Am I Blog Enough For You?

I closed my eyes and uploaded a modified config to my stereo controller, and it worked! Now I have total stereo control. I went through the configuration and realized that some of it was programmed wrong, so I corrected it.

I was nervous about the remote control IR hex codes when I uploaded the configuration. They didn’t download with the configuration. I was able to find hex codes for all my equipment except for my Sony Vaio. There is a cool site called remotecentral.com that has all the IR hex codes you could want (provided you don’t mind digging around the site for hours).

That solved, I did some more programming for the station. I’m getting to be quite handy in PHP and JavaScript. They must not be real programming languages because I can program in them.

The reason I have all this free time is that my family is out of town visiting folks. I had to reduce my vacation due to some stuff going on at work, so they went on without me. I did a lot of work to catch up Thursday and Friday so that I could have the weekend free for cracking and hacking.

Today I went to Berkeley to celebrate my anniversary of moving to the Bay Area in June 1989. I arrived in a convertable versus a Dodge Colt sixteen years ago, so there has been some progress since then. But now my forehead is bright red, so I haven’t gotten any smarter.

First thing I got a Top Dog with sauerkraut and hot Russian mustard. Then it was off to the record stores. The Tower Records that I worked appears to be long gone. Rasputin’s moved out of their three story glass thingie (which they built right after a bunch of riots on Telegraph, strangely enough) and into practically a whole city block of stores. I went to the mini-Amoeba, and hit the soul section. I got some funk compilations for the station, and for myself I got one of those DJ deep funk 45 compilations that I’m so fond of. I also found the first two Bill Withers albums remastered and put on one CD. Then it was off to Moe’s, Cody’s, and Shakespeare & co. I got two issues of The Believer and the new book by Matt Taibbi. I bought that book over the William Vollmann compilation that I keep meaning to buy because I loved Mr. Taibbi’s excellent review of Thomas Friedman’s book for the New York Press. He’s ex of The Exile, one of the greatest web sites/alternative press around.

I also wanted to buy John Dolan’s novel Pleasant Hell, but Cody’s didn’t have it. (My plan was to buy one thing at each store so that I’d have a genuine reason to go into each store.) The "information guy" at Cody’s took a bunch of phone calls before helping me. They didn’t have Pleasant Hell, and he offered to order it for me. When I said no thanks, I got a weird vibe like, "You’ll probably go buy it on Amazon, you dick." And he’s probably right. The guys at Shakespeare & co. were talking about how hard the market is for books these days, I suppose due to Amazon and Borders. But I’m still feel a vague guilt if I haven’t been up to those book stores in a while. I wonder if that’s how people raised to be religious feel if they haven’t been to church in a while. As a side note, the UFO sections of all three stores were pretty thin. I’m not sure what this means.

I walked through campus to Northside for Bongo Burger, another Berkeley favorite.

The day was slightly marred by not having the family around, though I
know that there is no way they would have tolerated two record stores
and three book stores and my choices of cuisine. The odds are that we
wouldn’t have even made it into Berkeley at all or arrived after
everything closed if we did. I can picture it now: We’d be sitting in
the van in the dark on Euclid street, and I’d be fuming. Then we’d go
to Barnes & Noble in Emeryville as a consolation, where I would pout and thumb through the same old lame music magazines. Well, it’s not
like I can bend the will (and bodily functions) of three other people
to do my bidding for a whole day. Still I missed them and saw many
things I wanted to point out.

I figured that I would get all winsome walking around Berkeley, but it wasn’t happening for some reason. The California move was a milestone in my life. 1989 is one of the years that I automatically calculate the time from when I read about something that happened in the last decade or two. (1998, when we bought our first house, is the only other year like that.) The major changes from the past few years have been up in my head and not very visible, so maybe I’m just too different to see Berkeley the same way I did back then. I stood in front of most of the main landmarks of my two years in Berkeley and didn’t feel anything. Though I did remember a dream from a few years ago where I saw someone fall out of the Campanile.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 12th, 2005 at 11:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.