Bocce Ball Shenanigans and Otherwise

My team at work had a little outing today, a very odd one at that: We went to a bocce ball hall. Who knew those things even existed? 70-year-old-men?

If so, that makes me all set to be one: Where's the sign-up sheet? Do I get a complimentary box of Depends?



In any case, I can't believe how much I drank today over the course of a few hours. It all started to go downhill when my friend when decided to crack open a bottle of Chimay at least 80 ounces in size. 80 fucking ounces!

Long after we sobered, we had a little get-together at my friend Jason's place. I had worked up the nerve to drive my Datsun 510 over there to get a taste of driving a stick on hills. Everything went well; I didn't even stall it!

Well, everything went well until I decided to leave near midnight. Jason lives on a giant, windy hill in Daly City, so I was able to coast the car down it for the most part. Much to my surprise when I reached the bottom, the engine had stalled. Restarting the engine didn't help, because the starter wasn't getting significant electricity. Luckily I was able to push-start the car, similar to how done in this video:



After one minute of driving, however, this was clearly not enough: The car kept stalling. It became clear that either an electrical short circuit exists or the alternator failed. Thankfully I could still push-start it, so I did; but tragically I would never be able to reach home from there. I ended up driving the car up the hill again, not stopping at any stop signs, parked it out front, and stayed at Jason's for the night.

Much to my chagrin, I attempted to replace the alternator in the morning, but that didn't work: The previous owner had gutted and redid the car's electrical system and replaced the original alternator with a internally-regulated one, one from a 1988 Eagle Medallion, which is really a rebadged French car. None of the replacements integrated with the electrical system properly!

This situation left me with no choice but to take my chances: I charged the battery for the day and drove it home with no alternator, something I would dissuade others from. It would be a lie to say that I wasn't scared of having the battery drain completely resulting in the car's stalling somewhere inopportune. Thankfully I made it home. The car's in the driveway, awaiting a new alternator. We'll see what happens next.

Ugh. :-/

This is going to be a small challenge.

Mid-May this year I bought a semi-classic car for three purposes: Restoring, having something that I could maintain myself without understanding modern electronics, and forcing me to learn---once and for all---how to drive a standard shift transmission. The third goal is most important to me, actually. I don't feel right having staved off driving a stick shift car for so long.

So what did I buy? A 1972 Datsun 510 coupe, very similar to the one pictured above. For those who are unfamiliar with the brand Datsun, it is a former naming of Nissan that was dropped in the early-1980s.

So what made this type of car so compelling? For starters, it is not much larger than a modern Mini Cooper. It has a superb turning radius, so it beats my 2001 Accord, which I hope to get rid of once the the Datsun's new and happy. Plus, when tuned properly, it gets exceptional gas mileage.

As for pending work, I need to ...

• Flush fluids,


• Tune the carburetors,


• Rewire some of the electronics,


• Wire temperature and fuel gauges,


• Wire the backup-lights,


• Wire the windshield washers,


• Install a sound dampening kit (Ordered),


• Install front and rear bumpers (Ordered),


• Install air filters (Ordered),


• Install interior fabric kit,


• Install grommets in the firewall, and


• Get the climate control system working,

Given just how simple this car is by today's standards, the important tasks are insanely easy. Plus, a ten-year-old could practically buy all of the replacement parts for this car with his weekly allowance.

In any case, last night tweaked me out a bit, because it was the first time that I have driven that car on my own for any appreciable duration. Learning to drive a stick shift is unnerving as it is, so I did not want to compound it with stop-and-go traffic, major traffic, and hills. My plan had been to drive the car at 0100 in the morning from Mountain View, where my employer is located and the car had been parked, to San Francisco and park it in my driveway to begin repairs in the coming days. The result: I made it home just fine with stalling the car only once, and that stall happened when I was parking it.

This is going to be a small challenge, but it will be worth it: I have a love-hate relationship with trial-by-fire situations, so I am looking forward to this project of mine keeping me on my toes. It is one of those things that in now + two months I will look back upon and wonder why I had been fretting.

Nostalgic at work already?

I really miss my old office layout before my group switched buildings. It's not that it was considerably larger than what I have now; the layout was just more conducive to being able to sit on an exercise ball than what it is now.

Thankfully I am in the San Francisco office Thursdays and Fridays, and there is so much more open space here: At least I can have my damn ball back; I'm sick of chairs.

I can see. Finally.

The medical industry has earned a special place in my skeptical heart: I only tend to patronize it every couple of years or so, or at least when the need is pressing.

That need came again recently.

I spend a huge chunk of my life in front of the computer at work and, to a diminishing degree, at home. Enough so that I have noticed my near-range vision start to get fuzzier and more difficult to focus. This culminated into an amusing trip to the optometrist this morning.

Much to my optometrist's chagrin, my vision was discovered to be better than perfect. I guess I don't feel bad for not having visited an optometrist in over 15 years now. In any case, the only major defect is that my eyes suffer from focusing fatigue. For this, I now have a prescription for incredibly low-strength reading glasses.

I am thoroughly excited but a bit daunted by the pressure of choosing the frame aesthetics. Anyone have useful advice for my dear face?

The sad thing part of today's outcome is that my optometrist is totally rad for a medical professional and that my eyes' lack of aberrance will diminish the need to visit her in the future.

How Recockulous Can it Get?

Tomorrow will bring me something that I had long-forgotten about.

My friend Jason reminded me that Machine Girl will be playing in San Francisco---finally. It feels like I've been waiting five months to see it at least. No fair with the export and import market hurdles. Boo!

Of course, of course, the plot doesn't look too outstanding; but I must ask: Who can go wrong with a film that has an airborne guillotine or drill bra?

Well, without further ado, the trailer:

Fixing Gtk+ Abnormal Font Size

It certainly says something about a piece of software when the majority of front-page query results on Google for it pertain to bugs than actual praise. A case in point is gnome-settings-daemon, the userspace daemon that loads preferences for Gtk+ and GNOME applications.

I gave up using fully-featured desktop environments like KDE, GNOME, CDE, XFCE, etc. about two years ago and never turned back. One of the major drawbacks from this with Gtk+ and GNOME applications is that font sizes never seem to render accurately in the absence of gnome-settings-daemon. Primarily their sizes appear at least three points larger.



Given this, I had explored several setups with Gtk+ resource files but never found anything quite satisfactory until now.

I ended up tweaking ~/.gtkrc-2.0 such that

style "user-font"
{
font_name="Verdana 7"
}

widget_class "*" style "user-font"

gtk-font-name = "Verdana 8"

was included, and behold the results in the lower-right quadrant.

Enjoy.

Forthcoming Two Song Sample from Front 242

As seen on alfa matrix, Front 242 will be releasing a downloadable two song sample for its forthcoming First Moments release.

It is very exciting to see more material coming our way from these pioneers. The apparent goal of the release is to include five versions of the same base audio, with each version having been encoded and compressed differently from the rest, all in the name of demonstrating how this affects our perception of the art.

Listen carefully!

My Ears Still Ring

Last night was a bit unexpected, yet a real treat. My comrade Nik called me to say that he ran into none other than Haujobb's Daniel Myer at the airport and that Myer would be putting on a show tonight in the city.

I have seen Myer's Haujobb once before in San Jose, like within 24 hours of getting back from Burning Man. I was in a pretty weird mood at the time; it must have been all of the playa dust embedded in my body. Anyhow, the performance then, like much of Haujobb, was hit-or-miss. Hence expectations were not too high this time. Well, Myer debuted his new gig called Destroid. His sheer volume of energy this time reminded me of some of the EBM classics, a pleasant surprise; and unlike the last time I saw him, this performance actually outdid the studio material.

Above all, I appreciate this guy's wit. It's a matter-of-fact and dry sarcasm that I can actually appreciate. His subtle poking fun at the scenesters amused me to no end. That was best achieved with his bringing out a few classics and doing covers. The best was of Einstürzende Neubauten's Fütter mein Ego. In effect: Move aside, my little snobsters, if you don't recognize this.

Bravo! Bravo! My ears still ring.

What's in a name?

So someone asked me what the name "Palast der Republik" is all about.

It's a building in Germany whose name translates into the "Palace of the Republic," and it served as the East German parliament building from the 1970s through the late 1980s. After the collapse of the East German state, performance and street artists took it over as squatters. I appreciate its retro architecture; it was something that stood out greatly in my travels. Sadly it has been demolished.

Interesting history: The main room contained hundreds of intricate light fixtures. This earned it the name Erich's Lampenladen, Erich's Store of Lightbulbs, after the then-authoritarian Communist Party General Secretary.

Where I have been and how the affects my going forward.

This is somewhat of an obligatory post, somewhat akin to a mile marker on the side of life's freeway, I guess. The sole purpose: So I can look back at this in now + time and muse about how short-sighted my views were. Or, wait, is that not the whole point of this?

I'm on the shuttle bus bringing me from San Francisco to Mountain View for work. It's a bit bumpy, and this annoys me. The funny thing is that I really have no right to complain about this: There's wireless internet, the seats are soft, and the bus runs on biodiesel. Modern bourgeois corporate slave?

OK. Enough meta-information.

Actually my situation has little that can be complained about. Ever since I moved to the Bay Area, life has been great. Almost every day is different from the previous.

No longer must I contend with the -30° winters in Minneapolis. That's inhumanly cold and reckolous. Never again. The cold was not the worst part: I detested much about the attitudes of the people there. It's amusing, because the natives prided themselves on their open-mindedness. Bullshit! Many are just a bunch of passive-aggressive ninnies whose most open expression of opinion is "That's interesting." On top of that, the young people are incredibly insular. After most of my friends moved away for jobs, it was practically impossible to break into a new social group there. Funny, because I seem to make a new friend or two every week here. If it helps nail the point home, about 70 percent of my close friends were foreigners who were there for one reason or another.

Life wasn't entirely bad. At least the Midwest had beautiful weather features. I had lived in Tulsa before Minneapolis, so severe weather was always a treat in both places. The sheer wimpiness of the Bay's weather is driving me to take a week off from work and storm chase in Tornado Alley. Sound crazy? I think of it as any other calculated risk. Well, I'd probably not do exactly what the guy in that video did.

Tulsa isn't a bad city; it has rad art deco stylings on the buildings. I guess that's what it got for being the oil capitol of the U.S. for a few short decades in the early 20th century. I couldn't live there again, however. People often find it funny when I remark about liking the people there a little more than those in Minnesota. Why? They were at least up front with their views, be they prejudiced or not. I think their biggest flaw was lack of exposure to the world outside of their context.

It's crazy how relative deprivation and exposure affect our preferences. Compulsory programs by the government get little pity from me, but maybe we should institute a program of mandatory intra- and international travel for our citizens. I'd be willing to bet more could identify Iraq on a map after that.

As a side note, It always amuses me when Bay Area natives comment on the Midwest and the fly-over states, especially when many of them have never visited. I wouldn't necessarily suggest spending much time in them, but you will quickly see that no place in this country is a panacea.

Internet Ambivalence, Be Gone.

OK. I finally got off the fence pertaining to journaling and modern blogging. It's funny, because I have been doing this on the Internet in one form or another since 1998 but never very seriously.

Long ago it was on web sites that I developed myself. Then came LiveJournal, but that went into the toilet quickly.

What has been the hang-up as of late? I'm not sure. I'm happy that technology has matured to the point where I can use it with ease. Maybe I'm just happy to be using a service that the good ol' engineers at Google develop and maintain.

What can you expect to find here? Judging from where my mind has been lately, which is typically in the gutter, you'll find writings on technology, photography, politics, social relations, political economy, San Francisco Bay Area, language, film, music, and other musings. I care a lot about technology; and since that occupies my thoughts, I am afraid much of this will focus on that. I will, however, try to keep the technological hegemony at bay. Please be patient.

I am not a very private person when it comes to my interpersonal relationships, but the political and social climate of the United States scare me. Because of this, a lot of activities and feelings will be omitted from the written record. I only mention this as a caveat in assessing my thoughts and me.

I should note that I have a terrible tendency to look at writing syntactically and not for how it reads. This is something that I will attempt to sweep aside in favor of more natural writing. Academic and professional writing come easily for me. Many a friend have joked that I would have made a good bureaucrat or cabinet minister.

In closing, I do want to remind everyone that the content contained herein does not represent the views of my employer nor should it be construed in such a way.