Tommyjournal archive March 2007
OK. The USPS mailing I wrote about yesterday got to me because it gave dogs a bad rap, and because... well... I have a story to tell about the obedience of the USPS.
About 15 years ago, I moved into a house in San Francisco that had a mail slot in the garage door. Problem was, the garage was below grade, the floor got wet when it rained, and mail would get soggy. I sealed up that slot and left a note asking the carrier to deliver the mail to a slot in the front door instead. He refused, and left a note saying my mail would be held at the post office until I opened up the slot in the garage door.
A phone conversation roughly like this ensued:
| Tommy: | How come you won't use the slot in my front door? |
| USPS: | It's farther away from the sidewalk, it would take longer. |
| Tommy: | We're talking one more step. There are seven steps in the stairs to the front door, and six to get to the garage door. |
| USPS: | Yeah, but you have to walk up to get to the front door. |
| Tommy: | Either way, you walk up and down the stairs. |
| USPS: | It's up to the carrier. What are you worried about, it doesn't rain much here anyway. |
At least they deliver mail in San Francisco. There is no mail delivery in the town of Lone Pine; people living in town go to the post office to pick up their mail. I'm lucky, I live a few miles outside of town, I get mail delivered. Truth is, the service I get rocks; mail comes early in the day, and the people working at the post office here are great.
Thursday 29 Mar 2007 4 comments
From a mailing I got from the USPS this week:
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But in the bigger picture, a dog is clearly superior--as shown by this (Tommyjournal exclusive) comparison chart:
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|---|---|
| furry and cute | not |
| has an acute sense of smell | doesn't |
| guards your backpack from squirrels while you're climbing | doesn't |
| loves you | ? |
| fetches newspapers | doesn't |
Q.E.D.
Sunday 25 Mar 2007 1 comment
I'm back home. I tried stopping near Lake Tahoe on Friday for some more climbing; normally that's not a climbing area for March, but it was warm last week. However, it hadn't occurred to me that the campground where I've on occasion found climbing partners wouldn't have opened yet for this year, making the exercise pretty much futile. I headed on home, crossing the Sierra Nevada via my favorite route, Monitor Pass, which usually isn't open this early--but this was a dry winter.
To give y'all an impression of what kind of bird I saw on Tuesday, here are a few condor pics, lifted from many available at the Pinnacles web site:
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Tuesday 20 Mar 2007 2 comments
I'm in the San Francisco area for a few days. Today was supposed to be a climbing day; my friend Sasha had set March 20 aside for us to go to Pinnacles (a little over two hours south of here). We'd made the plans a while back, not knowing we'd picked the only day of the week when it would rain.
We went anyway, knowing that the odds of having dry rock were slim. I wanted to go to Pinnacles bad enough that I was willing to hike in the rain there if we couldn't climb.
Man, was that the right choice. Yeah it rained some at Pinnacles, but lightly and intermittently enough that we climbed anyway. Not just climbed, but climbed with a California condor* watching us. Imagine turning around in the middle of a climb and seeing a specimen of the largest land bird in North America--only 22 of which were alive in 1982--sitting in a tree 30 feet away, curious about what you're doing. It was so cool. Cooler still was watching it soar, it was more graceful in flight than I'd guessed a bird of its size and appearance could be: truly a commanding presence.
And to think that yesterday, I was thinking I'd made a mistake by not rescheduling this trip when I'd heard that rain was forecast for Tuesday. March 20 hadn't even happened yet, and I was already evaluating it: it's gonna rain, we won't get to climb, yadda yadda yadda.
Heh.
*Gymnogyps californianus
Sunday 11 Mar 2007 3 comments
From the Marine Corps Times:
A Reserve corporal whose star has been rising in conservative circles over the past few months -- including appearing on Fox News and being photographed with right-wing firebrand Ann Coulter -- has acknowledged appearing in gay porn films.The marine in question, Matt Sanchez, has been discussed at length on leftie and rightie blogs over the past few days. Conservatives embrace Sanchez, as he claims to have repudiated his gay past. Others are skeptical, they suspect a certain recent Manhunt profile is his.
Sanchez says he's not gay, "absolutely not". He distances himself from the gay community and has nothing good to say about us. He praises an essay by Kevin McCullough that describes homosexuality as "filth" and as sinful. (It's telling that so many arguments against homosexuality fall back on the sin angle.)
Sanchez seems conflicted. Although he admits he worked in gay porn and as an escort, he has dissembled about how recently he was active.
He doesn't identify as gay, and although that endears him to Michelle Malkin and her ilk, the military may boot him just the same. The Marine Corps Times, again:
While Sanchez says he has put his gay porn past behind him, the Marine Corps hasn't. Homosexual behavior is prohibited by an article of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that forbids "sodomy."I bring all this up not to dwell on one individual (although the ironies in this case are striking); I bring it up because it is one episode in an ongoing conflict between the religious right and gay people in America. I will continually remind readers here that Malkin, O'Reilly, Bush, and various others on the right want gay people to be viewed as second class, and they are happy to turn voters' distaste for gay people into political advantage. Then they complain that gay people have been uncivil in response.
Friday 09 Mar 2007 2 comments
I did booby-trap my mailbox. For a few nights, it was outfitted with a radio link to an alarm in my house, to wake me up if the mailbox got bashed.
But I don't have an exciting story to tell y'all. No alarm went off at 2 in the morning, there was no jumping out of bed to investigate.
I hear someone else has turned the perps in. "Juveniles" is all the description of them the sheriff would give so far.
Saturday 03 Mar 2007 3 comments
Back in the 1980s, I had a great job. Not only was the work interesting and rewarding, I also had some of the most talented and fun co-workers I've ever known. Casual observers wondered whether we ever got any work done; sometimes it looked like all we did was play.
The play took many forms, including juggling and playing frisbee in an unused wing of the building. Our group's excesses were tolerated because we turned out good work in between play sessions. Well, sort of tolerated. As the company grew, restrictions were put into place; e.g., the facilities manager (hereinafter referred to by her initials, PH) locked the door to the unused wing of the building to keep us from playing frisbee there. No matter; I found a way to climb down into that area from an air intake on the roof. Frisbee play resumed (usually in the evenings after PH had gone home).
Once PH realized what we were doing, she locked the roof access door--with a combination lock. But PH was somewhat dim, and put the lock's combination on a Post-It note next to the door. I guess she thought it wasn't obvious; the note didn't say "combination", but instead listed the name and phone number of a repair company. But of course, the combination was the last four digits of the phone number. Again, frisbee play resumed.
At one point, someone was stealing our group's juggling balls. Every so often, a ball or two would disappear from our offices. My office mate and I laid a trap: we hid a video camera in an air conditioning duct, and installed a switch in my desk to detect when a juggling ball was lifted and start a video recorder. We caught the thief the next weekend. (It was another engineer whose office was near a room we played in a lot. The VP of engineering had told him "tough" when he'd complained about the noise we made.)
Catching the thief was fun--enough fun that I'm up for doing something like it again.
Someone's been vandalizing mailboxes in my neighborhood recently; neighbors wake up to find their mailboxes knocked off their posts or otherwise destroyed. This may not seem like a big deal; compared to the automobile break-ins that were commonplace when I lived in San Francisco, mailbox-smashing is small potatoes. But rural life is not city life, and I feel protective of my little community. This may be nothing more than a transitory spree of vandalism committed by an adolescent male, but I think it's worth nipping in the bud. A lot of us live here partly because we appreciate the relative absence of mayhem.
Part of the appeal of the video trap my office mate and I had set some 21 years ago was making it out of materials that we had on hand. Today, I looked through my workshop to see what I could booby-trap my mailbox with. I'll save the operational details for a later posting; for now, let it suffice to say that I have the technology.
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