I have the best story ideas while setting up new homes and new beds. I just spent the first full night at my new home.
Its a weird apartment, because people walk by it all day. Its built out of the ground floor of another old Victorian with intimate windows on the street and the alley next door. I can’t tell whether I’m an unseen observer or a goldfish in a bowl. I have decided to sleep in the front room, with street and alley views. Every time someone walks up 8th Ave they are only a few feet away from me and Ella.
I am thinking of research into one-way films, but it may reduce the voyeuristic flair too much
The front gate also opens right onto the street, and if I leave my door open Ella could be happily outside in a moment, tearing down to the corner or barking at passersby. I can drink a glass of wine and read a book in the evening light from the porch.
All of this familiarity with the people passing through and I will live alone here. The last time I lived alone was for a winter in a cabin near the continental divide.
Last night I woke up in a sweat at 3 am. I may have yelled out, after a few moments Jonathan called from nextdoor to see if it was me he had heard screaming a few minutes before.
So I’ve been quite busy for the last few days. I think I’m going to spend independence day in Mineral and head back to S.F. on sunday.
I spent most of the day yesterday riding into Chico by way of the Capay valley. So beautiful. About 15 miles out of Chico, near Butte City, California, my clutch cable snapped and I just stayed in 5th until I absolutely *had* to stop. After that I manually shifted the clutch (which was piping hot) with my hand, and ‘limped’ the bike home in 2nd and 3rd, manually shifting by reaching down to the lever. It was crazy fun. I got here a few hours ago, and I’ll be able to replace the cable tomorrow morning, so its all a good learning experience I guess.
Funny thing is, I noticed the cable was fraying, but I thought I would be fine for ‘just one more trip’. It was something above 100 degrees today, I bet that contributed to softening the final strands on that darn cable.
yey!
kserve project has tunneling through ssh to itunes.
what does this mean? it means all my music is available over the internet as a shared library in itunes or daapd capable media players. i’m listening to Shirley Bassey right now, streamed from the kserve… i.e. my huge music library can have a robust & accessible home on a media server that *I* maintain.
What’s more is that eventually the mediaserver (mediaservers are a dime a dozen these days) will level up to a media Librarian.
As with any wifi network service, bandwidth and connection access is a limiter, right now (at cafe Abir) the surfandsip dsl cops drops the library connection from time to time, but for the home this is perfect, for work this would be perfect also. The library will always be available at home for any media player using the wifi network.
some notes and questions:
Is this necessary over ssh? Is the encryption overhead an unnecessary waste of bandwidth
need to make a diagram of the network connections being used, to add to mrblack’s handy documentation…
need to add beacons(using beacon for os X now, very cool new way to easily link up the daapd service to itunes, would love to see video bots built from this kind of software) for file shares over ssh through samba or nfs… for file sharing in general…
i had to restart the mt-daapd server to get it to recognize & add songs to the shared library … (use cron to watch the directory for changes and restart the server everytime new files are copied? )
An actor friend took a Polaroid camera to a dinner party. He said something like, “I’m taking these Polaroids because its a dying form, and it distinguishes me among the ubiquity of digital cameras”. The next day I saw defekto start up his Polaroid project here. I wonder whether my friend will post his pictures & whether they will survive the digital dustbin. Now there are numerous Polaroid projects starting up or facing revived interest because of these last days. I have my own ideas too, after taking Polaroids across the country from Oregon to Florida I can’t forget the unique opportunity it offered to chimp my ass off, or snap 20 pack shots off and give them away like they grew on trees.
I was last in Gelugor over 12 years ago, but sometimes I still smell the incense and the food, or out in the sun I smell vegetation sweat in the heat like the afternoon I headed across the island by bike.
and today is not such a warm day, but as i go over the top of that hill
the smell hits me
and instead of coasting down as i do, I press hard on the breaks, squeaking the whole way down while i point my nose in the air like a interested dog.
I want to write a short story about this moment, like Flannery O’Conner’s stories about coming of age or loss of innocence — except her story has movement while all mine has is aroma wakening old memories…
As I look for moments in my life with movement worth writing about, a list comes to mind that I will use.
Tourist Mariella Bogus quoted in Adrian Short’s article on recent (4/08) Westminster City Council actions:
I paid £2.99 in good faith for a ‘Leicester Square’ fridge magnet from a street vendor, but it wasn’t until I got it home that I noticed that the font was wrong and the proportions slightly out of whack. Whatever the font’s meant to be it’s not sodding Arial and while I can’t afford a Pantone swatch book that red doesn’t look like the proper Westminster red either.
I emailed the council’s trading standards department who were very sympathetic but said that there was nothing they could do. Thank goodness that’s all changing now and people like me will get the protection we deserve from these unscrupulous hawkers. Now I feel that I can go back to London and shop safely again.
I read this post about the London street signage being copyrighted — and the excerpted letter, which I thought *MUST* be a fake — but after doing some link searching I find out it is probably, perhaps, actually a real quote (even though its got a nebbish and otaku quality that is unreal to me) .
And I realized I love boingboing because I read it the way I used to read Borges when I was young. I follow references towards a source, perhaps never reaching it.
When I was a teen I read Borges with a notebook to follow up on the persistent real references throughout his unique fiction. Authors, philosophers, myths, and untranslated language all got put into my notes to follow up later in used bookstores and libraries.
More unconsciously, I also love to hear music riffing back on influences, references and credits.
More on this and a conclusion later..