Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Thursday, 25 September 2003

# 7:40 PM

I'm writing this in the terminal of the San Francisco Airport, where I'm waiting for my flight down to L.A. to visit my family. Getting to SFO is a lot easier now that BART goes all the way. I hopped on the outbound J-Church streetcar at the time prescribed by TakeTransit, rode it to Balboa Park, transferred to BART and got off at the airport. From there, they have a little people-mover shuttle that runs in two counter-rotating loops, to all the terminals.

From Balboa Park to Colma the BART runs mostly aboveground. It's an interesting little part of the city to see; as you go outward it shades from streetcar suburbs (built around the 1900s) to dense automotive suburbs (1930s) to modern suburban sprawl. There are also remnants of the infotech boom, oversized office towers with FOR LEASE banners sadly flapping in the breeze.

From Colma to the airport, the train goes back underground, so you don't get to see any of that area. In places, however, they built the tunnel with no center partition, so you can see the other track and the far tunnel wall in the gloom of the emergency lights. It's kinda pretty for industrial architecture. The new stations look less like bare concrete blockhouses than the old ones do, despite still being built with bare concrete. Good job that.

The people-mover shuttle appears to run on rubber tires and an electric rail in the middle. There's no human driver; I assume they figured they don't need one since it's a completely closed track. It's got the 1990s cute-technology aesthetic; the cars are painted a friendly shade of blue and have big roomy interiors with friendly carpeting. An automatic voice politely announces each station and reminds you to hold on to something while the car is moving (there are no seats). However, these announcements are recorded in an autocratic male voice and played back far too loud. Furthermore, one of the announcements ("Please put luggage cart brake to on") has a grammatical error that I can't believe they missed.

The security rigmarole has been streamlined, and today appears to be a low-traffic day, so I got through to the terminal in about ten minutes. I still had to take off my sandals (more out of concern that they'd set off the metal detector than anything else, it sounded like) and send the laptop through the X-ray machine in a separate tray from its bag. This always sets off my theft paranoia, even though the checkpoint is carefully arranged to prevent someone lurking by the output queue to snatch anything. Oddly enough, they let me (twentysomething, long hair, cargo pants, CBLDF T-shirt) right through, but stopped the guy right behind me (fiftysomething, short hair, suit and tie) for a detailed search. He did set off the metal detector though.

There's a nice little piece of art in the escalator tube going from the BART platform to the shuttle platform. It's a band about three feet high, of little metal disks, going all the way around the tube. Each disk is hung on a separate hook, so they can ripple in the wind. You get the most interesting wave patterns going around. I like it. The art in the elevator tube coming down to the Terminal 3 ticket counters is much less pleasing, it's this nasty spiky brushed-metal thing.

# 6:40 PM

A package arrived this morning. I wasn't expecting a package. It turned out to be a DSL modem. I told the ISP not to send me another DSL modem, I already have a perfectly good one.

About half an hour later the phone rang. My car insurance company.

What I didn't say: "You lot are a bunch of scumbags who took three months to send me the card I'm legally required to have in my car, and never sent me the full policy document at all; I'm taking my business elsewhere." Even though it's true. I'm too nice sometimes.

# 5 AM

annoying discoveries

If my laptop has been booted up while disconnected from the docking station I just bought for it, then it refuses to send any signal to the docking station's video port. (The manual implies that this can be corrected by pressing <Fn><F8> while connected to the dock ... but you can't do that, because the laptop's keyboard is inaccessible and there is no <Fn> key on the attached external keyboard.) If it is plugged into the station and then booted, it does send signal to the video port, which looks just fine in text mode. However, upon switching to graphical mode I get a pattern of thin blue and green vertical stripes instead of the usual splash screen. Time to complain to the XFree86 folks.

The "KVM switch" box I got so as to use the same monitor and keyboard for both laptop and desktop PC, has big green LEDs which indicate which channel is active. Fine. These LEDs flicker when there is either keyboard or mouse activity, and flash when a dead channel is selected. Not fine. (I cannot stand flickering or blinking light, especially not in the corner of my eye, while I am trying to work.) This, at least, can be solved with black electrical tape.

Cleaning my keyboard made all the keys be sluggish. This will clear itself up in a few days but is annoying in the meantime.

# 1 AM

I've now set up my desk, mostly. There is still a morass of currently-unused cables to be dealt with, and a bunch of peripheral devices that have not yet been plugged into anything. And then there's the huge heap of papers that have to be sorted through.

Miraculously, DSL has been installed right on schedule.