This is a recording station. All cassette tapes in the house are being transferred to the computer. There will be no more tapes.

There was a woman on the train tonight in a light grey suit. I thought she looked like she has missed Paul Rubens Day.

When on Light Rail tonight, two woman were talking about a family member who they think has some issues with drugs. They know because "I go to Church. I can feel things like that."

Katrina came but the suffering continues long after the winds and rain have left. This country can spend billions on invading another country but there is very little aid available for domestic aid. The National Guard has been deployed to Iraq. Bush refuses to accept help from any other country, even though it is pretty obvious that what's happening now isn't working.

Meanwhile, here in San Francisco, I pile stuff on the cat. That's a knitted penguin on the top.

This is the path to the site of the Broderick-Terry Duel, a historic site in San Francisco.

Today, we went looking for toy guns to try to re-enact the duel. We were unsuccessful. My co-conspirator said "Where's 'My first gun?' American society glorifies violence yet toy stores don't seem to carry toy guns anymore. I guess this is a good sign. They had "my first leafblower" which I guess is setting kids up for a life of landscaping.

We live in earthquake-country. I know this but nothing really bad has happened here since 1989. This makes it easy to forget that we live on a fault line. The house is bolted to the foundation which sits on bedrock. I'd worry more about fire in an earthquake although there is a large cistern of water at the top of the hill.

This Katrina event has me thinking about emergency prepardness. We have plenty of food in the house. We have a propane grill so we can cook. We had a couple empty 3 gallon (total of 6 gallons) water containers. Now those are filled. We have a whole variety of first aid materials along with many flashlights with extra batteries.

During the day, we took another walk through the Harry Street steps.

Tonight, I cooked: pizza with my pizza dough (2/3 whole wheat), carrot cookies, banana bread and dark rye bread. And baba ganoush for the rye bread.

The construction at work continues.

The work is pretty much done. Today, they added the cubes. Now I want some cheese at the middle of the new maze.

There are activists who protest against putting veal into fattening pens but no one seems to complain much about putting people in cubes. I know I'm part of the problem. I work in one. Still, there seems to be something unhumane about putting people in boxes for many hours each day.

This is my current work-in-progress. I'm knitting a six fingered glove. So far, I have a thumb and two fingers.

The cubes are pretty much done. The network connections still have to be added.

Sometimes big construction projects downtown unearth ships. These were usually ships abandoned by people who came to San Francisco looking for gold.

I'm moving this URL.. I am still wondering what the point of this whole web site thing might be. I think it might be all about ego but if that's the case, why haven't I put any real effort into gathering any kind of statistics on my site? I know random people find it. I get email from them. I really don't know if I'm talking with myself or if anyone ever looks at this. The structure around posting a daily photo is good for me whether anyone else sees it or not. The knitting pages are helpful as a record of what I've done. The rest of this is here because I posted it at one point and it's easier to leave it than to delete it. Now that I'll be moving, there may be an opportunity to clean out stuff that I really don't need. Then again, the path of least resistance is to just 'copy' without doing any housecleaning.

The move has started. I'd expect this URL to be flaky for the next few days.

Meanwhile...I've finished the knitting on my six fingered glove. Now I need to block it & I'll be done.

This is the cat who isn't too healthy these days.

This is the mysterious Light Rail station that VTA has finally admitted is open.

This is an almost-empty parking garage in Milbrae. This station was supposed to be a big intermodal hub between CalTrain and BART. But no one takes it.

When I got picked up from the train, I was told "I have good news and bad news." When someone says that, there is inevitably bad news that needs some kind of cushion.

We did an historical minibar party for the anniversary of the Broderick-Terry Duel. We did this at the site of the duel at Lake Merced.

I think my dress needs a hoop.

The transition to a commercial hosting provider isn't going smoothly. First, they didn't ever update their internal DNS with my domain name. That required two emails, a chat session and another 24 hours to resolve. DNS was resolving fine...until it got to the host's front door. They hadn't created an entry in their own database for my domain name.

Email still doesn't work. While it isn't bouncing anymore (I had about 4 days of bouncing email), I cannot successfully establish a pop session. I suspect a similar problem on their back end where they didn't tell the mail servers about this new account. So far, it's been 5 days and at least that many emails (from an alternate address that works instead of the I paid for at this provider). There has been no progress.

If I had any hope things wouldn't be just as bad somewhere else, I'd try another provider. I picked a large one figuring that they would have their processes worked out. I was wrong.

However, I am amused by the stats on this web site. I hadn't had any stats on this site in over two years. Now I'm finding out that yes, I do get real traffic. The search terms amuse me. The most popular search term is 'bartender tricks.' After that, most of the common terms seem to be the names of bars. For someone who doesn't drink much, I find this amusing.

Other search terms: "drawn hovercraft", "folding t-shirt", "make your own dog house", "spewing pumpkin", "was supersize me a good experiment", "70s girlie mags", and "flowers that smell horrible."

Turns out there is a mini steam train in Lake Vasona Park. We went for a ride. Everyone else had the excuse that they were showing their kids the train, because kids love trains. We didn't have that excuse.

In the evening, we went to an outdoor film-in-the-park event with some movies and shorts by some neighborhood residents. The movies were pretty dull. This made me wonder some more about creativity and if it matters. For me, creativity matters a great deal. I think this may not be the case for the general population.

After watching the pretty-dull shorts, we watched some of another C science fiction movie where they broke into interpretive dance whenever they ran out of plot.

In the not-so-wee hours of the morning, I thoght I heard a noise. I turned to my more-butch companion and said "there's somehing in the kitchen." No response. I got up in time to see a shadow of something running down the stairs. In the dark, I took it for a large cat. I thought I heard something in the kitchen which meant this thing wasn't alone. I closed the kitchen door and turned on the lights.

We went down to the garage in time to see a racoon squeezing through the cat door. This isn't good. I don't want racoons in the house. The cat door is now closed.

After this early morning, we went shopping. Safeway is a surreal place at 7am on a Sunday.

This is part of why I like taking the train to work. I get to sit and drink my tea while watching the sun rise.

I've had it with ipower. It's been two weeks and email still doesn't work. Technical support has been less than useless. I can't establish a pop session. I get an authentication failure with two different clients on two different networks. Ipower is silent. The chat support says someone is working on the problem but it's been days. I have no response by email other than yet another request for my user name and password.

After the initial DNS issues, I decided to stick with ipower because the chances were that I'd have similar problems somewhere else. I'd rather see the problem through to resolution instead of jumping services. At this point, I have no confidence that this issue will EVER get resolved. While web hosting works, I also want email to work. That's supposed to be part of the package.

Ipower claims to have a 30 day money back guarantee. I'll exercise that as soon as I find a new provider. Unfortunately, the provider who seems to offer what I need is in Houston. I think I will wait to sign up until after the hurricaine.

This is sunset from CalTrain.

My problems with email appear to be solved. I was using the wrong user name. The introductory email for ipower lists the pop & smtp server information twice. I looked at the first listing along with the assigned user name and password. Then I created accounts that wouldn't accept a POP connection. The one response I received from tech support (aside from the second request for a user name and password that fails) was that the user name 'test' works. I tried it and it didn't work. What I didn't know was that the correct account name wasn't 'test.' It was 'test@parody.org.' That information was not clear in the introductory message or in the one semi-helpful response I received from technical support.

Now that everything seems to work, I suppose I'll stick with ipower just because I don't want to go through the same effort at another provider. Inertia wins. Meanwhile, I am amused by the search terms that find this site. "trebouchet" is my #3 search term. Others include: "I gave my cat exlax", "clip art of popeye the sailor", "mold on bread pictures", "where good friends and girls meet" and "funny stories about citibank and dead people".

There's a new puppy at work. Since puppies are forces of destruction, I think the puppy should be named "Katrina." True to form, one of the first things the puppy did was try to chew on my shoe.

Advice: if you find yourself standing in front of the cake mixes at Safeway, asking "What's a lemon cake? Where is it?", you should stick to take out. Cooking isn't for anyone mystified by the concept of a lemon cake, especially the kind that comes in a box.

Tonight, I made a complicated dinner. I recently bought the two cookbooks from San Francisco's vegan restaurant, Millenium. I've made a few things from these cookbooks before. The results have always been wonderful, if labor intensive. I had my eye on a couple recipes that appeared to be on the complicated side. I decided to make an afternoon of it and started cooking. A friend came over to help. We made plum sauce from plums, stuffed onions with roasted vegetables, spring rolls on a bed of marinated cabbage....this was complicated and took a very long time. The results were good...but I think I will keep these cookbooks as inspiration, not practical guides.

Somehow, the cat got outside. When I went to pull some laundry out of the dryer, I heard her meowing. She was outside in the garden. Somehow, she got out and spent the night outside. Since the cat door has been closed (as a result of recent racoon adventures) she couldn't get inside.

I got an ipod shuffle for my commute. I also subscribed to audible.com. I'm listening to the Feynman Lectures.

The cat likes to sit in the bathtub.

We went to a baseball game.