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..

I’ve been back since Thursday, but I’ve been busy with a few different projects, some worthwhile, some asinine.

One thing is this ongoing saga of storing my CDs. I went to Fry’s this weekend and bought three no-name binders that allegedly hold 320 CDs each on sleeves. That’s actually 160 per book, because I’m using one pouch for a CD, one for its booklet. I already had 200 CDs in loose sheets, too. Yesterday, I got all of my CDs from A-M ripped, bound, and in books. Not only am I getting a lot of new/old music into iTunes, I’m purging myself of jewel cases and I’m also pitching some CDs that are taking up space. I know this goes against what my personal philosophy was at one time, but I’ve moved enough and dragged around pieces of plastic and metal that I will never, ever listen to again, so less is more.

I also pulled my old JVC tape deck from 1993 out of storage, and wired it into my Mac. I then downloaded a copy of Audacity and started digitizing stuff. Actually, I first started by sorting through tapes and pitching things I had on CD already, or that were entirely useless. My tape collection is down to two shoeboxes and one of those plastic cases you keep in the car, and I think I will get it down by one shoebox when this is over.

After a huge pain-in-the-ass in setting it up, Audacity is actually working well. It’s free, which is good. It also lets you trim audio after you input it. You can also look at the waveforms and drop in a named bookmark when you find the start of a song. Then you click and export everything, and it splits up the songs by bookmark and dumps them to MP3 for you. Very nice. There are some additional functions for cleaning up sound and reducing noise, but I haven’t messed with them. These are mostly 15-20 year old tapes, so there’s not a lot of super high end sound I can squeeze out of them.

The whole procedeure is a huge throwback to 1993. First, that’s when I got this tape deck. Before that, I would plug a walkman into my receiver to listen to tapes. When I worked at Wards that summer, I used my employee discount to buy this tape deck, which had a record deck with the kind of auto-reverse that spun the heads, instead of just moving them over and reversing the tape direction. There was some advantage to this, and I don’t remember what - something about magnetic particles or something. Anyway, it has been a long time since I’ve seen this deck’s little amber display staring back at me, and it’s a weird little flashback to me. Hell, it’s a huge thing just to play tapes anymore. I rarely even touch CDs these days.

The other big flashback is that I’m pulling in a lot of the demos and other odd tapes I could never find on CD. I’m listening to a band called Oliver Magnum, which are a prog-rock-esque metal band from Oklahoma. This self-released tape, Drive-By, spent a hell of a lot of time in my walkman back in the day. I think if I made a top-ten list of the most-played tapes I listened to while trudging across the IU campus back in 1993, this would be in the top 5. And I haven’t listened to it in years and years, so it’s good to see it flashing by on the VU meters in Audacity. Last night, I pulled in an old Germ Attack demo that I loved back in ‘93. So this is all a fun little time-waster for me. At least it is delaying me from going on iTunes and buying a bunch of new music.

The iPod is up to 9182 songs; the goal is 10,000. Maybe by Wednesday.

As of yesterday, I have lost 18.2 pounds since 4/27; I managed to lose 3.6 pounds in the week we were in Vegas. (I was 100% sure I gained, but walking a dozen miles a day does something, I guess.) That puts me under 200 pounds for the first time in, well, a while. I think I was in the 190s back in 1997. Before that, it was probably in 1993, when I was walking everywhere (and listening the the aforementioned tapes.) When I get to my 10% goal, I am supposed to pick what my ultimate goal will be, and I don’t know what to use. this page has a calculator that shows results from a bunch of different standards, but it seems like I remember a BMI calculator that took into account your frame size by measuring your wrist, and I can’t find one of those. I think I would be happy if I could get below 180 (184 is officially the low edge of the “overweight” category,) but a harder goal would be somewhere in the 170-175 range.

One of our DVD players exploded on Friday. I went to turn it on, and it flashed orange and shot smoke out of the front. I had to move my player in the bedroom (I never watch movies in here, anyway) and now I need to take apart the old one to extricate the DVD in there.

Gotta go fill up my car. The absolute, absolute best price I can find is $4.54/gal, at Costco. Yeah, I know it’s *only* $4.14 in Elkhart. But to get that price, you have to live in Elkhart. I’ll pay the extra $250 a year for actual paved roads.