Linkstew

Hey, November! September just called -- he said he wants his weather back.

Oh baby, it's snowing at Kirkwood. Actually, it sounds like a pretty nasty storm, and I'm kind of glad I'm not there...

But oh, snowboarding is so close. I can't wait. I'd love to be able to go the weekend before Thanksgiving if conditions look good, but I may have to wait until December 7th/8th before I get to go. At least at that point I'll be done with classes and just have two finals left in my undergraduate career.

Heh, one of my thoughtful co-workers just sent me this email:

"it's important to me that, with the beginning of the winter season, i ask you one thing: if you die snowboarding in an avalanche, can i have your new powerbook?"

update, 11/10: Bah, apparently Kirkwood doesn't archive their news, because now that link above is dead. But that's okay, because there's a new update today: Kirkwood's opening on Saturday the 16th! As in, a week from Yesterday. I don't know if I'll get to go, but it's more contingent on me finding a ride than even my workload (despite having my last midterm on the 18th).

The two most important things I need to know about buying a car I learned from spending 19 summers of my life in Bakersfield:

1. The only sufficiently reflective colors to paint a car are white or silver.
2. It'll be a freezing summer in Bakersfield hell before I buy a car without air conditioning.

It's strange that the last time I was in Bakersfield, it was significantly colder there than in Berkeley, but this time, it's way hotter. Ah, extremes!

But as hot as it gets during the day, Bakersfield summer nights are wonderfully pleasent. I can almost smell the nostalgia.

Wait a second. In just two weeks, I'll be somewhere where the weather has been hanging out between -5 and 5 degrees???

Oh wait, that's Celsius... Damn those Canadians! At least it's not as bad as I thought. But maybe I'll still look into getting some new socks...

After calling around on Friday night, I went to bed dejected that I wouldn't be installing OS X 10.1 the next day. And that turned out to have been a self-fulfilling prophecy, because every time I woke up on Saturday, I rolled over and went back to sleep. When I got out of bed at 5 pm, I called CompUSA in San Francisco, but no one answered. So I started reading reports on MacSlash, and saw that the SF CompUSA was supposedly giving out burned copies. So I decided I'd go on Sunday morning.

So I sat around Saturday night reading what other people had to say about 10.1, and eventually went to bed, making for a totally wasted Saturday. On Sunday, I woke up around noon, got ready, and left for San Francisco.

I got off of the BART and went straight to CompUSA, where the Apple rep proceeded to not give me one of the burnt CDs he had sitting on his spindle. He also would not let me burn the image that was sitting on the desktop of that Quicksilver G4 onto the blank CDRs I'd brought along for just such a contingency. He told me if I wanted it today, I would have to go to MacAdam, which is just what I did. In retrospect, it may have been a good thing that he didn't give me one one of his burned copies, which were apparently bad apples.

So in what turned out to have been 90 degree heat, I walked on 4th from Market to Fulsom, and then on Fulsom from 4th to 7th to MacAdam. I handed him my proof of purchase coupon, he handed me a real upgrade kit, with the full user manual and 9.2.1 CD. Happy as a clam and sweaty as a pig, I made my way back to the BART station and returned to Berkeley on an excessively hot and stuffy train.

The storm didn't come as a complete surprise. The sky had been dark all day. But while I'd expected a storm, thunder and lightning isn't the most common of occurances in the bay area.

My apartment, unfortunately, didn't offer me a very good view of the show. Instead, I sat on my couch, with the lights and TV off, and the glow of my roommate's iBook in front of me. The walls flashed with the lightning, and the building shook with the thunder. And I didn't realize the power had gone out until I noticed the internet wasn't working. So I set down the iBook and went outside with the intention of watching the sky for a little while.

Only as soon as the door closed, I realized I didn't have my keys. And my roommate wasn't home.

So I watched the sky for awhile as planned. And then I tried contorting myself in various ways in a futile attempt to reach through the bars on my window and unlock my door. And then I went and found a Chronicle out front and read in the stairwell.

For two hours.

This is not my roommate's fault for not being home, and I in no way hold it against him. This is called: I'm a moron.

I'm just lucky he stopped by the apartment before going out for the evening. Otherwise, I would have been stuck outside with absolutely nothing but my newspaper for a very long time.

later: Oh boo, I just realized the power outage rebooted my computer, throwing away more than 100 days of uptime. Oh well.

Hey, if I move the office AirPort just so, I can get wireless net in, and at the tables in front of, the cafe downstairs. Wow, that was a productive way to spend an hour -- but now I can work from in front of the cafe and write up summaries of ResNet for work while taking advantage of this beautiful Berkeley day.

Of course, I've also got the option of heading over to Wall Berlin and taking advantage of their Surf and Sip participation -- but this is closer, and freer.

Disadvantage of my current location? Smoke. Blech.

Yesterday, I went to Bakersfield for a doctor appointment (and I apparently look and sound fine, and I'm not dead yet, but blood-tests might indicate otherwise). After the appointment, I went and saw Shrek again, because I figured I should take advantage of cheap Bakersfield movie prices while I had the opportunity -- but about half-way through the movie, I got a call from my dad, telling me that the canyon road (Hwy 178, for those playing along at home) between Bakersfield and my Parent's house was closed due to fires and falling rocks. Since my dad works in Bakersfield and commutes, he was in Bakersfield with me. He suggested we leave one of the cars in town, and take an alternate, much trickier route home. In my foolish optimism (and desire to see the end of Shrek), I declined, figuring that it couldn't possibly take them that long to clear the canyon.

Well, the movie ended, and I called my mom, and got some information numbers to call, and she called one of the reporters from the paper she works for, and I found out two things: 1. The recordings CalTrans offers up (via 1-800-427-7623) are useful for spatial, but not temporal information. In other words, I found out that it was closed, but not when it closed or how long it'd be closed. 2. The highway patrol expected to have it open by 5am.

So, to review the situation: it was about 9:30pm. My train was leaving for Berkeley in twelve hours, but all of my stuff was in Wofford Heights, because I was just going to a doctor appointment -- why would I take my luggage and laptop, etc, with me to the doctor? I couldn't take the direct, easy, well known 1 hour route home due to fire, etc. Two alternate routes exist: A complicated path I've never driven, and on which my dad got lost and ended up back in Bakersfield and took more than two hours to get home, or going around the problem to Tehachapi to Ridgecrest, which is at least a two and a half hour drive.

"Bugger that," I decided, and once I got ahold of my friends, I went and slept at Mike's house again. And used Mike's computer. And sat in Mike's chair, and used Mike's cable modem, and watched one of Mike's movies on Mike's TV and DVD player.

The issue of my stuff and the train still remained, though. So I called my mom and told where about the house I'd scattered my things: A book in the trailer out back by the bed. Showery stuff in the bathroom. Laptop + accessories on the bar. Yack Yack Yack.

She did a dandy job. I just forgot to mention my headphones. So now I'm sitting on the train, distinctly not listening to the mix of 500 some-odd mp3's I lug around. It's going to be a long six hours without any music and having to listen to the too-loud music of other people, and it's all my fault, because I decided not to go home with my dad, and forgot to tell my mom about the headphones. No one to blame but me!

Later on the same train ride: Here I am, sitting on the train about 3 minutes from Martinez -- And I've been sitting here for more than an hour. Ironically, we're stranded here because some grass fires north of here affected the train tracks, and the scheduling of all the trains in the area have been impacted. It seems I'm just bad luck with grass fires these days.

After the train ride: My mom mailed me in response to the above, and informed me that I should have spent less time being bored and more time looking through all my things, because she had definitely packed my headphones. So I unpacked and there, in my suitcase, I found my headphones. It wasn't even in the realm of possibility that she would have put my headphones in my suitcase, considering that my backpack wasn't even full. But it's still my fault for not looking through my luggage, or calling my mom and checking with her. Ah well, nothing that can be done about it now that the trip is more than a day passed.

Somehow it's already come to be December 18. The weather today was incredibly pleasant. It barely feels like December, let alone does it feel like a week from Christmas. This semester has passed by in the blink of an eye. Though when I think about it, things that happened just a little more than a week ago, like my Japanese Finals, seem like months ago.

It seems like time is distorting around me. The present is fleeting, and as soon as it's past, it's flung far away, while the future isn't even a factor in my day-to-day life.

In a way, without even trying, I'm living completely for the present. Carpe Diem, et cetera, et cetera.

Of course, now that this has just occured to me, it will no longer be the case and I'll probably start focusing on the past and the future to an extreme degree, leaving the present to fall away from me, ignored.

I had to run by Rexall today to get some Chapstick, because, well, my lips are chapped. A weekend in Bakersfield chapped them in the first place, and a windy dry Berkeley hasn't helped any at all. So I ran in, grabbed chapstick, ran to the counter, and the cashier asked me "How are you doing today?" And I was like "Well, my lips are kinda chapped..."

Isn't "How are you" a dangerous question to be asking in a store like that, where any range of answers could come up?

Well, I've made it to 1pm, which is a fair accomplishment, considering I got up at 6 freaking AM. And then I couldn't go back to sleep, because it was muggy, and I couldn't do anything useful, because I found that my net was down. So I tried to pick out some clothes to wear, but that turned out to be impossible, because it's not that hot today, but it's very humid. So here I find myself at 1am, tired, sticky, and generally annoyed. Maybe tomorrow will be better.