Hello, still from San Francisco. Things are going well here, although I am still thrown for a loop by the cold. But last night, A met up with us and we went to dinner at some freaky Pan-Asian place. It’s always good to see A, and the food was pretty decent, although I had great paranoia that I would ruin my diet for the rest of the century. When I got home and added it up, I actually should have stacked on another satay or two.

Today, I went to see Oakland host Philly, and as always, you get a nice bulleted list.

• For the record, I have not previously been to Oakland’s coliseum, and I had never seen the A’s. I saw the Phillies last year at Coors Field twice; once for the infamous tarp incident, and once at Coors for the final game of a 3-game sweep in which the Rockies won the pennant.
• This is the first game I’ve been to where I’ve used public transportation since a Yankees game I went to in 2006 when I still lived there. I walked down a few blocks to the Powell Street BART, then walked from the train to the stadium on the other end.
• After riding the NYC subways, the BART is hilarious to the point of absurdity. There’s carpet on the floors, the seats are padded and upholstered and nicer than most plane seats, and nothing smelled of piss. Nobody asked me for money (within the train), and they have digital message boards telling you when the next train is arriving. And cell phones work in the trains. If you magically transported a BART line to New York, it would be destroyed in 17 seconds. I don’t understand how it works here, but it was nice.
• I wrote in my journal and then read a book, and couldn’t remember the last time I did that on a subway. It was a real throwback.
• A lot of Oakland reminded me of some Chicagoland stretched-out urban sprawl, but with water and shipping cranes, and that’s not so bad. I always imagined it would have entire city blocks on fire and bodies hanging from lampposts and laying in gutters, but maybe that’s just because of the Raiders.
• After I got out of the train, I had this weird jog where I had to go down the stairs to the main level, and then go up a set of stairs and over to a huge half-mile long ramp that led to the stadium. I got there at 11:00 for a 12:30 game, so there weren’t any people on the walkway.
• The McAfee Coliesum is used for both the Raiders and the A’s, so as I walked in, I got all of the usual propaganda for both teams.
• The will call window is set up so that if you ignore all of the signs and walk about a hundred feet to the right, you are there. If you follow the signs and go left, you have to walk all the way around the entire stadium complex, which is about 47 miles in circumference. Guess which one I did.
• This was another geriatrics and pediatrics game, and a fleet of buses showed up with summer camp kids, all dressed in identical-colored shirts. And of course, the Taliban could cause as much terror as ten school buses of fourth graders, even if you spotted the jihadders a dozen crates of stinger missiles. As far as the geriatric part, there were more Rascals than an Our Gang marathon. But I mind the old folks a lot more because it’s easier to beat a kid until they shut the fuck up than it is to beat a parapalegic until they can miraculously walk again.
• There were a lot of Phillies fans. A LOT of Phillies fans.
• Complaint one about the mixed-use stadium: the concourse looks like a maximum-security prison built to riot-proof specifications in the 1960s. After seeing AT&T Park yesterday and then seeing this, it was a lot like touring Frank Lloyd Wright houses, and then taking a tour of a high-security mental institution built by a county government where a board member had a brother-in-law that owned a concrete plant.
• My seat was not bad; I was 15 rows up and in the middle of the section immediately to the first base side of the backstop net. These would be seats only available to dugout club members at a lot of parks, but I bought mine for $50 online. I had a pretty excellent view of the game, and if I walked up to the front of the section, I was directly on top of the visitor’s dugout.
• Complaint two about the mixed-use stadium: the seating is really fucked up. First, things are a lot steeper than they are deep, which is standard for football, but it made things weird. Also, the outfield has two little clips of section at the club level on either side, but no ground seats, and this huge blank spot of no club seats. Then there are two levels of suites above that. The whole thing makes it look like they started with a 14,000-seat minor league field, and then added layer after layer of decks above that to pump it up for football.
• The only A’s I know are either retired, traded, or dead. If I was playing a video game where I could pick Jason Giambi and Catfish Hunter and Cory Lidle, I would know what was going on, but I didn’t.
• The national anthem had a flyover with a Coast Guard helicopter, which was weird.
• There were far more hipster doofuses at the game than I’ve seen anywhere before. I guess if you’re going to be stylishly ironic and get all tatted up and wear an undershirt only and thick glasses, Oakland’s a good place to do that, and the A’s are a good team for you.
• The game started, and this was very much an AL game, where everything was either a strikeout or a homerun, and the term “manufactured run” draws a blank stare.
• Complaint three about the mixed-use stadium: as this is a football stadium, they added a shit-ton of seats to make it gigantic, including a giant deck of seats across the outfield at high altitude that increased the capacity to 60,000. The attendance at this game: 17,000. To “alleviate” this, the upper deck seats are all covered with huge vinyl banners with various logos and years of championships in giant letters. But still, when you look across at this gigantic section of 20,000 wall-to-wall seats, it’s pretty depressing.
• There was an inning when I almost thought they would have a grand slam, but it didn’t happen. Someone did have two home runs. There were a lot of strikeouts. Are there other things that can happen? Maybe they can just flip coins from now on.
• I do have to say the weather was pretty decent. It touched the 70s, and I was in the uncovered area, so I got some sun. The wildfires have been kicking up a lot of wind and soot, which has been on-and-off screwing up pitching at both parks, but it didn’t bother my eyes or anything.
• The big screens and scoreboards were football-type, so there was one small video screen, and one Dodgers-style amber monochrome screen, and another set of two on the other side. They weren’t as good as Coors field, but they weren’t as bad as Dodger Stadium. There wasn’t any walkup music, and the announcing was at a minimum. I listened to the game on the local AM, and the announcers were not that colorful, but they did have a lot of stats and history, and talked a lot about the historic Phillies-A’s rivalry when they were both out in PA.
• The game was FAST - just over two hours. Oakland shut out the Phillies, and scored five.
• One more complaint about the mixed-use stadium - it was NOT designed for egress. It took forever for the mass of people to slowly leak out of there. I don’t know what would happen if 60,000 drunken Raiders fan were leaving at the same time

So they game was eh, the stadium was not great, but I did have a pretty good time of it anyway. And I’m glad I went, because allegedly the As are getting a new home in four or five years, and I’m still pissed that I never went to Shea Stadium, and now I never will.

Gotta go wash off suntan lotion now.

Hello from San Francisco. I’m on the 18th floor of the Sir Francis Drake hotel, and I’m not sure what neighborhood that puts me in, except maybe “middle neighborhood”. But from a quick walk around last night, it’s an interesting place. There are hills, cable cars, buses with overhead power wires, and stores with old-timey signs and awnings out front that I really need to get a few shots of when I get a chance. The hotel itself is old and strange, with giant windows and a bellhop out front that looks like he’s dressed for a gig at Medieval Times.

I have a conference call in an hour, then I will set out to go to AT&T park and take a tour of what’s supposed to be an incredible ballpark. I won’t be able to see a game this trip, but tomorrow I will see one in Oakland. I don’t believe I will be wearing Rockies gear to either destination. And I probably won’t be buying any Giants wear, unless they have a psychedelic day-glo shirt with a picture of Barry Bonds’ gigantic head on it, with enough room at the bottom for me to sharpie in a “kids! winners do drugs! Bud Selig is a punk!” caption at the bottom.

OK, off to it…

It appears I will be in San Francisco next week. I don’t remember, other than A, who does or does not live there these days, so if you do, ping me. I am not sure what I would want to do there, other than maybe go to Alcatraz, and I am not sure you still can. It will be interesting to see the city again. I was in the area in 2006, and before that in 1996. Maybe I should get a map this time.

I just bought a ticket to the A’s-Phillies game next week. I was going to go to a Giants game, but they’re on the road. I really don’t care about the Giants, but I would like to see their new park. I don’t know much about the A’s, and I’ve never seen their stadium, so that crosses two things off my list. And maybe I can catch a park tour at AT&T and see it that way.

I got a fairly okay seat for the game - a couple sections over from the plate, 15 rows up, in an MVP box. $50, plus fees and delivery on a ticket I pick up and convenience charges, so $672.87. I have this other pet peeve about all MLB-related sites - when you fill out their giant form and there is a flashing thing saying “FINISH THIS IN 90 SECONDS YOU DUMBASS” and you finish it and submit, and it bounces back with “ERROR - THE DIGITS IN YOUR PHONE NUMBER MUST BE SPELLED OUT IN LETTERS,” so you hurry to finish it. But meanwhile, all of the checkboxes you cleared for “Put your name on a mailing list and get 50 piece of spam an hour for the rest of your life?” are all RE-CHECKED! And if you don’t catch it, they sign you up for some promotional crap forever. I think they do this on purpose. Just like how the MLB media player page has “save your login” checkboxes, but forces you to log out and log back in every time you listen to something. Fuck!

I went to Home Depot yesterday to get the torx screwdriver. There’s an entire village of dudes camped out exactly 100 feet from the entrance, waiting for day labor work. It’s pretty disconcerting - I wonder if any of them get work, or if this is some kind of Grapes of Wrath thing. There is a McDonald’s in the Home Depot, which is also weird. And a quick check showed no Nibco PVC fittings, but plenty of ABS and copper. I don’t know if that ABS is made in Goshen where me and my dad worked. I know the copper isn’t made in Elkhart where I worked, because that plant is long gone. The box labels only have the Elkhart corporate address. It’s always funny, because if you look at enough boxes, you will always find a crudely-sketched map of an entire plumbing system freehanded on the back of a box, from a plumber mapping out what he needed to buy.

I’ve got to get moving. I still want to get those widgets going, but they are all insanely stupid looking. I ditched the Amazon one, which seemed to be causing the most problems, though.

Yes, I am screwing with the look of the journal. There are a lot of minor changes piled on top of each other, mostly CSS junk. My big worry is that it doesn’t look right in other browsers, so if it freaks yours out, let me know. (A screenshot would be great.) The rounded corner boxes are the biggest pain, and will take some work to perfect. Also, the table loads weird, like you get two columns and then the third shows up. I think the Amazon ad at the bottom is doing that, This sucks, because I want to put some other widget-type stuff in the right column, but if it’s a widget that takes 20 seconds to load and fucks everything up (i.e. twitter, amazon), then I can’t do it. I would like to put a last.fm chart over there, but not if it takes an hour to render.

I am through with these tapes. I gave up and bought a copy of this Stanley Clarke album (Time Exposure) because I didn’t want to import it from tape. I bought this album when I was first learning to play bass, because my old teacher, Jamie Magera, turned me onto his stuff. It’s probably the first funk/fusion album I ever got into, and it was a real change from listening to Megadeth or whatever I was into at the time. Half of it is the “how the hell does he do that” factor of the tapping/popping stuff, and the other half is how smooth the laid-back parts are. The title track has a lead played by Jeff Beck, the kind of Beck-ian line that you will have stuck in your head all day. And George Duke is on the synth! The combination of bass and piccolo bass always add this depth to the songs, too. I haven’t listened to it for years, and now I will probably listen to it for five weeks straight.

Growl finally fixed their support for Mail.app in OSX 10.5, so I finally have tray notifications of incoming mail again. It looks different than when I did it in a plugin, but at least it works. I have a bad habit of having emails come in and I don’t notice them because the computer is muted and the dock is hidden. Not that I get any worthwhile emails these days anyway; I think I average about five a week, and 8000 junk. And now the 8000 are stripped out, so it’s just 5.

I have a new hard drive on the way for the Macbook, so maybe tomorrow I will swap it out. I will put the new one in an enclosure, use CCC to clone the current internal drive, then do the switcheroo. The Macbook is pretty easy to switch out, take out the battery and three screws. But the drive is held to its sled with four Torx T-8 screws, and I don’t think I have one of those around. So, a trip to Frey’s is in order. And I really don’t like being in the chute approaching the cash register with 50,000 different candybars.

OK, gotta get to it.

I’m starting to suddenly remember all of the pain-in-the-ass issues with cassette tapes, as I try importing some of them to my computer. First, I have a shoebox of Sony C-90s with no labels at all, and I have no idea what’s on them, short of listening to the whole thing. Also, many are not in cases, so the wheels have worked loose, and the tape is all unwrapped inside, which means lots of time re-tensioning things with a pen. A couple have the foam bit underneath the play head rotted away, so the tape plays like if you were underwater, spinning records backward. And I’ve remembered I had a bad habit of making half a mix tape and then forgetting all about it. The idea of setting levels and trying to mark the ends of songs to clip them apart is also something I’d forgotten. Tapes are a true pain in the ass.

But tapes are also interesting. I mean, I listen to the dropouts and cracks and pops, and still remember those exact imperfections on the tapes. And it’s weird to be holding a tape that someone gave me 15 years ago and think of all the strange energy still held in it from that connection. (I don’t really believe in “energy” in that way, but it is still nostalgic.) I was playing a tape that I know I first dubbed 25 years ago, and that blew me away.

Anyway, I am above 10,000 songs in my iTunes library - it’s 10,009 right now. I have all of my CDs from A-Z plus soundtracks in binders. I have to do the various artists, and then I’m sure a bunch of loose CDs will show up. I just got the newest Adam Marsland greatest hits thing in the mail (here, it’s only $6 on Amazon, and worth much more) and had a panic fit because I realized I would have to re-do the M section to get it put in there correctly. Oh, I also need to get a new hard drive, because I am fucked on storage. Time Machine has started bitching that it can’t make backups anymore.

I started using last.fm again, so if you are too, look me up - username jkonrath - http://www.last.fm/user/jkonrath.

Gotta split - long drive to Torrance ahead..