Author: Andy Scheffler

Orange County has grown since I was last here.

The last I remember, Weir Canyon road ended at a dead end not too far south of the 91. Tonight, we went up that way for dinner, and it just kept going, up past housing developments that look just the same as any others in Anaheim Hills.

In a strip mall that looks like any other, (which can’t have been there for more than three or four years) tucked between a Starbucks and a Subway, across from a Blockbuster Video, was this little Mediterranean place that broke the franchise monotony. It was filled with people that almost looked like I should recognize them. I realized, with a little bit of peoplewatching, that the reason why they all looked so familiar was because they were just so… “Orange County.” It’s hard to describe, but it’s sort of a “grown up yuppie” plus “Angel’s fan” plus a bunch of other things. It’s also very whitebread. I noticed the same thing at the airport when we were picking up my Grandmother last night.

I don’t know what the point of that was.

We watched Lilo and Stitch tonight, my Mom and Grandma hadn’t seen it. I’m also most of the way through Pattern Recognition. That book is giving me a warm fuzzy feeling that I don’t want to end when I finish reading it. At one point (pretty early on) he mentions a Macintosh G4 Cube, and I had to repress the urge to jump up and down, pointing at the book, screaming “I have one of those!”

I forgot to mention it yesterday, but as I was driving down the 5 Wednesday night, I was reminded of why I never want to live in L.A. again: a billboard sign advertising an Impotence Clinic.

You never realize how fast broadband is until you have to go back to 56k modem.

So very slow.

It’s a friggin’ shame that my Mom is out of range of DSL. Not by much, either. She might be getting a cable modem… but not anytime soon. Not like I’m down here that often. At least I have a laptop now so I can use all my applications and bookmarks, etc etc.

I made the drive down last night in the shortest amount of time ever. The fact that I didn’t hit traffic either in Gilroy or in LA, plus the fact that I was one of the few cars on the road (mostly trucks in the late evening on a weekday, made it possible for me to make it from Sunnyvale to Yorba Linda in 5 hours, 45 minutes, with a 15 minute stop for dinner. Also, because it was late enough, I just went straight down the 5 to the 91, instead of around the 210-57 like I normally do to avoid downtown traffic. That probably saved me at least 15 minutes, maybe 30.

We saw the neatest thing at Home Depot today. They have self-checkout, which must be in some sort of trial there (the Home Depot in Yorba Linda at Savi Ranch, if anyone’s curious). You scan the items yourself, you pay by inserting money or swiping a card, you bag it yourself, and you get a printed receipt. There’s a guy watching all four stations, and he has a display to see which items each person is scanning, to keep them honest. We ended up going through twice, because we forgot something. It was so darn quick.

Of course, eventually everything will have RFID tags in them, so we can just walk out of stores without having to even scan…

Hmmm… I made some entries with my cell phone, but my new Linux install was missing some key Perl libraries (so the parsing script failed on execution) so they are now lost into the aether…

Anyway.

I got my laptop back. (YAY!) They replaced the exact same part that they replaced last time. (NOT YAY) I can think of two possibilities:

1. The first part they replaced was faulty.
2. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing..

Only time will tell.

I also went to Jiffy Lube today, got my oil changed, and some other miscellaneous maintenance to the order of $210. Yay. If the car dies on the way down to LA after that, I’ll be very upset.

I am enjoying vacation. It is nice when the night is winding up and realizing “hey, I don’t have to got to work tomorrow, either!”

I’ve been waiting so long…

I took next week off.

Vacation! WOO!

(Alternative title: “Uhhh….. crap?”)

Short version: Someone may have hacked into my eBay account.

Long Version

I’ve recently had two very odd convergences. First, on Monday I found that one of the people I play M:tG with every week is in the same online sealed deck league (which in itself isn’t too odd, they hold 256 people each), but then last night we ended up playing each other.

Also, yesterday at lunch, completely randomly, I saw someone I thought I recognized someone out of place. It turns out it was one of the people that I play Netrunner with every once in a while. (Note to Frisco: Mark Davis) I ran over and said hello.

Online and real life worlds overlapping. This puts me in the perfect mood to start playing .//INFECTION.

So anyway… PowerBook still in the shop. Still on hold “awaiting part.” My car smells like it might be burning oil, but it’s very faint, I’ll be taking it into a mechanic on Monday, hopefully it’s nothing serious… I was planning on driving down to L.A. next week. It figures that something like this would start happening. I only have three car payments left. It seems that my computer jinx isn’t just limited to computers. (Although I did a pretty good job at causing a kernel panic on my BSD machine at work…)

Just before I wrote my previous entry, I ordered Zelda from ebgames.com.

Today, I received the bonus disk. Yes folks, that’s one business day later.

Back in November, I pre-ordered the new Legend of Zelda game for the Game Cube from IGN.com (store services provided by GameStop.com). Part of the fun in preordering this particular game is that it comes with a free bonus disc. Now… this disc has been out for a while, and I haven’t gotten mine yet, I started to get worried. So I wrote an email to gamestop.com. They didn’t respond. I wrote another one yesterday:
the email said…

I got my PowerBook back on Friday. It worked all day Friday. It worked all day Saturday. It worked all day Sunday.

On Monday (say it together, everybody!), it stopped working!

It just won’t turn on. I went through the whole rigamarole (resetting, zapping PRAM, all sorts of junk), but it’s getting shipped back off to Texas tomorrow. Again.

What did I do to earn so much bad computer karma?

I’m so happy right now. A week ago, I mentioned finding Warren Ellis’s mailing list (which he’s written in at least once a day since then), and not to long after that I found Dave Barry’s Weblog, which amuses me to no end, especially this recent entry, which actually had been sitting in my mind. (The column in question is in one of the collections I own.)

Also, today, there was a link to Peter David’s weblog on MetaFilter. It’s true, I am now capable of reading the thoughts of three of my favorites authors multiple times a day. I love the Internet.