm still figuring out what to do at such a thing. I expected to get hassled going to and from it, but the streets were mostly empty and the neighborhood seemed pretty ritzy. Talked with a real estate developer for a bit. His company is doing okay. Met a devoted motorcyclist who expects to die young. His father died in a crash and a friend of his lost a leg. He described going along the curvy parts of 1 (?) at 50 miles per hour, touching the ground at each turn. He rode a bicycle to the party though. Met someone working on growing livers at Stanford. (I didn't notice her drinking so I guess she was preserving hers.) Met an imaging engineer at Lockheed-Martin who was working on protecting his sister's honor. Ate some really nice crackers with cheese baked onto them. Drank some green punch -- yellow plus blue. An angel (it was a costume party) described the ingredients but I just remember vodka. I mostly tasted pineapple and didn't feel drunk. I guess this means I didn't have enough. I caught the tram back home. It reminds me a lot of Dortmund. (And the electric powered buses remind me of Poltava. I guess this is just because I haven't spent much time in other bigger cities.) When I got on, I showed the driver my dollar fifty and waited for him to take it. He wore dark sunglasses and had a large beard and kept his face towards the street ahead as I stood there. After a few seconds of waiting, he just said, "Take a seat." There was just one other person on the tram, an older fellow. He held an empty cardboard box and moved up to a seat by the front as I entered. "Tomorrow's my last day", he said. "You're still working?" the driver said. "Yeah," he said. "If you start out poor, you've got to work old." "Ain't that the truth." "Yeah, ain't it." The driver again wouldn't take my money as I left. Was it supposed to be free? (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 13th, 2008
11:44 pm	Glen Park I made it to Glen Park proper this evening. Signs around the park stated that smoking was prohibited due to the extreme danger of fire. It was easy to imagine flames climbing up the tall eucalyptus and pines. In some areas, the vegetation had been hacked away and the ground raked -- fire breaks? Or just gardening? I plan to volunteer with the garden club next Sunday. I'm also looking at this. Occasionally an acorn-like fruit would rain down. I've seen these around Joost and thought there must be some oaks... somewhere. But today I saw they were coming from the eucalyptus. I guess green they are immature. There are also some neat trees growing near the rec center. They have what seem would rightly be called compound compound leaves -- extremely tiny leaves arranged along stems themselves arranged along stems so that from a distance the larger units appear as leaves. The hillsides were pockmarked with burrows. The resident rodents did not seem tame but they also didn't seem shy. One jumped into its burrow as I approached but still remained peering out of the entrance. Voles? I'll buy a plant guide the next time I have a chance. (Somehow I have spent all of my cash.) Today I also put up a new shower curtain and scrubbed down the tub and walls some more. While I was putting the curtain together, another roommate showed up. I didn't know he existed. He seems nice enough though. He helped finish putting the curtain together. I didn't get as much programming done as I'd hoped to, but it is past my bed time. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 12th, 2008
9:59 am	DMV Sample Class C Written Test - #3 4. You want to make a right turn at an upcoming intersection. You should slow down and: ... Avoid driving in the bicycle lane. FALSE ... Maybe driving in California will be fun after all. I'll probably be the one on the bike though. (Ah, okay. #7 here explains this.) [I wish there was an extension to URLs' anchor syntax to handle regular expressions and character offsets -- does anyone use slashes in names anyway? Eg, I would like to be able to enter "http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/interactive/tdrive/clc6written.htm#/When can you drive in a bike lane/" and have Firefox autoscroll to display the first portion of the document matching the pattern /When can you drive in a bike lane/. I guess this would "break the internet" since it would encourage non-standard coding although on the other hand, browsers not understanding the syntax would just ignore it (already having to be tolerant of missing anchor elements due to the abundance of crappy HTML). I could write a proxy server to insert an anchor at the first match or a given position, but this seems like too much work... well, I suppose I could just serve the raw HTML without fixing links and images, but that'd be kind of shabby.] All right. I've successfully passed all of the practice exams. Photos from our West Virginia trip: St. Louis, Mammoth Cave, the wedding (in Lewisburg, West Virginia), Shenandoah National Park (former home of multiple communities wiped out to make way for tourists), Washington, DC, and back. Is it right to be irritated by Schumer's shamelessness?: Regulators Seize Mortgage Lender. I wonder what his position on insider trading is. This is also a way of signaling the "inevitable" (but perhaps more socially useful). Google News picked out this article: Cases Of Melanoma Skin Cancer Sharply Increased in Young Women, which recommends avoiding exposure to ultraviolet. This immediately brought to mind this post pointed out by patrissimo. I think I will still avoid the tanning salon. Are there many JavaScript apps using Google Charts for producing images? Seems like a neat way to get graphical output. I converted Graph to use it (old version) and am happy with the results (although I gained a bit of stress trying to get the online editor in Pages to accept my code -- the solution is to upload your own file). I have lots of other ideas for little projects to use this on. And holy cow is it time to get out of here for the day. (Before I leave though, I will spray my bed down with a good dose of Lysol and open the windows. I think I am beginning to smell traces of the previous occupant a.k.a "the dirtbag.") //Missions for today: Use the bus, buy a garbage can, buy a small rug/chunk of cloth, buy a plant, buy some fresh fruit, get Morris a summary of the forensics experiment, get the code for Maitra finished and running. Goals for the next year: Spend less than $30 a day on average (excluding rent) -- should be easily doable. So far, I believe I have spent approximately the following: $20 taxi, $2 BART, $2 BART, $10 BART + Caltrain, $25 taxi, $20 books, $10 food, $8 meal, $40 cleaning and other supplies, $2 BART, $30 various supplies, over 7 days which comes to around $24 per day. Hmmm. Well, I should be spending zero on taxis and cleaning supplies for a good while. I was thinking of going to a club tonight. Walking around downtown might be just as exciting though, especially if I get robbed. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 11th, 2008
11:26 pm	Channel 8 is in Mandarin! There's got to be a Spanish channel too. Woohoo! I'm eating Safeway bought cashews and thinking about going to DNA Lounge. But it's not quite midnight, and I'm ready to go to sleep. Zzzzzz. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 6th, 2008
3:03 pm	I took these and uploaded them mostly to document the condition of the place for when I leave, but anyway, some photos of the place I'll call home. I plan to head out in a bit to check out the neighborhood some more. (I was shocked to see it is in fact "Power Ranger" and not a dinosaur on the end of the bed. My memory's less reliable than I thought.) Things to buy: coat hangers, an alarm clock, some drinking cups, a bicycle lock, a shower curtain, hand soap, a plant. The owner gave me a packet of biscuits yesterday. I just munched on a few more: "Egg Yolk Biscuit / Vegetarian Health Food / Delicious Nutrition." They are delicious. Con mucho gusto -- with much pleasure Muy amable -- that's very kind Perdone - excuse me No sé -- I don't know ¿Entiende? -- Do you understand? ¿Podría repetirlo, por favor? -- Could you repeat that please? la carta -- the menu Voy a tomar esto -- I'll have this. la cuenta -- the bill bu2 yong4 xie4 -- you're welcome huan1 ying2 -- welcome ni3 xiang3 chi1 shen2 me? -- what would you like to eat? ni3 shi4 cong2 nar3 lai2 de? -- where are you from? zhu4 ni3 hao2 yun4 -- good luck [Should hao really have the second tone here? *] //vrai ou faux -- true or false (3 Comments |Comment on this)
7:01 am	home I have a place in Glen Park now. I'm still not sure how I'll get to work on Monday. A taxi is probably the safest route. (Caltrain's trip planner suggests it would take 3 hours to get there using public transit! Maybe I have made a bad decision. But I think driving, the time should be more on the order of at most an hour, and I plan to use alternative transportation anyway. (I remember last time, the Caltrain site suggested it would take 2 hours to get from my hotel in the same city to the interview when I could've certainly walked that distance in less time.)) The neighborhood reminds me very much of the residential neighborhoods in Dortmund and nearby cities -- super densely packed houses, most of them with a tiny, very neatly kept garden along the street. There was no traffic on the street as I walked on it, up the hill from the BART startion, but there were a fair number of cars parked along the sides of it. The other fellow renting a room in the house had a Prius parked in the driveway. The area seems bikable, at least if you can stand a steep incline. (I'm not sure I could make it. I was a little out of breath just walking up the hill. I guess though that when I'm in a hurry, I'll be wanting to go downhill anyway.) I think the housing materials are also similar to what I saw in Dortmund. Lots of stucco and cement and even some wood slatting. Many of the plants are new to me though. There were a couple neighbors out in their yards, chatting with each other as I walked by. They looked to be middle-aged. They didn't stare at me. My room is furnished. I guess it used to belong to a child though. The bed is a little short (although fine for me) and has a dinosaur painted on the end of it. //Ted Dunning: From Surprise and Coincidence to Parallel and Uncertain This looks interesting. (4 Comments |Comment on this)