BeigeJournal

While eating on Memorial day at Bluemound Gardens, we noticed that they offer a drink of, I suppose, filk potential:

Tullamore Dew Double Dew
Tullamore Dew and Mountain Dew. Dew both in a glass and see what it does for you.

I spent a good part of May 30 watching automobiles go round and round very fast, first the Formula 1 Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, then much of the Indianapolis 500, then the last half of the Coca-Cola 600.

I’ve become quite a formula 1 fan this year, and have seen all the races on the Speed Channel. By comparison, I think the oval track racing, both Indycar and NASCAR, is pretty dull. They just go round and round and round, all very fast left turns. I really think the road courses are much more interesting to watch, with the sharp, low-speed corners, the chicanes, the passing at different parts of the course. I also think the Speed Channel coverage is better. They seem to, for one thing, realize that there are other things to put on TV and other things for us to watch, and they start about 20 minutes before the race with some pre-race commentary, with a timer counting down to the race so we know when the real action starts, the race itself, then maybe a half hour after the race with some replays of highlights and the English language part, or part thereof, of the interviews with the podium finishers. Then they are done. They do not turn a ninety-minute race into a six-hour TV extravaganza. They also seem to do a much better job of displaying the relative positions of the racers than the broadcast networks do, with much clearer graphics.

I recently upgraded my Red Hat 8 system to the new Fedora Core 2. Red Hat 8 is getting old enough that installing new software is sometimes complicated by aging libraries, so the time had come to take a functioning computer and mess with it.

I have broadband Internet now, so I downloaded the 2.1 gigabytes comprising four install CD ISOs and the emergency boot disk ISO using BitTorrent. I started in the late evening and it was done by morning, though I let the uploads continue until evening.

After making sure my data was safely backed up, I ran the upgrade. It took a few hours to grind through and install everything. I had planned to use the stock kernel rather than compiling my own, but for some reason USB was not working and no USB modules were installed. I suspect that the upgrade program tries to just upgrade what was already installed according to the RPM database, and since I was running a 2.6 kernel compiled myself it was confused. I built my own kernel using the sources installed by the upgrade, which worked fine, although, as usual, it took a few tries to enable every feature that I actually need. In particular, it turns out that I do need the OSS sound emulation, since Baudline doesn’t support ALSA.

Overall, I was very impressed with how well the upgrade worked. Sometimes you can spend weeks gradually fixing all the things that stop working after an upgrade, but virtually everything was working fine after this one, aside from the kernel issue. I lost my customized menu bar, of course, and had to add all my launchers and monitors again. There were a few other programs I had to add, again probably a result of my installing most of my additions from source tarballs rather than RPMs.

Fedora Core 2 ships with Gimp 2, which in nice, except for the lack of gimp-print support. Supposedly recent version of gimp-print will work with it, and I’ll have to compile one if I need gimp-print before an “official” version is in the RPM repositories. On the other side, XSane works fine, though I had to fetch it since I’d installed it from tarball.

Printing has changed over to CUPS, and I could not get the configuration program to update the configuration until I deleted /etc/printcap, then it configured and worked fine.

I’ve not generally been a fan of the RPM system, partly because I don’t understand the rpm program. The documentation seems to randomly, or perhaps alphabetically, mix the sort of information needed by the people at Red Hat assembling an RPM-based distribution with the sort of information needed by ordinary users trying to install something. The other problem has been dependency hell, in which any addition requires the very latest version of five huge libraries, which in turn require the very latest version of ten other huge things, which in turn have still more dependencies on yet more huge things. Compiling from source tarballs is easier—configure, make, make install. As long as the system is reasonably recent everything is probably close enough to up to date for the compile to work. My desire to upgrade was partly driven by the fact that the system is just starting to get old enough that new version of some of the libraries are needed for some programs.

We now have programs like yum and apt-get, which can automatically determine all the dependencies and download and install them all at once rather than leaving the user to keep trying to install only to find yet another dependency to download and install first. I now have broadband Internet, which can download at upwards of 300 kilobytes per second rather than 3 kilobytes per second, so a hundred megabytes of updates is basically trivial rather than a show-stopper. I think I’ll be keeping much more up to date now.

I just had a truly hilarious walk and dinner this Friday evening in Milwaukee. I’ve been doing quite a bit of walking around downtown recently, and though I’ve complained that there isn’t much in my neighborhood, I do live, technically, in the city of Milwaukee, and relatively near, at least what would look near to a bird circling high overhead, to an “office park.” (They are not fooling anyone. Office, yes, park, no. Forest rangers work in parks. The people who work there, do not.)

A few restaurants have recently been built there. That “recently” part is interesting in itself. The big office buildings have been there at least since I moved here, in 1995, and probably some years longer than that, but building a restaurant near them, that’s a radical new idea.

Anyway, I thought, why not walk to the Atlanta Bread Company for dinner? Why not, indeed. I’ll be going back with the camera someday to document just what a special experience walking to this place is.

Step one was getting to the vicinity of the office area. I walked north-west on Fond du Lac Avenue, which, out here, is two lanes, mostly no sidewalks, partly wide gravel shoulder and partly narrow or no shoulder. 107th Street is two narrow lanes, lacks sidewalks, and has very narrow gravel shoulders. After crossing the Good Hope Road and 107th Street intersection, I then had to figure out how to get to the actual building. There is a sidewalk that runs off into the distance to the north. Figuring that a sidewalk must be a good route, I set off. And walked. And walked. Right on past the buildings. Off in the far distance, the paved road heading, in a curvy way, to the west and south and past the restaurants, was just coming into view. Much of the grass is very tall and probably muddy, but a little way before the road it turns to mowed lawn, which is reasonably walkable and cuts some distance off. After then walking quite a way back toward the way I’d come from in the first place, I finally reached the building. I was laughing much of the way at the absurdity of the layout.

My actual meal, a roast beef sandwich on rye bread, was fine. There were some other customers (including a small child who was a strong argument for effective birth control) who drove there, as was obviously intended. I assume the designers had lunch customers from the offices in mind, and the building faces the office complex, but I did not explore how easy that walk would be. There are roads leading that way, whether there are sidewalks I didn’t notice.

I took a different route back, walking behind the building, first on a service road, then over the lawn to the intersection. That’s shorter, at least. The “back” of the building faces a major road very near ramps on and off highway 45, and is a blank wall with electrical and gas equipment everywhere. There are some signs indicating what some of the businesses are, some of them temporary-looking banners tied to the wall. No windows, no access except over the lawn or by circuitous route that no pedestrian would take.

There is what I assume is a public sidewalk running from, well, a few meters east of 107th street (it just ends amidst the grass, with a dirt trail leading to the actual road) alongside the church there and past a landscaped berm to, I think, West Leon Terrace. That end is at least paved all the way to the paved road. From there it is a fairly pleasant walk through suburbia on sidewalk-less but low-traffic roads to the Little Menomonee River Parkway underpass under highway 145, which takes me right to my apartment building. That would be the preferred route.

A few years ago I attended a meeting at a motel near that office complex regarding the cleanup of the Little Menomonee River, which was contaminated by a wood treatment plant. I rode my bicycle

to the motel, but could see no place to lock it, so I walked into the lobby rolling it along beside me and asked the person at the desk where to park it. To her great credit, she had a solution. She called a maintenance person who is a serious cyclist himself, and he led me to a boiler room with, obviously, restricted access, and let me leave it there. When I was ready to leave I inquired at the front desk, and they contacted him by radio. He let me out through a back door in the boiler room, which was convenient as well as saving the hotel from having someone rolling a long wheelbase recumbent through the halls. I don’t think they get a lot of cyclists, and they may have been talking about me for months after that, but they did make me feel welcome. I imagine it didn’t hurt that they were hosting a meeting about an environmental cleanup and thus might have been expected some enviroweenies, plus I think I present an image more of fitness-nut/environment-nut with ridiculously expensive gear than of looser who can’t afford a car, which in the United States is much lower status than overeducated exercise nut.

We’ve had a certain amount of rain recently. Specifically, a lot of rain. These were taken before most of the recent rain fell, back on the 10th, when I had this encounter.

Did I leave a piece of power equipment around here somewhere?

Normally, that is a paved path to the intersection, not a body of water.

Usually, that’s a trail, not a river. The river is generally way off to the right.

Prospective buyer: Ever have any problems with water in the basement?
Seller: Well….

Is that an ice pack?

No, it’s a temperature assurance material.

I’ve had broadband Internet at home for almost two weeks now, and I really like it. Duh. I knew I would, of course, but it has had a bigger impact on my life than I expected.

I look at the weather online in the morning now. With dialup, I just didn’t have the time to wait for the system to dial and timeout and re-dial, and then, once finally up, slowly download the graphics. Instead, I’d turn on the Weather Channel, usually just as the local forecast was ending (‘…and now for the Tropical Update!’).

I’ve become quite the weather radar loop addict. The National Weather Service has lots of great stuff available, particularly satellite products. Weather Underground has all the usual data with quite nice user interfaces. For $5 a year they’ll turn off all the ads and enable 40-frame radar loops. I’m quite the fan of their radar user interface.

I do use the Internet more now, and use it differently. No more grumbling about graphics-heavy sites, and no longer do I pause to consider the waste of time before clicking on something.

Big files, of course, are much easier to get now. IT Conversations is much easier now. I downloaded the Fedora Core 2, all 2.2 gigabytes, by BitTorrent in a few hours one night. I’m very happy with Core 2, which I’ll report on at length later. I think I’ll have a much easier time keeping the system up to date, between apt-get and yum automating all the dependency installation and the bandwidth making hundred megabyte downloads seem fairly trivial.

Having the computer up all the time, with a quite stable IP address, is very handy, since now I can connect via SSH from the outside, and transfer files by sftp. SSH can automagically tunnel X11 connections through the secure link, which is really nifty.

Although cable Internet is rather more expensive than dialup, it is worth keeping the whole cost in mind. $45/month (once the six-month introductory rate ends) sounds like a lot, but of course I’ll no longer be paying just over $21 for the dialup. I’ll also no longer be making over 100 local phone calls, at $0.05 each, each month, dialing and timing out and redialing and dropping and redialing endlessly, so that’s another $5 saved. New we’re down to around $19 extra per month. It doesn’t sound so bad that way. Indeed, since DSL is cheaper than cable these days, that might be just about equal to dialup.

100 Suns, by Michael Light. Knopf, 2003.

One hundred photos of US above-ground nuclear weapons tests. Arranged in no obvious order, with a few pages of captions, generally a paragraph each, collected in the back. I understand the desire to not clutter the photos with the text, but it is awkward to have to keep the book open in two places and flip back and forth. These are mostly very pretty pictures, if you don’t think too much about what they are pictures of. It really is amazing, to those of us who grew up in the modern era of radiation protection guidelines, that people used to set these things off right out in the open, and with soldiers nearby, no less.

There are several Castle Bravo photos, the test that, though expected to yield 4–8 megatons turned out, due to the unexpected boost from lithium-7, to yield 15 MT and a radiological disaster. One wonders why, when testing a fusion bomb, they felt that they just couldn’t wait for more favorable weather. It also seems that a lot of the airdrop tests missed the target, starting with the very first, Crossroads Able. One wonders, if so much trouble was had hitting the target in very carefully organized tests involving dropping live nuclear bombs, when one would imagine extra care would be taken, where the bombs would have fallen in the confusion of actual war. No wonder there was such interest in high-yield weapons.

Now that I’m scanning slides all the time, I was starting to feel that 128 megabytes, which seemed like so much when the old Pentium III was new, was not enough. I used the very nice Memory Advisor at Crucial to select the right memory for my motherboard, and the free shipping had my order, placed on Saturday, in my hands on Tuesday. Just over $60, with tax, for 128 meg of RAM compatible with a somewhat obsolete computer. I remember when hard disks were $10 per megabyte. The hardest part, naturally, was getting to the memory slots, buried behind power cables and disk drive cables. The Gimp is a whole lot more responsive with 256 meg.

If you have an older computer that you’re not ready to replace, you might look into memory upgrades. A relatively small amount of money, compared to the price of a new computer, can make a big different.

As I’ve explained before, it was very easy to get the bits flowing over my Time Warner Road Runner cable Internet connection. Getting the Road Runner e-mail to work was much harder.

Their e-mail was not a big priority with me because I prefer to send and receive e-mail through my web hosting provider, but I wanted to get it to work. All the configuration web pages ask for your user name, which I was never told. The usernames are usually first-initial and last name, plus maybe a number. I was able to guess mine easily enough. You can then reset your password to a random series of numbers by giving the cable modem MAC address. I then tried to change my new password to something more memorable, but it would just accept my username and password and then go instantly back to asking for username and password. The webmail would give a “session timed out” error immediately, which at least is an error message, even if not a helpful one. By Googling I learned that both these pages use java programs and make some sort of connection on an undocumented port that your firewall, if you set it up right, will block. Since the port is not documented anywhere I could find, I gave in and disabled the firewall completely for a few minutes to change the password. The webmail I suppose should just be avoided, which is not a big loss.

The official FAQs are very stingy with the information.

I spent the first and second days of the month in Champaign and Urbana in central Illinois. I was there for KittenCon, my dear friend Barb’s annual birthday party and general get together. It was delightful to see her and her family, and the other friends who visited.

It was also a chance to wander around Champaign. I went to school at the University there, from 1989 through 1995, so it is nice to see the place again. When Chambanacon moved from Champaign to Springfield I lost one reason to visit.

I did not have a lot of time to wander the campus, but I did spend a few hours on Sunday out with my camera. There have been some changes. This

is new. I have no idea how usable the interior is, but the exterior is interesting:

Further north, something else is under construction:

I have no idea what this will be.

Traveling south, I saw this

and thought, didn’t that used to be one of the uglier sections of Boneyard Creek, a place I used to walk through often, a place so ugly that I kind of liked it, reveling in its brutally utilitarian appearance? Indeed, it was, but not anymore:

The whole Boneyard area, at least between Loomis Lab and the east end of the engineering area, has undergone a dramatic makeover. This didn’t used to be there:

Nor this:

They have the streamflow gaging station housed in an attractive little brick building, with windows so you can see the equipment. A nice plaque describes the station:

Also new to Champaign is Moonstruck Chocolate.

This was a pizza place back when I was a student. It was an OK pizza place, but this is better. We need one of theses in Milwaukee. The chocolate milkshake was superb.

Wright Street used to be one-way, northbound. You could go one way. Occasionally people would try to go the other way, but that didn’t work well. Now, um, I’m not sure it’s any way. At least, I couldn’t figure out what you’d be allowed to do on it.

That thing that looks like a red “8” by the walk lights is, in fact, an 8. They have count down displays indicating how many seconds you have left to cross. This is a great idea. Speaking of traffic,

ideally, motorists would yield to the bright yellow signs, too.

University campuses have lots of laboratory buildings with interesting stuff around them.

It’s part of what makes walking around fun.

I used to spend a lot of time walking around the campus and around town when I was a student, and although I didn’t spent much time wandering while visiting at the beginning of the month, it reminded me of how much I enjoyed wandering around. When I moved to Milwaukee I retained the walking around habit for a while, but it gradually diminished. I drive out to parks to hike, and I cycle, but my neighborhood really isn’t as interesting a place as the University of Illinois campus.

It was this line of thinking that inspired my recent time wandering in the city. There is a bit of industrial wasteland near my neighborhood, like the local scrapyard, which is sort of fun if you are the kind of person who photographs liquid nitrogen tanks, but there is no place to actually go. The highlight of local retail is a Walgreen’s, which, from my apartment, is fairly convenient to walk to on the Oak Leaf trail.

As my two posts on my Milwaukee walks describe, there are more interesting places to wander. The strange stuff in the Menomonee valley, the 3rd ward, the shops on Wisconsin and nearby, the riverwalk, plus, at least outside of the industrial Menomonee valley, not being the only person walking.

I grew up in the Chicago area, but rarely went into the actual city. We made some trips to museums, but didn’t really see anything else. These days I do occasionally have business in the central city, and I always enjoy walking around. Chicago is a much different place, and it always amazes me how many other people are out on foot.

I spent another Saturday wandering Milwaukee. After a week of rain, we finally got some clear weather. I brought my camera, but you’ll have to wait for photos since I’m still using film.

The sixth street bridge north bascule was open for some sort of work, so I went west on St. Paul, then onto the Hank Aaron trail to the western end of that segment, near 27th street. I was the only one there. It runs past city maintenance truck yards and a Marquette University athletic field. It’s very peaceful, in an industrial sort of way. It’s the kind of thing I like, anyway. After giving a passer-by some advice on getting across the river with the 6th street bascule still up, I dropped off the camera gear in my car and headed downtown, to Downtown Books.

While Voss Books, which I went to last week, is too neat, and far too uncluttered, to look like the usual used bookstore, Downtown Books fits the used book store stereotype. The place is packed with books, zillions of them, stuffed into every available space. While Voss is really nice, Downtown is, as we expect in used book stores, a bit on the wrecked side. It’s a wonderful place. I bought It’s all the Rage, by Wendy Kaminer, for a very reasonable $3.95. I need to stop going to used book stores, and new book stores, until I find time to read everything I’ve bought

Next stop Starbucks. I do like the white chocolate mocha. The pumpkin bread was nice, too. Then north, to where the Park East Freeway used to be. There is a new building going up, for what purpose I don’t know. I always find it a bit odd that in our advertising-saturated world so many construction sites are completely anonymous. The name of the construction company is prominently shown, but the intended purpose of the building is left to the imagination.

Walking south on the river walk, the next stop was the Grand Avenue Mall. I had not been in there in some time, and some changes have been made. Linens ‘n Things has moved in, in a space that includes what used to be the central atrium/hallway space, still open above, so from the upper floor you can look down into the store. I can’t decide if that design is really nice or a bit tacky, but it is a nice store. The store on the other side of the building is similarly configured.

By this time the 6th street bascule was back down, so I walked over and back, with camera. Then it was on to Outpost foods and home.

I found this on the ground while walking:

I always wonder how things like this find their way to the places that I find them.

This bulb was disposed of properly, after photography:

I had to replace it after eight years of service. The right side headlight is easy to get at, but the driver’s side has the battery behind it.

I just bought a Zero Blaster smoke ring gun, from Think Geek, as well as an I’m blogging this t-shirt, which I suppose I ought to wear while making smoke rings. It is a fun toy, just as Dan says it is. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that you need one of these, but you might well want one.

My crappy Internet service provider, Athenet, has finally ticked me off enough to send me enthusiastically to my local cable broadband vendor, Time Warner. For a long time, of course, I’ve wanted high speed Internet at home. First I had to wait for it to actually be available, and then there were the many horror stories of non-working service from the early-adopters. I don’t use Windows, which is all anyone claims to support, and when I asked some time back if Time Warner would install the service without Windows present, on the understanding that I’d be on my own as far as configuring the computer, they didn’t bother to answer me. Dial-up is cheaper, of course, and it was working, and I do get to play with high speed Internet at work.

The thing that finally pushed me over the edge wasn’t the low speed of the dial-up connection once it was finally working. It was having to not just wait for the modem to dial and negotiate with the ISP’s modem, and then wait for the computers to negotiate the PPP connection, but then have that negotiation more often than not fail, time out (eventually) and then wait for another cycle of dialing and, usually, timing out, and then the connection would frequently hang up after a minute or so, just when I was starting to actually finally do something. Then there would be another cycle of dialing and timing out and redialing, and then maybe yet another hang up. Eventually, after enough tries, I’d get one that works, and it would stay up for hours and work just like it should have on the first try. I’ll also note that I’ve never been able to relay mail through their mail relay, and have wasted countless hours trying different sendmail configuration settings, assuming that it must be something I was doing wrong, but when I bought web hosting service and tried using their mail relay, it worked perfectly on the first try. Guess it was another Athenet problem.

I stopped by the Time Warner kiosk-thingie at Mayfair Mall to order Internet service and I picked up the self-install kit there. I stopped by Radio Shack to buy some 75-ohm coax, connected the coax, through the provided splitter, to the cable modem, connected the modem and computer with the provided cat-5 cable, plugged in the power brick, told my computer to use DHCP, and everything should then just work. It’s that simple. Time Warner should advertise that it is this simple. They don’t tell you anything about how the process of getting the service connected goes, they don’t say anything about the self-install kit, they don’t tell you that all you need on the computer end is 100 Base T and DHCP (they don’t seem to document that the system uses DHCP at all), and basically they make it sound hard. It is really easy. Arguably, it is easier than getting dial-up to work. They ought to advertise this fact. They also ought to improve their documentation overall. I have no idea how to get the e-mail configured, though since I’m using my hosting service’s e-mail that’s not a big priority for me. The self-install kit comes with nothing printed at all. There is a reasonably helpful PDF about the cable modem on the included CD-ROM, but no information whatsoever on configuring the computer, even though all you really need is the magic “word” DHCP. They do have the necessary server names (mail, news, etc.) on their web site, but you’re on your own to find them.

In my case, actually, it didn’t just work. After dragging the cable box into the computer room to check that my new cable was OK, I called their main number, was promptly connected to someone who verified that the modem wasn’t quite talking to the system right, and who discovered, after a few minutes of investigation at her end, that they never removed the entry for my old analog cable TV box from their system when I upgraded to digital cable and somehow the system was confusing my new cable modem with the database entry for the old analog box. Once she fixed that, everything just worked.

You remember that TV ad for satellite television, in which, the moment the installer gets the dish connected, the homeowner runs out of the house shouting about how amazing the satellite television is? That’s pretty much how I felt once the helpful technician fixed their end. The cable modem lights came on like they should, I clicked the “activate” button on the network settings program, fired up the web browser, and dang, this thing is fast!

It’s around two orders of magnitude faster than the modem. I certainly haven’t done any extensive testing yet, but I’ve seen sustained speeds of around 350 kilobytes per second in wget. Graphics-intensive web pages come up faster than I can look at them. Nexrad weather radar loops are rather more practical than they used to be. It is much too soon to say anything about reliability, but it certainly is nice to have a connection that is just on and doesn’t take 10 minutes and a zillion redials to start working. I checked a few weather web sites this morning, which I normally never do because I don’t have time in the morning to re-re-re-dial.

We had quite a bit of rain today, enough to flood the river area, the, um, flood plain. I went out with my Nikon FE2 and trusty 50mm lens to photograph the water. I do need to get one of those new-fangled digital cameras so I can put my photos up on the blog as I take them and write about them, rather than at least a week later.

In my wanderings downtown, I always seem to get asked for “spare change” by someone. Generally this happens in busy places with lots of pedestrian traffic, like Wisconsin Avenue by the mall. Generally when I’m wandering through the post-industrial wastelands no one bothers me. Indeed, no on is there to bother but me and hence no one hangs around looking for people to bother. I don’t normally get hit up for change near home, but today I did. A large individual, though almost everyone appears large to me, walked up to me in a cheerful manner and explained that he ran out of gas, needed some money, didn’t have his driver’s license, and had been smoking weed, which he helpfully explained is marijuana, in case I turned out to be as naive as I look. I don’t know what to think of his story of needing gas money, but I do believe the marijuana part. If he was not on some kind of drug, would he have walked up to the first total stranger he saw who was carrying a large SLR camera and announced that he was using an illegal drug?

Via Many-to-Many, a wonderful interview with Clay Shirky on the Gothamist, in which I’ve found the perfect description of my fashion sensibility: “My sartorial sensibilities veer between dress-down Friday and last man out of a mine collapse….”

I’d read about drifting before, but I’ve finally seen a bit of it on TV. Drifting is one of those wonderfully wacky ideas from Japan, involving controlled, graceful, tire-shredding, screeching, smoking skidding around a track in a car. Apparently it’s a bit like freestyle motocross. The bikers decided that the tricks were so much fun that they might as well ditch the race and just do tricks. The drifters apparently decided that skidding was so much fun that they might as well ditch the race and just skid. Tire companies love it. Having seen some on TV, I can see how much fun it must be to watch. I’m not sure I want to drive to Indiana to watch an event, but I imagine in the future there will be more events.

Then again, Indiana isn’t that far away.

I spent Saturday afternoon in downtown Milwaukee. Though a bit cold and very cloudy this morning, with thunderstorms forecast, the weather turned nicer in the afternoon, and I went to central library, on Wisconsin and approximately eighth street. Inspired to do more walking around in part by last week’s visit to Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, which I intend to write an entry about once the photos I took are back from the lab, I commenced wandering. I did walk the new sixth-street viaduct before, when it first opened, and this time I crossed the northern part, then walked west on Canal street, past the Valley Power Plant. Part of the Hank Aaron trail is in this area, west of the plant. I’ll have to look at the map of the trail and do some exploring some day. The 16th street viaduct is apparently closed for construction, but the pedestrian stairs up from canal street are, for some reason, open. Ember lane led north to St. Paul, and then east past the Aldrich buildings and out of the semi-abandoned industrial splendor and into the gentrified Third Ward.

I stopped in Voss Books, a very charming used bookstore, complete with a very furry cat, as all used book stores should have. I bought a copy of Periodic Kingdom for $4.75. As a chemist, I can hardly resist books about the elements. I then stopped at Starbucks, for the very first time in my life. I’m sure it’s hard to imagine anyone in the United States in 2004 who has never bought anything from Starbucks, given that it takes some effort to get more than a kilometer from the nearest one (their web site has a locater to find the nearest store, which hardly seems necessary), but there you go. The white chocolate mocha sounded good, and, sure enough, was. I may join the cult of the cardboard insulator wrapped paper cups. The nutrition information tends to indicate why it tastes so good. The “tall” size I had contains 410 kcal and 20 grams of fat, 13 grams of that saturated. Plus 43 grams of sugar.

I then headed north. The city does seem more lively than I remember it being when I first moved here, in late 1995. A great many buildings have spouted balconies, having been converted from “abandoned” to “condominium.” It would be nice in many ways to live in the city, though aggravating in others.

I’ll have to bring the camera some day and do some photoblogging.

I had my 1995 Subaru Impreza in the shop Friday because its computer was unhappy with something, causing it to light up the “check engine” light. It turned out to be the knock sensor. This is now the third knock sensor this engine has had, which I suppose is not completely unreasonable for nearly nine years and nearly 175000 kilometers. My own feeling is that I’d prefer if the computer could tell me, the user, that it was having a problem with the knock sensor, rather than just telling me that it had a problem with something. You can get handy little devices that plug into the OBD port for fairly reasonable prices, which would be fine if I was actually planning on fixing the problem myself, but I’m not. I’m going to pay someone to fix it, but when I start the car up in the parking lot at work and the engine computer detects a problem, I’d like to know, right then and there, that it’s just the knock sensor (again). Apparently not many consumers feel this way. Probably most of them wouldn’t know what the knock sensor is for anyway. I suppose I’m used to open-source Unix software, which tends to spew detailed error messages even when, for all practical purposes, it’s working just fine.

Milwaukee alderman Jim Bohl has sent his spring/summer mailing. Getting prominent billing is a section that starts, “After the U.S. launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, Ald. Bohl spearheaded efforts to provide an official City of Milwaukee flag to soldiers from the Milwaukee-based 440th Airlift Wing, part of the Air Force Reserve, who arrived in the Middle East late last year.” I’m glad they have a Milwaukee flag, although my very first thought was, “Milwaukee has a flag?” Upon reflection, though, I do recall hearing about our flag. There was discussion of changing it, since it features things that no longer exist.

Since not only countries and large internal divisions like states have flags, but also even cities, can I have my own flag? I think the Medical College has its logo on flags. The problem is designing one. I wouldn’t want it to be ugly, like so many around the world. See The world’s flags given latter grades for ratings of national flags.

Also, apparently alderman Bohl is the chair of the “Truancy Abatement Task Force (defunct).” He chairs a defunct task force?