Jeff Luszcz’s Web Log

2007 Index

Number of countries visited: 2 (Canada and Denmark)
Number times luggage lost: 1
Luggage returned: 1

Age of bike in years: 13

Number of Bike Tires Stolen: 1

Number of Bike Chains Cut: 1

Age of Car: No Car!
Number of email accounts regularly checked: 5

Ratio of Spam to Real Mail: 100:1

Days spent swimming at Ocean Beach this summer (SF, CA): 1

Water temperature for that sunny California summer dip: 52 degrees

Number of LCD Picture Frames Available in Ct Christmas Eve: 1

Number of Making Dinner Shows missed this year: 2

Amazing sunset tonight

Just got back from a week back East, mostly in West Virginia. Cell phone (just barely), but no wifi. Not too much of a surprise.

You can buy fireworks, but not liquor, in the supermarket. I guess you have to pick just one, so they did.

Today was a purge day, ala 43folders which always feels good, especially in our smallish apartment. A stack of clothes for Community Thift, a couple of ties that didn’t survive the dress up test for Catherine’s wedding in Palo Alto last night. For someone who never really has to wear a suit, I have far too many ties.

A nice reception by the baylands, short but sweet, capping off a refreshing (and much needed) week of vacation.

The San Francisco fog cooperated on Thursday night to give us a view of the ISS Space Station and the Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-117). The shuttle couldn’t make its landing in Florida so we had one extra night to try to see it. Wednesday night was fogged over.

Heavens Above gave us the times that the space station should be visible so we went out to see what we could see.

We managed to see the space station travel over, followed about the shuttle about 30 seconds in the sky behind it.

Here’s an 8 second exposure of the space station, it’s the streak above the building.

Flickr set of the rest of the photos

Well it’s 2007. Fruit flies like a banana and all that.

2006 Index

Number of countries visited: 4

Weeks without access to laptop while on vacation: 2

Number of times email checked those 2 weeks: 2

Ratio of spam to real email: >50:1

Number times luggage lost: 2

Luggage returned: 1

Age of bike in years: 12

Age of car in years: 16

Number of times car stolen this year: 1

Days before car returned: 3

Number of earthquake kits eaten by car theives: 1

Number of email accounts regularly checked: 5

Days spent swimming at Ocean Beach this summar (SF, CA): 1

Water temprature for that sunny California summer dip: 52 degrees

Water temprature in Southampton New York “Polar Bear” swim: 47

Number of ipods available on Eastern Long Island (Shinnicock Canal and west) Dec 24th: 1

After dinner last night a couple of us went up to the Castro and managed to not get shot.
We were a block away at Church and Market when we heard the shots ring out. bang bang bangbang bang bang.
It was pretty clear they weren’t fireworks and then maybe 15 seconds later there was the noise of the parade fencing coming down as the panic wave started.

There was a noticable reduction in checking at the gates this year (though we decided not to go in since it was already far too packed. We hung out a little outside and watched the costumes come in.

Photos from Halloween

After a couple minutes things settled down, though you could tell something had just gone down since cops were streaming in from the outside area.

I’m sure this week there will be a lot of discusion of what to do about Halloween in the Castro. It is a great thing and a horrible thing at the same time. A lot of creativity, and drunken violence.

You could tell that the city cheaped out on things this year, no entertainment but more cops. It all added to a general bad vibe.

This guy had one of the better costumes I saw, he was a perfect Hasselhoff/Kitt combo. The red light in front even moved. He must be one of those guys that don’t work at a startup and have oddles of free time.

This year I was a combo “Abe Lincoln” / “Ape Lincoln” depending on the time.

Walking to work this morning, after getting off BART, I hear “Jeff, Jeff!” from across the street. It was Adam who noticed me walking in the opposite direction. One of things he noticed was my “old school” headphones, more in the style of knock off sony walkman circa 1986 with the foam puffy ear pieces. I lost my ipod headphones and these are the only ones I could find in the junk box. I checked myself in the window as I continued on, and man. _very_ dorky.

Off to Linuxworld in a bit. Palamida has a booth there today and I always like walking the floor.

Saw Nicole doing a bang up job at the EFF booth.

Just got off the phone with my wife who was driving with a friend to dinner. Then the earthquake started. It was the longest one I have felt (and the biggest one I’ve felt at home)
My neighbor is yelling at her hunsband to “turn the gas off”, though it didn’t seem nearly that big.

The USGS reports it as a 4.4 up near Santa Rosa.

The building  shook _a lot_ for a decent amount of time.

Crazy.

After recently getting a 5g ipod to replace my dead 1G I soon noticed that it didn’t quite work the same.

The most annoying loss of functionality was that you could no longer turn on and off the backlight by holding down the play(?) button. You now have to use a menu command, which is a little difficult to find in the pitch darkness. Apple, please bring this back.
A different issue was that it seemed like my ipod was losing its charge over night, but not every night. Sometimes it would go for days and allow me to turn it on, others, the play button would not start it up no matter what I tried. The weird thing was that it would wake up if you plugged it in to a USB port, and show a full charge.
I see others on the net have similar issues but there doesn’t seem to be a software/hardware fix for it.

What I have found out is this. In the case where the play button does not wake the ipod up, the center button will, if its held down for a second or two.

This  is different behaviour than the 1G ipod’s, but may be “normal” operation for the 5G.

Got a call from the SFPD a couple days ago saying they recovered my car in “drivable” condition.
It turns out the word “drivable” has a wide range of possiblities. In our case it means that all the windows were intact but the ignition and the back seat were damaged and someone had spent sometime hanging out in the car eating and smoking.

A women at “Auto Return” (a much more hopeful name than the old one they used to use “City Tow”) also got her car back in “Drivable” condition, except in her case the engine was pretty much destroyed as well as the ignition was jammed with somone else’s keys (which is apparently how many of the cars are managed to be started).

It must have been kids since nothing of any easy resale value was stolen and the car wasn’t stripped.

Cost a couple hundred bucks to get it back, probably as much to get everything fixed.

An annoying experience all around.

*not by choice.

Walking back from dinner last night K says, “that’s where the car was parked” somewhat fatalistically as she pointed at a car that was most definitely not ours. Called up the DPT, it wasn’t towed. Took a hike to the police station and reported it stolen.

I’m sure it’s now in a billion pieces, each probably worth more than the car was worth.

When I asked the police officer if he thought I’d see it again, he just smiled.

Good bye new earthquake kit. Good bye my LA miz tape from 1999. Goodbye my brand new lock mechanism put in 2 weeks ago.

TONIGHT!
WalkSF’S Membership Meeting
Wednesday, June 14th from 5:30 to 7:00
SPUR Conference Room (312 Sutter at Grant 5th Floor)

Join us for our Spring Member Meeting for 2006!

Free entry to enjoy delicious refreshments, pizza, great folks, raffle prices, and a chance to give your input to San Francisco’s first Pedestrian Master Plan.

Britt Thesen, the project manager for the city’s Pedestrian Master Plan, will present an update on the progress of the plan. She will also be hoping to hear your ideas and concerns about “all things pedestrians” in San Francisco. This is a great chance to help shape pedestrian planning for the next 20 years!

Please invite anybody you think may be interested in the topic or joining Walk San Francisco ~ our strength grows with each new member.

For more information please contact us:

Walk San Francisco
http://www.walksf.org
info@walksf.org

Pop on over to Walking in San Francisco

As a founder of a company, I get a lot of cold calls and business calls on the main work line. It’s probably split 50% customers and 50% companies selling something. I’m always surprised, especially on the cold call side, that people rush through their phone number like it’s some sort of speed talking compitition. I think email communication has made the phone call almost a lost art. The most frustrating ones, are the 10 minutes of a phone message, followed by an eighth of a second of the phone number.

Today I got a cold call from a head hunter. He kept his message short and to the point, repeated his name twice and repeated his number twice.
He might just get a call back.

Well, oh crap.

In the never ending battle between the ground and my ‘ancient’ iPod, the ground finally won.
Click click click is the only music it makes now after hitting the floor of the BART station square on its face. Usually I manage to hacky sack it on its way down with my foot, breaking its fall, but for some reason yesterday my reflexes were just a little off.

It’s amazing how much of a part of my commute in the morning listening to music ( or lately podcasts) has become. I’ll be waiting until after April 1st, though, in case Apple announces any new goodies.

I’ve ended up with 3 things that do almost the sames things in many ways (cell, ipod and palm pilot) I’d love to be able to combine the last two devices, but unless something really interesting happens next month I think it will be a while.

I like my phone to be a phone, a job it does pretty well. It also does some other jobs slightly less well (web surfing, contacts, calendaring, etc…) mostly due to the small size of its display.

My palm does its job pretty well (though I must admit I really miss my Newton) and knock-knock hasn’t let me down in years.

My iPod is the same way, does its job competently. I don’t really want to meld it with my phone, since my ipod often runs out of juice. I’m sad and tuneless, but its usually not too much of a problem except boredom. When my phone dies, on the otherhand, it usually means I’m much more greatly inconvenienced since I’m either out of touch w/ work or home when I want to be.

After far too long I’ve posted the latest walking in San Francisco, pop on over to take a look:

Walking in San Francisco for March 2006

Well, poor Judd-the-cat got a little matt problem this winter. Too much hanging out in the shower and getting wet.
We had the groomer come in, and 30 minutes and a couple rodeo like moments later we were left with this:

and

He’s feeling much better though looks a little bit like Pan with his shaved back legs. I _think_ he forgives us (for both the shaving and the oragami crown)

Last night was the annual San Francisco Chinese New Year’s Parade. We went as we try to do each year. Typically it’s cold and either raining or so foggy that it might as well be. This year was balmy and spring-like (like the last whole week has been). We came from all four corners of the city, bought our dozen Chinese Donuts/Sesame balls, ate our dozen of the same.

The parade was beautiful as usual. A couple floats seemed to be a little too commercial (more like ads)

After the parade was over, the streets were still shut down and we had the chance to walk around. The ground was littered with spent firecrackers and the snap pops.

We were at the bottom of a hill near Portsmouth Square to watch most of the parade, a little anoying since some kids kept lighting and rolling stink-smoke bombs down Clay Street. My lungs still hurt. Ugh.

Last weekend a copy of Firefox 1.5 automatically upgraded itself on my Windows laptop. Upon restarting the application I was no longer able to view any websites. Any web address put in would seemingly resolve quickly but only render a blank white screen. If you view source, you would get the source of the blank page.

Removing Firefox and reinstalling did nothing to change this behaviour.
Removing my profile did nothing
Launching Firefox in Firefox (safe mode) seemed to work sometimes, but then stopped completely.

Mozilla and IE continued to work as expected

I read the Firefox 1.5.0.1 release notes today and saw a notice that some firewall products silently disable Firefox’s access to the network.

Sure enough, my local firewall had Firefox in all RED as a BLOCKED product. Click / Click and all was well in the world.

I moved my old profile back to its original location and all is right as rain.

Keywords:
“Firefox doesn’t render”
“Firefox 1.5.0.1 upgrade bug”
“Firefox 1.5.0.1 upgrade problems”
“Firefox only renders blank page”