travelogue 22

March 28, 2007

after granola and danish I headed to menlo park, via stanford and page mill road, for some reason. you know I only come out here to drive around in circles. as it turns out, there was still snow at the top of page mill and so I threw the chevy cobalt into a left-hander and hand-braked into someone’s observatory where a cowboy was practising whipping himself in the sunshine. I figured I should probably go to the office.

halfway down the hill I get flagged down by chips and pull up at the end of a short line of SUVs with bumper stickers saying things like “sunshine country” and “the neverending sunshine state” and “I love my sunshine county” and “if you can read this, we’re not related” and poncho gets me to wind down my window, which obviously I don’t know how to do, but eventually just step out of the car instead. it seems there is a small pile-up in the middle of the road and I can see over poncho’s shoulder that a 20-something baseball cap is standing by his wrecked honda and nervously eyeing a 40-something handbag who’s pulling the wings from his wrecked BMW. some old blokes are scratching themselves and doing shoulder laughs at each other. I’m going to be late.

just then, mr bleasby calls me on my cellphone, which almost has me jumping into the path of the tow truck. nobody ever calls me. where do I want the ferrari sent? menlo park or broomfield? I dunno. the UK? you’ll want it while you’re here, right? er, I guess. are you in the office? I’m on page mill road. what? um, I guess we should send in to broomfield and I’ll throw some trousers away or something to fit it in my suitcase. is it 64-bit? etc.

about 30 minutes later and we’re snaking back down page mill, with me at the back of the snake, thankfully, lest I get intimidated by the locals and careen off the roadside into a swimming pool. I have to meet neal at lunchtime. it’s not lunchtime. it’s alright. I know I’ll take the wrong turning and end up in redwood city or something

by the time I’d gone about 5 miles on middlefield and ended up in redwood city, I was approaching lateness. I mean, redwood city is nice and everything, but I’m supposed to be 5 miles THAT WAY. where’s the freeway. ah. there. left lane san francisco. right. no. left. hang on. NONONONONO. screeeeeech. I hold up my hand to the carnage behind me because that makes it alright that I’ve just crossed 4 lanes at a 90 degree angle. san jose. let’s rock.

it doesn’t matter which campus you go to, everyone seems to be hiding. they’re all at home now, you see. if you’re going meet somebody, you have a provide a google earth file to find which flex office they’re in. as it turns out, it’s 2143 or something. lunchtime. ooh look. jonathan schwartz.

travelogue 21

March 16, 2007

ah. homeland security. they checked all my hold luggage and put everything back in kind of like it was before. except for all the stuff like shirts and jackets, which are folded in such a way as to make one enormous crease across the front you can’t ever iron out. and the electrical adaptors and cables they scattered about while checking for detonators. I think they also took my laptop out and played solitaire for while, but I can’t be sure.

it’s cold. I knew it would be, so I’d packed my dad’s killy skiing jacket just in case and as it’s still in my suitcase, I might just put that on for the shuttle ride to rental central. I like that shuttle. I like the way it tells you to “set the luggage cart brake to on” every 10 seconds. I like the way it stops at the post office. I like the way it accellerates like it’s lost control as you drop down the incline to rental central and the group of swiss skiers who haven’t set their luggage cart brake to on are now chasing it through the carriage. I like the way I don’t have to walk anywhere unlike the fricken 17 miles I have to walk at london heathrow just to get to the next terminal to get the travelator to the elevator to get the escalator which takes me to the heathrow express which takes me to the next terminal where I walk another 17 miles to get a rotovator from mr motorvator to get the conveyor to the upper layer where the fast bag drop has a sign on top because the line has stopped because the plane’s got lost.

my names not on the board. it never is. someone concatenated my name and title as “timmr” on my avis preferred profile and now nobody can say my name or apparently type it into a hand-held device. it’s alright though, the people at the preferred desk are very nice and because my car’s never ready they always give me a nice new one that’s just been cleaned. even if it is a red chevy cobalt LT, which in this case, stands for Lamentable Throttle.

I did something on the flight that I’ve never done before. I took out a GUIDE BOOK and started reading it. yes, a san francisco and bay area eyewitness guide I got back in 1996. I don’t normally give myself away as a tourist and spend ages in queues and as planes taxi to terminals just sitting there looking like I’ve done it all before and I’m not going to panic because I know when they’re going to call my seat number/open the doors/start the baggage carousel etc. so I’m just cool waiting for the moment that I stroll up to and pick off my suitcase and wander off leaving a bunch of holidaymakers thinking “why did his bag get off so early?” and I slip through customs high-fiving the national guard and then all the stall holders give me a wave as I walk through the concourse and my butler is waiting in the rolls. well, it’s not really like that of course, but I have travelled a few times and I don’t like people peering over my shoulder so I normally just make myself invisible. today though, I’ve got a few hours to kill in san francisco before I have to get to the hotel and as I always go to Colorado these days, I’ve not had a few hours in san francisco for a while, so I’m gonna do a bit of sightseeing that I haven’t done for years. so I’m planning how much of the 49 mile scenic drive I might do in 4 hours. in the rain. in a chevy cobalt Lacklustre Traction. when I can’t really be bothered. I got really excited about the places I’d never been, like twin peaks and the zoo and the presidio, which probably all look great in the california sunshine. but not today.

in the end I decided I’d do a bit of streets of san francisco/magnum force/dirty harry and check out some of those seedy places under bridges where they always find strangled people and the mayor tells them they better not terrorize the city this time with their maverick cop antics and then they’re off the case because the chief of police is in the pocket of the main suspect who’s a notorious drug cartel leader but you go ahead and solve the case anyway with your enormous gun and some reckless driving around telegraph hill. the starting point for that cheery tour was fort point under the golden gate bridge where I thought I might at least bump into michael douglas in a callbox calling in backup. as it turns out, I squeezed in a few miles of the 49 mile drive, the piers, fort collins, the presidio and some other stuff along the way. the presidio is strange, no? once I actually got to fort point, the rain came down, but not before I’d got as close to the underside of the bridge as possible, which isn’t very close, as it’s all fenced off these days, presumably in case I had some kind of warhead in my shoe, and had a quick look around the fort, which had closed access to the roof because of the lack of railings and so all in all it was a bit miserable but I kind of liked it that way and when you saw there were people surfing under the bridge regardless, it all made sense in a california kind of way.

after that I headed to palo alto to check into the hotel and spent the next 2 hours wondering what to eat and taking self portraits using folded key cards and mirrors. I ate a burger. the oscars were on. helen mirren won. I spoke to the bar staff in my best british accent. no, I don’t know her. no, she’s acting, that’s not the real queen.

travelogue 20

March 14, 2007

I’ve got twitchy leg stuck up british middle class paranoid delusional brain hammers going on. which means we’re only over Greenland and I already need to walk up and down the aisle of this cantankerous 747, bashing people’s nasty open-plan headsets into their chicken or beef, just to get the blood clot to move down to my foot where I can stamp around on it a bit to make it less apocalyptic. but I don’t want to disturb the plebs in the aisle or center seats next to me. british. so I’ll have to wait until they have a bladder moment and haul themselves like cattle to the folding door in the sky, at which point I’ll climb over their piles of tangled useless electronica and blankets, snagging my walkman around the throat of the person in front of me who has reclined their seat into my pelvis and accidentally ripping their head off in my haste. I can’t even keep me seat upright, but I’m tensing up my whole body for 10 hours so that it doesn’t move backwards unnecessarily. you, person in front, however, took a mere 17 minutes to push the button marked “Push here to be extremely annoying. Please ensure that you push back real hard on the seat back, so that the person behind you who is bending over his tray table, filling out his visa waiver dilligently, will lose a couple of layers of skin from his forehead. Anyway you can’t really see anything on these seat back videos, so let’s get that their viewing angle down to about 45 degrees. How annoying would you like to be today? BA can help”. after I’ve extracted myself from the window seat – which I demanded, of course, notwithstanding the pain I now cause myself but I’m british that’s what being british is all about – I’ll stand by the toilets, stretching out my legs like I know what stretches will make a difference and then wait 5 minutes each time a person comes up to use the toilet before I tell them that I’m not actually in the queue. I love that game.

I’ll go back to my seat in a minute and prepare for the next 5 hours by shaking the seat in front of me really hard as I try to manoevere into my seat and then wonder why someone sitting next to their 5 year old would nonchalently watch The Departed, not really looking, while their child is wondering why the man that looks like the devil is smashing the other mans arm with a hammer or something and mummy, is he dead eeuw, what’s that brains guts high calibre firearms graphic and prolonged violent scenes I’m not sure sweetie are you hungry THE VIEWING ANGLE IS JUST FINE IF YOU’RE SITTING IN THE SEAT RIGHT NEXT TO YOU, YOU CAN SEE ALL THAT STUFF PERFECTLY, THAT’S YOUR CHILD RIGHT? AND PUT THE BLOODY SEAT UP.

I’m not compelled to watch anything this trip. I can’t really be bothered to get the julian clary book out of my bag. I’ll just listen to the bloc party album 8 times and take pictures of ice until I dissolve.

travelogue 19

March 13, 2007

not to bore you with the details of the previous day and night’s travel but suffice to say that the 727 did what it does and dumped me at heathrow central bus station whereupon you search for a hotel hoppa to take you to the radisson only to find the stop, but to step on the H7 which takes you to the sheraton so nah mate, you want the H2 innit that’s the other one. that’s not embarrassing. anyway, arrival at the edwardian means being greeted at the desk with “yis, we’re having a wedding tonight so you are on six floor no smoking good” and dispatched to the lifts where you have to stick your room keycard in the wall before it goes anywhere. bing! 4th floor. 72 indian party goers and a pachyderm pile in “on their way to wedding. floor 6 please”. that’s not good. as I wheel myself into 607 I hear what sounds like the birdy song in urdu or something so I lock the door sharpish behind me and watch match of the day until I start dribbling on myself and then I have to work out where the extra 17 cushions go before I can get into bed.

it wasn’t that bad really. hoppa man clutched me from reception at 8am and expelled me at terminal 2. or 1. I dunno. everything looks the same at Heathrow. hang on. I need BA check in desks. I mean, I’ve already checked in online of course, but I need to go and join the longest queue in the entire airport – the one marked “fast bag drop”. oh, I should be in terminal 1. I expect there’s a handy elevator or something to take me there. or maybe a shuttle. what? whaddayoumean I have to WALK? VIA TERMINAL 3? I remember why I hate this horrible place. it’s then I remember that I’m not flying to Denver on a nice clean plane. I’m flying to San Francisco, so we get the rickety old 747 from 1997 with the seat that never stays upright. arse. gloom.

“29K sir. you have a window seat today sir”. “I know”

someone is in my seat. they’re there on purpose. there’s 2 of them and they’re leaving the seat in the middle empty to try and get 3 seats to themselves. “hi. 29K, er, I think that’s me, by the window”. “Oh, really? I though HJK went the other way round”. “No. K is by the window, definitely”. humph. much consternation at having to relocate 1 sat to the left. I smile a smile that says I’M PAYING HUNDREDS OF POUNDS FOR THAT SPECIFIC SEAT WHICH IS TWICE AS MUCH IN DOLLARS AND IF YOU THINK I’M NOT GOING TO ACTUALLY SIT IN THE WINDOW SEAT THAT I HAVE EMBEDDED IN MY TRAVEL PROFILE AT ROSENBLUTH THEN YOU MUST THINK I CAN’T EVEN COUNT TO K and prepare not to move any limbs for 10 hours by just kind of stretching a bit. oh. my seat doesn’t stay up. that’ll be nice.

it’s a morning flight so we’ll be in daylight for the whole journey, meaning I’ve got my camera strapped to me like some appendage in case I snap a near miss or a volcano or something but will probably end up just taking 37 pictures of a wing that you can’t really see because the windows are 17 years old and covered in ice and scratches.

ooh! a glacier!

jonathan schwartz salad stalker

February 26, 2007

if I stay here for another couple of hours the curtains will open themselves and small angels singing gretchen peters albums backwards will flutter among us tipping tofu over the duvet and delicately turning the pages on the ski magazine I will of course never read while cate blanchett wafts through the walls with USA today on a stick and all you can eat in the poolside grille. after that I’ll have a shower and stuff. ok, I’ll do that now. hey, where’s my angels? I’m paying a hundred bucks for this. well, no, of course I’m not paying personally, but like Neal says, we’re all paying really.

4 hours later and I’ve spent a good 10 minutes in the rental chevy cobalt LT which stands for Like Treacle just waiting for the rain to stop because I’ve not transported a nice wool jacket all this way just to end up smelling like a dead sheep by the time I get to the lobby so it’ll have to stop before I move from here. right. good. I’m at MPK 14 because I can count that far but I’m meeting at the iwork cafe in 10 minutes so let’s take bets on how many times I walk around the entire campus looking for it before I actually go into a lobby and tell somebody I’m english and so they take pity on me and ask me if I know the queen and how many oscars I’ve got before they tell me I’ve just walked past the place I’m supposed to be in and they were watching me all the time because I look like I have no idea what I’m doing which I don’t even though I’ve been here about 20 times before but still apparently can not orient myself after I walk through a security door and a small campus becomes a mysterious labyrinth full of strange mortal creatures with huge cups of water with permanent straws and the only way I can escape it is to find the keeper of the key which will obviously mean at least a couple of hours in a badly lit warehouse crawling through pipes and stuff until I meet a talking marsupial who dictates the meaning of life to a peasant dressed like oliver twist and upon seeing me scarpers into the night talking the key with him which isn’t a key at all, you see, it’s just an alegory. the key is me. I am the meaning of life and if I just stop and discover myself I’ll also find Neal in the cafe. oh, there he is.

as I’d had the ‘healthy option’ breakfast which is pretty much just 3 gallons of coffee with cream, a strawberry, and then 17 croissants with an extra bagel, I was only interested in a ‘light option’ for lunch, which I figured might be something like chicken pasta, but with 3 pounds of cheese and a gallon of cream and a bit of brocolli, so having been shown the salad bar I took a plastic bowl and started shovelling leaves like it was the middle of october. ooh, a bit of that green stuff. and another. ooh that looks nice. this bowl isn’t bit enough. hmm, what are those?

it’s at this point that jonathan appears from some secret trap door or something and he’s right in front of me with his own plastic bowl, tongs at the ready. I mean, he’s pushed in, which is a huge affront to an uptight middle class englishman, but I’ll let him off. as he goes around with the tongs, he’s talking to somebody who’s kind of over my shoulder somewhere about really important stuff, but all I’m really interested in is seeing what pulses he scoops up and whether balsamic caesar is the dressing du jour. I want my own jonathan schwartz salad and so I’m going around the salad bar picking off everything he’s picked off and trying not to look like a weird food stalker but failing but he’s so fast he’s already in a meeting in santa clara by the time I’ve picked up an apple from the fruit stand so I’ll never really know if I got it right. I look at my bowl and I don’t even know what half the things in there are, but I’ve got mental picture – I considered a real picture but I would have weirded even myself out doing that – and so when I get back home next week I’ll try and recreate it and then sell it on ebay. I was also saying hello to Martin and Sean as I was putting the salade de schwartz together, so I probably got a couple of things wrong. I don’t think he used french and balsamic together. eeuw.

infinite autochk banana hell

February 20, 2007

so after 17 hours of ever decreasing circles of success it’s time to give up on the possibility of extracting that photoshop of a stuffed polecat and the pop will eat itself back catalogue as I’m obviously not going to access C:Documents and settings at any time soon before I have to yank the platter out of the system and lob it unceremoniously into the dog toilet of bomb damage whereupon a 14 year old blart will find it take it home and slave it and uncover the names and addresses of all the top ranking officials at the middle school govenor’s committee at which the daily mail will foam at the mouth at the insecurity of our new labour data culture and start a campaign for mandatory arrests for anyone under 18 who looks like they have special needs which will draw robin in to the arguement just to point out why ID cards are so wrong.

having had partial success with chkdsk /r in the past I clutched at that straw as my data became inaccesssible all over the place and had, well, partial success with it. 57% success in fact. after I’d run it for the 4th time. which took 7 hours. before it hung. again. this was all from the recovery console which didn’t really let me do anything else unless I wanted to copy 20,000 files from one folder to another one at a time but I couldn’t even access the folders anway or see the place I would want to copy them to. all I want to do now is save the bits I hadn’t backed up to the external WD 250gb thing and then reformat the internal drive with a hand gun before the new 500gb one turns up on friday just before I go away for a week leaving everyone at home without a wireless connection for the old PC downstairs which is the club penguin access point or email. here’s how clever I am: admin tools -> computer management -> disk management -> properties -> tools -> error checking -> check the boxes for repairing bad things -> reboot to give exclusive access to disk. hey presto! infinite fricken autochk loop. as something was completely arsed up due to me defragging some system files onto a bad disk sector – oh yes, that’s fine sir, we’ll just put that useful utility over here, on top of the BROKEN STUFF – when autochk kicks off upon a reboot (for tis autochk that does the work) it never completes and I have to take a hammer to the big button on the front of the case to restart. and upon restart, autochk kicks off and never completes and so I have to take a bigger hammer to the broken button on the front of the case to restart. and upon restart etc.

I think I have dirty bits. I’ve been told that before, but this time it’s my computer telling me. more accurately, it’s probably a boot file or something file telling my broken XP installation that it has raised a white flag that says ‘dirty bit’ on it and so everything must go mad. you can unset this flag and autochk doesn’t run, which is useful. but you can’t do that from the recovery console. oh no. you have to have a proper shell to do that so that’s ok, you can’t log in to windows to get a shell because authchk won’t let you, but we all know that you can just run in safe mode and do it that way. easy. F8 F8 F8 F8, er, yes, I want safe mode. good. right. ooh, lots of cmd line references to drivers and stuff whizzing past which looks promising. hmm. I guess it’s stopped at that one because it’s REALLY BIG or something. hmm. it’s not that big. hang on. you’re not doing anything are you? (cue enormous hammer case button action). 3 attempts later and it’s clear that safe mode is going to steadfastly refuse to run and that the little people inside the machine are now laughing uncontrollably behind thier hands at my total lack of adequacy in resolving this technocrisis. and don’t you start telling me what to google in order to get the answers I need to work around this problem BECAUSE I’VE BEEN DOING THAT ALL FRICKEN DAY ON MY OTHER COMPUTER WHICH HAS SCSI DISKS SO NO I CAN’T JUST RUN IT AS A MASTER AND SLAVE THE BROKEN DISK AND NO I DON’T HAVE A CD OF LINUX THAT CAN RUN THE OS AND HAS THESE GREAT TOOLS TO EXTRACT FILES FROM THE BOOT DISK WHICH YES IS JUST ONE HUGE PARTITION I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW ALREADY THANKYOU.

at eleven thirty I am instructed to walk away before throttling myself with a USB cable tidy and I contemplate a life without XTC or all my old tweaked flickr files.

install. yes, just a clean install dammit. go on, do your worst. oh, that was quick. and you haven’t trashed the old files? nice. here’s an external drive. recognize that? ooh yes. lovely. right, is everything from The Smiths to Windsor for the Derby still intact? and that picture I took out of the window landing at Denver which was actually interesting? ooh, there it is. would you mind if I just move it over there? thanks awfully.

today I will mostly be installing XP Professional and Adobe Creative Suite 2.3. I’m not putting anything else on here. maybe the router. oh, and the laser mouse. maybe need the printer. and sonicstage. better get the drivers for the 7900GT too. and the audigy 2. oh, better make sure the wireless is installed. and the selphy. probably need to install sp2 and everything since then as well. better do that first I guess. ooh, and the new drivers for the WD drive etc. etc. etc. etc. etc….

14 percent completed

February 19, 2007

is it taking ages for you? I mean, I log in and when I try to access email it takes, like, 5 minutes to start and then that little network icon thing appears and just flashes a bit and it all runs really slow. does it do that for you? er. yes.

there’s only a limited number of times you can try and defrag a 250gb disk only to find you don’t have 17% spare to actually perform that action and so you go ahead and start creating multiple restore points and then try and remove the previous 4 versions of adobe creative suite without breaking anything that’s left and after you’ve rebooted about a hundred times and then had a go at using add/remove programs to try and remove a few programs – which you thought was a perfectly acceptable course of action – only to find that need for speed: stupid won’t actually remove and that if you get rid of the source code for half life that steam will actually blow a gasket and you have to download the ship before it’ll let you play episode 1 and then have a go at just ‘cleaning up’ some of your ripped cds only to find that you’ve just made all 200 cds that come after ‘The Smashing Pumpkins’ disappear into a mysterious explorer black hole at which point you’re wondering why you didn’t just back stuff up and reinstall the whole system.

or just back stuff up. oops

which is why you find yourself running the lovely chkdsk /r again because you can’t now even back up your 3 years worth of digital photos and ripped cds because fricken stupid ntfs file system doesn’t know where they are even though it’s looking REALLY HARD and locking up the whole system every time you move a window an inch to the left to check out the progress of disk check which will fail after 10 minutes because you’re running it when you’re actually logged in you idiot and because you’re LOOKING at the disk in a funny way it’s throwing a wobbly and hiding behind the sofa and throwing up into the event log which you finally checked after googling all your error messages only to see a millions references to bad sectors which have been there since january but you didn’t realize because you just thought you had probably made something go wrong because you installed a web cam and so you were asking for it and that’s why every time you synchronized go live it took 17 hours to update a teleweb widget which is coincidentally about how long it takes to explain why making it a capital ‘E’ should be such a problem but anyway here you are frothing at the mouth at gibberish like Windows replaced bad clusters in file 32122 of name DOCUME~1TimLOCALS~1APPLIC~1MICROS~1MEDIAP~1CURREN~3.WMD and wishing your sun ray at home had arrived or your acer ferrari but at least it’s a holiday in the US so you’ve got an extra couple of hours to catch up on things, like, um, WATCHING STUPID CHKDSK UTILITIES FIX PROBLEMS WITH MEDIAPLAYERS, so everything’s alright. nobody’s reading this anyway so how less productive can you be, waiting for the chance to be able to restore all your design work for the last 2 years?

28 percent done. it worked last time. if it doesn’t work this time I’m going to take the spare disk out of the w2100z that’s actually got solaris installed and port adobe creative suite 2 myself. by teatime. and then draw massive pictures of sheds with wings and print them on the rasterizer whereupon I’ll plaster them onto the bus shelter and do a short fandango with a spanner.

is it fixed yet? NO IT ISN’T. alright, I was only WELL DON’T

vanishing point release train

February 9, 2007

I just thought of something. it needs to go in this release. oh, and this. can you do this also. I just did. but I just asked. and I just did it. oh. but can you still do the other thing? and the thing that we weren’t going to do but we are going to do which is the thing we first thought of but we dropped it when we spoke about the other thing which is more interesting and forgot but it was always there really. yes. it’ll take 12 days. does that mean 12 days, or 12 days? it means 12 days. except, well, they’re concurrent, meaning that they’re not really twelve days, but they’re 5 days and 7 days which is 7 days but it overlaps you see so we still have the 20 days so altogether it’s March. is that what you said before? yes. and you can do that one as well? I just did. no, that one. yes. right. actually, I just got an email from china that said they want to use that thing you did to let people buy goats. I thinks that’s what they said. I’ve got a cold. can we do goats? yes, you just need to train the reptiles. great. and I’m not here. yes you are. yes, I am now. but I’m not now.

nice! have a good weekend!

I am Damo Suzuki-uh

February 5, 2007

gone in 30 seconds hey presto its all gone right I am to be pleased seeing that you’ll be helping me and that’s how it went as we flicked the switch and they literally poured in like 2 raisins from an Alessi storage jar and landed with a faint thud on the worksurface of texas. I don’t know the answer but I bet I know someone who does so by the end of the business day (1) you’ll be all the wiser and we will be noting your demograph in the great funnel in our heads. it’ll take 13 days plus the year to pretend we can alter the busines process so you’re welcome to join the call if we can use your dial-in. please use your direct dial number. we don’t talk to receptionists, however well-informed they are.

and that was when a canary landed on the fence, so we burned down the street – just in case.

paris hilton shuffle damage

February 1, 2007

buzz. when we spun it very fast with our finger the light came on but I suspect if we had stood on the surface of the sun the buzzer would never have gone off. its a euphemism for global warming. a fan for a fan. but looky. if you’re getting one of these, or maybe even a hundred, that helps right I mean power consumption. but like he said what’s my bottom line I DONT CARE about that its numbers numbers numbers just gimme a CVP that propels me through the roof and I’ll blister my fingers counting out the money for you. you’re so full of that over there. she said.

when you’re arguing about entry points and gas vans its neither a weasel’s chapped lip or kasey chambers captain that will find you on page 2 so let’s just be grown up about it. money is changing hands and I’m adding another daisy to my chain. end of.

2 stars for an unutterable outburst. were it not for the proximity of deadlines, I could imagine a place where people listened to lou reed albums without skipping any tracks.

Things what I writ