Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Tuesday, 30 July 2002

# 10:30 PM

The spiraling shape will make you go insane. (Explanation.)

# 10 PM

Backdating entries with Blosxom is way too hard. You have to find the relevant entry file in a pile of, er, about 250 others at last count, and use touch to adjust its last-modification datestamp. Putting that together with the sheer size of the pile, which will only get bigger, I think it may be time for a bit of redesign.

The bathtub is still clogged. It looks like it may take a plumber's snake to unclog it, which means time to call the landlord. They had better get on it today; I'm not going to be happy if I have to shower tomorrow standing calf-deep in yesterday's bath water. (I did not have to use the Dremel to get the plate off; it turns out to be easily unscrewed.)

# 9:20 PM

seen on the street

A panhandler type sitting on the sidewalk, back against a wall, intently reading Target: Wastelands.

A guy wearing this T-shirt.

I'm also pleased to notice that a restaurant is opening in the long-deserted building on the southwest corner of Bancroft and Fulton.

apartment life

The bathtub drain has been threatening to clog up for months; today it finally did. Cue my discovery that I do not own a plunger. Easy enough to go buy one, but it hasn't yet had any effect. I suspect I need to plug the overflow pipe, which will be tricky, because there's an apparently unremovable metal plate in the way. Well, worst case, I cut it off with my Dremel.

# 3:30 PM

dream

I was riding around in a Zodiac [warning: unnecessary use of Java] with Nathaniel and Shweta, in a swimming pool. This Zodiac had a bizarrely designed outboard motor: it got fuel pumped to it by an immersion pump in the tank, which you could not turn off; if you did, it would explode and spray fuel oil all over the place. You could only stop the motor by hoisting the pump out of the tank, leaving it running.

Unfortunately, someone did turn off the pump, and it did spray fuel oil all over the surface of the water, and I had to clean it up with nothing more than a bucket at the end of a retractable chain on a pole. As I did this, the swimming pool gradually got bigger and bigger until it was a full-size harbor, and no matter how many patches of oil I scooped up, there were still more. Also, there was nothing to do with the oil except dump it on the ground, which is not exactly a good move.

Then I woke up.

# 3 AM

Today I went to Fairfield for a company meeting. (There is no office and we all live scattered around the Bay Area; Fairfield is about equally inconvenient for everyone.) I got to meet Nathan Sidwell, who was visiting the States on account of SIGGRAPH 2002. Among other things, we played miniature golf at Scandia Funland, which is your standard arcade plus minigolf course except it's all Scandinavian themed. We don't know why.