Concepts in the Paradox

Since going part-time vegetarian, I’ve had some awkward food moments. Beyond being called a hippie, as one might expect, I’ve had some food servers give me some interesting interactions:

Yesterday at a Valencia coffee shop:
Me: “I would like the veggie sandwich with hummus instead of mayo.”
Cashier: “Would you like bread with that?”

I thought this was otherwise known as a “salad,” no?

Today in my favorite TL burrito shop (the one that doesn’t make me ill):
Me: “I would like a veggie taco with black beans.”
Cook: …
Me: …
Cook: “For real?!”

January has been an active month, with dead time between events starting to go back to back with things to do.

At work, I’ve ended up diving head first into SAN virtualization. I didn’t want to go this route for a another few months, but we’re evaluating SAN technology, and the research needs to be done quickly. This stuff isn’t as hard as I thought it would be, and in fact it is pretty straight forward. LUNs here, WWNS there, sparse volumes and mirrors over there.

I finally heard back from David Snyder at SPUR, and he’s going to put me in touch with the transportation communications intern there. The idea is for me to do “online advocacy” for transit, something that I’m already knee deep in by nature. We’ll see where things go. SPUR’s membership fee was a whopping $65, but it is for a good cause. These folks seem to know what they are doing.

The car has been up for sale for almost 2 weeks now. I put it up on cars.com for $21750, but the only contacts I’ve gotten are other sales agencies wanting to list my auto for another $50. I hate to lower the price, it is already low compared to other cars for sale in the area, but every month it sits is another possible parking ticket or accident, plus deprecation and the insurance payments I have to make.

Speaking of parking tickets, the two citations I got from DPT came back after I wrote a very polite letter to the them. Their reply? Pay the $100 or find a cop to verify that the tags are current, have him sign off on the tickets, then submit $10 per ticket ($20) for “administrative fees” to have the citations written off. I about flipped my lid when I read that. The DPT brings in $40m a year, so I have little concept of why I must pay fees to have my fine waved. Such is the law, and such is yet another complaint letter for me to write. I’m getting good at writing them these days.

Finally, I went to the MacWorld expo this week. I ended up buying a keyboard cover, 2GB of RAM for my Mac Mini, and laid out the cash for an academic version of Adobe CS2 + Acrobat 8. It’s about time really, I’ve been suffering with The GIMP and I’d like to greatly improve the designs of my various blog sites. Now I have something more to learn, but it’s graphics, so it should be fun!

I was going through my unsorted stack of receipts today, looking for the my warranty documents for my Marin urban bike. It’s time to take it in for adjustments, and while I’m at it I want to take the Timberline mountain bike in for a tune-up. In the process I came across the registration tags for my Subaru.

It looks like I failed to apply the tags. I must have forgotten in the chaos of moving, and as a result I got two “expired tabs” $50 tickets on my car the last 2 weeks.  I decided to take a bike ride up to my magical street parking permit zone in Western Addition to apply the tags. Luckily, no new citations this time around, but not so luckily me the battery was dead. I had left the map lights on the last time I used the car. Good going me!

$45 later, my automo-car was jump started by a friendly SoMA tow truck driver. Yay insurance reimbursements!

I put the car up on cars.com this time around. CL didn’t yield a single hit. I’m priced lower than all the other Subaru’s in a 250 mile area, so I should get *something* soon.

I only play one online.

The new established diet is what I call the “2/3’s Vegetarian diet”. It serves a dual purpose, first to reduce the amount of bad fat in my diet by avoiding meat, and second to “help the planet”. Yes, this is another step in the greening process.

Allowed items that don’t count as meat are eggs and dairy, though I should take substitutes if they are available. I can have meat with any single meal, not including snacks. I could have beef jerky, for example, and that wouldn’t count. Eating a hot dog might be pushing it though.

It’s now day 4, and I’m actually enjoying this diet. I went to Speedster’s in Oakland and they had a selection of veggie dishes that were spectacular. Eating at Naan’n Curry yielded similar results, I possibly had the best egg plant ever. For breakfast it is yogurt and bagels anyhow, so I almost never have to worry about taking that as my meat meal. I dislike pork in general anyway, a typical breakfast meat.

My sister would have been 37 today.

I got the first bunch of gifts for the holidays today. I have one more shipment from ThinkGeek, then I’m going to make a trip to BigLots and perhaps a few “stuff” stores in the Sunset to round out my shopping.

I finally tracked down a copy of The Logic of Failure, which the local library doesn’t carry. It’ s supposed to be an excellent book on why even experts fail at complex projects. I also have How to Solve It, a good on Mathematical Methods, and Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, on loan from Keith.

Tonight I spent most of the night cleaning up the mess that started to gather in my apartment. I feel a little bit better now that books aren’t laying in a stack on my floor and papers strewn across my sofa.

Tomorrow is a full workout day. ZG/L13 plans are looking pretty thin, unless someone can seriously motivate me to go out after 2 hours of self-inflicted hell.

What is your programmer type?

I went to the 24 Hour Fitness at 45 Montgomery this evening, and I was surprised at just how clean and new it looked. I haven’t been to the gym in about 3 weeks, and having a clean and uncrowded place to go to is a big motivator for me. Also, it is one hop on Bart or Muni, or a 2 minute average wait if I select Muni at any time during the day.

The Zaurus is up with pdaXrom, which is pretty slick if not minimal. It’s fast too, way faster than the stock Zaurus ROM. I guess they are keeping the code page in the ROM, because ABIword loads in a half-second. The Wifi isn’t working yet, but it’s more likely the case of I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to iwconfig. I might get a CF Bluetooth card if I can find one on the cheap, they run about $89 anywhere I look. Having internet-via-cell phone would be nice; I already do that with my Macbook. If you have a CF BT card kicking around, I’d be willing to take it off your hands.

The problem with the buzzer going off when I leave a store is that I have to wonder, “What do I do?” My first reaction is to just keep walking — I’ve done nothing wrong, and I have better things to do than to participate in a store’s shrink reduction program. But where should I draw the line when it comes to store security wanting to rummage through my personal and private effects? As it would turn out, my temper easily draws the line. Yes, I felt like an ass, but I had no choice in the matter. My button had been pressed, and so someone had to receive my bacon.

I’ll let my email to Burlington Coat Factory explain what happened this evening:

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(meta: hmm, I sure am posting a lot)

I’ve decided to do the Xen BoF again this year, after talking to William Pollock of No Starch Press about his plans for a book on Xen. I guess his author for the Xen book he had in production fell through, and now he is thinking of starting up a Wiki. Of course, a couple people recognized me from last year’s BoF, and wondered if there would be another. I really didn’t feel like doing the BoF thing again, it’s sorta stressful, but the gears started to turn, and I filled out a slot on the BoF schedule anyway. (9pm tonight, Washington 3).

Topics from brain storming:

1. Distro support: XenSource (RHEL3), Debian, RHEL, Fedora, Suse

2. Management tools
3. Features, what have people used? 64/32-bit, migration, LVM vs. loop back, imaging, fail over
4. Resources: mailing lists, blogs, wikis, forums
5. Hints & Tips in general
6. OS’s you’ve virtualized: Windows, Linux distros, OSX, BSD, etc.

Cory Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing, had some interesting points during this morning’s keynote at LISA this morning. His message was that we are once again starting to lose the battle that we were winning in the ’80s with our right to own what we purchase. Companies such as Sony, with their “root kit on a audio CD” and the FCC with the broadcast flag, or even Apple and their DRM-crippled iPod, are treating their customers, and ultimately owners of this equipment as criminals. Real criminals, at least by a small stretch of the imagination, that download material from sharing sites such as Kazaa, Bittorrent, or eMule, have far more control over their illegal downloads than legitimate customers.

Cory went on to make the point that even “click to agree” clauses, often known as End User Agreements, have become deceptive and almost impossible to get out of. Simply by having a laptop delivered to you, in the case of Lovato, is enough for you to “agree” to terms that are not only stated in a lengthy agreement, but any future terms they might want to define.

The keynote did carry a positive message, even on top of all of this denial of our freedom to simply own what we pay money for, saying that big companies are starting to wise up against this, and are joining customer advocates such as the EFF. AT&T, for example, is being sued by the EFF because of wire tapping ($150 per customer per day that was tapped), has joined in with other companies like Sony against anti-consumer companies such as the MPAA.

On a different note, overheard on the way out of the keynote:

“…oh, I was in the back of the room for power. I fell asleep while coding drunk, and ran down my battery last night.”