20 years ago today I was living in Oakland, across from Highland Hospital. 

One day my friends Stephanie and Linda wanted to do some shopping and we headed over to Hillsdale Mall in San Mateo.  I forget the reasons why we went all the Way to San Mateo to do shopping, or what particular store we were headed to.  Our plans were to do some shopping, then head back to Oakland.  I took the San Mateo bridge to get there, and had planned to head back on the Bay Bridge.  If we had been on time, we would have been heading back at around 5PM.

We were having a fun day when suddenly, the mall started to shake.  We were experiencing an earth quake, and it felt like a pretty large one.  I remember people started frantically running out of the mall.  My friends and I were pretty close to an exit, but I had no desire to leave the mall.  We were pretty close to an escalator, and I recall moving us towards it, and stood under it, thinking it was the safest place to be.  I glanced outside and could see stucco falling onto the side walk, so I knew that was NOT where I wanted to be.  The escalator we were standing under was near the poster/print shop.  I recall it having a two story glass window, and it was starting to flex pretty badly.  I had never seen glass move so much, and it was quite fun to watch, but the window never broke.

After the mall stopped shaking we made our way to the parking lot.  I had parked on the upper level.  Not to many other cars were up there.  The first thing I noticed was that my car was no longer in between the lines of the parking space, but had moved over a bit.

Having grown up in the Bay Area, earth quakes did not phase me.  I had lived through quite a few, and I did not understand people who let a little ground shaking scare them.  From the moment the ground started shaking, to seeing the stucco falling, to seeing that my car was moved a bit, I was very calm.    This is one of the things I remember most..  I remember  thinking that most of the people in the mall were acting quite silly, running outside the way they were.  Even one of the people I was with wanted to go outside during the shaking, and I recall having to stop them, for their own safety.

At this point I figured that the roads would be very chaotic, and that the best thing we could do was to wait it about a bit, listen to the radio, and then head to my moms place to make sure everything was OK there.  She lived in San Mateo, not too far from the mall.

We got into the car and turned on the radio.  The radio was tuned to my favorite radio station of the time, and I was slightly surprised to hear news, and not music when I turned the power on.  We first heard the magnitude of the quake, and I recall acknowledging with a laugh that it was quite close to what I had predicted earlier.  The news continued with a report that 'the bay bridge had fallen', or at least that is what we heard.  It was most likely an early report, and it was a bit vague, but we heard that something major happened to the Bay Bridge.

This is where I stopped being calm.  If something could happen to such a large structure that I had driven on countless times, how was the rest of the Bay Area?  how was my moms place, how was my mom?  I started the car and headed over to my moms place.  On the way there we continued to hear reports of a collapsed freeway in Oakland.  I didn't recognize the name at the time, but I would later learn it was roadway I drove on almost every day.

My mom was fine, and seemed a bit surprised that I had felt the need to check on her over 'just a little ground shaking'.  I again figured it would be best to sit tight for a while, and maybe watch the news.  My friends called home to let their families know they were OK.  While watching the news we learned that Caltrans had shutdown the San Mateo bridge for inspection.  It would reopen in the morning.  Not wanting to drive around the bay, back to Oakland we ended up spending the night at my moms place.

That is what I remember from 20 years ago today.

Tags: bay area, earthquake, hillsdale mall, mom
Current Location: Oakland, CA
Feeling: thankful

I have found my self trying to remember all the reasons I am not interested in another laptop a few times, so I figured I should just document it somewhere, and add to it as needed:

1. I want real cooling fans.  Tired of my laptop over heading and spontaneously  shutting down due to over heating.  This is after adjusting fan settings and placing on a laptop cooler.  Of course, this is what you get when you cram an Intel P4 Desktop CPU running at 3.2Ghz into a laptop case.  Oddly, the overheating tends to only happen when running iTunes.
2. Too many wires.  3 USB plugs, some which can't be merged onto one hub for power/bandwidth reasons.  Power cable, network (wireless is not fast enough for me when connecting to my file server), speakers, external monitor, etc.
3. I never use it as a laptop anymore, partially due to #2.  I now have a netbook for mobile / coffee table use, and honestly, the iPhone has replaced my need to even carry the netbook around with me anymore.  Safari is that good.
4. Sound.  I am sure this would not be the case with a newer laptop, but the fans in this laptop are very loud, and this is after cleaning.  Add to this the sound of the laptop cooler it is sitting on, and it sounds like I am in a server room.
5. Being used as a desktop replacement has not been good to the battery, which is now stuck at 0%.

For some of this, I am sure it is just due to owning a desktop replacement laptop that is 3 years old, and a newer laptop, with newer laptop CPUs would not be as much of an issue.  There is still not much point if I do not need to take it with me, and the Netbook gives me access to all non Apple specific things stored on my file server.

I am also considering make the switch back to a Mac again, although my last attempt with a crappy iBook did not go so well.  These days they are all Intel based, and that means that if I still can't get OS X to work the way I want, I can at least run Windows on it, and/or guest it with out the additional CPU translation.  I even hear you can integrate Windows apps into OS X, but that sounds like a negative feature to me.

At this point I have drank the koolaid a few times.  I ripped all my CDs into Apple Lossless in iTunes, purchased an iPod, and now an iPhone.  I might as well take the next step, buy a Mac, and put an Apple sticker on my car.

I am considering a MacMini or a 24" iMac.  This is what I know so far:

• Small
• Quiet
• I can get any monitor I like for it. Supports 2 monitors.
• Cheap, starting at $599, what I paid for my current 3 year old laptop.
• If being a Mac owner does not work out, can also use it as a media server.

• May use laptop parts, including HD.
• Still no 4" fans
• Limited to 2.0Ghz
• Limited to 4Gb RAM (although this should be enough for anyone)
• Drives are only 5400 rpm

• Built in screen makes perfect laptop replacement.
• Faster speeds than the MacMini
• Memory up to 8Gb.
• I have been told that it does not use laptop style parts such as the hard drive.
• Supports an external monitor.
• Drives are 7200 RPM

• Much more expensive than MacMini
• Might be cheaper to get my own screen + MacMini
• Still no 4" fans

Tags: desktop, laptop, mac
Current Location: Oakland, CA
Listening to: Sound of loud fans

Prompted by a recent conversation...Poll #1437956 Bath Towels
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 12

How many times do you use a bath towel before putting it in the laundry?

Tags: bath, habits, laundry, towels
Current Location: Oakland, CA
Feeling: Curious

I am getting much happier with my own cooking lately.  I am starting to cook the way I used to, back when I still lived at home.

I made a breaded chicken breast tonight, with much success.  No recipe, just instinct.

I made the breading out of about a half cup of  some leftover bread crumbs, added some freshly chopped parsley, freshly chopped thyme, finely chopped/minced 3 cloves of garlic, about a table spoon of minced onion, a few squirts of lemon juice for moisture and flavor, and some lemon pepper. 

I beat some Dijon mustard, about a table spoon, and a little flour into an egg for the egg wash.  Stole that from a breaded pork chop recipe that I tried recently.  It creates a thicker breading that sticks better, and adds extra flavor.

The rest was just a typical 3 step breading.  Cut the breast into two in order to make two servings, rolled it in flour, the egg mixture, then the breading.  375 for 30 min.

It was excellent.  Christine said it had lots of flavors, which I took to be a good thing.

Tags: chicken, cooking, food
Current Location: Oakland, CA
Feeling: satisfied

inoah  had an interesting idea last Saturday night.  Create a Twitter account that spews nonsense, based on the input of users it follows. 

A day later, I created the Twitter account named BlaBlaBloblo.  Originally, the code was a shell script that called dadadodo but I soon after implemented the whole thing in Python in order to be better suited for 140 character output, and renamed the twitter account to DinDaaDaa, giving it a name that had more meaning to me.

So now I have dindada.py, a program that accesses a Twitter account, uses the tweets of those it follows to form a Markov chain, builds one or more sentences from the chain, and posts a tweet back to Twitter.  Tweets that are read are accessed through the Twitter JSON API, and saved to a local pickle, as to help build the Markov chain over time.  Words are weighted by frequency in order to produce better output over time.

The funny part is that this account already has 21 followers.

I now wonder if I should create a new LiveJournal account and do the same thing.

Tags: blablabloblo, dadadodo, dindada, markov chain, noah, twitter
Current Location: Oakland, CA
Feeling: tired