Be warned: there are a lot of bodily fluids in here, so you might want to skip reading this post if that's going to gross you out.
Quite a visit. Some highlights included cutting open my file cabinet, cutting the lock off my storage unit, seeing Paul, Lisa, Binta, Stefan, Rick, Joe, Marilyn, Jill, Dallas, Mandy, Matthew, Debbie, Debbie's ex-husband Greg, Jason, Abasi, Buster, Bobbie, and others again, meeting Brett and Evan for the first time, putting my house on the market, packing up a bunch of my books, vomiting from being poisoned, getting picked up by the sheriff, and not getting enough sleep; I'll elaborate on these later in this email if I have time. I was hoping to get some work done while I was here, but I didn't. Being here reminded me that I miss many people from here, even though I'm really glad I don't live here anymore. I wish I'd had time to see another 15 or 20 people I know here (whom I will not list for fear of omitting one) and to spend more time with the people I did see. I'm waiting in the Dayton airport for my ATA connection flight to Chicago, whence I'll hop a plane to SFO. Once there, Beatrice and I have an appointment with a building manager to discuss moving in. I miss Beatrice immensely. I really wish she'd been able to come out for some of this time; I went through all this stuff from my past, and I really wish I'd been able to share it with her. I'm very happy that I'll see her again in just a few hours. * * * I took a taxi to the airport this morning. The taxi driver drove up Peters Pike, a ridiculously phallic name for a street. Most of the houses on Peters Pike are very large, nice houses on very large, nice lots, but few of them stoop to ostentation. He pointed out one house with a fence, a pond, and a fountain and said it reminded him of some people he worked with, and he wondered if perhaps it belonged to one of them. He managed to talk over the televangelist preaching on the radio to explain that some of the Emeralds he knew were the sort of people who would decorate their house in this way; perhaps it was a Diamond, but he didn't know how many of them were in the area. We talked a bit about Amway (the above terms are Amway jargon) and Quixtar. According to the taxi driver, Bill Britt sort of coerced a lot of his downline to become Quixtar people; he said that the budget for the Quixtar web site was 500 million dollars (over what period of time, he didn't know, that it got about 4 million hits a day, or a bit under 50 per second, that Quixtar representatives were grossing 4.2 billion dollars a year, and that they used two Crays (two of them for redundancy). I might be remembering some of this wrong, and the taxi driver might be mistaken. 4 billion dollars means 3.65 web site hits per dollar, which seems awfully optimistic. It seems that some Amway (and, I guess, Quixtar) people get off on talking about how much money other people have, or are spending. It's sort of like how some computer folks get off on talking about how fast some processor or network card or OS kernel is, whether or not they actually have the opportunity to use it themselves. I guess this might be a draw of Amway and Quixtar --- even if you don't make a lot of money yourself, you get to hear lots of stories about how other people make and spend lots of money. * * * Last night I cut open my filing cabinet to extract my files. It was a big military green galvanized steel filing cabinet with four drawers, and I bought it at salvage without a key; somewhere along the line, when I had housesitters taking care of my house, somebody pushed the lock in and locked the thing. I wish I'd bothered to learn to pick locks when I was a kid. I brought over my Dremel tool and cut the sheet metal around the lock. It stank horribly --- the paint and zinc and steel dust in the air were not pleasant, and I was in a walk-in closet. Cutting the sheet metal did not free the lock to any significant extent --- it just made it wobble around. I tried drilling out the lock --- I knew it would destroy the high-speed cutter I was using for the job (the lock was brass, which is much harder than steel), but I thought it might be worth it. Alas, although I got a couple of pin tumblers out, but the high speed cutter did not extend far enough into the lock to free all the tumblers, so I didn't gain anything from this. We (Jason, Debbie, and I) tried prying the top drawer open with pry bars. We got it to open perhaps half an inch, not even enough to remove the files. Then someone (Debbie, I think) noticed that it was attached to the back of the file cabinet; pulling on the front of the drawer was pulling on three spot welds on the back of the cabinet, which had pulled the back of the cabinet into three little dimples. So I cut around the three little dimples. The drawer opened another half inch, enough to remove the files, but not enough to get at the drawers beneath. So we stopped and thought for a while. "You don't have any tin snips, do you, Debbie?" I asked. She didn't, but there *were* a couple of pairs of dikes and a heavy-duty pair of needle-nose pliers. With these, I was able to open the cut I'd made in the back of the cabinet until it was about a foot long and examine the locking mechanism. There was a vertical sliding metal rod, which was what had been attached to the back of the cabinet. It was badly bent from our earlier prying; it had a kind of hook on it that looked like it caught on a corresponding hook on the bottom of the drawer, but it wasn't engaged. I asked Debbie if she could pull on the drawer again so I could see where it was attached. It came right out. I examined the locking mechanism and found a cotter pin attaching the lock to a metal rod that extended to the back of the filing cabinet and engaged with the vertical sliding rod. Pulling the cotter pin enabled me to slide the vertical rod, even in its bent-up state, so the other drawers could be removed. We took the cabinet and drawers out to the garage. I'm afraid it's no longer really a viable filing cabinet. Jason and I went to his house; I had planned to bring boxes of books inside, but I just felt awful and wanted to go to sleep. I slept on the couch; this was around 12:30. * * * Around 6:00 this morning, I awoke suddenly and ran into the bathroom to vomit. I guess I must have inhaled too much of the zinc, steel, and paint; but also, my entire delicious aloo mater with rice and vegetable appetizers I'd eaten at Amar last night came up, so I apparently wasn't digesting very well anyway. We got up around 7:00. I've been feeling a little better since vomiting, but not much. Jason gave me a ride over to Debbie's/my house around 8:30; I had planned to sort out boxes of things to discard, but I wasn't able to, although I sorted out a few more books for Jason. I ate an egg at Debbie's, along with a couple of spoonfuls of sugar to calm my stomach. I've had diarrhea all morning; fortunately, very little leaked out on the flight from Dayton to Chicago. At Debbie's, I cleared out my left nostril. There was an amazing amount of fluorescent yellow mucus in there, perhaps four or five cubic centimeters; I suspect it might have been produced in response to getting vomit up my nose this morning. I oiled my hands and lips with olive oil; they were becoming rather chapped. The diarrhea probably caused this, at least in part. I caught the taxi around 10:45. I had to go through security inspection twice; my tiny keychain can-opener was apparently contraband, so I had to go back to the checkin desk and put it in my checked bag, a huge duffel bag from the basement of my house. The second time through, I apparently set off the metal detector, so they wand-inspected me, felt my legs and shoes, and generally took up my time for no good reason. * * * I met with Lisa Arzate, the realtor who's worked with both me and Marilyn on several house deals, on Friday, to put my house on the market. She seems to be doing very well. She also visited the house yesterday, Tuesday, to look at it and figure out what needed to be done to get it ready for showing. She noticed a lot of things I didn't. One of my files includes the old house inspection report; with luck, I'll be able to email her a list of things from there that needed fixing. We're listing it for slightly more than I paid for it; Dayton's housing market has not been as good as I hoped. * * * I picked up four of my computers from my house and got picked up by the sheriff on, I think, Saturday. I bought a cluster a couple of years ago, shortly before leaving Dayton for Seattle. I never had gotten it operational, although all the machines booted. Matthew and I drove over to my house to pick the machines up; we were moving them to Jason's house so they can be Internet-accessible in a place convenient to one of the Canonical Hackers. Looks like my house is getting some new neighbors; the duplex next door had a guy moving in, and apparently his father and two brothers were helping him. So, after we finished getting the computers, Matthew and I volunteered to help too. That landlord needs to take better care of that place --- there was dirt on the floor, one of the outdoor wooden stairs we were walking up fell off while we were using it, and one of the boards on the lower landing broke when someone stepped on it with a boxspring. (I don't think it was me this time.) It seems that one of the neighbors --- I think the downstairs tenant in that duplex --- called the police to report a burglary in progress when they saw Matthew and me carrying all these computers to Matthew's car. The sheriff showed up, made us put our hands on his car, felt us all over looking for weapons, and put us in the back seat of his car. He drove around the corner and looked at Matthew's car and asked why the registration wasn't coming up. He'd misspelled the license plate. I pointed this out and explained the situation; after he checked out our IDs, made sure we weren't wanted men, and understood that he'd picked us up for taking my own computers from my own house, he apologized and let us go. It was my first time ever being picked up by the police. A surreal experience. * * * On Friday, I made a stir-fried thing with some marinated tofu for dinner, and Debbie made some sushi. The four of us ate at a 45-cm-high plastic Fisher-Price table of several different brilliant colors. The stir-fried thing was not as much of a hit as I'd hoped --- I put in too much soy sauce, I think. * * * The first two nights I slept on Debbie's couch; another three nights, I think, I slept on Paul's futon; and on two more nights, I slept on Jason's couch. * * * I took inventory of my books, counting about 800. About 200 of those I selected to bring back to California; Jason will ship them to me when he gets around to it, which I hope very much is soon. * * * Tuesday morning, Paul gave me a ride to the Dayton Mall. I caught the X5 bus downtown and waited at the bus stop for a bus that would go to my house. The temperature was about -9 Centigrade, and the wind was about 30kph. I'd forgotten how it hurts to be cold. Just part of that old Dayton nightmare, you know. * * * I'm really glad my ears and nose are clear for the return flight. * * * I brought a lot of stuff on this trip. These things turned out to have been good ideas: - a backpack - decongestant tablets - a laptop - some non-battery-powered reading material - some warm clothes - some painkiller tablets - an eraser - a maglite - a toothbrush - a checkbook - some CD-ROMs - a sewing kit Next time around, I want to bring: - a prepaid phone card (MUCH cheaper than a cell phone) - a second battery for the laptop - kleenex (got some for return flight) - face masks, so as to not cough on people when sick, and not inhale the coughs of others when not sick. - bottled water (got some for return flight) - food when traveling on ATA --- airport food is both terrible and expensive, and airline food is nonexistent - extra underwear in carry-on luggage Things I've brought that haven't yet turned out to be useful: - a little notebook - some writing implements - a stapler - some antacid tablets Things I brought that I shouldn't have brought: - a box cutter (in my carry-on luggage; I noticed it after I got to Dayton and put it in my checked luggage for the return flight) * * * One night, we watched "Hedwig and the Angry Inch". It was painful to watch, because the characters were in such pain and it was well-done. Some of the songs still echo in my head. * * * On the flight from Dayton to Chicago, I started out sitting next to a cute young woman with liquid brown eyes and a blue plaid bandanna over her head. She was visiting Dayton from Philadelphia; her best friend was in Dayton. She was reading John Grisham's _The Practice_. But I had the opportunity to sit in a window seat in an exit row, and I took it rather than sit next to her --- I thought watching the landscape would be more fun than talking to her. On the flight from Chicago to San Francisco, I sat next to a cute thin curly-haired white guy with brown hair and a short beard covering most of his face. Unfortunately, he slept much of the flight. * * * Some Canonical Hacker was shocked that I'd never seen a porn flick, which I thought was amusing. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> "Why are you withholding me?" -- name withheld "Oh... And dig this: I am a fish. 'Nuff said." -- Joe Blaylock (no further explanation) These are the denizens of the CLUG mailing list. Their five-year mission:
