January 2005 Archives

By rights, northbound traffic on the 101 on a weekday morning shouldn't be bad, but it always is. By my rough figuring, practicing my SoCal lane splitting technique saved me about 45 minutes.

I read the great, free Ventura County Record over breakfast at Coco's. Lots of roads on my planned route were unexpectedly still closed from the rains, but some quick adjustments kept things fun.

I wasn't in the proper frame of mind on Santa Rosa Rd., and the curves didn't flow as easily as they should. The same on Jalama Rd. towards the coast. I walked a while on the beach, and the ride went more smoothly on the way back to Lompoc. Hwy 1 was closed south of Jalama, allowing for some triple-digit loneliness into town.

Tepusquet was messy, and the weather looked clear to the east, so I headed for Cerro Noroeste. By the time I reached the turn-off from the 166/33, the base was bathed in clouds and fog, but I quickly rose above them - into the cold. Patches of snow edged the road, and I wasn't sure if the wet spots were just water or maybe worse, so the going was slow - and cold. After a quick fill-up at an Arco station next to the I-5, I caught a second wind and went straight through to the house.

427 miles over ten hours. Few better ways to cleanse the soul.

So, last Friday my son Justin let himself get baited into a schoolyard fight. I'll skip the details of the fight itself, but needless to say he has an appointment with the Dean of Students on Monday morning to set the terms of his suspension.

I'd been planning a motorcycle ride for Monday for weeks, but was perfectly happy to skip it to go with Justin as his mandatory parental unit for the meeting with the Dean. Happily, Carole offered to fly out to handle things at school, so I can leave first thing Monday for my ride. She flew out on Saturday, and returns Monday afternoon.

Today, I set out to get new phones for me, Justin, and Jeremy. On the way there, Jeremy called me and said the Bowser's wanted us to meet them at Fuddruckers for lunch. We had lots of waffles for breakfast, so at first I declined, but he called back to say everyone else was going, so I agreed to meet them around 1:00. I talked to a guy at the Cingular store and got the basic details of the plan I wanted, but had to leave for Fuddruckers before I could seal the deal.

While we waited at Fuddruckers for Carole (always late, but worth the wait, I've been told), I mentioned to Karen that I could get an extra free phone. Samantha picked up on that right away, and by the end of lunch Karen had agreed to let Sam cover the $10 cost of the extra line on my plan. I wound up with 4 new Sony Ericsson Z500A phones. Sam gets hers on Tuesday, when I go out to finish up some tax work with Karen and Cary.

My friend Cyndy has a new granddaughter. Isn't she cute? A good head of hair for 12-days old, too.

Based on projections that my FJR would arrive in July last year, I planned a fantastic trip up the coast for the end of August, returning home on the Sunday before Labor Day. Fours days up the coast to Port Angeles, across to Victoria for 3 days, then four days back through central Washington, Oregon, the Cascades and the Sierra. Heaven on earth. I had hotel reservations for the entire trip, and a detailed yet flexible itenerary.

Unfortunately, my FJR arrived at the dealer on the exact day I was supposed to depart. I had to cancel all my hotels, but vowed to take the trip as soon as it made sense.

The Western FJR Owners group has held ride-ins get-togethers for three years now. Wouldn't you know it - this year's meeting is in the Skagit Valley, halfway between Seattle and the Canadian border in northwest Washington.

I signed up and got hotel reservations within hours after it was announced. The trip will be different than the one I planned last year, but still pretty heavenly.

Sign-ins start at noon on Friday, August 5th. My current plan is to do an IBA Saddle Sore 1000 ride that Thursday, from my home to the Motel 6 in Olympia/Tumwater - 1,083 miles according to Streets & Trips. Yes, I have contigency plans, but my goal is to ride a 50CC cross-country ride in 2006, and I need to assess my ability and desire to ride long distances. (A 50CC is coast to coast in less than 50 hours.)

A Thursday departure also lets me spend more time on the backend of the trip. I plan to head to Victoria after the gathering ends on Sunday, August 7th, and spend a few days riding Vancouver Island - Tofino on the southwest coast, and Port Alberni in the central valley.

On the way home, the plan is to take the coastal route all the way home.

Here's to dreams...

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Carol called with an odd question. In Microsoft Word, there's a flashing vertical bar that's independent of the mouse cursor; what is this bar called?

I knew it had something to do with inserting things, but I wanted to be totally accurate.

I dove into Google, and found a page at the University of Texas with this graphic. Officially, it's called the insertion point.

Before the GV game at 3:30, I decided once and for all that I'll wear a hat if I'm looking into the sun. It's better for my eyes, and it lets me see the game much better. My partner was Raymundo Prisco, a top notch referee with a low-key but effective style.

On the surface I expected So. Pas to dominate the varsity game, but Monrovia was able to control the overall flow. There were no major controversies, and only a few peeps from the Monrovia coaching staff on my side of the field.

I felt pretty good throughout the day, but by half-time of the JV game I was dogging it a little. Raymundo had lots of energy and covered deep into my half when play dictated.

We started bright and early at 6:45am - maybe a little too early. I dozed off watching Down With Love, and felt especially tired all day.

After finishing, my car was trapped by the truck pouring concrete for a new stairway leading to the Donation Center entrance. I watched them work for a while, picking up some pointers for any future concrete work I may be involved in.

This is my last all star schedule. Period, the end.

Over the years, I've devoted a lot of my free time to AYSO activities in general. Specifically, I estimate I've spent more than 800 hours developing and refining a web-based schedule, results, and standings system. At this point, the CLI schedule generator works pretty well, with only a couple of known limitations. The web-based system that displays schedules, results, and standings always gets rave reviews.

The big requirement of the system is hard details on the number of teams per division and the available game slots at the various fields. For this all star season, the latest changes were recieved on Friday afternoon - dropped teams from two different regions. This is data that was 'required' to be submitted around Christmas time.

Anyway, I got to spend a stressful Friday evening trying to generate a schedule for 140+ teams in 22 separate competitions, on 30 fields over 7 play dates, with lots of restrictions. Some fields were available at odd times on specific dates; two teams could not play games at 11:00am, and needed byes on specific dates.

The system is nice, and given a 10-day window to create a new schedule, I'm okay with it. But not like this. I'm done.

So I'm sitting at my computer around 2:30 on Tuesday afternoon, and I get a phone call from Justin. He starts out telling me that nothing's wrong, which is usually teenager code that something is wrong. Here's the story:

He needed to return a book to someone who has a 7th period class, so he's sitting in the Cadillac on the south side of Lemon opposite the high school, with the motor running. A plain-clothes policeman knocks on the door, and tells him to move the car from the posted No Parking zone. Justin ever so politely tells him "I'm not parked". The policeman says "yes, you are parked" and repeats his request to move the car, which Justin does.

So, he called me to confirm what I had told him months ago: parking is when a car is unattended, which isn't allowed in a No Parking zone; if you're in the car, ready to drive it away, you are "stopped", not parked, and you're allowed to sit in a No Parking zone (but not in a No Stopping) zone.

After reminding him that its rarely wise to tangle with a policeman, I reiterated my belief that he was allowed to sit there in the No Parking zone, because he was "stopped", not "parked". I talked with other people about it, and they had different opinions, so I looked it up.

Here's the relevant section of the California Vehicle Code:

Park or Parking

463. "Park or parking" shall mean the standing of a vehicle, whether occupied or not, otherwise than temporarily for the purpose of and while actually engaged in loading or unloading merchandise or passengers.

Added Ch. 1608, Stats. 1961. Effective September 15, 1961.

I printed VC463 out and handed it to Justin last night. I was wrong.

On the same day that the White House conceded that its futile search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was, indeed, finally over, President Bush told Barbara Walters that the invasion of Iraq was "absolutely" worth it.

I did a bunch of shopping this morning - Target, Smart & Final, and Ralphs. As I cruised the aisles, I noticed that I was doing something that I never remember doing before - I was talking to myself, out loud. And it wasn't just the occassional word, but an on-going dialogue. We talked about why the new Ralphs separated the string cheese from the mozarella, how Ralphs can charge 3.39 for a 6-pack of pop-tarts when Target charses 2.19 for the same thing, and whether I needed four bags of softener salt or just three. It was weird.

Weirder still, once I noticed what I was doing, I didn't (couldn't?) stop. I was also having brief conversations with other shoppers, checkers, and bag boys.

Is this some kind of sign?

When I check e-mail from home, I leave it on the server, so when I got in to work this morning I had 16 days of e-mail to download. If you add the 22 messages on the Xoption account which downloaded before the other accounts were displayed, I count a total of 12,266 e-mails. Based on past experience, I expect to find 25 personal e-mails, 250 e-mails from various mailing lists I've joined, and the rest will be junk, of which 90% will be automatically discarded by the various spam filters (SAProxy and specific filters in Eudora). It took two hours to download it all.

The nurse butchered my left arm - but what can you do. Based on Roger Ebert's recommendation on yesterday's Best of 2004 show, I watched The Terminal, and enjoyed it entirely. I even stayed 20 minutes after my donation was done to finish the movie, which I've never done before.