(from 1999)

Mahlen Morris's weblog from 1999, in newer-items-at-the-top style. (All the links to places on the site are broken and just being kept for history.)

Well, being an engineer, I'm taking the slight potential for Y2Kproblems as an opportunity to stock up supplies for other infrastructure-failure type problems, like earthquakes and so forth. But i'm still (unlike people who mysteriously eagerly anticipate the End Of Days, say) not looking forward to it. Because all we'll have to eat is: water, cold baked beans, fruit cocktail, Spam, tuna, Ritz crackers and Saltines, and chocolate. For who knows how long. Not my vision of fine dining.

Well, I hope you all have a delightful and celebratory New Year/Century/Millennium. Let's try to do this next century right, shall we?

Oh, now how could i not love this movie? Yeah, it's way cool. It's making me laugh just thinking about it. It's a bit more of an action film than the first one, but still very interesting in it's toys-eye view of the world. The people effects are definitely getting better; the scene where Al's sleeping really surprised me with how life-like it was. And of course, they've picked up the idea from Bug's Life and added "outtakes" at the end, showing the "actors" in unguarded moments. These people love their job too much.

Well, I finally got enough time and motivation to set up the new machine as the server, so you're now reading this page from the 700MHz monster that arrived last week. I'm sure you we're just tearing your hair out wondering what's been happening. Mmmm.

Well, we, as usual, went to my parents house for Christmas day. I ran into our neighbor Neal Collins, who, bizarely enough (he never exhibited nerd genes when i knew him), is now also a Java programmer in the Silicon Valley. Speaking of things nerdly, Diane got me a snazzy-cool Lego Mindstorms robot making kit. I haven't had time to actually use it (the danger of cool toys in general), but will soon, once the new computer has all the essential software on it. It's amazing to me how many things i have to install just to make the computer feel usable. I'm not quite there yet, and i've already installed Emacs, Netscape Communicator, RadioSpy, GameSpy, WinZip, Shove-It, Java 1.2.2 (and Hotspot), the Palm Desktop, and Half-Life/Team Fortress Classic.

So, how's the new machine? Sweet. I hadn't thought that the extra processor speed would matter much, but everything snaps up faster. I'd never realized that a lot of my web time was spent waiting for the computer to render the page, but pages definitely come up faster. And these Harmon-Kardon 595 speakers are wicked; i've got them cranked up on a streaming MP3 online station called 'rEp RuH zEnT', and the house is rocking.

Woohoo! Three big boxes just arrived at my desk (printer, new speakers, computer), which means my new computer has arrived. This means i will be REALLY BUSY for the next couple days, pulling stuff off of the old machine and setting up the new one.

Given all that, this site may be down for a while, whilst I try to transition all of this stuff over. Patience will help you through this trying time...

Diane and I went to Hillsboro, Oregon this last weekend to do the Christmas visit thing with her sister, Janice, her husband, Greg, and their four kids, Hannah, Joanna, Jessica, and Jonathan. Not sure i spelled those all correctly, but that's who was there. Took some pictures and movies; will post soon. We went to see some very large falls on the gorge, and the kids did a piano recital of Christmas music for us (I was the Emcee). We're not around large groups of excited children very often, so it was very exciting, but going home and sleeping afterwards wasn't so bad, either. They gave us a cool rice cooker, which Diane is convinced will wow me when i read the instructions. However, it only has one button on it, so how cool could it be? :)

The most oddly poignant moment for me was when Diane and I went to a "New Urbanist" development in Hillsboro (because that's where the Starbucks was (i know, Starbucks is evil, but there aren't many cafe's open around there, particularly on a Sunday)). Since we are chewing over new housing ideas for ourselves now (though not in Oregon or anything like that), we walked around the plaza where the model houses were. This ~10 year-old boy roller-blades towards us, and quickly asks, "Do you have any kids?" We said, um, no, and that we live in California. He was crushed. The poor kid clearly has no kids to play with. We later saw him desultorily skating around the plaza by himself.

Just got the word that my new computer got shipped by Dell today. Me is Mr. Excited! Don't know when it will arrive here at work, but when it does, you'll soon be viewing pages off a 700Mhz Pentium III, with 256 Meg of RAM. Smoking!

Of course, in ten years that will be the level of hardware that fits on my Palm, so this entry will look foolish and silly then (what i have on my Palm IIIx now is very similar in speed and memory to a Macintosh James had in our place on Valencia in 1989, as evidenced by the fact that i can play the original Sim City on my Palm). Young Kyle will be amazed that anyone actually played games on anything so primitive. Well, Kyle, uh, eat it!

Not many updates lately; Diane and i have been crazy busy and sleep-deprived. We're going to Oregon to visit Diane's sister's family this weekend, where i suspect we will re-discover why we don't have kids (ahem).

OK, took a little time today and added pictures and little movies to the page from our trip to Albuquerque, New Mexico this past Thanksgiving weekend. A small child named Kyle is mysteriously prominent in these. You may also note that I've limited the News page (this one) so that it only shows entries from the last month; it seemed impolite to list all events ever written here every time you pull down the page. You can still see older news with the Previous News link at the bottom of the page. Am I looking out for you, or what?

I finally finished this last night on my always enjoyable Rocket Ebook. Well, Diane and I really liked Angela's Ashes, and i liked this one too, although Angela's Ashes is a more thematically clean book, whereas 'Tis' skips whole years at a time at points in the narrative. Still, McCourt's reflections on being a poor immigrant to the U.S. in the post-war period are pretty interesting, and his reflections on teaching both poor and suburban kids still ring true.

I note with some fascination that Angela's Ashes has been translated into many European Languages, and i ponder how one would translate the sound of Irish elocutions into German. But then I'm reading a book on translating now, so I'll get to that...

A lesson to you youngsters out there who think that sodas are all fun and games. Read this, and maybe your frozen peas and ice cream can sleep more soundly.

Diane's company, Ralph Johnson & Associates has finally sprung a car for Diane to use, and it's a beaut. A silver/gray Nissan Altima, brand new. Lots of features that I'd only heard that cars have; the one I find myself most jealous of is the CD player. Sweet. Diane's pretty tickled, to say the least. No word yet on whether or not I'm allowed to drive it, but I won't complain if not, since that means that she'll drive me around for a nice change. I returned the Hamster-Mobile today to ACAR Rent-a-car of Palo Alto, who did a great job.

Diane and i watched this in our hotel room in Santa Fe this weekend, and it was pretty damn funny. The scenes of Eddie Murphy as a highly paranoid action star being secretly pursued by Steve Martin's last-chance filmmaker and his crew of desperately bad actors had us howling. Plus great parodies of the egos of minor actors, and Eddie Murphy as a frighteningly nebbish ("Running errands would be a step up for me") look-alike to the action star. Silly and fun.

Whoohoo! We've got a new digital camera (a Sony DSC-F505), and you know what that means...too many pictures. Go click on the pictures link to see 'em!

I just need to sound off for a moment. Man, do I ever hate this commute down to Redwood City. It took me 90 minutes in the car to get here this morning. I'm already noticing how much less time i have in the day for Diane and the rest of my life, and it's largely because i'm spending about 2 hours a day in the car. The mass transit options involve less driving, but equal or even more time. I just hate it, it makes me feel like a big dumb fool for doing this commute. It's a suburban soul-numbing ennui, a feeling i've been blessedly without most of my life.

I'm also feeling kind of out of the loop, not working in San Francisco, which is certainly ironic, given that i'm at a company that is part of the zeitgeist. I just miss my tall buildings and bustle. And vegetarians; i've yet to meet any down here. At least i won't be here forever...(sigh).

I'm really new to the caring-at-all-about-cars thing, but since i've been driving (and more signifigantly, parking) in San Francisco, small cars have been my fantasy items of choice lately. Earlier i mentioned the Audi TT, but today i discovered the Corbin Sparrow, an electric single person three-wheeled car. It doesn't look like it currently has the range i'd need for Redwood City and back, but ohhhh, that's a small car. Yummy.

There is a series of large warehouse style stores in California called Fry's Electronics. They are basically Costco's for nerds, filled with computers, parts, junk food, phones, appliances, software, CD's; one could easily start a company with an office space, people, and a trip to Fry's. They are a Mecca in Silicon Valley, praised for their prices and scorned for their service.

It shames me to admit this, but I'd never been to one until yesterday. The local ones are all in Silicon Valley, which, until i started working there, i never ever visited. But yesterday Diane and i took the plunge, and found it to be a lot of fun. We must have spent 4-5 hours at the Palo Alto Fry's (which has a Wild West theme), and picked up two things so that Diane could use her Palm III on her iMac at work, some phone cables (we think Wanfu has been chewing on them, which is why no one can call us successfully), some SF Bay Area Thomas Guides, since we're both driving a lot more than we used to, a music program for me called "ACID DJ", and, um, some Almond Roca. We also watched a lot of "The Matrix" on the many TV's that were showing it, saw an HDTV for the first time (WOW!), tried laptops for Diane (a Sony looks to be in her future, her new employer willing), played a little bit with digital cameras, which we've both been coveting, and basically hung out at the mall. Fun, fun, fun...

This is a spare little novel about a black woman in the South in the 1940's, and about the way that her heritage and the white slave owner in it colors everything in her life. The prose is amazingly spare; almost Hemingway-esque. It's a slice from a life that i never see. Jones is an interesting writer, although i feel like i didn't completely connect with this book, so i may not be her audience.

You'll note that i never actually say much about the plots of books i review; I figure that there's lots of places to find that, so i'll just say whether or not i liked it.

This rampant new-job-taking going on at our house has become a dilemma for Diane and I, as we've gone some time with only one car. Since we worked just a few blocks from each other, it was pretty easy to get around with just one, but now that i'm working in Redwood City, and Diane will soon be zooming around the whole Bay Area, we needed new wheels for a while. So i decided to rent a cheap car until Diane's company gets her one, and found (via E@H's in-house concierge service) just such a thing at ACAR Rent-a-car in Palo Alto. While i would have loved an Audi TT, that's not quite in line with our attempts to save moolah. So i'm now driving a crappy 3-cylinder Geo Metro with 78K miles on it, no tape deck and a radio with no attenna. It runs, though, so not bad for $400 a month. Of course, i got completely lost in Palo Alto and Menlo Park trying to get back from ACAR Rent-a-car, so that didn't help my impression of it. It's my Hamster-Mobile for now, though.

I've been busy with lots of changes, so I haven't updated in a while. The biggest item is that I've started working at the Excite@Home offices at 555 Broadway in Redwood City. That's one wicked commute, by far the worst i've ever had. At some later date i hope to have a chart of commute times by method and time of day, but for now i can safely say that driving when lots of other people are too sucks raw eggs. Fortunately, Diane has had this week off before starting her new job, so i can use the one car we own to get down here.

The people here are very nice and so far seem surprisingly competant for such a large company (~1900 people now). The one odd thing i've noticed is that many of them say how non-corporate the place is. This must be some sort of company mantra, because it sure seems corporate (i.e., beaureacratic, large, impersonal, slightly soul-numbing) to me. I'm puzzled what these other people expect a 'corporate' place to be like. Random strip-searches at the door? Guys in blue suits singing the company songs? I'm probably just spoiled, i suppose...

I haven't updated the 'where to find me' info to the left just yet, but will soon.

Wow. This was much better than i expected. As memorable as "Pulp Fiction", with the pace of "Trainspotting", and some of the most original and creative cinematography i have ever seen. It's amazing that such a crazy film, with such piercing insights into the banality of modern life could get made in Hollywood. Maybe there is hope.

I could tell you what the film is about, but the first rule of Fight Club is, "Do not talk about Fight Club." Indeed, go see this film before someone spoils the hairpin-turn plot for you. Be warned, though; a film that involves a club for disaffected guys beating each other with their fists is not for the squeamish; Diane was covering her eyes for large sections of the film.

Well, this is probably my least favorite Noon yet. It's still pretty good, but it never seemed to cohere into a story, exactly. Since it's out of print, it's not likely you'd just stumble across it anyway.

Pollen takes place after Vurt, and stars the shadowcop from Vurt, Sibyl Jones. It does explain some of the mysteries from Vurt, like how the races (human, dog, robot, and corpses) started inter-breeding. And some things that were mentioned in Nymphomation (like the program Columbus), turn up here as major characters. So, that was cool.

I might have liked it more if I'd read it over the course of a day or two, but i was reading it at work, at lunch, and so it got spread out. Noon is sort of like the Beat writers; he writes at a breathless pace, and it's better to read him that way too.

This was the first time i used www.bn.com's used book seller search, which is certainly handy. I tried to find this book for a while through regular bookshops, but with no luck, and no way to order it, since it was out of print. Now i'll have to get Noon's latest, Pixel Juice, which is still in print.

Wanfu is finally feeling better, barely sneezing at all. He's certainly more energetic, attacking my fingers from beneath the monitor as i try to type this. Diane is giddy with having just had her last day at Federighi Food Machinery today, and she's enjoying playing with him in his hyperactive teenage state (I personally was a surly and sullen teenager, but to each his own, no?) He seems to like her black socks, thinking them to be precious prey, once caught to be carried off to the safety of his lair in the closet behind my guitar. Diane forced me to use that title, by the way.

Perhaps someday this site will not be solely about the cat, but we're still in the honeymoon stage, ya know.

It is finally official; the company I work for has, as of this afternoon, been sold to Excite@Home, in Redwood City. They won't be formally announcing this for while yet (we don't want Yahoo to know what we're up to), but i had my new employee orientation this morning, which was pretty good for a company of 2200 (by far the largest company I've ever worked at). We're planning on moving our stuff down there this Friday, when Mahlen will be heard to say, "Dear Lord, why did i agree to this insane commute?".

Honestly, it's hard for me to feel this as a job change yet, since i'll be working on the same software, with the same people, and the same manager. Still, I've been waiting for this to happen for some 6 months now, so it's still a feeling of relief.

A morning of doctors for me today. I had a dentist appointment at 8:45. Now, i basically brush my teeth once a day, after lunch. I don't floss. You may be the kind of person who flosses at night and enjoys going to the dentist, and if you are, I'll bet you're pretty smug about it, too. For myself, though, going to the dentist is like what i imagine going to confession would be like; a stern professional making you feel guilty for how you've been living the last few months, and making you suffer for it. In this case, paying with pain and blood. And this was just for a cleaning, mind you. So, if you're easily swayed into action by reading something on the Internet, brush twice a day, and floss after dinner.

But my dentist, Dr. Cynthia Hom, entertained me with tales of bad dates she's been on lately. Seeing her the first time was, incidently, a life milestone for me; the first time i consulted a medical professional younger than myself.

Then i went to the Marina Pet Hospital, because the new cat, Wanfu, is drooling mucus and sneezing like crazy, and seems kinda miserable. In fact, he appears to have an "Upper Respiratory Infection", i.e., a cold, which he probably got at Animal Care & Control, ahem. He's been in the car so much in the last two weeks with us, he must feel that being in a cat carrier and driving around is a regular part of domestic cat life. He'll get better soon, we hope, but he must by now feel like he got a raw deal getting found by us.

This is a great book about the town in central Florida called Celebration, which Disney created as a housing development that enacts many of the New Urbanist tenets regarding how to create more liveable, pedestrian, and community-based towns. Ross lived there for a year, and seems tuned into every facet of life there. He is neither a Disney booster (in fact, he has some tart and cogent analysis of Disney), nor is he looking for a simple "Disney has gone too far" angle; he really just wants to know what works and what doesn't, and show how people interacted there, and what they felt. The book's subtitle, "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Values in Disney's New Town" gives you a sense of what was on resident's minds.

As someone who lives in and loves "Old Urbanist" places (like San Francisco), i thought this was an objective look at why such a place came to exist, and how it works and doesn't.

No one claimed Wanfu- so as of today he is officially ours. We picked him up from the pound. He looked a little thinner but happy otherwise. He was well behaved considering that he had been in a strange cage for 5 days and was prodded, poked or pricked with a needle by all the humans he came in contact with...After the adoption papers were completed at the pound, we were off to visit the vet...According to the vet he is about 1-1/2 yrs old and in good health. She also informed us that one should never turn down a cat that picks you....I hope the other stray cats in the neighborhood don't hear about us. Three cats, two humans and 17 foo dogs is already too many creatures for this small apartment.

Well, i wouldn't call it a face lift, but we have applied a tad more blusher to the site, in light of future additions that Clark has so correctly suggested. But the coolest thing is that the page is being Dynamically Generated! Darn tootin', we've now got Apache JServ and GNUJSP running on my palatial estate's server, so every time someone wants to see this page, a Java program runs on the machine, reading the file that i'm typing into now, and creating the lovingly formatted page you're looking at. Overkill? You're goddam right it's overkill for a personal page! That's what being a crack programmer is all about; spending more time on automating the solution than the simple way would take, just cause it's cooler. God Bless America!

In an email from my brother Clark down in Albuquerque, NM, I was informed that mahlen.org has now been bookmarked on the Web browser at 30: Second Street. So, to all of you at 30: Second Street, a big HOWDY from San Francisco from Clark's weirdo older brother. Note to clients: ask Clark to make one of your shots just one frame longer.

I got some free tickets from a co-worker to see Trust at the Eureka Theatre in downtown San Francisco. I didn't really know much about the play, but Diane said, "Hey. it's FREE. If we don't like it we can leave during intermission." Well, we both really liked it. It's a play about the perennial "Troubles" in Belfast, Ireland, but this time from the Protestant side. Although, really, the play is not about the politics, but concentrates on the effect that the paranoia inherent in such a situation conflicts with the needs of one's personal life. Powerful stuff, and a lovely little (299 people) theatre that we'll visit again soon.

Wanfu (the white cat we found on the street earlier) is now with SF ACC (Animal Care and Control), which is responsible for lost pets. But it was really a mistake taking him there. Now they could euthanize him if no one claims him and we don't rescue him in time. Diane is totally in love with this cat; if she were armed, she'd have busted into ACC and stolen him today. So, we'll be there bright and early Sunday afternoon, picking him up and taking him to our usual vet (the ever so pricey Marina Pet Hospital), to ensure that he's healthy enough to be around our other two cats.

Bottom line: if no one claims him by Sunday, Wanfu is ours.

So I finished this book this weekend, and I thought it was pretty great. Noon is a really imaginative Science Fiction author. His books don't really make technical sense; he never tries to completely explain how the stuff happens. He just paints an emotionally rich portrait of ragged people (many of his characters are homeless or economically marginal) dealing with some very weird shit. He's funny, clever, and his work really has an emotional tone that is rare in SF; much like the early cyberpunk work in that way.

If you're just starting with Noon, read Vurt, his first novel. That introduces you to the Vurt universe, which his later novels have been placed in, though some (like Nymphomation) take place before the events in Vurt.

After reading Nymphomation, Noon is now on my I'll-read-anything-by-him list.

A couple times last week we noticed this very friendly white cat that would follow us home from where we usually park the car. Last night, we were walking back from our local cafe when we saw what seems to be the same cat, but three blocks away. This seemed a little far for a cat with a home to be wandering, so after feeding him (he was pretty hungry), we've sneaked him past our two other cats and have him holed up in our office, where i'm writing this. I went around our neighborhood putting up "Cat Found" signs, but we're only sort of hoping the owner is looking for him. We've really taken a shine to him (he's sitting on my lap as i type this), so if no one calls, we'll bring him to Animal Care and Control, where they'll hold him for a month. If no one claims him, we'd have the first shot at adding him to our house. We have, of course, been wracking our brains coming up with names for him (not a good sign, eh); the current favorite is "Wanfu", which is Chinese for "ten thousand blessings", though i have my doubts that Pooky and Lucy will view him that way.

More on this story as it develops.

Yes, I finally get a personal homepage that actually has some content about myself. Definitely worthy of a vanity domain name like mahlen.org, yes? You bet it is, pal. Whoa, you aint so sure? Well, step outside and let's settle this, Bucko...

I actually had been planning for some time to get mahlen.com. Every so often I'd go check that it was still available, but I'd never plunk down the $70. I was pretty smug, know that while all the dave.com/net/uk/jp/whatever variations were taken ages ago, but mahlen.com was still there. But then, this week, when i decided to register platelady.com for Diane, i checked mahlen.com and it was taken! As was mahlen.net! Some guy in Texas by the name of James A. Mahlen had snagged them both. And he'd snagged them just a few days before. What a fool I'd been. So I snapped up mahlen.org ASAP!

So let that be a lesson to you and me. Don't put off doing things that matter to you; there's plenty of other things to put off doing, like chores around the house.