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Happy 2023 Winter Solstice!
- To: robert-friends
- Subject: Happy 2023 Winter Solstice!
- From: http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert (Robert)
- Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2023 07:43:28 -0800
Happy Winter Solstice! 🌅
Here is my latest contact information:
Robert
.
where-I-live
my-Oakland-voicemail-number (voicemail)
our-San-Jose-phone-number
http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert
http://www.
My solstice update is below.
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News
Lifestyle
* Home
* Yes, but, is solar good for the soul? It took a mere 9 months
before starting the process of getting solar panels up on the
roof and actually having them installed. No sooner than they
were in place on the roof in February when we found out that the
battery was recalled. Thankfully, we remained dependent on the
grid for just a few more weeks until the replacement came
through. To finalize my vision of continuing some semblance of
a life after the coming earthquake, I convinced Noelle to buy a
hybrid plugin when she needed to replace her car in April so we
can run off electricity for a while. Next steps are to replace
the natural gas-powered appliances.
* The dread of the pool overhead. Where I sit or put stuff can
matter when there is the danger of pooled water bursting through
the ceiling. Every time it rains, I worry. Our roof guy kept
coming over and over again, adding more and more sealant. When
I last climbed up on the roof, I saw all of the sealant sitting
there on top of the ceramic tiles. We haven't seen any rain
come through, but, given how long this leak has been there, I'm
not too hopeful that the problem of seeping water has been
permanently fixed.
* Old man atmospheric river. It just kept rolling along. And it
had its designs set on flooding our basement in early January.
It was our first use of the water pump for about 4 years and it
did come through for us. I did make the unfortunate discovery
that the amount of water in our quarter basement is more than
will fit in a 5-gallon bucket; it gave me an excuse to mop the
kitchen floor, but forced me to rejigger the set up. I moved
the outlet hose so it went out the door and away from the house.
* Extending book shelves. Our book shelves are always overflowing
with books. It was a no-brainer that when, in April, the
Rotary Club offered little free libraries to those interested,
we jumped at the chance. It took several months for the project
to churn through the system, but, in mid-September, a couple of
Rotary Club people assembled and placed the library in front of
our home. There's a school down at the end of the block, and
the library has many kids books. However, Noelle likes to shake
things up by putting books on anarchism and communism in there.
* Health
* Pandemic
* Not the healthy kind of fiber. It all made sense that, since,
thanks to the solar panels, there was now a reliable source of
electrical power, plain old telephone service could be tossed
aside and our internet connection could be switched from DSL
to fiber with VOIP for the phone service. While the switch
from one to the other seemed fairly painless and resulted in
dramatically faster internet speeds, the phone service didn't
do as well. The phone did work for most cases, but any time
keypad touch tones were required to navigate a phone tree, it
simply would not work. My internet provider would not believe
me, and I had them send someone out. The technicians went
down to the basement with me and I repeatedly showed the
problem to them. We spent almost two hours in the
quarter-basement trying to figure it out; they left baffled.
But, that wasn't all that they left.
* This stinks. A little over 24 hours after they left, I got a
sore throat and felt miserable. It turned into a headache and
coughing. Noelle urged me to take a COVID test. Sure enough,
I got the dreaded Big C! The usual cast of symptoms arrived,
including more coughing, stuffy nose, fatigue, chills, and
fever. While the coughing lasted a big longer, most symptoms
were gone or very reduced in a few days. The scariest part,
however, was that, as I was recovering, I lost my sense of
smell. It's weird losing a sense. You definitely feel like
you're constantly walking in a daze.
* Quarantining is the order of the day. I gave my sickness to
Noelle and we were both sick. We were sick during the weekly
cycle when we would normally buy groceries. Not wanting to
infect anybody during the infectious period, we ordered
groceries online for the first time. It seemed to be pretty
straightforward, but there were more quirks than I expected.
I didn't realize that I would be assigned a shopper. This
person kept texting me messages about what should be chosen
when an item was not available. I probably could have done it
better, but it wasn't the greatest experience, and won't be
doing it again if I can avoid it. Ordering out from
restaurants for home delivery was fine, and may do that again
in the future. (An aside: the above-mentioned telephone
problem was revealed to be a bug in the ONT modem firmware;
after our internet provider informed the modem manufacturer
about it, they pushed out an update with the fix two months
later.)
* Miscellaneous
* Gimme shelter. Or, at least, a tax shelter. This was the
first year that we enrolled in a high-deductible medical plan
with a health savings account. With employer matches, I
figured it to be the cheapest health insurance coverage.
Getting used to it was a bit bumpy. At first, there needed to
be a critical mass of savings before it could start being
used. Setting up the account so it was independent of our
employers involved calling the insurance company multiple times.
(Don't know why it could not be done online.) Keeping
track of which providers were or were not paid requires
vigilance. I hope that "the savings" will all be worth the
extra trouble. Wish we had Medicare for All.
* Family
* Galloping to a gala. When we were informed in mid-August that
Noelle's dad and step-mom were to attend a party in Sonoma
County, our mission became clear: we were to rendezvous with
them prior to this gala. We monomaniacally drove up to
Guerneville on a early Friday afternoon before rush hour
started, stored away our luggage at the motel, and met them soon
after. After squeezing quality out of every minute with them,
we relaxed and explored Guerneville and surrounding areas. You
can see pics at
https://www.flickr.com/photos/noelle/albums/72177720310750640 .
* Transportation
* Commuting
* Goodbye ruby Tuesdays. Or some other equally precious stone.
Although Tuesdays were never special before, I try to put
every Tuesday out of my mind because, starting this year, it's
the day I now go into work. I would have preferred never to
go to the office in the first place since I never talk to
anybody there and find it to be a waste of time, but my
supervisor decided that we will have our team meetings on that
day. The sole benefit I find is that it gives me an excuse to
ride my bike along the river trail.
* Travel
* Joining the peanut gallery at the monkey house. I hadn't been to
any sort of zoo in a very, very long time, but that's where we
landed during a trip to Santa Barbara in early April. Despite
it being a relatively small zoo, tromping around to every
exhibit all day grew to be very exhausting. I looked forward to
going back to the motel and simply zoning out.
* Disposing of the remnants of a life. In late May, we visited my
mom in . We spent more time trying to dispose of more
stuff that my dad owned. As part of that process, we took an
all-day road trip to Grants, , to pull the records of
some property in that my dad bought some years ago.
On the way there, we passed through the Cibola National Forest,
Ramah Navajo Reservation, and the Zuni Reservation, and visited
a sculpture garden and labyrinth in El Morro. Once in Grants,
we found out that the property could not be exactly located. We
then went to a title company and found that it was a very small piece
of land. After doing some web searches, I found that my dad had
bought the land through a broker who sells hundreds of small
lots, and such brokers never expect the buyers to get a return
on their investment nor sell the land. It was a fruitless effort.
You can see some photos at
https://www.flickr.com/photos/noelle/albums/72177720308662836/with/52940241159
* Not never Texas. It was my hope that, for the rest of my life,
I could proudly say that I never went to or through Texas. That
hope was dashed in late May when my only choice for a direct
flight from southern involved a drive to El Paso. I
still had to leave relatively early, but not nearly as
ridiculously early as Noelle went she few out of Roswell. The
one thing that surprised me about Texas was how nice the
highways were. I would've thought that if there were low taxes,
all public infrastructure would be dodgy, but it wasn't that way
at all.
* Institutionalized in paradise. The climate in Big Sur is indeed
warmer than where-I-live, astonishingly. It was in mid-December
when we went to The Esalen Institute to partake in a yoga
workshop, soak in some hot springs, and eat some tasty vegan
food. Just before we had arrived, I had gone to my doctor and
then to my ophthalmologist to have my eyes dilated. Noelle had
to drive us all the way down since, as usual after dilation, I
couldn't see a thing. We felt very rushed to get there in time
for dinner on a Friday. In fact, I felt a little rushed during
the entire weekend, coordinating times to eat, soak, and
stretch. Relaxation seems to be a luxury that I cannot yet
afford.
* Food
* Plant-based cream of the crop. There is a farm animal sanctuary
called Rancho Compasion. In mid-February, we attended a benefit
for this sanctuary. We were served a fancy dinner based on
recipes developed by Miyoko Schinner, owner of a large line of
ready vegan foods. After the dinner, there was an auction for
various services and holidays. Noelle was interested in some,
but each item quickly spiraled upwards in price rendering them
ultimately unaffordable. Clearly, there are some very wealthy
vegans in the area.
* Miscellaneous
* Oven rescue. We've had this toaster oven for almost 20 years
now, and a few years ago, the oven part broke. Rather than
buying a replacement and adding to America's great landfills, we
brought it in to a "repair cafe" in mid-August. They try to
involve you in fixing whatever you bring in. I watched the guy
slowly take this thing apart and when we finally hit the part (a
temperature-based switch), the repair guy used a voltmeter and
found that it was irreparable. He carefully put it all back
together, tested it, and handed it back to us, still broken. We
continue to use it since the toaster part never broke.
Entertainment
* Movies
* Getting back to "Get Back". I had to break off seeing the
remainder of the "Get Back" Beatles documentary after leaving
in April of last year. My thought was that I was
going to see the rest later. The beginning of this year was
"later" when I finally finished it. What struck me about the
series was how just how bossy Paul was. For some reason, I had
always thought that John would've had that role. It's possible
that it was just the snapshot that the camera caught, that John
had stepped back at that point and Paul assumed that role.
* Destroying worlds can be a major bummer. It was late June when
we saw "Oppenheimer" in a iMax theater. The iMax experience was
probably not necessary since the film would've been too loud
either way. Perhaps that was the point -- the loud sounds
created a crazy sort of disturbance. As a director, Christopher
Nolan has his shortcomings, but the film did do a good job at
portraying a man with rather contradictory and dubious morals.
* Television
* Not seeing red. Netflix ended its DVD service and we no longer
see the red envelopes in our mailbox. The physical DVDs had
features not available in most streaming services, such as
specials, interviews, etc. While we still do stream stuff, we
will probably be visiting our local library as a source of DVDs
as well as using more clunky solutions, such as buying them
online and then selling them again.
* Our inevitable future. Michael Moore, on his podcast,
recommended the drama TV series "Extrapolations". It is indeed
eye-opening. We are slowly watching it because it is utterly
depressing. Each night after watching an episode, I have
nightmares. In my most recent one, I dreamt that water was
pouring in through our living room ceiling and I frantically ran
around trying to stop it but couldn't. (If you see the show,
you may figure out why I dreamt that.)
* Spoken word
* Insane in the membrane. Or brain. Or something. Josh
Kornbluth performed his monologue "Citizen Brain" live in
in late July. We hadn't seen him live since 2005.
This was the second time we saw "Citizen Brain", but it was on
Zoom during the pandemic. It was still just as funny and
engaging as the first time we saw it.
* Outdoors
* All the Ohlone people. It was in 2016 when we last went to the
Ohlone Peoples Gathering in Fremont. We decided it was time to
go back in early October. There weren't as many exhibits as
last time, and it was certainly less crowded. It was nice to
walk around Coyote Hills Regional Park in the nice weather.
* Music
* Change, not cents. "Stop Making Sense" was re-released this
year, and, in early October, we saw it at a local theater.
While I had seen parts of it, I had never seen the whole thing.
Never having been a big fan of Talking Heads, I was expecting
that I wouldn't know most of the songs. Surprisingly, I knew a
majority of the songs. It was a very enthralling film.
* No cats or kitties here. We followed the travails of the punk
rock band Pussy Riot for a few years now since Putin made them
popular by getting the members of band locked up in Russia. At a
local rock venue in mid-November, Pussy Riot came with a very
political mixed-media presentation. It was all in Russian, but
there were subtitles on the screen. Despite not seeing the
subtitles clearly (we had to stand far away due to the crowds),
I learned quite a lot about their story and their life in
Russia.
* The Canadians among us. Noelle found out recently that Bruce
Cockburn relocated from Ontario (Canada) to the San Francisco
Bay Area, which explained his frequent local appearances. Bruce
Cockburn is a guitarist and an influential folk artist, and we
saw him on Noelle's birthday. There was an urgency to see him
since he's getting up in years, has arthritis, and may not have
many more concerts left in him.
* Sports
* Getting exercised at the Athletics. The Oakland A's baseball
team is leaving Oakland. Because of this move, ticket prices
for games were very cheap. In August, and then later in
September, we met our friend at the Colisseum BART train station
in Oakland and went to see some baseball games. Not being any
sort of a sports fan, I just hung out, ate some vegan food, and
occasionally glanced towards the field to see what was going on.
* Is it finals? Or playoffs? I don't understand a lot of
basketball, but Noelle enjoys it. During the playoffs or finals
or whatever they're called, we visited a number of restaurants,
pubs, and bars in June to watch the San Francisco-based Golden
State Warriors basketball team play. And, ultimately lose,
which, thankfully, saved us some money.
* Misc
* Nontrivial trivia. Noelle is head of the events subcommittee in
the beer co-op we're member-owners of. One of the recurring
events is trivia on Tuesdays, and, somehow, I was dragged into
this, despite being really terrible at trivia. But, it allows
me to get out of the house and gives us a break from cooking at
home. Conveniently, it ends before my night-time work meetings
with my Indian colleagues begin.
Politics/Society
* Economics
* You'll be tempted to use a fork when eating the rich, but,
please, use a spoon. A new book by Bernie Sanders and John
Nichols came out called "It's Okay to be Angry About Capitalism"
and in early March came to where-I-live to promote their book. The
theater in downtown where-I-live was packed and he was
enthusiastically received. He had great things to say about
economics in the United States, but, recently, he has fallen
short in foreign policy with respect to middle east conflicts.
* Misc
* Cooperation is competing for attention. During the spring and
summer, there were a few co-op-related events in our backyard.
In April, the worker-owned Smart Yards gardening service
installed a laundry-to-yard greywater system. Just a month
later, we had the "Celebration of Cooperation" party sponsored
by The Student Cooperative Alumni Association, with
food and beer donated by Unumhum Brewing Co-Op. In August,
Unumhum Brewing had its meeting to get ideas for future
directions of the co-op, the state of things, and to provide
opportunities for member-owners. Phew.
Technology
* Computers
* Software
* Miscellaneous
* Eeek! My membership in IEEE (Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers) is going all electronic. Some of my
IEEE journals were already online and it took 2 years for me
to catch up, and I finally did so in October. But, now I'll
no longer be getting paper. Same for the ACM (Association
for Computing Machinery). While it does save on physical
space, there will be no piles to remind me to read stuff.
* Hardware
* Networks
* DD-WRT everywhere. The install of solar annoyingly started
infering with my home wifi network. I speculated that there
is a cell phone or equivalent built into the equipment. I
spent some time trying to figure out how to get around the
problem, and I did find a channel with the least interfence.
But, things continued to be unacceptably flakey. To address
the problem, I bought two routers. I thought that they were
going to come with DD-WRT installed, but neither of them
were. So, I ramped up on how to install firmware onto
routers and brought them both up-to-date on the latest
release of DD-WRT. These are connected downstream from the
routers that my ISP provided me with in my fiber
installation.
* PC
* Linux
* Kernel fibers. As if losing touch tones after the fiber
was installed weren't bad enough, the Linux kernel on my
desktop started crashing. (The kernel recovers from the
crash, but I see the traceback in my logs daily.) I
suspect that it was due to much higher throughput speeds,
but it was crashing in the ethernet driver. It would do
this without fail every day at 11:57pm, inexplicably
(there were no cron jobs or anything like that). Upon
doing a series of web searches, some people said that
disabling energy efficient ethernet (eee) in the driver
would fix it. Sure enough, it did. Unfortunately, I have
to re-disable it by hand on each reboot since, no matter
what I do, I cannot get it to disable automatically.
* Feeling deeply the cutting edge. In last year's solstice
message, I whined that I hadn't gone through the trouble
of upgrading my machines to the latest Debian release
(bullseye). That all changed when each of my applications
started failing one-by-one. At first, the Session
messaging app started failing. Then, desktop Signal would
no longer work. With my having a complete dependency upon
Signal, its failure was completely unacceptable. I then
started the laborious process of upgrading all my
machines. I started with the easy ones in the beginning
(my Virtual Private Server and then my desktop machine)
and then moved onto more difficult ones (my mini-laptop
and regular laptop). The easy ones took about one day
each; the difficult ones took two days. My feeling is
that upgrades to future releases will be easier.
* The last mush user. According to
https://popcon.debian.org/non-free/mail/by_inst, it looks
like I'm last person to continue to use mush mail client
a.k.a. the mail user's shell. From what I can tell, it
has been kept alive on my system since 2002. All of my
mail message handling is done through mush and it would be
difficult to switch to anything else, including mutt. (I
had to actively suppress the installation of mutt because
it wanted to install an incompatible version of GnuPG.
One of my long-listed to-do items is to bring all my
processes (encrypted emails) into using the most current
version of gpg, but it would take a few days of work to
accomplish.)
* The SMART thing to do. Last year, I replaced Noelle's
hard drive with an SSD (actually an M.2 memory stick) to
avoid the fate of my desktop computer after it started
getting SMART disk monitor errors. I thought that that
would be the end of the story and all would be well. That
was not to be. While it worked fine for a few months,
after I upgraded the kernel (see above), things started
going funky. Sometimes, the hard drive would go into
read-only mode. Sometimes, during boot, everything would
work fine, and, then, suddenly, it would go into read-only
mode. Running a disk check seemed to fix it each time. I
did many searches and could not find the cause. My
current fix is that, on each boot, an fsck disk check is
always done, even if the disk is considered "clean".
There have not been any SMART errors. It's possible that
there is some bug in kernel which is corrupting the disk
over time -- who knows? I'll keep good back-ups.
* Internet
* Fire, water, snake. It was earlier this year that I noticed
that Waterfox hadn't been updated in months. Because Firefox
had stopped supporting legacy addons, we had switched to
Waterfox. I discovered that the Waterfox people had too decided
that they would stop supporting legacy addons. Looking around,
I found that only Basilisk would support Firefox legacy addons.
Although we have found that a few web sites do not work, the
switch from Waterfox to Basilisk on Noelle's computer has been
fairly painless.
* Courage confronting the snake. Like with Noelle's computer, I
tried the same switch to Basilisk but I could not get it to work
on my work laptop. My suspicion is that the display hardware is
incompatible. Eventually, after struggling with it, I made the
bold switch to a non-Firefox browser, the Brave browser.
Despite it not having good accessibility capabilities that can
accomodate my poor eyesight, I've been mostly happy with it.