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Happy 2010 Winter Solstice!
- To: robert-friends
- Subject: Happy 2010 Winter Solstice!
- From: http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert (Robert)
- Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2010 06:51:58 -0800
Happy Winter Solstice!
Here is my latest contact information:
Robert
.
where-I-live
my-Oakland-voicemail-number (voicemail)
our-San-Jose-phone-number
our-Oakland-cell-phone-number (cell)
http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert
My solstice update is below.
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News
Lifestyle
* Careers
* Same as it ever was. I remember my 10th grade Modern European
History teacher, Ms. Sirkin, saying that not everyone can do well in
school because otherwise there would be no one to sweep the floors.
So, naturally, 10% of all employees at my workplace are required to
be losers. That is, they don't advance at all, get no pay
increases, and no bonuses. I managed to fall into that gap this
year. I'm thankful that I have a frugal lifestyle so this is
affordable, but, 'though looking back at it and wasn't a surprise,
it was the first time this has happened. Maybe the beginning of the
inevitable decline. [BTW, it's ironic that I received a D on the
Modern European History final exam.]
* Home
* In the middle of the street. We bought a house and closed on Mar 8.
We moved in on Apr 21. It's about 2.5 blocks away from our old place.
The mortgage plus property taxes are just slightly higher than our
rented place was. Looks like we won't be seeking cohousing in Silicon
Valley any time soon. See pictures at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/noelle/sets/72157623854878391 .
* The warmest people in the warmest months. Since we were unable to
come to consensus with everybody on a particular date, we decided to
have 2 housewarming parties (potlucks, actually) in June and July.
We made flyers which we passed around the neighborhood and stuck in
people's doors. We also used evite. They were surprisingly
well-attended ('tho there were fewer people in July) and we got to
meet the neighbors. See pictures at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/noelle/sets/72157624628917948 and
http://www.flickr.com/photos/noelle/sets/72157624412284998 .
* Pink, Raspberry, or Angry Red? We had to have the front room
repainted because the previous owner had glued sound absorbers onto
the walls and it left glue marks. This involved pulling off all the
glue from the walls, sanding down the drywall, and putting on
several layers of paint. We ended up with a mix of colors since
some thought the color ("red raspberry") I had picked was too harsh.
See picture at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/noelle/4556416365 and at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/noelle/4557044776 .
* Measuring intelligence. We had a so-called smart meter installed in
July. It's supposed to allow PG&E read the meter without walking on
to the property. It also allows us to see our typical electricity
usage hour-by-hour via a web site, which is kinda cool. I'm not
sure if others in our neighborhood ever got one of these smart
meters -- we may be the only ones for all I know. I wanted to
schedule a specific time to have it installed since it involves
turning off all the electricity and some of my computers need to
stay on all the time.
* Tree worship. Noelle decided to order a tree from Our City Forest.
There was only a limited selection due to the wires above the tree,
but Noelle wanted a tree that changes color in the Fall. I wanted a
tree that had "soft" leaves rather than sharp ones. We agreed upon
a Japanese Pagoda. (These are surprisingly common trees. I saw
several in New England during my visit there.) In order to obtain
the tree, we had to attend a tree planting workshop. We went in
June and that was also when we got the tree. (It barely fit in the
car.) So, we spend a while digging a big hole putting it in and
Noelle has been watering it religiously. See
http://www.flickr.com/photos/noelle/4848993945 .
* Nothing gained. I like using online bill pay as much as possible.
When we hired a landscaping company to mow our front lawn (when we
had a lawn), I had every intention of paying them via online bill
pay. But, it turned out there was a bit of confusion about it. I
kept expecting to receive a bill that said "no payment due", but I
never received one. I thought that I hadn't prepaid in sufficient
advance so I kept paying. At one point, I realized something was
wrong. I called them and they claimed that, not only was I not
caught up in my payments, but that I owed them money! They insisted
that I create a list of check numbers to verify each payment. I was
amazed that this landscaping company didn't have an accounting
system sufficient to track payments. I began working with my bank
and there was a bit of back and forth. Eventually, after cancelling
my service with the landscaping company, they came to the realization
that they owed me money. We'll mow our own lawn from now on, thank
you very much.
* Water, water nowhere. Noelle made the choice that we needed to get the
lawn replaced with something that wasn't so water hungry. She hired
a company and the native plant garden was installed in November. See
http://www.flickr.com/photos/noelle/5178565217 .
* Pets
* The arrival of one Gary and the passing away of another. In
January, we adopted a black and white cat. His name is Gary. (Gary
Coleman died in May. That was the first proposed name extension,
but many others have come up since.) Noelle was worried about
getting a cat so soon after Dolly died and before we moved into our
house, but it has seemed to have worked out. See
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=gary&w=9249148@N04 .
* Travel
* Go east, old man. Last year, I had leg problems which prevented me
from taking plane flights. So, I had delayed going back east. This
was the year I went, at the end of September. I hadn't seen my
parents since 2006.
* Food
* Lazy vegetables. Earlier this year, we signed up for a Community
Supported Agriculture (CSA) service. This service, rather than
having to drive or ride to pick up your veggies, delivers the box of
organic vegetables directly to your doorstep. It was just the right
service for us since it was the actual picking up of the vegetables
that deterred us in the first place. Our CSA offers monthly tours and
we decided to visit in September. We got to pick a few white radishes
and buy some fruit and listen to a band.
* Working on a great tannin. I have recognized that drinking red wine
upsets my stomach. (Cherries have the same effect.) In September,
we went wine-tasting with a childfree group. I had to step carefully
in what I tried, sticking to just the white wines. Thankfully, the
tasting included both ostensibly dry wines and sweet wines. (I didn't
feel the white wines were dry enough.) We ended up buying the sweet
white wines since they had an unusual and good flavor.
* People
* Missing persons. Last solstice message, some messages bounced. I no
longer have email addresses for these people:
Louis Dunne
Clayton Glad
Louise Zivnuska
Bruce Moreland
Chris Golden
If you're in contact with any of these people, please tell them that
I am missing their email addresses.
Entertainment
* Radio
* Pulled kicking and screaming into the 21st century. The battery
cover on my personal FM radio finally broke off and disappeared
somewhere. So, I was forced to buy a replacement. I did a bit of
research and decided that I would try to find an MP3 player with an
FM tuner receiver that was also compatible with Ubuntu. Only
Sandisk's Sansa MP3 player fit the bill. I bought it at a local
store in September. I don't like having to recharge it via USB
(batteries would have been better), but it seems to work for my
purposes. I even brought it on the plane and played podcasts and it
worked out fine.
* Movies
* DVDs by mail. Netflix unhappily got rid of its "friends" feature.
So, if you were my Netflix friend in the past, you are not now.
However, my Netflix queue is always available via an RSS feed at
http://tinyurl.com/qu8lj (a.k.a.
http://rss.netflix.com/QueueRSS?id=P8598597045281752300300559819027949 ).
Our Netflix instant queue is available from
http://rss.netflix.com/QueueEDRSS?id=P8598597045281752300300559819027949 .
* Beyond DVDs. All my Movielens ratings are available at
http://tinyurl.com/robertsmovielens . This year, I stuck all
ratings of movies which are not on Movielens but which I have seen on
http://filmaster.com/profile/robertb/ratings .
* Books
* Quantatative easing 4 you! In June, we saw the author Elaine Aron
talk about her newest book "The Undervalued Self". It was a break
away from the "sensitive person" theme of her last books.
Psychology is the focus of this book and the book introduces the
concepts of "ranking" and "linking" and how some people prefer one
over the other, both for themselves and others, and the ways it
helps certain people and hurts others. Lately, I have been thinking
about inferiority complexes and self-esteem issues and am convinced
that these issues are the main reason why more people are not
indignant about income inequality and eroding civil liberties in
this nation. I haven't read this book, but I'm wondering if it may
hold an answer to this predicament.
* Every vegetarian is illuminated. Jonathan Safran Foer was the
featured speaker at the Commonwealth Club of Silicon Valley in
September and we knew we had to see him. He talked about his most
recent book "Eating Animals", a book questioning why humans still
eat animals and whether it should still be done. Raj Patel (also a
great guy) was the one interviewing him on the stage.
* Television
* A fix 'cause I'm goin' down. We had to live without streaming video
for a few weeks in Jan when our Roku died. It was past its
warranty, but Roku gave us a discount when replacing the unit,
anyway. We don't watch streaming video that often, actually, since
most titles available in that form are not compelling (and lack
features, like the specials and closed captioning).
* Music
* Living on a lighted screen. Noelle found a small ad in the local
free weekly rag in June announcing the one day (a Wednesday, no
less) screening of the movie about the band Rush, "Rush: Beyond the
Lighted Stage". So, we ended up having to buy the tickets for the
late night showing and waiting in a very long line at our local
theater. It was a pretty good movie, 'tho, and covered all the
important points, I think.
* Theater
* Mime is the word. "Posibilidad, or Death of the Worker" was this
year's SF Mime Troupe show. As usual, it was excellent (and
reinforced the message author Juliet Schor conveys in her recent
book and also, of course, Naomi Klein). We managed to combine this
event with the local vegan meetup group. So, after the play, we
went to Saturn Cafe in downtown Santa Cruz and had some yummy,
fattening food.
* FDR has left the building. In July, we saw Ed Asner play FDR in a
one-man play/monologue. (Yeah, Ed Asner as FDR -- sort of a
stretch.) It was interesting and entertaining. It's a relief that
there are still people like Ed Asner in the world, but, with this
year's death of Howard Zinn, it seems like there are fewer and fewer
of these sorts of people left.
Politics/Society
* Voting/Elections
* Bad pot luck. Cans had the opportunity to legalize
marijuana but didn't manage to do so. Other election results were
disappointing, including the re-election of ex-governor Jerry
(who will probably end up being Schwarzenegger-lite). In fact, I'm
not too optimistic, politically-speaking, about the future.
Technology
* Computers
* Hardware
* PC
* No thanks for the memories. My desktop at my computer finally
died. The memory went bad and, given that the machine was so
old, it's impossible to get memory for that sort of computer.
(My desktop at home runs the same risk since it's variant of the
same Dell model.) As a replacement "machine", I ended up
installing and running Virtualbox on my work's laptop. My hope
was to get Windows working under Linux, but I couldn't get it to
work. The other way around did work (Linux under Windows).
But, since I don't trust Windows farther than I can throw it,
the machine is dual-boot and I'm running Linux in the other
partition. So, when Windows fails me again, I'll still be able
to work, if necessary. (FWIW, Virtualbox works very well. I
even listen to podcasts within the Linux guest.)
* Fixing a hole. After hearing a story from the Wall Street Journal
about various companies tracking all of us, I decided to pump up
my privacy settings. In addition to running privoxy, I installed
RequestPolicy and BetterPrivacy in Firefox. The former is slightly
redundant with privoxy, but privoxy doesn't handle ssl (https)
encrypted pages entirely, so RequestPolicy takes up the slack
(sometimes). (I tried NoScript, but it is simply not as powerful
as privoxy, despite it having the advantage of working on ssl
encrypted pages.) BetterPrivacy gets rid of flash cookies, which
I only learned about this year (I'm a little slow).
* Software
* PC
* Linux
* Cutting down on deep fried...laptops. A few months before we
moved, I plugged in my Dell laptop one day and I saw a spark
at the outlet. I thought nothing of it until I tried using my
laptop. It suddenly was frozen. So, I hard-booted it and it
would always stall mid-boot. Only after several minutes of
frustration did I realize that I had fried my motherboard. I
had only had that laptop for 2.5 years before I had to replace
it. (Perhaps that's standard operating procedure for most
people?) After some research of what ran Ubuntu reasonably, I
decided upon an Acer Aspire laptop. I should have also read
the reviews. The keyboard is unpleasant and the design and
placement of the touchpad is horrible. I really miss my Dell.
(Looking back on it, a Compaq, HP, Dell, or Lenovo would've
been a better choice.) Ubuntu is installed on a separate
partition in a dual-boot fashion, allowing booting of either
Ubuntu or Windows 7. (Yep, I now have Macrosoft software
again!)
* Mac
* A hard disk's a-gonna fail. Noelle's computer, just before its
warranty was about to end, died. The hard drive on her PowerPC
Mac started getting all sorts of errors. It was pretty unstable,
but she kept using it until June. We bought a new Mac (Intel-based).
Apple's policies towards PowerPC users (they stopped updating the
software) made me mad. So, the first thing I did was install
Ubuntu (dual-boot) in the hopes that we can ween ourselves off
MacOSX. My plan was to run the MacOSX partition virtually from
Ubuntu. I still haven't had time to do that. Noelle just uses
Ubuntu for the time being and most things work (except it's not
as intuitive as Mac OSX).