Category: Family & Home

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Hurtling Semi

Behind our house, the hills rise steeply. Moeser is virtually unbike-able, rising quickly into the heavens. This afternoon a semi truck lost its brakes at the top of the hill and hit huge speeds on the way down (I heard 100 mph being thrown around at the accident site). Slammed through multiple vehicles, then overturned in someone’s house just one block away from ours, and burst into flames. The house burned down. Cars it hit on the way down reduced to hideous smooshes. Eight people injured, some critically. One young boy apparently hanging by a thread, though no one died. Strangely, the resulting power outage (power pole taken clear out, live wires hurt some teenagers) reached all the way to Berkeley, some 20,000 people without power, but one block away, our power unaffected.

Music: Dust Brothers :: Chemical Burn
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iPhoto’s Lame-Oh Randomizer

   

Shot over 300 images over the Minnesota vacation, then whittled down to 120. The Achilles’ heel of digital photography is that there’s no risk/no expense, which encourages you to shoot five variants of everything, rather than one well-conceived shot. Nobody has any time, so the collections never get edited properly and you end up with mountains of superfluous bits to surf through in the future. With analog, each shot costs (financially, environmentally), so the image is conceived in the mind before being committed to film. Analog images are somehow less disposable.

It’s kind of like the difference between composing at the typewriter vs. the word processor (I wrote most of my college papers with a typewriter, only started using the UCSC mainframe during my senior year). When typing, mistakes are costly. So you roll your eyes, lick your lip, scratch your head, and conceive an entire paragraph mentally before committing to paper. Work from an outline so the pages come out in the right order. With word processing, you enter the process of infinite revision, spray your thoughts all over the page and let god sort ’em out (or do it yourself). Thoughts are more malleable with a word processor.

Anyway. Discovered last night that if you set iPhoto‘s slide show feature to randomize the images in an album, you’ll start seeing the same images over again very quickly.

– Displayed images are not dropped from the random queue
– The algorithm clearly favors some images, skipping others

Above: Miles at 11 months on the shores of Gull Lake, MN. Cousin Roya with famous goofy elastic mug.

Music: Etta James :: A Sunday Kind of Love
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Grand View Lodge

Spending the week at Grand View Lodge near Brainerd, Minnesota with extended Kubes family. The classic American resort thing — fishing, golf, tennis, lakeside reading, yoga, meals included… It’s all about the kids — 11 cousins now, Miles the youngest, being showered with kisses and funny faces. By night, Cranium, Mexican train dominoes, political and religious discussions with brother-in-law. Total wind-down time, recharge batteries before students return next week. Absolutely no idea what’s going on in the outside world right now, and don’t much care. Vacation classique.

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Winnemucca

Totally therapeutic weekend at Dad’s place in Pioneer — after renting for five years, he finally bought the cabin he lives in. Hadn’t been there since we were snowbound last winter. In bad need of a weekend away, took a 5.5 mile hike to Winnemucca Lake. All reality is equally real, but something about boulders and pines and clear water and warm winds and eternal wildflowers seems so much more real than asphalt and Burger Kings. Can’t explain it. It just does. Miles rode in his new Kelty Base Camp, loved it. Dad greeted us in his Be t-shirt. Melted the weekend away.

Music: Mose Allison :: Your Molecular Structure
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Lone Cheerio

Cheerios on the table. Cheerios on the floor. Cheerios in plastic baggies ground to a fine powder by little boy banging. Cheerios after squash and peas. Cheerios after high-fat yogurt. Cheerios in the folds of the car seat. Cheerios to buy time. Cheerios goggles to make baby laugh. Cheerios race car under foot. Cheerios bit in half by tiny front teeth. Cheerios soaked with slobber, goobering down side of high chair. Cheerios on baby boy’s sweet breath.

Amy shot this poignant little Cheerio this afternoon.

Music: Traffic :: Shanghai Noodle Factory
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Miles Month 9 Photos

miles_cables.jpg In the month 9 gallery, Miles learns to crawl, cruise, and then walk. We move into a new house and Miles digs it. Going to the zoo, trip to Arcata, stealing keys, messing with cables, and cuteness coming out our ears. This is a big gallery — 32 photos in two sets.

And now the mimicry has begun – he wants to do everything we do. If Amy cleans something up, he takes a hunk of cloth and wipes things at random. If I drive a toy car up his arm, he returns the favor. And Amy and Paula swear that when Paula said Hi to Miles yesteday, he said Hi right back.

Music: Miles Davis :: Budo
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Miles’ Brush with Stardom

Almost forgot: A couple of weeks ago we were at Hidden City Cafe’ in Point Richmond, Miles between us in a high chair banging Cheerios into a fine powder, when suddenly he breaks into that huge smile he reserves for people who are really turning him on. We turn to see who’s eye he’s caught this time, and it’s Elliott Gould, stopping to make goo-goo faces at a baby on his way out of the restaurant. He grins at us and slips out the door, probably too soon to avoid hearing one of us stammer, “Hey, isn’t Robert Gould?” Doi.

Music: Reggae Disco Rockers :: Baby
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14,600 Redux

Since posting about the DSL bandwidth bummers in the new house last week, the outlook has not brightened. Speakeasy put me in touch with their throughput gurus and we looked at the problem from every angle (I can’t recommend Speakeasy highly enough – their customer service is sterling). Conclusion – they can get me maybe 5% or even 10% more upstream, but we’re not going to get anywhere close to the 768kbps upstream I had in the previous house until the telco builds a closer C.O. Called the telco and got laughed at — “You’re already within DSL range — why would we build another C.O.?”

Started doing more research into cable options via Comcast. Just getting through to them has been a study in frustration. Half a dozen phone calls and emails unreturned. All I wanted to know was what their upstream cap was and whether they impose any restrictions on ports/servers. Their web site was totally unhelpful. Their commercial service sounded promising, but no details online. Finally, a sympathetic soul in tech support passed me to someone with a clue. Sure enough, 384kbps upstream cap and no traffic on port 80 allowed. Period.

So I’m back to square one. Home T1 too expensive. Colo probably affordable but will necessitate buying another box. Having too much fun running servers to throw in the towel, though someone with a less-thick head than myself probably would have long ago.

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Cahoustics

A while back a friend was was working as a janitor in a recording studio in L.A. During a session, another janitor walked in and exclaimed “Great cahooostics in here!”

Our new living room also has great cahoustics. Same gear. Same music. Way better audio. We rock.

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GFCIs, Oops Hole

A dozen receptacles in the new house are two-prong. Those always turn out to be the ones into which you need to plug a three-pronged electric cheese grater. Adapters aren’t really safe, elegant, or convenient, so I’m removing all the old receptacles and replacing with ground fault circuit interruptors. Which takes a bit of hard swallowing, since the old receptacles all had lovely bakelite covers, which now go into a drawer to gather dust.

Hired a pair of electricians to do the hard work prepping new circuits for the garage, add a receptacle to the kitchen, replace our antique fuse box, add a phone jack, etc. We love ’em, they’re great. But came home from a wedding today to a VERY contrite note explaining that a “miscommunication” had resulted in a 1.5″ hole accidentally being bored through our beautiful new floors. Mercy. I can just see how the moment unfolded:

“I got daylight.”

“I’m not seeing your drill bit.”

“I’m through.”

“Where are you?”

“Uhhh…”

They came up on the wrong side of a wall. Rather than behind the stove in the kitchen, the hole is near the stereo, in the living room. They’re willing to pay for repairs of course, but what a drag.