Blog: Archive for July, 2001

Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig. At least for a bit.

M and I are back in Burnaby after our California adventure. We'll be spending the next week packing up hundreds of books, tapes, CDs, binders, papers, clothes, cute decorations, and assorted detritus, leaving the computers (and therefore the desks) for last, of course.

The moving truck is due here on the sixteenth, and we'll be leaving then, too, heading south to Seattle to drop off and retrieve some stuff from my brother and sister-in-law, then south to the great state of California.

Planned but unscheduled stops include Emperor Norton I's grave in Colma; the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose (which has haunted me since I read about it as a child); and Hearst Castle in San Simeon. Others may be added as time and interest allows.

First day of packing, and, well, we didn't get much put away in boxes. We did get more tape and shrink wrap, though, and we cleared out all of our deposit bottles, along with a huge number of jars of various sizes and shapes that we'd collected over the last four years. The cupboard they were stored in now appears rather bare.

We also cleared off the kitchen table, which had lots of miscellaneous paperwork scattered across it, which means we can use the table as a staging area for packing books. I hope to make some real progress tomorrow.

Check out the Librarians Are Corrupting Kids site, which tracks censorship attempts and encourages kids (and adults!) to read censored books.

A controversy recently popped up on debian-legal. A user wanted the Project to remove all of the messages he'd sent to various Debian mailing lists from the archive, apparently because he didn't like the way they cluttered up the results of searches on his name (!).

Anyway, that spawned a discussion about the X-No-Archive header, which was essentially created by DejaNews to allow USENET folks to opt out of their archive, and whether or not that header should be respected by mailing lists.

The world has changed a lot since those heady days of old, when people felt free to post anything they wanted to USENET—sexual peccadilloes, sure, along with radical political opinions, screeds on bomb making, intensely personal discussions, amazing flamewars, and even some wonderfully useful information.

Then came DejaNews, with their plan to archive the whole of USENET, and everything changed. Suddenly, USENET, which had been ephemeral (articles “expired”, meaning that unless individual sites or people made an effort to save copies locally, they no longer existed for public access), became corporeal. Suddenly your boss, or lover, or neighbor, or mother could read everything you sent to USENET. Secrets divulged in the expectation that they'd go away, political opinions expressed in the heat of the moment, confessions of nontraditional activities were available to all.

Protest ensued, and the X-No-Archive was born.

On the other hand, Deja provided a unique service. Before they began their archive, participation in USENET required you to read groups regularly. Stop reading for a week or so, and you could be hopelessly lost when you returned. With Deja, all the messages you'd missed were in the archive, so you could catch up.

Deja also allowed useful information to stick around. Experiencing some annoying problem with your OS that isn't mentioned in the FAQ for the appropriate group? Well, if some other people had that problem, and there was a thread about it on USENET, you could now search Deja and retrieve that thread and fix your problem. All without having to post to the group and subject yourself to potential flames for asking such an obvious question, too.

Deja, and mailing lists, are just the tip of the iceberg, though. With so many people running personal websites, especially weblogs, the world is a different place. To some degree, I am always aware that what I say here may, someday, affect my ability to find a job, or my relationship with coworkers, friends, and relatives. I have to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of every piece of personal information I consider writing about here. That creates a conflict that I have yet to resolve. On the one hand, I am a big believer in total honesty. I don't like bullshit, and I don't like pretending to agree with people when I disagree with them (especially when they're wrong!). On the other hand, I don't really want to hurt people's feelings, or make life more difficult for myself. I expect that society as a whole is going to have to deal with this conflict before too long, as the pace of technological change makes the collation of random pieces of data easier and easier to do, even for relatively unsophisticated users.

Day Two of packing (the first day we really did much of anything). We actually got a lot done. Eleven boxes of books, and we were able to break down our Onkel shelf unit and take all the shelves out of two Billy bookcases. Of course M managed to find yet another banker's box of books after I'd sealed the last box, but luckily there were enough unpacked books to make up a twelfth box.

With the books out of the way, the next step is to deal with all the unsorted papers scattered around the apartment, especially M's stack on the end of my desk (which has been building up for a couple of years now). Then we can do all the cute decorative items, and we should be left with clothes, food, dishes, and computers, stereo, VCR, and TV. Of course the computers and entertainment stuff have to wait, otherwise we'd go mad, so it may be that we'll burn through a lot of packing in a short time, and then stall for several days until the moving truck is coming down the street.

Melissa also packed our scanner and inkjet printer, so we won't be scanning in any new images for a while, nor will we be printing any color documents. I don't anticipate that being a major problem.

On to packing various loose stuff—papers, magazines, various unused magnetic media, memorabilia, and so forth. We're also detatching various additional bits from the computers for packing—zip drives, and so on.

If you've missed updates to my weblog, well, blame Debian. Something changed in one of the packages (Perl, I think) that caused Apache to die when trying to load mod_perl (which was no longer in Perl's search path). As a result, it's been impossible for me to generate updates.

I finally grabbed some time today to look into things. I ended up purging all the Apache packages and reinstalling the straight Apache server and the mod_perl package. After some tinkering with the configuration, I got everything working again. I sure do love computers.

Still more packing. Today, my desk is on the chopping block. I have hordes of paper that needs to be sorted, filed, and packed. I'm not looking forward to it, but the alternative (shoving everything willy-nilly into a box) is worse.

Great Buildings Online is an interesting site with lots of photographs, floorplans, and even 3-D models of famous buildings from around the world.
Via Red Rock Eater mailing list.

Whew! Done (with that pile of paper). I managed to recycle a huge amount of paper, as well, even after keeping copies of most of the things I've typeset over the last four years. Meanwhile, M made a solid start on packing away our CDs and some of our videotapes, after sorting out a bunch to take with us.

We spent most of today running around. We visited M's doctor to renew some prescriptions, then checked out hats at Mountain Equipment Co-op, then popped into the grocery store to fill the prescriptions and pick up some English muffins, milk, and spicy jalapeno tortilla chips. Yum!

Next, we're planning to stop by the recycling depot and drop off a load of stuff (mostly paper), then up to the university to drop off some borrowed equipment and clean out M's office.

It's pretty hot here—high seventies, but also nearly 60% humidity. The sad thing is that while it's probably much hotter in Claremont right now, it wouldn't feel quite so bad because it's so much dryer.

Big surprise: the recycling depot closed at four o'clock. So we ended up taking everything up to the university, instead.

Still more packing awaits us, concentrating on the closets, the bathroom, and maybe the kitchen.

We took the car down to be serviced. Cars these days are ridiculous. The best one at the dealership was a tossup between the CN$75,000 Corvette with a heads-up-display and the “Street Force” SUV, which was apparently designed for vigilantes.

We made beer batter shrimp and onion rings, using our last bottle of beer (which has been in the 'fridge for months). The shrimp weren't great (but they haven't been great in anything else we've done with them, either), but the onion rings were quite good. I've missed onion rings—one of the Great Mysteries of Canada is why you can't get frozen onion rings or frozen ravioli in supermarkets.

The car wasn't done today. Not a surprise.

Not surprisingly, the car didn't actually get serviced today.

I started tearing the bathroom apart, with M joining in after a bit. We had to go out to get some plastic bags to safely pack things, and took along two bags of books M had found that we didn't want (wonderfully campy books such as everything you've always wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask and The Sensual Woman)—they'd been dumped on M by a friend who'd moved a few years ago. Alas, Burnaby Books didn't want most of them, either, but they did take a few, which we traded for David Brin's The Uplift War (only two more and we'll have both trilogies!) and a two-in-one with Harlan Ellison's Doomsman and Lin Carter's The Thief of Thoth (my brother is a huge Ellison fan, but I'd never heard of this novella, and, hey, it was right by the register).

After dinner (pasta, a welcome break from seafood), we went back to work, and managed to fit almost everything into one 2 cubic foot box.

Tackling the bedroom is tomorrow's goal.

Ooh, Friday the Thirteenth! An inauspicious day to move, which is part of why we're moving on Monday.

Car's back. Everything appears to be fine, but I need to have the brakes and the air conditioning serviced once we're settled. Fun, fun, fun.

Breakfast at De Dutch, a pop-in at the insurance agency (to sign the form to cancel our renter's insurance), and a drive up to the university to drop off some recyclable transparencies.

We've started to tear apart the bedroom and pack it away, mostly clothes, at this point. M also did a great job in the kitchen, and we have three boxes of food (that's because we tend to buy lots of stuff when it's on sale, which is also why we've had fish almost every night this week ;-) ).

Spent most of today downtown. We took some old clothes to Value Village, then picked up our friend Dhavide, who's just about to finish his Ph.D. before heading off to Toronto for a post-doc.

We picked up the Run Lola Run soundtrack, which is almost as good without the images as the movie is, along with Morrissey's Bona Drag (a collection). Dhavide picked up a huge CD binder, which came with a smaller case, so we did a deal and we now have a small CD case (that holds 24 CDs in sleeves that can be popped out and swapped around).

I also got some Private Reserve Naples Blue ink, which is an interesting light greeny-blue, and much better than the blue-black ink I've had for years.

We made an abortive attempt to see Memento at Tinseltown, but were stymied by all the people slowing us down and a huge cattle-call lineup at the box office. On the way back downtown, we stopped off at the Café Sil Vous Plait for a quick bite.

After that, we were at a loss, so we drove home, stopping off to pick up our prescriptions on the way. When we got home, Dhavide marvelled at the disaster area our apartment has warped into (somewhat different from the disaster area it usually is), and we decided to rent a movie.

We ended up with Brother, Where Art Thou?, which was really quite good. I seem to recall it not getting the sorts of positive reviews I usually expect for Coen brothers' films, which is probably why we didn't see it in the theatre. I wished I'd read The Odyssey more recently, though.

Around eight o'clock, we plied Dhavide with various food items we would otherwise have to throw out (including a 750 g block of cheese we'd bought shortly before we'd left!), packed the food into a cooler, and headed off to Kishu Island, an inexpensive but quite good Japanese restaurant near Dhavide's place.

After dinner, we dropped Dhavide home, exchanged near-tearful goodbyes, and headed home. M and I spent far too long tinkering with computers (getting backups lined up and encoding MP3s from our new CDs), and collapsed into bed near one o'clock Sunday morning, day -1....

The penultimate day!

Vancouver is saying its goodbyes by arranging to have crappy weather for the last couple of days we're here. Yesterday it was hot and muggy, today it's cold and pouring rain.

Our DSL connection is down, which is especially lame given that we're leaving tomorrow and tearing the machines down this evening! M spent some ridiculous amount of time on the telephone with their first line of tech support, whose advice boiled down to “reinstall Windows” (on our machine that only runs Windows because M wanted to experiment with the Windows software for our digital camera) despite the fact that the problem is very clearly on their end.

(I'm updating this via a dial-up connection.)

Now that the backup is finished, I'm going to shut down my machine. I'll be back in a week or so, depending on when our stuff is delivered to us in Claremont.

See you then!

M and I arrived in Claremont Sunday evening, after two cool tours of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose (the standard mansion tour and the “behind the scenes” tour that takes you to the basement). We'd stayed in Sunnyvale the night before, after a long drive down from southeastern Oregon.

Apologies to anyone who was expecting us to stop by—the schedule got moved up (from “your stuff might not be there 'til Thursday” to “your stuff will be delivered Tuesday morning at nine o'clock”), and we didn't really have time to get together with anyone. If it makes you feel any better, we weren't able to visit Hearst Castle, either, even though we'd just seen Citizen Kane with Brian and Jenn and were psyched about the idea.

Anyway, our stuff has arrived, and surrounds us in piles of boxes. So far, the only thing that seems to have been significantly damaged is one of the drives in tenby, our gateway machine. After a bunch of fiddling, M was able to get tenby to boot off another drive. We'll still need to talk to the insurance people about the damaged drive, though, especially as tenby was packed by the moving company's packer.

We're spending lots of money replacing things we weren't allowed to pack (such as cleaning supplies) and buying new things to fill holes we didn't have in Vancouver (such as lamps and a refrigerator).

Yes, we bought a refrigerator. It's amazingly cool (pun intended), and has all sorts of wild features, such as a shelf that goes up and down when you turn a crank and shelves inside the freezer. It's also the first fridge I've ever had that had a light in the freezer. We were going to rent a fridge, but it turned out that (1) the rental company was run by Nazis (they wanted my mother's name and telephone number!) and (2) it's actually cheaper to buy a fridge than rent one. Also, because of California's energy crisis, we'll be getting a $125 rebate from Southern California Edison, as well as a $50 manufacturer's rebate.

Since the savings are rebates, the fridge cost quite a packet, and woke up the fraud folks at Citibank, who promptly (several hours later) put a hold on my card. We found out about that when we were in Ikea, buying the aforesaid lamp (a third “Not” torchiere), an under-the-desk thing for diziet to live on, and attempting to buy a shelf for my desk (they didn't have some of the parts, but they didn't know that until after we'd paid and gone to pick them up). The clerk had to call Visa, who called Citibank, who asked me a bunch of questions (the first thing I said to the guy was “I know, I know, we bought a refrigerator and it freaked you out.”).

Also on that trip, we checked out the 99 Ranch Market, an Asian supermarket near Ikea. At first we (I) were disappointed because we didn't find Ribena (a blackcurrant syrup you mix with water to make juice that M introduced me to), but after asking a couple of different people we found it—in the UK packaging (which looks kind of like a bottle of wine) rather than the Hong Kong packaging we're familiar with from Vancouver (which is a weird squat bottle with a tiny neck). We also got a whole box of Sapporo Ichiban chow mein-style noodles, which make a delicious snack, and are pretty much the only ramen-like product I've ever had that tastes good.

Still no wasabi chips, though. We may have to contact the company (Brilliant, in Richmond, B.C., I believe) directly.

What else? Claremont has the most primitive cable system I've seen in about ten years. You have to have a converter box to watch some channels (such as the Discovery Channel), and taping anything requires a nightmare tangle of wires, A–B switches, and cable boxes. Seriously lame. On the other hand, it's fairly cheap, and we're unwilling to miss out on the new seasons of Buffy, Angel, and other shows we've gotten in the habit of watching.

The CS department still hasn't resolved its space crisis, so M is temporarily housed in the Dean's conference room. Her new machine (a dual-processor 800 MHz G4 Mac) is on order, but won't ship for a few weeks, and there's no real point in her ordering office furniture until she knows where she'll be. Meanwhile, we have several boxes of books we could (and should) take in to work so that they're out of our hair.

We're stuck on a modem line, and, boy, does that ever suck. Months of DSL helped us forget about the pain of modem connections, and being reminded wasn't something I desperately needed.

Being without a refrigerator for several days, not to mention having our dishes, pots, and pans scattered around in various boxes or unpacked into odd locations without proper shelf lining has meant that we've been eating out for the last few days, giving us a chance to try some of the local restaurants and chains.

Marie Callender's is a nice place to eat—the food is good, plentiful, and cheap (for the States, anyway). I had a turkey dinner with real turkey (as opposed to the thin, round slices you get in a cheap frozen dinner), yummy mashed potatoes, and dressing with chestnuts and walnuts.

We also had a good experience at Boston Market, which has at least one restaurant not too far away.

Claremont proper has some restaurants that sound good that we haven't sampled yet as well as an Afghan place (that was okay, although not especially Afghani, as far as I could tell) and a really good ice cream shop that's almost as cool as the Soda Jerks in Pasadena.

The Claremont Inn, on the other hand, is a dump. I won't recommend it to any guests, or anyone else, either.

Most Southern California drivers are much more considerate and careful than their Northern California counterparts. That said, we did almost wreck the car twice the other day when (1) while I was backing out and turning to the left so I could leave a parking lot, someone in a minivan tried to back into the spot next to me without actually ensuring I'd seen them, and (2) moments later, some idiot in a Suburban tried to drive around me on the left side while I was making a left turn! And, yes, I had my turn signal on both times.

After four years in Vancouver, where you have to drive 50 km/h (~30 mph) almost everywhere (with the occasional opportunity to go 100 km/h (~60 MPH), I'm having difficulty getting used to the idea of zooming around at 40 and 50 MPH.

Dear diziet is back up and running (hence your reading this entry), snuggled into a new under-the-desk stand. When I checked to see if anyone had added to the discussion about a “serious” bug filed against one of my packages (problems compiling with Debian's gcc-3.0 compiler), I discovered that I had another serious bug to fix. I'm in the process of building and uploading new versions to fix both bugs. Never let anyone say I'm not efficient when I can be.

Anyway, that's about it for now. Once our fridge cools down, we'll have to go buy food to put inside, and maybe after that we'll be able to (and more enthusiastic about) cooking. In the meantime, we'll still be sampling some of the local food—maybe pizza tonight, or possibly checking in on the bizarre pastrami craze around here.

Yesterday we rushed around and picked up information from various banks. In the end, we opened a joint account at Washington Mutual, where we get free checking, zillions of ATMs, and make my brother (who works for them) happy as well.

We also went grocery shopping for real for the first time, buying all those things you take for granted until you move and have to leave them behind (or throw them out) and then buy again in the new place. Mostly condiments—stuff like Worcester sauce, malt vinegar, jams, peanut butter, vanilla extract, chocolate syrup (for egg creams!), and lots, lots more. And most of that stuff is expensive, too. Oh, well.

One of the weird things about the States is the lack of decent frozen fish. I never ate much fish as a kid, and I never realized why until yesterday. In Canada, we bought these huge boxes of really good breaded or battered fish filets (sole, halibut, cod, and salmon). In the States, however, all you can find are breaded generic white fish, often reconstituted from ground up bits (“fish sticks”), and very expensive fresh or frozen unprepared fish. All of which makes eating fish more difficult.

On the other hand, we can buy frozen ravioli and onion rings (we didn't, but we could), which aren't available in Vancouver at all.

Today M and I set up my long-lost stereo, which has been in storage almost continuously for almost eight years. Once it was put together, I worked on lining the shelves in the bedroom (where we'll be storing clothes) while M packed smaller empty boxes into larger empty boxes. When it cools down, we'll take a bunch of those empty-box filled boxes out to the garage, where they'll live until we move again. With any luck at all, their relocation will result in a lot more floor space in the apartment, and will be a big step towards actually having a home rather than just camping out in an apartment.

We did laundry for the first time. The machines here use a smart card system—you put money in the card with an ATM or credit card, then put the card in the washer or dryer. The cool thing is that the machines count down the time 'til they're finished, so you know when to come back.

We also went to campus so M could ask some questions about getting various things done (DSL, getting a laptop, etc.). She ended up checking out Josh's TiBook and iBook, and deciding on an iBook. Josh had the department secretary type up a requisition, then M and I walked down to the bookstore and walked out with a brand new iBook.

Neat machine, but (of course) it had to be problematic. After initial success and joy with Mac OS X, M installed our digital camera software, and then discovered major problems on the Mac OS 9.1 side of things. After hours booting, rebooting, and re-rebooting, she figured out that the problem was (apparently) being caused by one or more corrupted preference files. Gotta love Mac OS.

By the time we left, we were both freezing. Air conditioning can do that. It was dark, though, so it was pretty cool outside, too. And I had parked the car in the shade, so any heat it had picked up was long gone by the time we got in, too. At least the apartment was a toasty eighty or so.

One of the things I've noticed over the last couple of weeks is the incredible amount of information that it's possible to expose yourself to. I've had the Web for ages, of course, but the sites I check with any regularity generally don't add too much on a day-to-day basis. Even following up links from those sites involves checking no more than five or so sites, most of which don't take much time.

But now that we're back in the States, we have NPR again, which means that you can potentially spend all day listening to news and talk shows. Morning Edition starts it off, followed here (on KPCC) by a local talk show for two hours, then Talk of the Nation, another local talk show, and then All Things Considered. And then more shows, with Fresh Air at 10:00 PM and As It Happens at 11:00.

And it's not particularly healthy information, either. I weaned myself away from shows such as Crossfire because they pissed me off too much, and made me feel frustrated and impotent. NPR brings you up to sixteen hours of Crossfire-like frustration and impotence. You can hear the latest idiocies from the Bush administration, followed by an hour-long talk show about kids making a fortune on the Internet by “misleading” the fools who take their advice, followed by an hour on Ohio's successful prosecution of a man who wrote some paedophilic scenarios in his private journal, which was read by his parole officer and led to him being arrested and put in jail for what is, ultimately, a thoughtcrime. (At least the guy from the Ohio chapter of the ACLU was well-spoken, calm, and forceful enough to—I think—distinguish himself very clearly from the guy from some rabid child-protection organization that's perfectly happy to sell everyone's rights down the river to protect kids from the nebulous threat of an unknown number of paedophiles lurking the shadows and on the Internet to prey on them.

The best call was from a woman who pointed out that paedophiles don't need detailed written or visual porn to get excited, citing a case where a man had been arrested and police found tens of thousands of photographs of children in school photos (i.e., fully dressed, and often formally, and not at all sexually, posed).

America scares me. At least it's not quite as bad as Britain. Yet.

Lethargy has set in on the unpacking front. Much of what's left is clothes we don't wear that often (not at all so long as they're packed, of course), lots and lots of books, and pretty much all of the decorative stuff—photographs, posters, chatchkas.

But all that stuff is taking up room, so we'll have to deal with it sometime. With luck, having it out will make this apartment feel more like home.

I've updated the “reading” box. I have not, in fact, been reading the Ellison/Carter book for weeks now, having given up on the Carter piece shortly before leaving Vancouver, and having left the book in Seattle for my brother.

I haven't really been reading much of anything. I brought a bunch of books with us, but never really had a chance to read them. After driving for six to eight hours everyday, I was generally too tired to concentrate on a book, and once we got down to Claremont and started unpacking and rushing around picking up stuff we needed, I was even more tired. Once we got things almost working, though, we started to slack off a bit, and I have had a chance to read odd bits of last month's Atlantic Monthly, notably the pieces by and about Mark Twain, which reminded me that I never really learned very much about the Civil War that interested me, and that, given the interesting books about the pre- and post-Revolutionary period I read earlier this year, there are probably some decent books about the Civil War available, too. I'm still not up for Ken Burns's PBS spectacular, though.

After playing with M's iBook a bit (as well as the blue and white G3 she's got as a temporary machine at work), I'm really wondering if I want a new computer after all.

Oh, don't get me wrong—I'd love a faster machine with enough memory that it doesn't need to swap, that can run modern software (a decent standards-compliant browser that was remotely responsive would be a godsend!), and that would have some amount of cool associated with it, as well. But I've realized that in order to get such a machine working at its peak would require hours of tedious fiddling, downloading, compiling, installing, and tweaking. Not to mention spending additional money for a new trackball, tablet, and software to replace the older software that almost certainly won't work properly.

Not to mention the whole Linux to BSD plus the Mac OS X interface thing.

Maybe I should just get a processor and memory upgrade for diziet, which faithfully ticks away doing the right thing for me.