Sunday, January 2, 2005
Driving lessons: Patrick and I drove to a nearby mostly empty mostly flat parking area next to Lake Merced which is about 5 minutes away. I had given him stick shift driving lessons before in this same place a while back, but we didn't do it consistently enough for him to feel comfortable on the road driving by himself. He did very well today, causing the car to stall only once or twice in about 90 minutes. Even though he's a new driver, he has never grinded the gears in my car. I believe he'll be quite trustworthy once he gains more confidence in driving a stick shift. Grocery shopping at the new Trader Joe's in Daly City. TJ's moved within the same shopping mall to a smaller location. It's more crowded than ever before—about as crowded as the downtown Trader Joe's. Could it be more city-dwelling Democrats turned on to TJ's by buyblue.org and choosetheblue.com? The novelty which caught my attention was an extremely industrial hot air hand dryer. I can't remember the name of it, but the air came out of it so forcefully that the skin on my hands resembled the face of the pilot in the world's fastest jet airplane—I could see my skin rippling like a bed sheet. Late lunch: deep-fried wontons, Chinese chicken salad. Yesterday I thought I had conquered DHCP but after the server was restarted the network didn't work again. I thought something had gone wrong in my software configuration and spent hours trying to figure out whether it was DHCP or the packet filter or something else. Eventually I figured out that all that was needed to fix the problem was to cycle the power on the hub I have for my internal network, then, in Win XP, repair the network connection if needed (if right-click > Repair doesn't work, then ipconfig /release followed by ipconfig /renew then ipconfig /all to check). Patrick made a very delicious dinner tonight: beef flank steak wrapped with goat cheese and spinach; coconut rice, steamed broccoli, garlic naan. After dinner we looked at photo albums online: Tina's pix of her trip across the southwest with Daniel, Galen's pix of his ski trip with the boys in Lake Tahoe, Tony A's pix of his trip to China. I archived some documents. One was something from long ago—Monday, August 16, 1993—a letter I wrote while working as a PageMaker technical support technician at Aldus Corporation, 411 First Avenue South, Seattle, Washington, 98104-2871. The letter described a snipped of PostScript code to add to the customer's HP LaserJet III file (HPIII522.PPD). "...Try printing as you did before, targeting for the HP LJ III PS, Printing To the same, and using the HP LJ III PS PPD." Vacation is over, and I'm glad we have no Christmas lights to take down or tree to leave out on the curb to die. Pay rent, sync up the USB drive, and it's back to work tomorrow.