Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Sunday, 13 January 2002

# 9 PM

Figured out how to change the fonts in XFree86 4.1 to get the old left and right single quotes again. Too bad it involves recompiling X11 from scratch - the Debian packages aren't set up to let you regenerate just the fonts.

# 12:30 AM

i bought too many records at amoeba music

My sister Dara came up from Stanford and spent the day with me. We went to the Haight and wandered up and down for a couple hours. These days it's been yuppified, most of the stores are chains of one stripe or other. But Amoeba is still there and still doing gonzo business selling you all the records you didn't know you wanted until you saw them in the rack. My haul:

A Slight Case of Overbombing (Sisters of Mercy)
Candy from a Stranger (Soul Asylum)
Days Of Open Hand (Suzanne Vega)
For Those About To Rot (a tribute to AC/DC)
Loaded (The Velvet Underground)
Mink Car (They Might Be Giants)
Ramones (The Ramones)
Stanford Prison Experiment (The Stanford Prison Experiment)

When I got home I found a Usenet post pointing me to a C&W band, Luther Wright and the Wrongs, who have remade Pink Floyd's The Wall in bluegrass. They call it Rebuild the Wall. If I'd known about this before going to the city, I'd have been forced to look for it at Amoeba. And of course they would have had it.

fear and loathing in millbrae

When I say "My sister came up from Stanford," what I actually mean is "Her boyfriend needed a ride to the airport, so I drove down there yesterday afternoon, had dinner with them, took him to the airport, and then she stayed over at my apartment and we hung out today."

Now my attitude to driving in the Bay Area is, always assume it'll take twice as long as it ought to, because of traffic jams. But by some miracle there wasn't any traffic on I-280 last night, so we got to the airport about an hour before we needed to.

San Francisco International Airport is not really in San Francisco; it's south of the city proper, in Millbrae. What do you do in Millbrae for an hour? Well, despite being best known, to me anyway, as the home town of a plot-device character introduced in the last ten pages of Microserfs, it does have a halfway decent all-night diner. The place is owned by a windsurfing nut: on the walls there are all these pictures of the guy windsurfing with various improbable people, such as state senators. Everything is painted various shades of a color best described as Crayola "magic blue." And it's the only place I've ever been where puff pancakes were on the menu.

Overall it was the sort of place where I would not have been terribly surprised if some avatar of the road experience in America walked in the door. Shadow comes to mind.