Based on the construction and openings going on, I suspect Redwood City must have crossed some critical threshold in terms of average income or population. We've gone from one Starbucks and one Starbucks counter (at Safeway) to three standalone stores and two counters (one in Target). (I suspect that there's a law of Starbucks to be formulated here.) Whole Foods has started renovating the former Albertson's at El Camino Real and Jefferson Avenue, while Trader Joe's is building a new store just north of the Redwood City–San Carlos border. Pasta Pomodoro and T-Mobile have opened new sites as well.
It looks like everything should be ready by mid-fall. A year past that, the downtown cinemas should open (which will be one of the few Peninsula theatre complexes within easy walking distance of the San Francisco–San Jose Caltrain line). If there is restaurant development to match, Redwood City could be a very interesting small downtown in two years. But right now it's changing enough that I'll be driving to Menlo Park a lot less often.
I'm often manipulating over 100 files when I'm making modifications to various software components. Generally, the buffers menu in Vim (X11/Motif) handles this okay, unless all of the files are named with the same letters. In a recent batch of changes, 90 of my files were named "Makefile", "prototype_com", or "pkginfo.tmpl"; this results in the buffers menu being larger than the vertical height of the screen.
I tried a few of the publically available scripts, and found BufExplorer to be all I needed and more: since it turns the list into an additional buffer, with various viewing and sorting options, it's easy to search and select the correct buffer to modify. And your fingers need never leave the keyboard.
Recommended.
(I suppose I glossed over this in the flat tire story.) Here's a shot of Benjamin inspecting his new younger brother the afternoon of his birth:
We're sleeping occassionally, in case you're wondering.
I figured I should mention that I'm going to make most of my Solaris-specific comments on my blog at blogs.sun.com. We'll see if I can keep the topics meaningful and interesting on both, without halving my posting rate on each.
Had a brief moment of suburban excitement: Dina, Nathaniel, and I were on our way to an afternoon appointment when our driver's side rear tire blew out. On the soon-to-be-five-lanes-wide U.S. 101 South, in East Palo Alto. Busy.
Nathaniel will turn a week old soon, so he wasn't much going to be much help; Dina had to stay inside the car with him. The AAA estimate was forty-five minutes, so I jumped out and decided to learn how to change the tires on our wagon.
The kit included a fold-up reflective safety triangle, which I put about five yards behind the car. That made me feel about one and a half times safer, since the cars were whooshing past about 10 feet behind me. I positioned the jack at the little arrow on the undercarriage that showed the jacking position. The car raised fairly easily, and I was on to worrying about whether I could generate enough leverage to loosen the lugnuts. The tire iron, at ten inches, seemed short, but I was able to break the tension on the bolts with a bounce on the iron at 90 degrees, despite being buffeted by the occasional semi or panel van.
I pulled off the tire and slid it into the included protective tire bag (an oversize plastic garbage bag) and installed the puny limited-use spare. We ended up being only ten minutes late.
(Quiet kudos to Saab for an excellent set of tire changing tools, indicators, and instructions.)
It is with great sadness and honor that I announce the death of my father, Richard Lawrence Venezky, on June 11th, 2004. My father was an amazing man who excelled in so many ways and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to not only write updates on his condition but also to receive many wonderful comments in return. I have learned so much about my father over the past year and a half. Your stories and well wishes verify my feelings that he was a loving father, a caring husband, a loyal friend, a committed mentor, an inspiring teacher, an honored scholar, an avid collector, and a gifted gardener. He greatly enriched our lives and we will all miss him dearly. I would love to be able to sit with each and every person to record all the stories and I hope you will continue to email me with thoughts about Dad.
I have many stories to share of my own too. I grew up thinking that adulthood involved marriage to someone you loved filled with fun parties in junkyards and vacations to exciting places, that being well-read with multiple hobbies was important, and that no matter how brilliant or famous someone was, they were still just a person. He made these things look so easy that I thought one day it would all just happen for me too. I now understand that he worked hard to make these things happen but that he enjoyed what he did so much that it never looked like work.
In the past few weeks I have thought about the pain of losing Dad and come to realize how fortunate I am to have had him in my life for so long. He fought the cancer with such dignity and strength that we really thought there was nothing he couldn’t do. I realize that there will be many unanswered questions but that one of the gifts my father gave to me was the determination to learn on my own and the joy in doing so. I will always want to know exactly how I can best educate my children or how he made his garden grow but I will also take pleasure in knowing that he is proud of me as I go through this process of discovery. Stephen and I are going to work to make sure that our children know Dad and have some of the same benefits I have had growing up. I will think of him every time I work in the garden, eat a vegetable, read a book, or learn a new skill. Stephen, Benjamin, and I love you Dad.
I use ion as my window manager, but have recently switched my home desktop from a G4 Cube to a PC running Solaris. I'm a regular full-screen VNC user, and getting vncviewer and ion to cooperate is pretty key. Fullscreen mode can be achieved using vncviewer and ion (from blastwave, or build them yourself) with only a few modifications to the X resources for vncviewer. These aren't at all tricky, but require enough experimenting that writing them down will save someone somewhere five minutes some day.
Although the fullscreen transition will mostly work, ion will be confused about the keyboard focus, so we need to tell vncviewer to take additional responsibility. Add the following to your $HOME/.Xdefaults file:
vncviewer.grabKeyboard: true vncviewer.fullScreen: true
For the latter case, you could instead use the -fullscreen option to vncviewer or the on-screen menu. That's it: you're immersed in a virtual reality... which for me is mostly the same as my normal reality.
Update (9 June): Five minutes saved already; see Comments.
A peculiar quotation from an interview with Red Hat's Matthew Szulik:
The issue of Intel versus AMD ultimately goes back to the distribution partner; if companies like Hewlett-Packard, for example, can be successful with the AMD parts, then AMD will benefit. Another issue for AMD will be dealing with Darth Vader in Redmond and Jabba the Hutt in Santa Clara.
(Intel is headquartered in Santa Clara, although I don't think "Santa Clara -> INTC" is standard usage like "Redmond -> MSFT".) But when did sloppy Star Wars analogies become acceptable CEO material? I can only think that there was a hapless PR liaison grateful that an even-more-confusing Axis of Evil analogy ("... between the North Korea in Redmond and...") had been avoided.
Strange.