The Mandelbear's Musings

Somehow it doesn't seem as though much happened. A quick look at the house shows that this is not entirely true -- huge progress has been made on the improvements, tens of thousands of dollars have been flung around with abandon (including a 50% down payment on the landscaping, and starting a household checking and savings account), the front yard, massage studio, and lower front bedroom have been torn apart, several new holes have appeared, and so on.

None of this was my doing, of course, except for the financing. I have merely been plugging along at my job, filing the inevitable extension on my taxes, and generally muddling along considerably more slowly than I would like.

This week's quote/self-observation comes from Friday: "Middle-sized bears are extremely timid creatures, but are occasionally so oblivious that it doesn't matter."

Meanwhile, Seattle has been declared #2 among the 12 best places to live in the U.S.. San Francisco is #1. I think the Twin Cities cheated, with Minneapolis nabbing 12th place and St. Paul coming in 10th. (The differential doesn't surprise me -- St. Paul is a university town.)

Other good links amongst the notes, as usual.

Almost a week. Starting out rather rough: the YD was injured in a near-accident on the bus on Monday, Colleen had an endoscopy appointment on Wednesday (mine is this week), and in between I was very stressed and close to overload. This makes bears grumbly. Grumble.

On the other paw, the house gets closer and closer to reality. It's going to be a strange household -- strange even by Seattle polyamorous fandom standards, I suspect -- but it'll work. It'll work precisely because of its strangeness. Hmm. That really wants a separate post, doesn't it?

It's not something I ever expected. Living with kids younger than my younger brother's grandkids? Taking on over half a megabuck in debt when I'm old enough to retire? Am I crazy? Of course. And I have the prescriptions to prove it.

Quite a few excellent links, spanning much of the Space Marine kerfuffle.

While I was on the bus to work I got an unexpected call from the YD, saying that the fire alarm in our apartment building had gone off.

Colleen parked her scooter in the third-floor elevator lobby and walked down the three flights of stairs to the exit, between the first and second floors. Whereupon she plunked herself down in a half-barrel planter (next to the door and conveniently empty) to await developments.

It turned out that someone had burnt their toast, then opened the door to the hallway. I got the news before the bus reached its first stop in Seattle, which saved me the trouble of figuring out whether to turn back.

The neighbor who had gone downstairs with Colleen, encouraging her all the way, went back and retrieved her scooter. The YD, too, kept her head and made sure to take her keys and Colleen's cane along.

More adventure than we needed, but it's good to know that Colleen can get downstairs under her own power in an emergency.

When we left our intrepid, if somewhat reluctant, adventurer he was in the process of moving in to his new apartment in Lake Forest Park. (When the rest of the family arrived on Tuesday it somewhat inevitably acquired the name North Starport; the only other serious contender was Starport North, but that doesn't have the built-in pun that justifies the new URL.)

Tuesday the 3rd was busy. I had an interview at Facebook (that resulted in a rejection, and a severely dented passenger-side front door thanks to a concrete post in the parking garage) in the morning, came back to Shoreline for some badly-needed rehearsal time, then down to Seatac to pick up Colleen and the YD at the airport.

That's when I found out that Colleen was en route to the ER, having gashed her leg on a closing fire-door coming out of the jetway. GLEEP! (And someone dinged the front bumper of my car in the Lowes parking lot.) By the time we finally got everybody back to the apartment and got settled in, I was pretty thoroughly frazzled.

Internet turned on sometime Tuesday as well; it was supposed to have been the previous Thursday, but I'd given them the street number of the office rather than of the building. Oops. But at least I could be frazzled with a live net connection.

I'd brought up quite a lot of stuff in the van, but there were still some omissions. Like, a phone cable and a computer power cord. Minor -- I made do quite well with the netbook, though stuff like posting on DW went by the wayside. Oh, and pillows. I borrowed a set from the Wolfling, who stayed with us in the apartment Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

Tuesday evening we had dinner with Chaos and her new BF, Rabbit (James).

Wednesday we made our expedition to Central Market. Thursday we had dinner with Naomi and her kids, then made our way to the Seatac Doubletree for Westercon.

Saturday was my concert. Formal setlist and recordings later, one hopes; for now, the set was The Fox, As You See, Wheelin, The River, Riverheart, Boom Gone To Bust, Kitchen Heroes, and Inherit the Earth. The first half was something of a minor trainwreck, but I felt good about the second half.

A few good conversations at the con; nothing very deep, but people are glad to see us moving up to the area.

Monday was a full day of interviews at Google's Seattle office. I really hope I get that one.

Yesterday noonish we set out for finally set out for home. Old home? The apartment -- and the PNW -- is already starting to feel a lot like home. There's nothing like a couple of drives through the desert to make one long for a place where it's cool and moist a lot of the time.

It's going to be a bit of a wild ride here on the River. I seem to have been drifting for a long time. (I know, I've always viewed my journey downriver as a walk along the bank, but I can damned well mix my own metaphor if I want to.)

And I know that most of what I've written about under this tag has been relationships, friendship, and the care and feeding of geeks. But every once in a while, you have to change direction. And it's happening now.

Grand Central Starport is full of boxes now -- we're moving in less than two months. (How much less is, at present, a matter for some speculation.) I'm also changing jobs. What job I'm changing to is, at present, also a matter for speculation.

I believe I've mentioned alexithymia. I have it -- a difficulty detecting and identifying emotions and other mental states. I believe what's going on now is a mixture of anxiety and stress, mostly. And although I'm getting better at identifying and dealing with anxiety, stress is another matter.

Guess I'm going to learn.

I'm not sure exactly what went into the decision to move from the Bay Area to the Seattle area; economics (cost of living's 25% less) was only part of it. And certainly the fact that I have family and close friends there was a factor. But I don't think that's all of it. Both Colleen and I were ready for a change. Big change. As I said, we'd been drifting. 36 years in the same house, 19 years in the same job... one gets stale, somehow. Complacent.

And, yes, I've always taken the hobbit's view of adventures -- "Nasty, uncomfortable things. Make you late for dinner." It takes a certain amount of concentration to look at that big bend in the river coming up and look forward to finding out what's around it.

The house is full of boxes; we're moving from 1850 square feet of house and 1600 of garage, to a two-bedroom apartment (and some storage in Naomi's garage). The bookshelves have been ravaged. There's an apartment waiting for us in Lake Forest Park, empty of everything but major appliances and potentiality. Potential energy, soon to become kinetic energy.

Is that white water up ahead?

I spent the morning working on my resume, adding to the projects and publications lists, and expanding some of the more interesting projects. And I finally made an HTML version of the resume, though the formatting leaves something to be desired.

I'd originally been planning to spend the afternoon at Stanford, at the memorial for my old professor John McCarthy. But when I signed up for that I'd neglected the fact that it was the YD's 20^th birthday. So instead, we went shopping at Target (we'd given her a gift card) and out to dinner at Kobe.

In between, Colleen and I went out for a two-mile st/roll. The scooter started running dangerously low on power about 3/4 of the way through, so I went home by myself and fetched the car to retrieve her. The scooter isn't in terribly good shape; I'm glad we're getting a new one.

In the evening, I started moving stacks of cookbooks to the card table. Colleen promptly rebuilt the stack with a second round of culling. And that's just cookbooks!

Linky: Record Heat Wave Grips US. But Is It Climate Change? Cute little video about trend vs. variation.

Yesterday was a pretty good day, despite some setbacks. I got a little "carpentry" done in the morning, making a back-spacer for Colleen's recliner to keep it the right distance from the bookshelves. The necessary 30" looked shockingly far, but was of course exactly right. I had measured it, after all.

Then we went up to San Francisco, to visit the DeYoung Museum, which the YD wants for her art history class. She is, finally, getting interested in going to museums. Naturally, the DeYoung is closed on Mondays, never mind the fact that it's a holiday. Headdesk. Fortunately, the California Academy of Sciences is right next door (ok, across the concourse, but in any case close enough). It turns out that the YD had never been to a planetarium! Never been interested in going, before, but she loved it.

I managed to lose the parking-lot ticket, so it cost $25 for parking. In addition to making me feel particularly stupid for having put the ticket in the same pocket as my phone.

We took Highway 1 down to Half Moon Bay; a pleasant drive that we don't do very often. There's a fish market just after the turn onto 92, where I picked up some ahi tuna, which we had as sashimi for a late lunch when we got home. The guy at the counter also sold me three more chunks, at a reduced price, which I'd been planning to use for dinner. When dinner time came, though, they tasted "off" and didn't smell all that good; I dumped them and made sausages instead.

I spent the rest of the evening kind of zoned out and apathetic, though I did do some more reading in The Language of Emotions. It's fascinating, but difficult, and I can't tell whether it's just my alexithymia making it difficult, or whether it's totally bogus. One of the things I'm having trouble with is her notion of "boundaries", which is absolutely central to to all of the visualization work the book is based on. She actually equates it with "aura". It doesn't seem to be all that closely related to what Wikipedia says about "personal boundaries":

Personal boundaries are guidelines, rules or limits that a person creates to identify for him- or herself what are reasonable, safe and permissible ways for other people to behave around him or her and how he or she will respond when someone steps outside those limits.

... which it also distinguishes from "personal space". And McLaren doesn't. So...

I understand personal space, sort of, I think, but either version of "personal boundaries" seems to be a concept I have trouble grasping. That probably needs to be a full-bore River post at some point.

Hmm. Mixed. Distinctly mixed. Had bagels and lox for brunch (well, actually, Colleen had bagels and lox, I had my lox on a gluten-free "English" muffin, and the YD had hers neat. Then we headed up to San Francisco, intending to go to the DeYoung Museum, which the YD needed to visit for her art history class.

The parking lot was full, and most entrances to Golden Gate Park were blocked; there must have been something going on there. So we fell back to Plan B: the Cantor Museum at Stanford. The Cantor has a huge collection of Rodin sculptures; I love it. Colleen and I had a blast.

The YD was bored. And unfortunately, I misinterpreted her sitting down and saying "I'm done" as meaning *"done with the museum" rather than "done with this gallery", so Colleen and I left her there while we explored the upstairs. This proved to have been a big mistake; she was in tears at having been abandoned.

We took her out to dinner, partly as compensation, and partly because I was starving and didn't want to cook. We went to Jasmine, our favorite local Chinese place. We hadn't been there in several months; they seem to have a new chef and a slightly different menu. Yum.

But I didn't get much else done. A little work toward replacing the audio on the Conflikt concert page with a better recording, but didn't actually get it done. Blarg.

I also found out that the Westercon 65 web site is out of date and woefully short on contact information. Anyone out there know who I should contact about a filk concert gig? (Hint: not Rick Weiss; that's part of the "out of date" thing.)

A few links in the notes.

As of noonish today (I forget the exact time), Colleen and I will have been married for 37 years. She's fond of adding "... and we haven't killed each other yet!"

Happy anniversary, Love.

Odd day. I had an extremely satisfying morning at work, building the pjsua command line SIP user agent/softphone and verifying that it actually works with the hardware we're planning to use for our demo in late January. $BOSS was my assistant; he's thrilled. I'm relieved -- this close to retirement age I kinda have to keep pulling miracles out of my hat to stay employed.

I also noticed a newish (mid-2010, as it turned out) MacBook on $BOSS's desk; it had been intended for the new hire who turned us down and went to Microsoft a few weeks ago. Since my old one is ancient and obsolete, this was a major win for me. I spent the afternoon configuring it. Which was tedious in the extreme -- see the notes for details.

Macs still feel somewhat toy-like to me. Apple's keyboards have always been pretty horrid compared to IBM's, and the one-button UI gives the impression of having been dumbed-down for newbies. I mean, it's great marketing, but if you've been using computers professionally for the last half-century, ...

I spent most of the evening splitting up Tempered Glass's next-to-last practice session, so we'd have something to remember it by. I still need to do the last session, and I think there may be some concerts back there that need work. Note that the practice sessions will not be going up on the web -- at least, not yet, and maybe not ever. Nostalgic bear.

After that, I let the kids introduce me to Munchkin Cthulhu. Fun! I can see how that can be an addictive game.

When it finally wound down around 1am I did a little more Perl hacking to fix problems in the concert rendering, and remembered somewhat belatedly that pseudoephedrine is a stimulant. Well, it's better than not breathing.

The house feels better with a Chaoswolf in it -- she arrived yesterday at about 11:30; we had bagels and smoked salmon for brunch.

After dinner (carnitas, using the pork shoulder that I'd put in the crock pot the night before), we went out to the Golden Bough concert. Fun, as always. We've gone to the last 20 or so out of 22. So, yes, the YD has been going all her life.

Other than that... Well, I did take a walk, and do some practicing. So that's a win.

Link sausage: Why Steampunk (still) Matters

A good day? Mostly. I went up to the Menlo Park office for a meeting, and took my walk to and around the little artificial pond in the nearby park. I was struck by how many phone conversations I recalled while passing the place where I'd had them. Apparently location is a powerful trigger for me. (Now I'm finding that just thinking about the places brings back more memories. Eeep!)

I spent some time comparing netbooks -- I am now thinking of a Thinkpad X120e. The HP Pavilion dm1z has gotten better reviews, but I really want the pointing stick and middle mouse button.

I also spent some time researching laryngopharyngeal reflux (again). After rejecting the idea of using omeprazole (which interferes with citalopram metabolism), I decided to try raising the head of my bed about 10". This appears to have worked -- I woke up able to breathe and without having to constantly clear my throat. So... YAY!

Another patent with my name on it has issued. I have very mixed feelings about this: there's a sense of accomplishment, but I really hate the idea of software patents (which this is, like most of mine). I have 24 now.

A long phone call from a lonely Wolfling -- she's depressed, and I don't know how to help. I don't know what to call that feeling, but it hurts. Empathy? Maybe that's why I kept my feelings buried for so long, and so deep that I didn't know I had them.

A couple of good links: Ysabetwordsmith's Asexual Awareness Week Wrapup, Liralen on the difference between religion and faith (among other things). As a total outsider to religion, I've mostly seen its bad side; "faith" in particular has always baffled me.

Hmm. This one seems to have gone a little deeper than usual. Have to do more of that.

I spent much of my time at work setting up Nagios to monitor our servers. Fun! My last experience with monitoring was Big Brother, years ago. N. is much more flexible, and easy once you get the hang of it. I'm going to set it up at home, too.

After dinner I drove in to downtown San Jose to pick up my brother Al, who's in town for the SACNAS conference. We had a good talk -- we have a lot of catching up to do -- and I sang a couple of songs. Al has, sadly, not played any music for decades; I'm hoping to get him back into it. In part because I feel sorry for his two guitars and his banjo, which deserve to get out and have some fun sometimes too.

A good day (but no walkies--silly bear). A couple of links in the notes.

Hmm. Not a bad day, with a two mile walk and a little music practice, though the van needing major service and new tires did put a slight damper on things. The pain was noticably less, but I noticed some "muting"; much the same audio effect as walking around in a fog.

The fog doesn't seem to have affected the programming part of my brain much; I was actually more productive at work than I have been in about a week. Pain is a major distraction, apparently, even when it's not the only thing I can think about.

The UBF's severe back trouble, dating back to an fall at work, is apparently an act. He couldn't help load his boxes into the van, but had no trouble unloading in Simi Valley. Fascinating.

Moving the new switch evened out the load on the UPSs nicely; there's still some additional power consumption on the router side that I'd like to get rid of, though. That will require moving off the old 3.5" hard drive, and is probably best combined with an OS upgrade. So... when I have the time? Oh. Right.

Did I mention that Colleen had her cast taken off Monday? Her arm is still sore, and her fingers are pretty weak, but she can actually use her dominant hand now. Happy cat. Happy bear, for that matter. She can do a lot more for herself now.

A few links up in the notes.

We went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium yesterday, by way of The Whole Enchilada for lunch. Since I'd neglected to renew our membership, the combination made for a rather expensive day, but it was a good trip. Not exactly aerobic exercise, but a couple of hours on my feet counts for something. There's a lot of new stuff -- the whole new wing has been revamped. Flamingos! (Actually, roseate spoonbills. Close enough.)

I was pretty completely wiped out all evening. Out of both physical and emotional spoons, and ended the evening feeling noticably depressed.

I did notice that I got a lift from seeing cflute's response to a comment I made on one of her posts. I think it shows progress that I can actually notice my mood at times, and sometimes even notice changes when they happen instead of hours later.

I also discovered that the (external USB) backup drive has been mysteriously offline since mid-June; that's not so good. Took a reboot of the file server to fix it; fortunately that doesn't take long.

According to the standard creepiness rule I shouldn't date anyone under 39. For some reason, that plus the corresponding graph are the only links today.

To Alan Turing (who would have been turning 99 today), and to my esteemed brother Alan Savitzky.

A good day. A 20-minute walk, and the Clueless Coworker has until the end of the week to get his tasks finished, so I may not have to take over. On the other hand, that puts me sort of between projects.

But by far the high point of the day was taking the YD's boyfriend to the train station to go back to Simi Valley. And there is much rejoicing (though not on the YD's part, of course). Seeing her sad and distressed hurts, but on the whole this is a very good thing.

Upstairs is full of boxes; it's not clear yet how his stuff is going to get hauled down to him, but it'll happen.

Meanwhile the YD's semester started on Monday, so she'll have more on her mind than just brooding. That's good, too.

Another good thing happened at work -- a couple of coworkers (one from marketing, the other the tech writer) came to me with a question about the file format. It felt good and somewhat amusing to know that I'm the one people go to with random questions. (The CTO, who was also capable of answering, was out of the office, but I suspect they would have come to me in any case. I like to think so, anyway.)

I finished the day by upgrading my desktop to Ubuntu 11.04, or rather starting the process -- it was still pulling down packages when I went to bed, but finished this morning without incident. And it seems to have fixed the recent weirdness with the grub configuration.

Oddly, there seem to be no links. Must have been a busy day after all.

... to my lovely daughter super_star_girl!!!!! Have a great one!!!!

Gleep. Somehow I seem to have let an entire week go by without posting -- Consonance, two doctor's visits, a huge pile of work, another huge pile of links, ... and only one walk.

Consonance was fun. I had no concerts, and sang less than half a dozen songs in circles. But I heard some good music, and had some good conversations. Not as many as I'd wanted to have. There's never enough time, in a weekend when everyone has concerts and workshops to go to. But... ok.

And the workshops, Carla's on editing songs, and Joe's on open tunings, were great. Some notes from Carla's workshop under the cut.

The Tempered Glass CD, Hearts of Glass, Nerves of Steel, went for $150 in the InterFilk auction.

Lots of work. Not so much fun -- there's way too much to do, in too little time. It's taken me most of the week simply to come up to speed. Not good. Damnit; the factory tests shouldn't have been an afterthought.

Did I mention that we're having our annual "It's Green!" party on Saturday? Yeah. That. Come on over, if you're in the area!

A big pile of links under the cut, which I'm too fuzzy-brained to sort through. So enjoy the chaos.

Yesterday was mostly pretty quiet, hanging around the house and eating leftovers. The entire afternoon was eaten up buying the YD a TV, as a combination Christmas present and good grade reward (which normally would have been sushi). It took two trips to Best Buy -- the first one was dead on arrival.

The best part, though, was going to bed early and snuggling until midnight when we could finally wish one another a happy 35^th anniversary. Hard to believe we've been together that long.

The GaFilk video that peteralway posted includes a clip of me performing "Uncle Ernie's", which made kind of a nice anniversary present.

I took a walk! It was only about half an hour, after which I had to spend the rest of the afternoon playing cab-driver, collecting Eileen's dad at the Fremont BART station, then the YD at the airport. But I did get a walk in. Finally.

I also did a clean install of Debian Squeeze (testing) on Dorsai, my old desktop machine. Did the minimum necessary to give it its old identity back, then turned it off because I don't actually need it right now.

Why does the YD, and to a lesser extent Colleen, keep getting upset every time I try to tell her something? "Stop lecturing me!" when all I was saying was, "Next time tell me you're in the arrival area instead of saying you're next to the Southwest departure sign." And again trying to straigten out her stupid prepaid debit cards. I don't read minds, remember? And I may have a real reason for wanting an unambiguous yes/no answer to a simple question, even when you think you already said that as a non-answer to some other question. Baffled bear.

*sighs*

Yesterday was a pretty good day. I got in a walk, and made a successful expedition to Big!Lots for full-spectrum floor lamps (plus bonus desk lamp and torchiere). We had three extra people for dinner; I made chicken wings, ribs, and cauliflower. Yum! I got the backup drive moved over to an external box on the fileserver, just in time for this morning's backup.

Some great news from a friend.

The fact that there are still some lingering bugs and corner cases left over from last weekend's server swap is not terribly surprising; I'm not going to let it worry me.

Some good links. Watch out for book bears!

Apparently Saturday's bike ride wore me out -- I slept until 11 (some of that in Colleen's arms, which was very nice), and had a mild blood-sugar crash in the middle of the afternoon's shopping expedition. We also got some nice dark purple cotton sheets.

Evening brought more office cleaning with Eileen, resulting in multiple square feet of clear counter space. Some of it badly in need of dusting.

It also resulted in a box full of ancient software, mostly games that ran under early versions of Windows (3.1 through 98, IIRC). Free to a good home. There's more up in the attic; maybe I should bring it down before Wednesday.

Some links under the cut.

I was going to say that not a whole lot happened; the actual events got buried under an avalanche of links. But really, a walk, a productive day at work, the Younger Daughter getting ready to start college week after next, and some noodling on guitar must count as something.

Lots good links under the cut. The best are probably U.S. scores dead last again in healthcare study (Reuters) and this good article on polyamory by bookwyrm172006.

Pretty good day. Busy, with only a brief walk, but I got a reasonable amount done at work. The bullpen is great for group communication, but lousy for concentrating on programming when someone else is having a conversation.

The YD landed hersef a job -- selling Cutco knives. Tupperware with an edge, basically. Not something I could ever handle, but maybe she'll be good at it.

Probably the best news of the day: Groklaw - Stewart Rules: Novell Wins! CASE CLOSED!. In other good news of the "why the heck did it take so long" variety, Starbucks offers free Internet access now. Which pretty much leaves high-end hotels the main holdouts.