Starry Wisdom

I got sarnath, my Macbook Pro, back early. Hurray!

Moving day is December 8th.

Housewarming probably early 2009.

I’m sitting at work, waiting for my friend Adam to call me back. He’s just arrived at the airport (from Boston) and once he gets his bag I will head over and pick him up. He’s in town for a conference, but is spending the night at my place, since the conference doesn’t start until later tomorrow. After I pick him up and get him settled off at home, I’m going to head over to the Fillmore to see Stereolab.

No, I didn’t go to the Redbull Soapbox Derby in Dolores Park today – although I did want to. Instead I am watching a cat derby in Sunnyvale.

My friend Erin, who lives in Sunnyvale, is in Salt Lake City this weekend, so I am keeping tabs on her two kittens (Or are they young cats? They are about 5 months old. Not fully cats yet for sure, especially in behavior). I have some birthday festivities to attend back up in San Francisco tonight, but I want to make sure the kittens are well attended, so I am staying here until early this evening. The upshot of course, is that I am missing the Dolores Park silliness. The kittens are pretty silly (they are wrestling in a bit of sunshine on the carpet not), at least.

It’s actually kind of weird being here alone. The last time I was here alone was probably back in March, when I was watching Sneakers, before she got really sick and Erin was willing to leave town. It’s also weird that because, while Sneakers was very much my cat too, these girls are not. Granted they love me, and are really friendly and adorable, but it’s still a bit weird. But I can’t help but think of Sneakers – as I look up at the “mantle” over the TV I can see the lovely wooden box that her ashes are in. She’s been gone for almost 3 months now; I still miss her.

So I don’t end on a down note, here is a photo of the kittens investigating the toilet (they didn’t drink form it but they were sure interested):

My mom was in town from Thursday evening until Monday morning. I will go over some highlights of the weekend:

After picking her up from SFO and dropping her stuff off at the house, we went to eat at Liberty Cafe in Bernal. I had a pot pie and I burned my tongue a bit on it. This was unfortunate because the next day we went up to St Helena and Calistoga.

While “up north” we took a tour at Ehlers Estate Winery, which is an organic and not-for-profit winery – all their profits are invested in cardiovascular research.

We happened to be there on one of the last few pressing days of the year, so we got to see some sorting action, and sample the cabernet sauvignon grapes. They were actually remarkably delicious – quite sweet, but not cloying, and with a rich flavor. The put green globe and red flame grapes to shame!

After the tour we had a tasting of their merlot, cabernet franc and cabernet sauvignon wines. They were all pretty good, but die to my tongue burn I think I might have missed some nuance. Regadless, I like the franc enough to buy a bottle of it.

After the winery we had a decent lunch in Calistoga, and then went up to the Petrified Forest. This was a rather interesitng, albeit overly touristy place. Still, giant fossilized trees are rather impressive.

I decided to take my mom to dinner at my favorite sushi restaurant, Sakae in Burlingame. I discovered it soon after she left the last time she was in the area, so I figured it would be nice to take her there. We both greatly enjoyed our meals (it was the first time I had really good (not from Mollie Stone’s) sushi in months. After dinner I took my mom to Lucky 13 where people I knew were meeting for happy hour. We hung around for an hour of so, and my mom got to meet some of my friends.

Saturday we visited the newly opened California Academy of Sciences. Parking was a bit of a mess, but we actually managed to find a street spot about half a mile away from the museum. While walking across the plaza between the De Young and CAS we came across a guy registering people to vote, and we each donated a dollar for an Obama button. And then we entered the zoo that is the CAS on Saturday two weeks after opening.

The first thing that we did was get tickets for the planetarium – it was 12:30 and there were tickets for the 3:30 show, which seemed reasonable enough. We spent the next 3 hours looking at most of the exhibits – the overall highlight was the living roof, for me, but there were some good tanks in the Aquarium. The one major exhibit we did not visit was the rain forest “dome”. The line was just too long. The planetarium show was indeed neat, and it should be something on everyone who visit the museum’s agenda.

After the museum we headed back to my place and got ready to go to dinner:

You might be asking yourself “Oh, why are they dressed so nicely?” The answer of course is that we were going to Gary Danko for dinner. I could bore you with details of the dinner, but I will just give you a capsule summary: exquisite. Seriously it was fantastic from the physical restaurant, to the food (well one dish was only REALLY REALLY good, but the rest were so good, I am willing to overlook that) to the staff. We had a great time and a fantastic meal. And we were very full.

Sunday was a chill day – mom had to grade some papers, so we hung around the house for the morning, then went down to Sunnyvale that afternoon to visit with my friend Erin and her two young cats (just a little old to be kittens now). We went to dinner at my favorite mexican place, Vive Sol, and that pretty much was the end of the weekend. I took mom to the airport Monday morning before going in to work.

I replaced it, that was rather easy. The new one hums, even at full power. I’ll suffer it, though, for having light in my room controllable by the door.

I had an idea for a neilcast the other day but I’ve forgotten. If I remember, I might post one today.

Yesterday my friend Camille messages me because she was bored at work. Eventually the topic of the debate came up, and that they were showing it at the Parkway in Oakland – a brew & view type theater. This sounded like a good combination. So after work, I BARTed on over to the east bay to encounter a gigantic line (I was there a bit after doors opened, but I guess people were lined up since 5PM). And Camille and her coworker Aisha weren’t there yet. I waited in line but they were at capacity before I got in. So I waited around for Camille to get to Oakland, reading my book.

Eventually they arrived and we went to the bar next to the theater, which was very loud but at least they had the CC on the TV tuned to the debate. Camille and I drank a beer while Aisha found out that we could watch in the laundromat across the street. After we finished our beers we headed over and it was much quieter there, we could even hear the candidates speak. Aisha had made friends with some people there, and was drinking a bit of their Shiraz. I mean, right here there is a good story, but the night just got more amusing. (From what I gathered, I was impressed with Obama, but I will watch the debate via Tivo again to get a better opinion).

After the debate, Camille was hungry and wanted to go to Church’s down the street. Aisha and I also thought this was an OK idea, then I remembered that Merrit Bakery and Restaurant was just an extra block away. The promise of chicken and waffle enticed them to walk the extra block. The food there is good, but the high point was the person who sat next to us – the self-described oldest dog walker in Lake Merritt. At 82 year olds she was quite the whippersnapper, and regaled us with stories about the dogs she walks, and her past dogs, as well as her husband. Oh yeah, they also have some amusing looking cakes there:

After dinner we ended going back over to the loud bar. There was actually a party going on, with a DJ, which explained it being so loud. We ran in to the people from the laundromat again, and one of them turned out to be a documentary film-maker. I told him I would netflix his current movie, Hip Hop Colony which does look rather interesting.

Anyway, after an hour and a half or so at the bar it was time to go home. It was not at all the night I was expecting but it was suitably great in its randomness!

There is a particularly nasty iPhone bug going around. Judging by the scuttlebut on the internet (and from the guy I talked to at the apple store) it is no rare occurrence, yet it doesn’t seem to be all that well known. The bug is that all downloaded applications stop working – they load up until the splash screen and then crash. Given that the iTunes applications were a major selling point of the 2.0 software, this is sort of a big deal!

From what I’ve gathered, this is a problem in the DRM signatures of the applications. They aren’t matching with the information with the phone, so they just silently fail. Evidently the information in the phone and computer you sync to can come out of sync. The silent failure is a big problem in and of itself – it sure would be nice if there was a crashlog built in where you would see “Facebook – unable to load, invalid DRM signature” or such. The other big problem is that the solution to this bug is incredibly heinous. You have to erase your phone (a 90 plus minute process on the 16GB phone, maybe it’s faster on the 8GB – but this appears to be a byte-by-byte reset of the NVRAM). Then you have to restore it as a NEW iPhone via iTunes (my roommate, stega, claims you can restore it to your backup, but I had no success with that, but the new phone image worked on the first try). Most everything you had on the phone of value – photos, contacts, music, is easily backed up to your computer such that they survive the process. But there are two things that are ONLY backed up as part of the old image – SMS conversations and Notes, and as such these are completely lost.

Furthermore, the way to avoid this bug is to not download any itunes applications via the phone, and only to do it on your computer. This is an inconvenience to say the least. The next software update is suppose to cure this but I am not holding my breath!

I mentioned this in a comment, but the landlord called my roommate back and said he is working on “modifying the terms of the loan.” In other words, he is trying to keep the house. I wonder why it took until foreclosure started to do that. We’re basically in a wait-and-see state. We have the URL for the auction, so we can keep on eye on that. So far there is no first bid from the bank, which is a better than bad sign.

If the house does get sold, the worst case, near as I can reckon, is we get 60 days to move out. But it could be more complicated than that, since Foreclosures Do Not Affect Rent Control Rights. My current belief is that this house is covered by rent control, but I do not have proof of that. Basically it would mean that we are safe through the end of the lease (not that much longer than the 60 days past the sale) and that they couldn’t arbitrarily evict us, or raise the rent arbitrarily. San Francisco is a weird city. There are other possibilities of what might happen as well, but the worst case is livable, I suppose – save this would make it three years in a year that I’d move, and four out of the last five.

On a brighter note, here is a cute picture of a kitten:

A notice that the house is in default and due to be auctioned on 9/29. I sort of wish this came a few days ago, so I wouldn’t have paid rent to the landlord who evidently isn’t using it to pay his mortgage. Well, we left him voicemail and email, so we’ll see what he has to say on the matter. But I am not a happy campter.

Oh yes, I have a cold too.

Tell me it’s not!