7 July 05
Stone
Three things:
I’m sickened by violence, this violence, our violence, the spiral this creates.
I’m certain Bush is mentally ill.
And I’m furious that our so-called leaders seem so quick to make political capital out of this morning’s attacks. It’s grotesque.
6 July 05
Luring Them In With WiFi
I like the following idea for encouraging people to use mass transit: the East Bay bus system, AC Transit, is planning to equip about half their transbay fleet with free wireless. So bring your laptop on the bus to San Francisco starting this fall. This project is being pushed by the Alameda County Congestion Management Agency with funding coming from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.
(From Beast Blog.)
5 July 05
Imagining Memoirs
Now that my project is put away like the straw bales from our field that got loaded onto tractors today, I’ve been pondering a bit more about Spain.
Specifically, I’m wondering whether the man who was hand-picked by a dictator to be his successor—from tender years, having seen his father exiled, always in the shadow off a minor tyrant, groomed, indoctrinated, cloned—has any plans to write about any of it. Because the minute the tyrant died, against all expectation, the new king called a general election, and when the military rebelled, he calmed them down and nobody died. How refreshing.
Whether he has plans to write about seeing the decades of Doña Carmen terrorizing the jewelers of Madrid as she was driven up in the black Cadillac, terrorizing them so much so they took out insurance policies against her. He was unable to speak up or say much.
Everyone assumed he was stupid; he never said anything at all. Present at minor foreign functions and royal weddings in Europe, diffident, silent, brooding. Turns out he was probably thinking all the time.
4 July 05
Summertime Bales
The wheat in the field outside our house was harvested a week ago Saturday, and a couple of days ago they went through and made straw bales out of the stubble. It’s a very pleasing thing, a field full of straw bales. Makes you want to build a house from them.
3 July 05
Emerging from the Deep
Advice to designers, editors, dissertation writers, and anyone who’s contemplating a big desktop publishing job in the future, imminent or otherwise:
a) make copious, redundantly copious, stupidly copious, backups. So when you accidentally overwrite a file of fifty pages with only the first page, all you have to do is go to the last backup and enter (tediously, admittedly) all the latest iteration of edits, not retype the whole thing. I know there are people who know how to retrieve supposedly lost file copies but they aren’t around at six in the morning or nine at night on the weekend. And I’m not one of those people anyway.
b) never, ever make global changes of anything when you’re tired. This is the way to end up with sentences that start like this: “In generallifornia…”
c) resize all your fifty gigantic maps BEFORE you need to go to Kinko’s on Friday night and it’s due on Tuesday after a holiday weekend with a skeleton staff of people who will be working at three in the morning with more or less of a clue.
d) don’t eat that extra scoop of ice cream before going to bed. Do you really need your heart racing that fast?
e) decide on a style and STICK to it. The Central Valley/Bay-Delta controversy has changed so many times over the last week I’m still not sure where we are with it, but I think it’s changing anyway, to Central Valley and Bay-Delta, hyphen not endash. But this will have to be in the next draft. As it went to press it was Central Valley and Bay-Delta (endash).
f) When compiling styles for multiple documents be sure, always, to set them in the master document, not in satellites. I have a style called Appendix Chapter Title, appchtitle, appcht, and probably one other one. They all do more or less the same thing. More or less. The less part is going to harrass me for days.
During this past week I’ve hardly even read email, let alone read blogs. I hope to rectify this now.
I did hear from my sister about the legalization of gay marriage in Spain: GO SPAIN. Thirty years ago, when we lived there, a mere suspicion that someone was gay or lesbian was enough to land them in jail. Reading through the Spanish press subsequently the general tone seemed to be this: and you have a problem with this why, exactly?
2 July 05
Return Of The Solar Cooker
We recently replaced our old CooKit from Solar Cookers International. This is a very simple solar cooker made of foil-coated cardboard which reflects sunlight into a black cooking pot that is placed in a transparent roasting bag. It’s timely having the new cooker, for it’s definitely solar cooking weather—long clear hot Davis summer days.
It’s so convenient. Yesterday I threw some quinoa pilaf into the pot with diced tomatoes and garlic and put it outside when I left for work, orienting the cooker to the southwest, and when I returned late in the afternoon it was ready to eat for dinner! This was good since the house was pretty hot and I didn’t want to cook inside. Today the meal was artichokes—yum.
1 July 05
On Charrette
I feel like one of those legendary Parisian architecture students in the 19th century, finishing drawings right on the cart on the way to the delivery spot. We are now into third and fourth proofs of chapters of this thing. And delivering Part One to Kinko’s this evening, I discovered they’re going to be closed on Monday.
Here’s a wave from the cart…
1 July 05
Eyes On A Comet
At 5:52:12 GMT on July 4th, plus or minus 10 seconds, the space probe Deep Impact will slam into the comet 9P/Tempel 1, currently at a modest 10th magnitude in brightness. No one knows what we’ll see, but it’s possible a flash from the impact may be visible in a medium-sized telescope. It should be worth getting mine out for the event.
29 June 05
Dry Run in the Heat
Today was the hottest day of the year so far, about ten degrees hotter than yesterday. It means shutting all the doors and window shades when we leave in the morning to keep the house as cool as possible.
I cycled in to Kinko’s in downtown Davis today at lunchtime to pick up the sample chapter I had taken in yesterday. Some pages are in color, some in black and white; the whole thing is double-sided, and it’s well over 400 pages at this point and I don’t want to be resolving weird issues next Tuesday, a recipe for premature aging.
Then I cycled in again after work to meet Numenius at the bank to try and get a sterling check for the second time in five days. Alas, no luck: this system or that system was down. As a consolation we went to the Picnic in the Park and ambled home. It was still well over 90 degrees fahrenheit at 8:00 pm. It’s sleeping in wet T-shirt weather.
28 June 05
Don Gallo
We’re not getting much of a chance to sleep in these days. The chicken who was present upon our return from North Carolina turns out to be a young rooster who has lately learned how to crow. Nowadays he does this outside our bedroom window, bright and early in the morning.
No one is sure where he came from. Not across the street—though they have had chickens there, there’s never been a rooster. Our landlady thinks somebody just dumped him off here. So far he’s survived the trucks zooming by, and the local coyotes (one of whom we saw from the train Sunday running off with a jackrabbit).
He’s pretty to look at, but I could do without the alarm clock!