Introduction
This is the fifteenth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, and Volume XIV is here. (The different volumes have nothing to do with one another and can be read in numerical order, alphabetical order, in order of importance, or by court order.)
What are albertnet bits & bobs? They’re brief passages from letters, emails, essays, shopping lists, or other combinations of letters and words that I saw fit to type at some point. Read these silently to yourself while pointlessly mouthing the words, or read them aloud to your child or pet, or read them at top volume on a city bus. Or do all three! Mix-n-match!
[The below photo has nothing to do with this post, but hey ... happy Halloween!]
August 3, 2006
I have my PC media player set up to cycle through all my music, so I get everything from alternative rock to classical to rap. Right now I’m hearing a blast from the past: “Hunted Child” by the L.A. rapper Ice-T. My roommate C—, aka Dithers, used to sing along, “I’m the honey child!” I for my part liked to sing, “Death row . . . water buffalo.” [The real lyric was “what a brutha know.] Years later, at the bike shop in Berkeley, I continued in that vein, and for a brief time had the nickname “Water Buffalo.”
August 23, 2006
There used to be a sign on the Muni [i.e., local mass transit system] buses that read, “There is no limit to the number of seeing-eye dogs on Muni.” I always wanted to nudge a fellow passenger, glance toward the sign, and say, “No kidding—this bus is teeming with them!” Later the Muni folks changed it to “Any number of seeing-eye dogs are allowed on Muni, free and un-muzzled.” Scarcely better, but did it have to be so wordy? Why not just “Seeing-eye dogs are allowed on Muni,” or, because it’s really the point, “Only seeing-eye dogs are allowed on Muni”? Or perhaps best of all, how about, “If you can read this, get your dog off the bus”?
August 31, 2006
I finally got some Tour de France coverage on tape. It’s pretty cool. They show some dudes’ heart rates in real time! The commentators talked to Floyd Landis’s coach during stage 17, when Floyd made up all that time and put himself in striking range of the overall win. They were talking about stage 16, when Floyd cracked and lost like eight minutes on the last climb. He uses this Power Tap mech in the rear hub that tells him his power output and can be uploaded to the PC after the race. His coach said that during that ill-fated last climb on stage 16, Floyd was putting out 260 watts, which was quite low for him. Well, it so happens that it’s almost exactly what I averaged on the first two passes of La Marmotte this year! (I did 262 watts on the Col du Glandon and 264 on the Col du Télégraphe.) If you don’t factor in rider weight, you could conclude that I could hang with Floyd on his worst day! (Of course, rider weight is everything, and I’m sure my power-to-weight ratio isn’t even close to his.) Every night before bed both girls beg to watch some Tour de France footage. I limit them to five minutes (unless I get too caught up in the action and forget to curtail it).
September 8, 2006
I came across one of those questionnaires that help determine if you’re an alcoholic. Question five was, “Do you suffer from regular alcohol related accidents?” My completely honest and sincere answer is, “Not unless you count peeing on the rim.”
October 18, 2006
I’m so sorry to hear you got dragged to Kentucky Fried Chicken. I hate that “food.” E— and I went to KFC one cold, rainy day in Michigan during our cross-country bike tour, and immediately regretted it, from the first greasy bite onward. Which is weird. I mean, you’d think just about anything would taste good when you’re tired, cold, wet, and lost. I wonder if the ill-fated Donner party could have enjoyed KFC, right there at the end when they’d already eaten their boots and everything. Probably not. Man that stuff is gross.
November 11, 2006
I’m so frustrated with my work PC. The IT folks have locked down the browser to make sure the online experience is as annoying as possible. Every time a website runs a script (which means about half a dozen times per page) a window pops up saying, “Oh NO! Rush the children down to the cellar, put your tray table in the upright locked position, tuck and roll, Simon says cover your head! This website is running a SCRIPT! It’s possible that something TERRIBLE could happen! Do you really want to run this script, or should you just power off your PC and go home?” It’s systematically training you to automatically click “YES” to any dialog box that pops up, guaranteeing that if you ever got a useful dialog with a serious choice, you’d fail to recognize it. Somehow this makes the security people, who are evidently running the company, feel a bit better. Sadists. And whenever you click on a hyperlink or type in information and submit it, you get another dialog box: “You could not possibly have realized this, being an ignorant type with no concept of computer networks (the opposite extreme of us security types), but you are about to send information over the INTERNET! Do you have any idea what you’re doing? Don’t you know that OTHER PEOPLE could SEE this information? People you’ve never met, strangers, some of them psychotics, or the kind of people who don’t even put the toilet seat down? Are you SURE you want to do this? Wouldn’t it be better to go back to the IBM PC and DOS 3.1 and use WordStar? Are you really ready for this Brave New World that has such people in it? Is it really worth it?”
November 13, 2006
Not to worry, DSL [digital subscriber line, an early Internet broadband product] is pretty straightforward to have installed. After you place your order, a guy shows up at your house reeking of cigarette smoke. He might work for your actual provider, or not; he might actually work for the competitor of your actual provider, in which case another guy will come weeks later who will work for your provider, or at least a subcontractor of your provider whom you’ve never heard of. Each guy will come into the house, look in your crawl space, scratch himself a bit, then leave without appearing to have done anything. I guess one guy has one task and another guy who comes later has another task, but it never appears that anybody actually does anything. The first time through I expected to see the telco guy shimmy up the telephone pole across the street, but he must have done that in Ninja clothing the night before.
An any case it really is easy for the consumer, whose entire role is to keep an eye on the telco guy and make sure he’s not casing the house for valuables (see “Ninja clothing” comment above). Sometime before or after the telco guy’s visit, or between the telco guys’ visits, a box comes in the mail containing an install CD and a really cheap looking DSL modem. You follow some illustrated instructions and you plug a bunch of stuff in. Sometimes the DSL is provisioned on your existing phone line, so you have to put these weird filters on all your phone jacks, even ones with no phone plugged into them (if you believe the instructions, which I don’t). This is still pretty straightforward unless you’re also sharing those phone lines with your streaming digital audio system, in which case you have to draw a network diagram, scratch your head a lot, pay extra for a static IP address, and configure that. My current DSL, even though it’s a separate line from my voice line, came with a lot of filters anyway, with specific instructions to do nothing with them except save them in case you decide to switch to Voice Over IP (VOIP). So every so often I have to stop my wife from throwing out the filters, but that’s pretty easy.
I’ve had three different DSL providers, and only the first installation was difficult. My router was configured wrong and it didn’t do a darn thing. I was very distraught until I phoned a colleague and he helped me suss out the problem. The guy who installed it refused to help, and I had no recourse because I had no idea what company he even worked for, nor what he was even doing in my house.
November 29, 2006
At long last, per your previous inquiry, I’ve found a photo of the post-race meal served by the Marmotte race organizers. That shredded white stuff you see in the picture is raw jicama, I think. (Tasting it didn’t help with identification because it tasted like absolutely nothing, except aluminum, which everything tasted like, due to the physical abuse I’d just put my body through.) The dry, lifeless baguette must have been imported from the U.S. (from the Safeway deli, to be precise). I didn’t even know you could get a bad baguette in France. Maybe they have special crappy ones for the Americans. I’d really like to know why the race promoters thought anybody would be excited about this plate. (Full disclosure: there was also a second plate, of mealy penne with a bland tomato sauce, that didn’t warrant a photo. It was nominally edible.)
November 30, 2006
To be honest, I generally take a head-in-the-sand approach to the woes of ageing. I’m aware of a great many ways in which the body begins to wear out (though certainly not even a fraction of the total, nor of the myriad details of such), and I’m aware of many (but certainly not all, nor even most) of the ways in which a healthy lifestyle can delay the inevitable. That said, I’m also aware of the non-physical aspects of ageing: specifically, the emotional and psychological components, the most visible of which is the worry involved. As if the physical discomfort and reduced abilities weren’t bad enough, there’s the ever-growing concern that they’ll get worse, that they’re leading up to something dire. Toward the end of E—’s grandma’s life, I learned the hard way never to ask the open-ended question, “How are you?” This seemed to be an invitation for her to begin an endless litany of complaints and grave portents. I find that one of the great joys of (relative) youth is the illusion that it will last. To begin worrying now, to become vigilant of the pitfalls of this or that poor lifestyle choice, to start getting “Prevention” magazine, etc. would take much of the fun out of still being mostly intact. When I become a geezer one day and have to forego, with a sigh, that third piece of bacon, I want to at least have the pleasure of remembering my thirties, when the only memories I’ll have of limiting my bacon intake are considerations like “is it too hot to burn my fingers?” or “will that leave enough for E— and the kids?” Maybe one day I’ll wish I’d started the fiber and temperance a little earlier, but I’ll also, I’m sure, think back and say, “By god, I lived large as a young man, and I enjoyed it!”
As for whole-wheat pasta, I lump that into that category of foods you should either enjoy in their proper form or skip entirely. This substitutes-to-avoid group includes Hydrox cookies (imitation Oreos that taste bad), turkey bacon (inedible), soy cheese (culinary blasphemy), light beer (urine), grocery store pastries (a waste of fat and a carbuncle on the already ugly face of American food), margarine (proof that man is essentially evil), frozen yogurt (not yogurt, not ice cream, and not good), low-fat ice cream (the only noble justification for suicide I can think of), soy milk (tofu urine), and of course carob (the existence of which means the terrorists have already won). I mean, food ought to be pleasurable, life ought to be pleasurable, and if you’re not a total sloth and/or glutton you ought to be able to enjoy yourself somewhat. Those who do fake workouts (dangling by their wrists over a Stairmaster so their feet can paddle ineffectually around, while they read a frickin’ magazine, for crying out loud) can have their fake foods, and the rest of us—big strong creatures with appetites and a zest for living hard and well—can do whatever produces good results. That’s my take, anyway.
November 30, 2006
Congratulations on Baby M—! She is darling. I can’t tell which of you she looks like. In my experience babies seldom look like their parents, who are, after all, adults.
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