Red Roses

Rocky is our alarm. He is particularly good at advising us when deliveries are being made. I think he hates that big brown truck.

I was downstairs, in our "basement". That's where I hang. Rocky sounded the alarm, so I rushed upstairs. The delivery vehicle was gone by the time I arrived, but there was a long plastic box on the front steps full of red roses for Delia. When Delia called, an hour or so later, I told her about it.

"Who sent it?"

I had no idea, apart from the fact that it hadn't been me.

"Well, open the envelope and see," she said.

The little card said the roses came from the Vice President of Givenchy, a woman Delia had met several weeks earlier when she visited San Diego. In addition to the flowers, there was a coupon that Delia can use to get another dozen roses each month all of next year. The note said "Thanks".

Each of the flowers had its own little water bottle attached, so they would have survived quite a while even if I hadn't brought them inside immediately. Delia now has them proudly displayed on the coffee table in the living room.

Rats!

Last Friday I had a class at Oasis, held at the Robinsons-May department store in Mission Valley. My car was doing fine until I parked it. Then it started to idle so roughly the whole car shook violently. I had two stops to make on the way home, and the rough idling continued. In addition, at my last stop the "check engine" light came on.

Engines on modern cars are about as hard to check as computers are and for much the same reason -- they depend so much on modern technology that only high-tech tools will work to diagnose their infirmities. About all I am capable of determining is whether or not there is enough coolant and lubricant, and neither of those seemed to be the cause of my problem.

This morning I took the car in to the dealer. Just before noon I received a call giving me the verdict: rodents had consumed enough of the vacuum line to cause a loss of vacuum with the resulting problems. Rats or mice had gotten into my car's engine and were eating it.

We had our first ever home invasion by mice this year, after fifty years at this location, and now rats or mice are attacking my car.

I guess I'll have to start setting the mouse traps outside under the car now.

BlogBack Comments

It's such a small change it would go unnoticed if I didn't mention it: a small link at the bottom of my Blogger page that simply says "comments". As simple and obvious as it was to add, figuring out what to do from the available instructions was neither simple nor obvious.

First, BlogBack is produced independently of Blogger. It is an add-on. The people who wrote Blogger didn't allow for comments, so several others did: Blogkomm, DotComments and BlogBack being the ones whose code uses PHP for the feature. Many others use CGI or other techniques, including seperate hosted services.

BlogBack consists of two code snippets, one of which you're instructed to place in the header and the other of which you're told to place in the section. Now this is where it fails to be obvious: the header and so on of what?

I should keep you in suspense, but I won't. When you go to the Web page where you edit your Blogger entries, there are three tabs on the page: Posts, Settings and Template. You click on the Template tab and insert the snippets in the HTML code you find there. Then you save the template, go back to the Posts tab and Publish the entries you previously produced.

Now for a test: go to the Am0 Home Page, click on the link at the bottom that says Am's rAMbles and see if you can leave me comments on any of the entries there.

Blogger

Am's rAMbles

I've added another new feature to my Am0 Web site, one I call "Am's rAMbles", using the Blogger Weblog system, which is explained in the initial entry there.

Yes, it is yet another attempt to escape the confines of Xanga ... or at least to try an alternative until I can make a valid comparison and decide what I want to do. At the very least, it provides me with a backup means of expression for those times when Xanga seems not to be functioning.

"Please sum up your thoughts about me in one word and leave it in the comments. Then post this in your own weblog to find out what everyone else thinks of you."

Alternative to Weblogs

I've added a new feature to my Am0.us Web site: a news publishing device similar to Weblogs. It's down at the very bottom in a link called "News". It doesn't allow for comments but I'll come up with something that will allow you to talk back to me. Meanwhile, my site will no longer be as static as it has been.

As if I needed to waste yet another day in which I could have been doing something useful.

I didn't start out to do it. Really I didn't. It's just that when I found the program it was so easy ...

New Old Car

I've been driving a 1988 Chevy Baretta. It has been in a couple of accidents that we know about, primarily because its computer has a tendency to fail at crucial times, taking critical services like the power brakes with it. It was purchased used, so we don't know what happened to it before we got it.

We do know that its computer is very delicate. Need a tune-up? Computer dies. Oxygen sensor having fits? Computer dies. Solar flares? Computer dies.

I took it in on Monday of last week because it was leaking oil. They changed a gasket. The computer died. There went another $412.

That annoys me. Why should changing a gasket kill the computer? Perhaps because I had them change the oil, the oil filter and the air filter at the same time? None of it is reasonable.

It didn't happen all at once. I had the gasket and other stuff changed last week, renting a car for a day while it was being worked on. Then I drove the car for a week with it malfunctioning: it was idling fast and ragged. It was harder than usual to keep to a target speed, the car speeding up or slowing down on its own. I took it back in yesterday and learned of the computer problem. With the computer replaced, the car runs well again.

But for how long ... and at what cost. That car goes through more computers than Bob Aston does.

So I surprised Delia and Cathy by doing what I've told Delia she should have done a year ago. I bought another car.

It isn't new and it wasn't expensive, a 1998 Chevy Malibu, ten years younger than the trouble-maker. The car I rented last week was a 2003 Malibu, so I knew I liked the breed even if I couldn't afford something newer. It has a few miles on it, an average number for a California car of that vintage: 72,000. It is my favorite car color, white. It has four doors, so I can get in and out when parked close to other cars. I expect it to get me there and back for at least the four years it will take to pay for it.

When Derek arrives for Thanksgiving, we will temporarily be a four person family again and we will have one car each.

Derek can drive the Baretta.

Traffic Reports

San Diego has sensors built into the major freeways that read the speed of passing vehicles. This information is displayed on several Web sites, particularly one maintained by CalTrans, and reports traffic hazards and accidents as well as giving a real-time look at the speeds traffic is really moving at. The indicators are displayed as color-coded dots that display average speed when the cursor is passed over them. A series of aqua or green dots means all is well. Yellow indicates traffic is moving slowly and red means it is almost stopped.

Accidents and hazards are shown as diamonds. Clicking on a diamond takes you to a page with the report. Yellow diamonds represent hazards, orange diamonds represent minor accidents and red diamonds are for big, serious accidents.

Right now the map shows one yellow diamond. It should have some kind of enhancement for stupidity because somebody is changing a flat tire with their legs sticking out into the traffic lane. I expect that one to turn red at any moment.

I saw a yellow diamond escallate to red last night. Some logs rolled off of a truck going up a freeway approach, which generated the yellow hazard. Car after car ran over the logs until a total of seven cars were wiped out and they had to call in ambulances, fire and tow trucks.

Saturday nights the diamonds seem to appear like corn popping, most of them associated with drunken driving. Quite often only one vehicle is involved. In one of these cases, the female passenger got out of the vehicle just before it was hit by a large pickup truck. The truck drove off; the young man in the car was trapped inside as it went down the side of an embankment.

I begin to understand why people would buy police scanners and spend hours listening to them. The panorama of human stupidity portrayed in these reports is as endless in its variety as it is staggering in its volume. I didn't know all of that was happening. I just wanted to know if it was safe to drive home.

I see lots of stupidity while driving. It usually does no harm. No paint is mixed, no metal is bent, no blood is spilled. I've seen plenty of close calls, near hits that I was sure would connect but didn't.

Now I know they're not all so lucky.

Strange Aural Memories

Sunday while driving to work I couldn't get a song out of my mind. It was a song I hadn't heard for decades, the theme song to a movie I had seen just once. I had heard the song on radio several times during its brief period of popularity but hadn't thought about it for many, many years. It was particularly inappropriate to the conditions I was driving through, Barbra Streisand's rendition of "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever".

On a clear day
Rise and look around you
And you'll see forever more.
On a clear day
How it will astound you ...

This was echoing through the empty chambers of my mind as I drove through the curtains of smoke, almost alone on the freeway, on my way to work.

This morning the wind was blowing the other way. It was a breeze from the sea that had blown the smoke away so I could see the sky again. Once more a song sprang to my mind:

Happy days are here again,
The skies above are clear again ...

This was a little more appropriate, being a song of the Depression.

If you are right-handed, then the left side of your brain is in charge most of the time while the right side of your brain quietly sits there doing analysis. Every once in a while the right side of the brain will send a message to the left side. Sometimes the message takes the form of a visual image, sometimes a voice or other audible illusion. Lately I've been getting the message in music.

It's rather nice.

Strange Days

The sky is grey, shading to dark brown at the horizon, which is much closer then usual. If you look off towards the distant horizon, you will see billows, sheets and whirlwinds of the greyness in front of the brown wall that marks the limit of vision. Valleys and depressions are filled with the grey clouds. Looking closer you can see grey flakes drifting down like some feeble snowfall.

It is dark out. The noontime sun is as red as my eyes. Later it will shift to orange before it fades away completely.

The air smells like burning newspaper, burning grass and burning leaves during the short time you are able to smell it.

Crossing the ridge from Lemon Grove to La Mesa, the air gets thicker, heavier. The horizon is much nearer here. I get my medicine and my new glasses and a few essential food items -- how appropriate that the store personnel are wearing masks today, like bandits, bandanas and paper masks that I'm sure are useless -- and depart the crowd for clearer air.

I shouldn't have been surprised that the store was crowded. Half the stores in the county are closed and the few people that have to shop have to go to the few stores that are open.

There isn't much traffic but the few people driving are surly and mean, as if they think the fire was my fault and they want to punish me. Maybe it's just that the smart people aren't driving today, leaving the roads to the idiots. If I didn't need the medicine, I wouldn't be on the road, that's for sure.

I got off work ninety minutes late Monday morning. I was supposed to work just until midnight but my relief was late. People who have problems with the concept of Daylight Saving Time ending and everybody gaining an hour might consider finding a better field to work in than Technical Support. A lot of the calls we received near midnight were from employees wondering if they should show up for work Monday morning. Having not been told otherwise, I told them they should either come on in or call in at an hour when somebody in authority might be there.

My sleep was interrupted early (for me) Monday morning by my doctor's receptionist, calling to cancel my appointment once more. I got up after only about six hours of sleep (I need eight) and had a headache all day despite two naps. I stayed home and did my laundry, the only thing that kept it from being a totally wasted day.

There was no mail yesterday; there was today. The local schools remain closed, as do the courts. Television is pretty much limited to fire coverage.

I don't feel too bad right now, except for the constant stinging of my eyes. The weather is changing and the wind should blow the smoke away from where I'll be instead of towards me. The temperature should drop and the humidity should rise soon, which should help efforts to kill the fire.

We had fire to the south, east and north of us. We were lucky. We didn't get burned while people living a very short distance away in all but one direction lost everything. Delia, especially after talking to her friends, was in a panic much of the time. I wasn't. I am simply thankful.

What a waste of life it is to react with anger, depression or fear to a problem that could be minimized by proper planning, survived by avoiding stupid actions and used as a lesson for the future by those willing to look around themselves, including into the future.