scrottie

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 08:24:34 GMT

One of today's bits of fun was some kind of emergency that I don't have the details on (we were often not included on things and that's only gotten much worse since getting bought) where instead of getting a ticket, it was a Slack message. But only a Slack message. No one was tagged. And so there was no response because no one got an alert. And no one saw this and tried to escalate it by tagging people or opening a ticket or any other reasonable thing. And I'm reminded by this and a thousand other things that people in corporate environments constantly do the stupidest thing possible to sabotage everything so that they can blame other people and make themselves look better. Everyone is constantly doing this in incredibly elaborate farces. There's the old adage of giving someone enough rope to hang themselves and that does sometimes happen but mostly people weave intricate traps for each other all day long. There was absolutely a lot of this when it was 1 + 0.5 + 0.5 people writing code and three C-levels but now it's like Mad Max. One large government research project I worked on, I watched get completely derailed by one rampaging angry idiot, and the project got turned around from a smashing success to a complete failure. I've long marvelled at other partner companies' IT contacting US and asking us to help them find their own internal data that we don't and should not have access to, but now I see immediately how everyone tries to outsource their jobs on everyone else and how that's a logical extension of that. A whole bunch of managers just pass the buck all day. This is in middle of a meat grinder. Monty Python and the Holy Grail credits did a sthick where the people responsible for sacking the people who have been sacked have just been sacked, and that's literally what's going on in here. I don't know if any of the people who left should have (ok one was getting up in our tiny little team's business about hour usage even though, or more likely because, we out competed his huge team so don't miss that). I don't know if in general, the good people got pushed out and the dramatic actors are left if they were horrible too. The immediate coworkers have done their best to raise to the occasion. I'm really really tired of neurotypical people right now.

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Trivial

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 23:35:06 GMT

One of my Sacramento-San Joaquin river rescues was a red plastic, textured ball. This was light weight and more of a toy than any kind of serious sports ball. Given other recent finds, I do have to admit that I do tend to investigate red things. Most bits of plastic I just remove from the river and that's it. This I decided to throw in the Person-Over-Board bin at the club, which is full of sets of plastic laundry soap etc jugs, each pair tied together with a line, one half full of water, to simulate a person floating in the water needing rescue. Sometimes the club does this thing where we lob tennis balls in to each other's cockpits, or try to. If you land it in the cockpit, you sank them, and they're invited to try to sink you in turn. If you miss or they manage to defend, you have to go pick it up and try again. So sportsballs aren't completely out of place. A few days later, yesterday, we had an open house. Open houses always have a communal dinner and hang out afterward (I managed to jump on the new club J80, the only one in the fleet I hadn't been on yet, aside from the Senior-only dingies, and the Lasers). One person had a small child who found the ball and was happier than a pig in mud getting strangers to play with her with the ball. When they went to leave, I told them the story and suggested they take the ball. They did. I feel good about that.

In other news, California is throwing millions of dollars more at the Rio Vista lift bridge that they're already constantly working on at night and repainting every year. This is just one of dozens historic lift and bastile bridges out here. The contrast in bridge maintenance between NY and CA is stark. Apparently the bridge is getting an ADA complaint ramp so I don't have to carry the bike up and down stairs. And the new bridge decking will be polyester-concrete, and I'm sure riding by traffic I'll get some of that in my brain.

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Fri, 17 May 2024 21:11:40 GMT

Coming in to the Albany Amtrak station always is always a slap in the face to remind me I'm in New York and I don't fucking understand New Yorkers. A few years ago, Amtrak started doing bicycle roll-on service on their long haul routes and stopped doing the bike-box thing. Part of the bicycle roll-on thing is you get a baggage ticket for it at baggage claim, but take it yourself to the baggage car and hand it to them, then pick it up again at your destination. I did exactly that between Antioch and Chicago and I've done it several times previously. So I get in to Albany and no one is at the baggage car. I wait a few minutes. The one other time that happened, I found a conductor, he made a radio call, and someone met me there. So I found a conductor and explained that I checked a bicycle and need to pick it up from the baggage car per my orders in Chicago. He informs me it'll be at baggage claim in 20 minutes. I ask, "even bicycles?". He turns around and starts talking to someone, apparently ignoring that. I haul all my bike bags, which are much easier to move around on a bicycle, up the two stories of stairs, across the skyway, across the station, down the elevator to baggage check, and there's no one else there either, but there's a sign telling you to go to the ticket desk in the lobby. I go there and start to explain the situation. He makes some radio calls. Baggage assistance shows up and goes down to the baggage car with me, opens it, takes my tag, and hands me my bike. If the train didn't have a layover in Albany, I'd have been screwed.

Leaving the station with the bike, I go outside and spend a few minutes getting situated then decide that I should use the bathroom before I go. I wheel back in and wheel the bike in to the bathroom and wedge it between the wall and the sink, all four panniers on it, do my business, wash my hands, and start wheeling the bicycle out. A woman comes in the doors from outside, sees me (the bathrooms are down a hall right off the main entrance), and charges straight toward me, blocking either of us from going anywhere -- trying to get in to the men's restroom. If you're having deja vu at this, trust me, so did I. funny deja vu where I -- an almost identical thing happening last time I came in to town but trying to exit through the main doors instead of the mens restroom, but the bike was folded and in a bag and I was carrying this whole mess. After a moment, she realizes what she's done, and turns around and goes the other way.

New Yorkers move way faster than their brains do, a story in two parts.

Addendum: the baggage car was not locked, just latched. If this happens again, I'm stealing my bike from the baggage car.

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Fri, 17 May 2024 16:14:11 GMT

Back in the land of signs that say "POSTED" on them in large letters, the Empire of Texasland. It looks like humans forgot how to build or repair structures about 30 years ago and civilization has just been coasting since, with the help of some imported modular buildings and trailer houses.

Finally broke the pattern last night of staying up until midnight PST then being woken up at ever earlier and earlier times relative to PST. If I were in charge of this shit, I'd run it very differently. Wake-up calls would be optional. Less like the military, more like a resort. There would be a buffet.

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taxes

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 04:32:11 GMT

Welp... taxes more or less done. Last year I made a bit more than the previous year and taxes about doubled from the previous year. This year, I made a bit more again and taxes nearly tripled from that. So I guess this must be the infamous "get fucked" tax bracket. About half of the extra I made over last year goes to taxes. That includes paying back about 3/4ths of the "health marketplace" insurance premium subsidies. The subsidies on those have a longer tail than I expected; last year, I kind of freaked out when I saw I had to pay back about a quarter on those (and then updated my income on coveredca.com), but decided to keep it. Cancelled it now. I've never used this insurance. Sometimes you talk to some old people who talk about how great it is, and how they get all of these pills for almost nothing, and everyone seems to really care, but almost universally, it's reviled. They fight you tooth and nail. The processes for anything are impossible. You go for months with them foot dragging and fighting. You don't get a diagnosis, you get an autopsy, while paying inflated rates out of pocket for each visit up until the $8,000 or whatever copay level. So I have to wonder if they generally treat old people different than younger people. But apparently not always... maybe working class old people get lumped in with the rest of us?

Going to sleep on this and wait and see if anything brilliant occurs to me. This is going to mostly wipe out savings. Of course, I should have been estimating taxes as I went throughout the year and budgeting then, but I say that every year. Maybe this year I'll actually use the tax site to do that. Take-home winds up not being that much so I never feel like socking a bunch of money away is really attractive. Usually what happens is the new year starts to come around and I start buckling down hard on work and grinding to try to earn and save enough in those five or so months to pay all the taxes for the last year. That used to work.

Looks like my effective tax rate is 27%, just for federal. Can't help thinking about how giant corporations have an effective rate of 0%.

Edit: Part of this stupidity is staring at the screen for at least two solid days and then being fried on computer right as the full impact of the financial fuckery is hitting.

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boring sailing

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 06:59:07 GMT

No students by the time I got to the club, which is right around 2pm with the train landing a bit after 1:30. Walking out on the Berkeley peninsula always involves indirection. The couple snogging on a park bench by the bay gets a wide berth. The turkeys get a wide berth. Give the crows some room too. There's the famous Berkeley Drum Circle and inexplicable meetups of 30 friends on the path. The Humane Society is right by there, which is lovely, so all kinds of nervous and shy dogs get walked, or if the dogs aren't nervous or shy, they get walked in big packs. Staying with my friend A and catching up with him at his park, it was similar but different, with martial arts practice taking place in the park, casual adult soccer games, people practising taunt line, couples camping out, friends gathering. There's no straight line through that kind of stuff.

Week day lessons start at 1pm. Sometimes (contemporarily and historically) I'll show up and there will be no students waiting and a bunch of boats already launched in that time with more instructors wandering around looking for students. Other times I'll show up and there will be a mass of students and no one else rated to teach anywhere. Today there were an abundance of instructors, three boats already out, one boat with an instructor and two students getting ready to launch but stuck in a protracted "dock talk", and no other students, so I sailed with someone else who showed up to teach and had the rare pleasure of sailing with someone senior rated, Camille. By the time we were about to launch (which took about 10 minutes), a student showed up, so Camille had him get and suit up a harness, after asking him if he'd done trapeze before and wanted to. Winds were moderate. Camille was a drill seargant; everyone demonstrates their docking and does it again if needed; everyone demonstrates their crew-overboard recovery; capsize recoveries; etc. The student is frazzled and overwhelmed and is no longer interested in the trapeze, so we do a hot swap in the boat, of taking off PFDs and doffing and doning the harness, and I'm on the trapeze, whee! It works something like this: I'd only done that once before. Technically people of my rating (junior, the popular rating in the sandwich of novice-junior-senior-cruising skipper) are allowed to do that, but not fly the spinnaker, but for some reason, we don't very often. It's kind senior insanity to just decide that *someone* *must* trap out. When we came back, there was one late straggler student, so just he and I went out and did small circles after a bunch of tacks and gybes. As happens a lot with students working towards their junior rating, there were almost-broaches, where he went through the gybe too fast and didn't hold the boat down (stops multiple positive feedback systems that culminate in you getting wet the boat laying on her side) and the boat violently headed up and nearly capsized from a broach. So, we worked on that. Gybing a dinghy in 20 or 30mph winds (was probably 12 or 14) and not getting wet takes a lot of precision. **

99% of the people I've taught I never see and are gone but a few are holding the fort in a major way. One is Gene. Almost every time I've been there, I've run in to him. I was his first instructor. He won't let me forget that I let him capsize. I told him to let the mainsheet all the way out before tacking so that if he went too far, he wouldn't capsize. He asked what would happen if he didn't let the mainsheet out [mainsheet hauls in the main sail which can easily wind up sideways to the wind, which makes a crap wing and a great lever when 90 degrees to the wind]. I asked him if he wanted to find out. He said sure. We tacked and capsized. It was probably blowing 24 or 28mph winds. The waves were half as high as the capsized boat. CSC is positioned just at the receiving end of the straight the Golden Gate Bridge is built over, so winds are like a jet. He's now the type of instructor who has a detailed safety "dock talk" with students before leaving the dock. I'm pretty sure that didn't traumatize him, and this has come up many times and I've asked a lot of questions, and often capsizing and recovering from it builds confidence in students that mistakes are ok and the worst that can (likely) happen isn't that bad *, but verbal foreknowledge is good too. Theory and practise have a yin-yang relationship at CSC. Also, ask a stupid question, say "yes" to "do you want to find out", get wet. (I do now generally ask students individually how they feel about getting wet and work hard to accommodate people who don't want to... but also, the water is really really nice right now.)

* It often happens that the largest crowds of students show up on the hottest days, but the hottest days smoother the winds. So you have this combination of not being able to sail and being too hot, so it often happens that people just capsize and chill in the water. The dayleaders are used to this and don't even drive the rescue skiff out to see if people are ok. It's a good time to practise righting boats, and some of that happens, but often we just bob around in the water with a half overturned boat. Capsizing with no winds requires intention but isn't difficult.

** Sometimes these boats will break free of the water and start skimming the surface, or "planing", but unless that happens, you wind up in situations where you have 28mph of wind and the boat's hull really, really, really wants to do absolutely anything except push a trench faster than maybe 12mph through the water, and the boat will do anything she can to escape pushing that trench, and that typically involves everyone getting wet.

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Boring

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 02:13:57 GMT

CSC has a board position open for a Banquet Chair. It's very CSC for leaders to be in charge of things like cooking for everyone. That would be fun. Except for all of the other stuff I'm failing to get done. There's a chair in charge of fixing dinghies. One in charge of fixing keelboats. One in charge of safety and maintaining the rescue skiffs. There probably should be one for rats and mice.

Bunch more rain. Kind of a cold snap. Much wind. Big spinny system came down the coast. Club was closed Thurs for low tides but it was also raining, hailing, dark skies, and cold. Mount Lemon^WMount Shasta^WMount Fuji^WMount Rainier^WMount Diablo has snow on it. I should go skiing. There's no skiing on Mount Diablo unless you do some kind of xcountry thing.

I fact-checked my class to death and got a B-. At the end of the semester, the graded quizes unlock so you can see what was scored as incorrect. Many quiz questions directly contradict each other. I was on the Dean's List for a while (which I guess is above the Honors List I don't know how this shit works) while I was opening cases on each and every one of these but they've worn me down. Tech continues to be a welfare program for mediocre upper middle class white kids and no shitty degree is going to change that.

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Fri, 29 Mar 2024 05:43:42 GMT

One of the ways that New York reminds me of Texas is people overwhelmingly make great effort to keep their dogs away from people. People will be walking the cutest little lab mix puppy that obviously adores everyone and wants to say hi to everyone and they'll reel that poor little thing like until it is half way hoovering off the ground the moment they see someone, then pull it off the sidewalk at 50 paces away. I know people take dogs with them for protection and people train dogs for this and that is a dimension here. I think the only time a New Yorker has really apologized to me is when I was walking along and a hit a corner with overgrown shrubs and ran in to adorable puppy a couple was walking from the other direction. We had a whole slobber fest full of tummy rubs and face licks before they even realize what happened... then they apologized to me. And I'm sitting there on the ground soaking up their dog's spit while they profusely apologize. New York is no where near Canada all in all and the exception doesn't prove the rule.

So, conversely, one of the most wonderful things about the California Bay Area is people will show up places and their dog just gets elevated to human levels of liberty, running around, making friends, seeing what people are up to, begging snacks, getting pets, getting strangers to throw the ball, whatevs. Almost every time I go to CSC, I make a new dog friend. I've also made cat friends there. Hell, the squirrels are friendly. Somewhere I have a pic someone else took of a rat that crawled in my hung motorcycle helmet and took a nap. And out here in the sticks, there's a friendly tom with a collar who soaks up the pets and hangs out in the community room like he owns the place. I haven't tamed the coyotes yet.

Mitsu is still kicking. He's pushing 80 and still windsurfs every day as far as anyone can tell. I don't know what the story is and I'm afraid to ask, but my imagination says he was a champion windsurfer who immigrated to the US when he was in his 20s for the windsurfing scene then just never fucking stopped. He always recognizes me and asks me about stuff. Today, he asked me about the tallbike, which I confirmed I still have and is indeed in NY as he suspected, but not NYC, just NY state. He asked me how I come between New York and California; I told him Amtrak and he approved of that. He said he used to ride Greyhound a lot and I said I did too. As far as we know, he's been in the states for at least 40 years, but he still has a thick Japanese accent and my audio processing isn't great to start with. He was telling me about a few years ago no longer volunteering for a center, whose name I think was in Japanese, that helped new Japanese immigrants get their footing in San Francisco, on the other side of the bay, but that closed down because of the Internet, and the Internet helping Japanese immigrates. He hadn't been there in a while. He said ten years ago, his car broke down and he didn't have it fixed. I didn't know Mitsu had a car. He's a gardener specializing in climbing trees and he's still doing that. He feel out of a tree a few years back and was injured for a while, which somehow resulted in him running around in his boxers in inclimate weather a lot. I haven't been hanging out at the club late in to the night recently, but in the past, I've looked at the time well after most things have wound down and people left, and after dishes were done and all of the blunts smoked, and it's 11pm, and thought oh, I should go, then right then, Mitsu comes crawling out of the bay with his windsurf rig like Swamp Thing. He says he always knows how to find the wind, but he can't windsurf to San Francisco because the winds change, and you can't make sail changes on a windsurf board like you can a sailboat. He seems to realize that he's winding down a bit and can't easily go all of the places he used to. But he's still windsurfing. I don't think it's the still the case, but for decades, he sat in the tiny clubhouse and sewed windsurf sails in to the night. And if you windsurf, he'll talk your ear off about boards and sails and technique and the wind. The unofficial club motto is "windy, windy", from Mitsu's, "oh, windy windy!".

Edit: I'm probably going to forget to take my final exam.

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Boring

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 03:44:06 GMT

New filter on but due to the hour, untested. I didn't goober too much diesel. Broke siphon so couldn't pour diesel in to the filter, so had to pump it in. Hand pump didn't work for some reason so after much effort, got out the electric fuel transfer pump that plugs in to the cigarette lighter (cuz cigarettes and diesel fuel goes together). Hoping I don't have to bleed the injectors (mechanical injector pumps! 1970s!). Managed to not dump the fuel out of the fuel line in to the engine. Some small pockets of air will get broken up in to a stream of tiny bubbles and pulled through without any problem. After mucking with diesel, everything always smells like diesel for days and I hate that. New filter is comically much larger than the old water separating filter without a clear bowl and even more so than the small clear inline filter.

Trying to recycle engine oil in Rio Vista from yesterday's oil change (was that only yesterday?) I once again figured out only very slowly that it was Sunday. Ace Hardware had bad hours a few years ago then very suddenly had good hours, and ever since, I've not thought too much about Sundays. So I hauled the used engine oil and filter back with me with a replacement floor scrubber (for decks and sides, cuz raising the new sail, the new sail lifted my old one off the deck, and I'm used to it floating, but cap came off the hollow tube and couldn't stay back on, so it sank), a gallon of Simple Green for more bilge scrubbing (to be wet vac'd out and put in empty gallon jugs), and a box of shop towels. This little Kubota has served me well so far (knocking on wood) but I still dream of putting an electric in there. Did not forget my laundry soap and had two weeks of laundry piled up so that went to and fro to Rio Vista, over the Sacramento River, with me with the groceries and hardware store goods and used engine oil.

U*P learning journal has a like five step submission process. Every now and then I fail to do the last step of confirming the submission. So Fri, trying to finish stuff for the week, I noticed that a paper I put some work in to (since I'm arguing that the course material is completely wrong, I feel like I have to argue carefully and with well supported arguments, as they say) was still in "Drafts" status and was a day odd over due with no option now to submit late. Dammit. Then this week the learning journal is about Alternate Reality and Virtual Reality and IoT and connected devices are the future thanks to 6G! And I don't think I even have the energy to argue this one. This class is bad and I won't miss it. Need to do discussion replies. Guess that and a shower and shave are probably what's left of the day, leaving work in a sorry state. I'm failing at way too many things at once.

Edit: One thing that was bugging me was the lights constantly flickering with some electrical or wiring problem when the sconce light is on. It's clearly electrical because both sconce lights will flicker together, in sync. There's another little LED light here but having more light really helpful to me, so I've been in a cycle of turning it on, getting annoyed, turning it off. In the past it was flickering and I found the bad connection to the battery. Then it didn't flicker for a while. Then it did. Unscrewing and re-screwing the little E26/E27 bulb different amounts seemed to help a bit but never for long. Last year (or two years ago?) I replaced the light socket in the little sconce, but it didn't help. On a lark, I replaced the generic 12 volt E26/E27 bulb... and the flickering stopped. Whatever was going wrong in the bulb was flickering the whole circuit. The LED light strip was just more immune to the noise apparently. One of these days, I'm going to fix the wobbly table.

Edit edit: Almost forgot... finally replaced the bicycle brake pads. Been meaning to do that for ages too. A while ago, I decided to drill a hole right through the middle of the front rack frame to get to the adjust bolt instead of having to take off either the disc brakes or the rack every time I needed to adjust it and that was a great decision. Getting it adjusted is still annoying, just a lot less so now.

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Boring

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 03:36:00 GMT

Finally today got around to changing the little diesel's oil. Instead of a drain plug, there's some hose attached to the drain hole. I think this 500cc engine takes about two quarts tho really it probably takes liters. It's Japanese. Ran myself out of shop towels doing that so didn't get around to replacing the little in-line fuel filter with a water separating one. The fuel fill is in the cockpit, and I often come back to find the cockpit full of water because the scupper (still just one, still need to re-add the other) clogged. Anyway, engine fired right up. Still should put that separating filter on tho. Arriving this trip and finding water again, I had decided I should just hire the neighbors to check on things since the shower drain filter has failed me twice now only to find out they're being evicted. Took down the old, well worn, patch riddled mains'l.

The cherry trees are popping. I took pics but vintage point-and-shoot pics don't do them justice. Amtrak has a great view of the Rio Vista wind farm, with the windmills being barely identifiable in this blurry photo. In real life, they aren't blurry but they are still tiny. At this distance, I mean.

Suisun Fairfield station has an interesting to me vibe:

It reminds me of pictures of underground villages people have made, with little fake jolly old England facdes on small buildings, fake trees, and never remotely reasonable lighting.

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Tue, 05 Mar 2024 05:18:19 GMT

Sailed with the club again! Due to low tides, lessons were only 1.5 hours before the sun started to set, bounding things on that end. Wound up with just one student, a Korean exchange student, studying at UC Berkeley. He was a very good student. He got a 1.5 hour lesson. Someone had a black puppy that looked like it had some lab in it and then maybe some Saint Bernard or something big. Or maybe just mutant lab. He was a slobbery happy lovebug. CSC often delivers on dogs. Made it back to Amtrak five minutes before a return train, without any planning, which is good because they're every hour except for sometimes two hours apart except once during the day three hours apart. I changed out of my wetsuit in the train bathroom. Also confirmed what I learned on the previous visit, that Amtrak commuter light rail tickets, which you obstinately buy for a specific time, are good for any time or day. I forgot what I was told but I was told they're good for something like maybe 90 days. The round trip ticket I didn't use Sat I used today. I think there's a punchcard type thing too where they scan the same code over and over and the credit card tap-to-pay thing they were doing closed beta of before is now open. Responded to messages on work tickets and did a few minor tasks on the to and from. No rain today. Not sunny either but I'll take it.

Edit: Water in the bay is currently colder than in the delta. Had a pre-sail swim and struggled to breathe but went to the windline at the edge of the novice area and back.

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boring

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 19:36:19 GMT

Was going to go hang at Cal Sailing... but I woke up to a massive cloud burst a bit before the alarm was set and turned it off. The alarm, not the cloud burst. That was in the middle of a sustained hard rain. So I guess I should get work done today and try again next week. Problem with starting to do anything fun while in middle of grinding is my mind then very much gives up on trying to grind.

I'd put covered one of the portlights in Gorilla Tape brand duct tape (McMaster sells this as "high tack duct tape" and I love how they unbrand things and just pick something that's at least reasonable quality and probably better) before I took off last time after finding it dripping yet again right before leaving and not being able to deal with it. The glazing in the framing had gone so I tried re-doing that with silicone, but I did a kind of terrible job and wound up with a lot of large air bubbles in there (I tried to really fill it up and then slide the plastic in to the aluminium framing so I'm miffed about how I failed so badly). So now I don't know if the bad window glazing job is leaking or the bedding of the frame to the hull that's leaking. And the aluminium frame has holes eaten in it all from saltwater. So I guess my current plan is to pull it out, trace the hole, have either one or four custom (there are four this size tho the openings may vary slightly) new ones made, and then just keep a bunch of duct tape over the hole in the mean time. At least this tape comes in colors so I can match the hull so it's not screamingly obvious at a million paces. So while I've been getting buckets dumped from the sky, we're staying dry, minus the small annoyance of driving wind splattering rain drops some times in just a perfect way that the splatter makes it bounce off of trim designed to stop normal splashes and rain. And condensation dripping from the extreme humidity.

Edit:

Oh yeah. One of the two bus systems up, the Solano County one (Rio Vista, Vallejo, etc... stuff west of me and still north of the river delta), still has its route 52, which goes up from Antioch (closest part of mainland served by the BART Bay Area light rail) listed on its schedule: https://www.riovistacity.com/sites/default/files/fileattachments/delta_breeze_transit_system/page/2577/schedule.pdf . I checked the schedule. I checked the site for news. No news. Route 52 is on the schedule. Route 52 does not exist any more. That's a huge pain because strategies for making it in to mainland and making it back up here again in the same day revolve around being able to get there relatively quickly and it leaving at a relatively late 6pm. The other route takes hours to traverse. If I were king, failing to update transit info with changes and leaving even one rider stranded would result in the immediate termination and public humiliation of the mayor. People get cranky about their trash not being picked up. Have they ever *themselves* not been picked up, I have to wonder. Rio Vista now has one bus route left. Sacramento, the wrong direction for the sailing club and also a long, slow slog with multi-hour layovers, still has a bus that comes a few times a day. Neither run late or on weekends.

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Wed, 28 Feb 2024 17:50:25 GMT

It took me this long to hear car honking (no shortage of geese tho). A roadcrew is working on the levee road. The levees are built out of some the greatest soil, packed with decomposing organic material, in the world. Great for growing things. Terrible for building levees and roads. Anyway, don't miss the constant honking.

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Wed, 21 Feb 2024 02:51:09 GMT

Jury duty: Assignment issued Fri was to *maybe* appear at 1pm Tues depending on whether at Tues 11:15am they figured out they needed people. At 11:15pm, I watching a Sacramento light rail bus while waiting for updates... no jury duty, thanks for making myself available. Foiled again.

Quickly caught one of the SCT (Sacramento County Transit... the rural routes) buses back to the one-third way point, Galt, where I had a three hour layover. Walked around the flea market more. It's extremely Hispanic. Previously, I didn't get away from the doodaads but decided to do a quick pass before hitting the library that's also right by the bus stop... on one far side (this thing is pretty big) is produce. Avocados in stores are inexplicably $1.50 to $2 each and at the market, $3 buys you a small bucket. So apparently only gringos buy avocados at the supermarket and they don't buy that many. A satsuma tree was for sale and a lot of people fawning over it like it was a baby. So far I've resisted the urge to push my way to the front and pick it up. Satsumas aren't in season but there were several other varieties *of mandarin oranges. I bought one then immediately forgot what type I was told it is. They're pretty good, with nice flavor and a bit of tang, but not easy to peel. I got two pounds, which cost a dollar. I may have to go to Galt more often. Oh, there's a large trailer making corn tortillas. There was a long line and I have store tortillas. Next time.

I was sure I saw grapefruits on a grapefruit tree but saw none at the market. Checking the trees in Isleton, one yellow grapefruit is full of fruit but another grapefruit tree I've stolen from is bare. Oranges are exploded now, in Isleton and at the flea market. I'll steal some later but I'm taken care of for now and I'm doubtful the yellow grapefruit will make good marmalade and it's hard to steal enough to marmalade from one person's private tree without it looking like a robbery. It's probably too late or I'd see blossoms or immature fruitballs.

One work task derailed me while I was on the train (which always has way worse cell coverage and way more tunnels than I ever remember) turned out to be a module that bundles up emails with their images as inline-MIME attachments running the images through the same (default, unrequested, whether you use it or not) template parser as the body of the email. And it took $company this long before I came along and tried to use an image where the two character template escape sequence appeared (not once but twice in the image). And the error was incredibly unhelpful. So that was a day debugging that module and slowly realizing the horror and continuing to fail to get what is expected to be a basic task done.

Work is in bad shape. Most coursework for the week is done. The thought of falling off the edge two weeks in a row was too much so had to clear that off. No more major running around until next week, where I promised to stop in and pick up the new sail. That might be getting up at 5am or something ungodly to catch the Rio Vista bus so I can make it there in time to make it back on the last bus at 6pm. If I hadn't kept them waiting on that pickup for a long time already, I'd make them wait until it was convenient for me. The Bermuda Triangle of Davis, Sacramento, and the Bay Area is surprisingly disconnected but also kind of surprising that it has any bus connectivity at all.

Oh yeah... the ride in after getting off the train in Martinez Friday:

That first hell climb I pushed the bike up after trying to mash a short time. That didn't help with average speed. Fully loaded single speed has limits and it looks like despite my repeated insistence on the non-plastic bottom bracket at the bike shop when I was asked, I got the plastic bottom bracket and I cracked it. The second climb was easy, for me, but my bottom bracket was already having a sad. They probably went to order it and saw the metal ones were out so went oh well and ordered that. I made three routes and jumped from being on one to the other to the third which thankfully had zero closed military checkpoints (thanks, Google) and got in at about 1:30am. Incidentally, I rode past three BART light rail stations but for some reason decided that exploring military checkpoints and pushing my bike up hills sounded like the thing I wanted to be doing instead. With a failing bottom bracket. Tho in its defence it did handle the 40 mile Nassau loop a handful of times and a couple of trips to the store before cracking.

Edit: The second climb is the Antioch bridge! Scary on a good day, it's terrifying when the famous Delta Breeze is howling. Thankfully the wind was calm *and* it wasn't raining, coming in.

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Thu, 16 Nov 2023 21:44:23 GMT

Gah. Just got a text that one of the b**t people passed away about a week ago. I wrote about him earlier. Came in as a sneak-aboard aboard a way too small boat, a 21' power b**t with a cuddy cabin (nothing below decks but berth for two, some room to sit with your legs off of the berth, and that is absolutely it). Before he came in, he was tied up somewhere without power and had no heat through a winter, and his wife, who he was really close to, passed then. Ex-marine guy the manager hired to clean the place up worked both angles, tough enforcer and helping the local population stay below the enforcement radar. Steve was basically gifted run of an abandoned vessel, a probably 34' Carver motorboat, with incredibly ample living, bath, and captain's quarters, after being chased out numerous times and sleeping in his F150. At the same time, the place was basically cleared out of abandoned vessels, so some strings must have been pulled for that. Then later, the pump-overboard valve was left open (and you're not supposed to do that inside protected waters, but almost everyone does, which is a big part of this mess) and the Carver nearly sank, with people rallying pumps. I didn't get the full story. As often, it's best not to ask too many questions. Pertinent information is volunteered.

Steve usually had (shit) beer and was quick to share it, and hang out and talk.

Part of the arrangement that put him below the radar was that he would help out around the place, which they badly needed because they aren't willing or maybe able to pay for shit. So he was often helping push hyacinth out of slips, tie up little dams to try to keep hyacinth out of slips (this stuff vanishes entire coves from satellite imagery, making it look like the pre 1940s marsh has come back). The whole time I knew him, he was complaining of lack of energy, and lack of balance. He got on to some California Affordable Care Act health care plan after his wife passed, and the whole time all of us knew him, he was fighting with that. He'd go in complaining of pain, nausea, lack of balance, lack of energy, and they'd send him back with some bullshit prescription that did nothing.

When I left, after years of back and forth, they had finally done an MRI and found likely tumors, and were trying to get around to doing a biopsy, drawn out over months. We dropped him off and picked him up repeatedly while they scheduled appointments for a biopsy then figured out oops nope we don't have any in-network doctors to do that after all, try again next month.

Just now, I got a text that after I took off, they found stage 4 pancreatic cancer, then a week ago, died. Great fucking work, US healthcare system /s. Great fucking job shoving your head up your ass an incredibly long period of time and doing nothing and managing to wait until it's all too late then just failing. Nice fucking work making all of us run around non-stop trying to fix this thing while you didn't. I drove out to this fucking corporate hospital repeatedly as part of this bullshit while they slowly figured out that they couldn't do anything.

I'll always remember Steve on the phone bitching at these fuckers and I think that that's what he would have wanted. He also grew up often taking trips aboard a small wooden motorboat with his father from a young age. Pics I was shown were classic 50's; skipper-father had his pants tied over his waste and stood looking tall and proud. He often talked about how tiny the boat was but he remembered her being much larger. And all of the places around that crazy fucking river delta they went. He wanted to sell his old, green Ford F150 that only had 160,000 miles on it and buy something even larger (can't relate there) and a giant travel trailer and cruise around again and see the country, again, after only less than a year ago inheriting money from his family and not being old with no retirement. Mostly he worked doing construction. He had one story of traveling out to Florida I think it was for a job to build a deck with stairs leading down to a beach for some rich ppeople, then after he got there and started, only a neighbor walked over and told him and his crew of two that, well, you know, protected tortoise nesting season starts in three days, and then it's illegal to disturb them, so they cut every corner and worked around the clock even as water infilled their post holes in beach sand, but got it done. I only heard one side of this story, but as far as I'm concerned, this fucker deserved to fucking retire and not have to clean bathrooms and push invasive weeds out of slips. Oh, and he was a drummer in a metal band. And had stories of fighting rednecks in bars, where they tried to gang up on bandmates when they didn't stick closely enough together, and wouldn't even let them leave without a fight.

So fucking hell. There's my memorial to Steve.

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Tue, 14 Nov 2023 19:46:11 GMT

Swimming is kind of falling apart. I may hop the bus in a bit here and go try. The indoor pool closest to me is broken. The most bus accessible YMCA involves an hour of walking each way in addition to the bus. (Indoor swimming may not be a perfect Covid activity, but social distancing is fairly good and the room is large and full of moist, chlorinated air. The New Yorker compulsion to be directly up your asshole for absolutely no reason still bugs me for multiple reasons.) That onlly-an-hour-walk-each-way YMCA has now for months failed to stay open because they won't pay lifeguards better than $15/hour, NY's minimum wage. The college right by here has a pool I figured out from very indirect means. Maybe I'll start taking winter classes there just for access to that, but that's one hell of an expensive gym membership. I keep blogging (not going to dig them up) about the flight of pools from the urban cores to the opposite sides of burbs. And this isn't even urban sprawl; it's a patchwork of exourban shit. CDTA's carshare program seems to have lost a car and moved another. I was avoiding using the car that appeared being skeptical that it actually existed (there's a pretty big disconnect on their car share program). Turns out it was parked on-street on the worst part of the downtown district, so getting out of there took forever, getting back in took forever, then, of course, someone was parked in the "no parking car share parking only" spot and I can't check the car back in until I agree to a thing that says the car is back in its spot so I circulated in hell traffic with everyone angry at everyone and especially me for an hour until that person fucked off out of the car share spot. So yeah not doing that again. And I guess technically it means there are 2/5ths fewer cars in the system now as far as I'm concerned. I was trying to figure out if the further-away Greenbush YMCA had a larger pool and looking again, it does, at 8 lanes vs 6 in Bethlehem, but Greenbush seems to permanently keep 4 of the 8 lanes out of service, arbitrarily coning off two of them and then with two of them dedicated to free swim, leaving 4. If you are not adequately up someone's asshole in NY, the authorities will assist you. (But seriously, lap swim in the bay area is worse, but at least they fucking open the lanes up.) Trying to navigate this mess has been a time vampire and it's kind of falling apart right now. To have any chance of getting a lane, I have to break up my work day to get there mid-afternoon, and things that require expended periods of concentration are what pile up. So maybe I'll try again tomorrow and hope to get in one swim this week and go to the further away YMCA that only ever has four lanes open? Maybe I'll try joining a private gym that only has a four lane pool and see how that goes, and then have three gym memberships while I'm trying to figure this out? One of the ways NY is like TX is that virtually every lake is completely private. The river is full of sewage.

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Thu, 09 Nov 2023 16:21:00 GMT

Boycat knocked the Nikon camera off the table. It was stupid of me to leave it there. I think he's learned that people come when there's a large bang, so various objects, some quite large, are pushed off of things throughout the day. Or maybe he doesn't care about the people and is only bored. But he tries to demand attention on and off through the day too. This was a camera I got my mother many years ago so she would take pictures of her quilts. She kept making quilts and then not taking pictures of them. Various film cameras were obtained for that purpose too. Still need to deal with some of those.

Rough past couple of weeks for electronics. Button on the old Rio Forge mp3 player died. This was an eBay item picked as the last Rio mp3 player made, when they finally figured out how to make the player show up as a USB flash drive instead of requiring their Windows-only software. It also took up to a 4gb SD card. It also had an extremely chintzy build. This is a classic corporate story. They were the first to market with an mp3 player, and immediately got locked in to a tunnel vision of cutting costs and iterating on products only by very slowly increasing memory capacity and changing the physical shape in arbitrary ways to make something unchanged from the first version to make it seem fresh. Apple and the iPod ate their lunch and they went bankrupt. See also Commodore's criminal mismanagement of the Amiga.

The Cowon iAudio7 players I liked a lot always had button failure. I got one of the Chinese evolutions of the popular AGPTEK mp3 player (what the hell is that screensaver screen it always shows while playing music that has no useful info on it and why did the Chinese clones keep that?) and the play button failed. Some of the iAudio7s I got were refurbs that shipped with broken buttons. Trying to keep a working mp3 player has been a huge saga. Dug out an eBay Rio Sport I got for running a long time ago and it works but requires the Windows 32 bit app to talk to it since it doesn't know how to be a USB drive. It has 128 megs of memory but the "sport" models seem to have better construction. Hoping.

Most other other device that takes batteries has the batteries failing. I've been busy replacing them, but all of this just generates piles of ewaste. Lithium recycling I read is only currently reclaiming half of the lithium in recycled batteries which seems oddly inefficient.

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Tue, 22 Aug 2023 14:53:54 GMT

Guess the other possibility on Amtrak than decaf was I was fighting a (relatively) mild case of 'vid, obtained on travel, despite some significant effort at minimizing other people's fouled air. Sure felt like withdrawl tho.

Cats took a few days from this to lull me in false confidence, but they've started this back up again, and I very much remember the stickh... boycat at some point starts attacking my feet while I'm sleeping and refuses to stop. Get up, throw him out, close the door, look around for mamacat, but she's no where to be found. Go back to sleep. Woken up by cat crying and clawing at the door. Sit up and look at the door. No mamacat, so she must be outside. Go back to sleep with a pillow on my head. Crying and clawing continues. Eventually after enough repeats, catch her on the inside of the door, but she instantly runs under the bed when she sees me move, and if I try to hold the door open, boycat comes in and she does not go out. Have to slip out, catch boycat, lock him on the other side of the hall door, then catch mamacat and put her outside the hall door without boycat slipping back in, which is hard to do when you're groggy, and close the hall door and bedroom door, or else mamacat will sit there and claw at the bedroom door and cry to get in.

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Fri, 18 Aug 2023 15:37:49 GMT

I know dreams are supposed to go at EP+ speed, but I woke up at 2am at pounding rain and closed windows in middle of a dream about a bunch of stuff going on* but on the way somewhere else where I needed to do other things, having to stop at a credit union branch to do stuff for my mother. This turned in to the entire dream sequence, where I was trying to produce more and more documentation, and then repeatedly waiting to be called, then left standing at the counter, then eventually there were no employees or tellers around and I was standing there, then there was no one at all else there and I was standing there and they were closing. I woke up at 7:30am to mamacat scratching at the door (I threw them out at 2am) in middle of the same dream sequence. Then I went back to sleep and woke up at 9am still waiting at the window panicking about all of the other things I had to do that day, with all of my documentation there, and two computers booted up and on battery with stuff on their screens to show them. I went to bed at 1:30am. Didn't make it long before the rains hit but it wasn't raining when I went to bed. I think I was just trying to deposit checks in to my mother's account for her. Last I remember was knowing they closed at 4, but looking at the clock on the way and it was creeping past 4:23, and thinking, well, there goes another whole day of completely failing to get anything done.

The MUD has had *two* active players on lately.

* Not interesting, doesn't matter, but was somewhere very rural and disconnected, paralleling my real life but ofc different. Large building with lots of shoddily done drywall. This is part of my most recurring dream theme.

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Wed, 09 Aug 2023 20:08:04 GMT

Past couple of days, I've travelled along the Mississippi, through the Wisconsin Dells, past countless lakes in Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska. The keelboat exhibit (with one very odd shoal draft keelboat with a kinda Mississippi riverboat with a stem) just happened to be on Blue Lake, where my father often took my brother and I to swim as kids. I tried to get pictures of some of the small marinas further out on the Mississippi, which were small, eclectic, beautiful, and reminded me of the Sacramento delta. Before Minnesota, we followed the largely untouched Columbia for a long and beautiful stretch. But now the water is brown. It's the Hudson.

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Wed, 09 Aug 2023 03:31:14 GMT

Pretty sure I got served decaf this morning and it took me a long time to figure that out... because I was asleep. I was reverse drugged. Missed a meeting. Yet another reason to bring my own coffee setup setup on Amtrak. Much better after a later afternoon coffee from the station in Chicago but now my stupid brain will expect late afternoon coffee or power itself off. Train had a very young and still a bit awkward crew who seem to be brand new on the job. So far Amtrak has been on time, unlike me.

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Mon, 07 Aug 2023 14:55:40 GMT

I was remiss in not tracking which siblings of my mother are the evil ones (versus just arrogant or other things). Growing up, the evil ones ran the whole program, so more or less all of them became part of it from supporting it. The sister who came to help her clear up her apartment was the or one of the evil ones, and even with all of the siblings running around, this was not communicated to me. It's frustrating that they're all now clapping themselves on the back for reforming themselves but aren't putting the evil sibling in check. This kinda still amounts to enabling. You can't tell me you're one of the good siblings while you're giving cover to the bad one/ones. From being busy, in part from compressing my schedule to avoid this, I figured things out too late and I'm now kicking myself for not really pulling my mother aside early and really checking in. I figured if this woman was invited in, it must be ok, but I did zero double checking on that. Just one chunk of this is my mother being a bit neuro-atypical is all of the excuse this sibling needs to do absolutely everything she can to try to deny her agency. My mother's advanced level masking came about in a previous case of people taking away her agency. One short week ago I was basically not around humans.

My father has aged a lot and now looks like an old man. He has Nicola Tesla style relationships with animals including now a bird friend. A lot fewer cats. Didn't ask what happened. I think he may not know what happens to animals dropped off at "shelters", which he was talking about doing with some outside cats. I don't know if knowing would crush him and if he has been doing that.

Half brother, his wife, and family was a wonderful visit. Good beer, wine, and board games were had. Got to chat on the drive to visit my father. Iowa drivers have this idea that if they do their maneuvers slowly, they don't need to look, so no less than three times I/we were badly cut off. You just have to slow way down and be ready to yield to any other car you see, even if you're on a highway with a 65mph speed limit and you see a truck approaching from a farm road. Turning your head to look for oncoming traffic is not a thing. I didn't get pulled over for a cooked up traffic violation this time but one Iowa state trooper who had another car with out-of-state plates pulled over got distracted from that and gave me the eagle eye as we drove by at exactly the speed limit. Maybe part of the reason I hate the east so much is having wanted to, then to some degree managing to, escape that kind of Ya'll Aren't From Around Here Are Ya xenophobia (yeah actually I am ya shitbag and unlike you I'm not proud of it because all of the people like you are an embarrassment).

Parts of Iowa are beautiful. We checked out the Lewis and Clark boat, or very likely, one of them. It's outside and needs varnish. It's on a very large, heavy trailer but is still inadequately supported and sagging. You could tow it away if you had a large truck. Other large models are inside. I'm told the Lewis and Clark boat was just moored in the small lake they moved it to, which incidentally was one of the lakes my father took my brother and I to swim in when we were young. The large museum/lodge building was closed unless you got a code from booking somehow. The informational plaques give you Wikipedia style info about Luis and Clark but don't answer any of the questions people looking at this exhibit would naturally have. All of this seems poorly thought out, but that's the pattern for Iowa. And if you go there with out of state plates and they don't already have someone else with out of states plates pulled over, they'll find a reason to pull you over and search your car.

Need to give my father the same treatment my mother is getting, of the Swedish Death Cleaning. He has requested it a few times now.

Edit: Got back in to MN at 1am. LM was wired and we talked until 3:30am. She does this every time, and this is so incredibly my ADHD friend's stichk.

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Sat, 29 Jul 2023 06:26:29 GMT

Got the Mistral windsurf rig out a few more times. Mistrals are vintage now with a solid following still. The boards are long and narrow. This thing clocks in over 10 feet long. Of course the reputation is for being easy to sail all day with ease. The bottom is mostly just completely flat but it does nose up a bit. The centerboard was missing and can't be had and I didn't get around to fabricating another one, but the helpful people in the Mistral FB group insist that being a "freeride" board, it doesn't need the centerboad. People mostly sail without it and only get it out for going upwind in light airs.

I'm staying in this sheltered but narrow space for now but did manage to get upwind and managed some tacks on this tippy, narrow board without falling in tho mostly I'm just falling in. Trick seems to be not even try to step across until the sail is well on its way to being on the other side, then quickly drop it forward and start sheeting in to complete the tack and for balance. This is really forcing me to counterbalance off the sail rather than trying to balance on my feet.

The loong straight edges dig in like a snowboard. My tacks have a long way to go. Unlike the big wide heavy Bic board, this thing wants to GO which makes the narrow space frustrating but I'm not confident enough yet to venture further, except maybe to canid beach if I tow the whole mess over behind the 'yak and rig the sail there. No huge hurry. Trying to do a billion tacks should hopefully force me to improve. Oh, and for reasons beyond my keen, even with the sail angled well forward which should drop the nose off and put me on a broad reach or run, sometimes it just decides it's going to sail backwards. Never saw that once on the Bic, the CSC boards, or the Delta Windsports novice board. I don't think I had the main backed? Is it somehow related to the lack of a centerboard?

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Fri, 28 Jul 2023 17:23:54 GMT

Don't remember how I found this stuff Solarez stuff. Maybe it was a rare useful product suggestion. It's a tube of one-part (pre-mixed or idk what) polyester resin that cures in UV light, which is just sunlight. It doesn't stick to plastic film. It doesn't set up in the tube after exposure to air like 3M 4200/5200. You can just dispense exactly as much as you need, instead of invariably mixing the wrong amount, and dispense it directly on to the repair, then take plastic wrap and cover and pull it taught to fair it. Did that to the chunks missing out of the windsurf board the other night. I might use a lot of this stuff on different things.

Also, just ordering Sunbrella acrylic fabric (plastic, plastic, more plastic) by the yard is vastly less expensive than having a "canvas" outfit custom make you a sail cover. There's no reason to leave your mainsail uncovered. 5 yards of heavy Sunbrella (same stuff premium sail covers are made from) was $45, with free shipping, on the fleabay. You don't have the fun little twist clasps. You could do that or snaps or something yourself, but just lashing it down with a bunch of bits of short line is fine. The mainsail is often the most expensive thing to replace on a sailboat, the sun is the enemy, and people just wreck them. I am not even joking. If you wanted a new Beta Marine marinized Kubota diesel engine, noting that a diesel is often an upgrade from gas on sailboats that raises the resale value a lot, with transmission, flex coupler, mounts, heat exchanger to keep raw water out of the engine, it would cost *less* than a new mainsail for the same size boat. And if you don't cover that shit with $45 worth of actually sun-resistant fabric, you're a moron. Incidentally, the engine is one of the few things that isn't plastic, like the sail or the sail cover. Maybe I just really like plastic idk.

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Fri, 28 Jul 2023 06:31:44 GMT

Sail maker arrived, with wife and three kids, including their brand new one, in tow. Wife and kids hung out near the pool. Says he has a Moore 24: https://sailboatdata.com/sailboat/moore-24/ . Sounds like there's a small fleet.

Confirmed my current main is hella stretched out. Much more fun in person than using remote communication. That's a major expense I'd been saving for. This is partly my fault for trying to talk to them during the busy season tho I had this idea I could dump measurements on them (boomer sail loft was more than ready to do that which is where communication broke down) and then not really care how long it takes them to finish. Going for a bit less body and higher aspect ratio with the idea that the loads of power on a beam reach in rig designs of this era just isn't justified and close reach performance is more important. But also, less body is less to flap and less to get stretched out, and makes it easier to flatten the sail for high wind. While waiting (they were considerably later than planned), I got some good deck scrubbing in and other minor projects.

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