Category: Personal

Set in Seattle

Seattle Skyline
The Seattle Skyline as seen from Dean’s roof

Doc and I were up in Seattle this weekend. He was judging a yo-yo competition, whilst I was wandering around looking at things and exploring. And eating brunch. I ate a lot of brunch.

It was fun exploring the city, but by far the best thing I got out of this trip (aside from seeing friends, of course) was a book. I had forgotten to bring a book to read on the flight, and I had forgotten my headphones so I couldn’t even listen to an audio book. So, literally the first thing I did after arriving in Seattle (after looking at all the flowers and things at Pike Place) was visit a cool little bookshop.

Right away, Omon Ra caught my eye. It depicted what appeared to be the Ancient Egyptian god Ra, wearing a space suit. It is no secret that I have long been obsessed with Ancient Egypt: its culture, its way of life, its religion, its architecture, its writing, etc. And, he was wearing a space suit. Come on. I read the back, and it didn’t mention Egypt or Ra or gods, but it described a dark absurdist comedy about a young boy in Soviet Russia that dreams of being a cosmonaut.

I read the first couple of pages, and I was immediately drawn in by its easy, whimsically poetic style. Not at all in the way that some poetic literature can be dense and difficult to parse, this read incredibly well.

After seeing how quickly I fell into Pelevin’s writing, I bought the book and read it pretty quickly. It was an amazing book, and not what I was expecting (although I wasn’t exactly sure what I was expecting). I’m always on the hunt for more good books, and buying them randomly rarely works out. I end up with lots of duds that way (that I read anyway because I paid for them, damn it!), and usually I can only find good books via recommendation.

So: thanks Seattle, for getting me to get this book!

Also, it turns out that it was not a coincidence that the title of the book has “Ra” in it, and the cover depicts what appears to be Ra wearing a space suit. So that made me happy, too.

But it is a coincidence that a blog post with “Set” in the title ended up talking about Ra (Set’s brother) so much. I set out just to talk about my trip in Seattle, and did not plan on talking about the book at all. I named it “Set in Seattle” as an inside-joke that my friends and I shared about the Ancient Egyptian god Set living in Seattle, and he starred in a sitcom called “Set in Seattle,” which was an intentional pun on the fact that the show was set in Seattle about Set in Seattle. OK, I’m not sure where I’m going with this anymore. You had to have been there.

Tourist Day

Tomorrow marks my third anniversary with Doc, and since he gets to plan the odd numbers, he picked SF Tourist Day. Tourist day is a concept that we have discussed frequently, but still haven’t actually done. The idea is: we go around doing all the weird fun touristy things in San Francisco that we have never done before. Like renting those yellow go-karts, touring Alcatraz, checking out Coit Tower, riding segues in Golden Gate Park, et cetera.

Doc also wants us to dress up in touristy SF shirts, and since he dressed up in roaring 20’s attire for me last year, I’m fine with going along with that. We actually found a fun SF hoodie at the Goodwill that I am excited about wearing now.

After touristing around the city all day, we are planning on having dinner at the Commonwealth Club on Mission Street. That part maybe isn’t so touristy, but it was something we both wanted to do. But we did briefly consider the possibility of eating clam chowder at Pier 39 for dinner 😉

Windows 8 Versus pip

Let me start off by saying that 2014 was a bad year for my electronics. I dropped my Nexus 4 off a cliff, my laptop mysteriously stopped working after Doc put it in his backpack (??), my iPad’s screen got disconnected somehow (but the backlight still works, I just can’t interact with it in any meaningful way), and I upgraded to Ubuntu 14 on my desktop at work with Ubuntu / Windows 7 dual boot, and it turns out… that was a bad idea.

One by one, my electronics have been restored: I got a Nexus 5, Doc gave me his old iPad 1, I installed Ubuntu 12 back to desktop and it works again (with all my ARB files in tact, woo), but the one holdout has been the laptop. By-the-way, don’t ask me what I’m going to do when they drop support for Precise Pangolin. Drop the desktop off that old cliff, maybe?

So apparently there’s this new thing called “Windows 8” and all the laptops come pre-loaded with it. Also, apparently all laptops are touch-screen now whether you want that or not. It’s been maybe 4 years since I last went laptop shopping. So it goes. I finally got a pretty good deal on a laptop, and while I managed to avoid getting a touch screen, I did not avoid the Windows 8 (new things are bad, yarr!). It is taking some… getting used to. And one major obstacle I keep coming across is pip.

I got pip working on Ubuntu pretty much instantaneously. I got pip working on Doc’s Mac pretty quick, and that was the first time I’ve ever worked on a Mac. I even got pip working on Windows 7 with only the most minimal of tiny struggles. But Windows 8 has thus far thwarted my every attempt at using pip. I… think I got installed? But it literally doesn’t do anything. I’ve tried it in Powershell as admin, I’ve tried it in command prompt as admin, I’ve tried it in Python command line… I’ve even changed and unchanged Path like a kabillion times, and I’ve almost all but given up on it. Powershell, at least, has recently gone from telling me that there’s no such thing as pip to telling me that there is no such library as anything anywhere so don’t waste my time with the whole downloading libraries crap.

So I feel like… at least Powershell is learning. Something. Bit by bit. I think either it is an annoying proxy thing, or a wizard did it. But the weird thing is, after all that, I’ve somehow gotten easy install sort of working. Which is something, I suppose, but now it is even more baffling why pip won’t work. I say sort-of-working, because half the time it leaves everything as EGGs and the other half it gives the libraries weird long crazy names that I have to rename manually to be of any use. If this is how easy install always is, then I guess I have it totally working. I’m just more used to… less half-assed installs with pip on any machine that runs anything but Windows 8.

Maybe this all just has to do with how unfamiliar Windows 8 is to me, or maybe it is a continuation of the 2014 curse of electronics – I don’t know. But I’ve been able to get all the libraries I need onto this wretched laptop, and hey – there’s always manual installs.

The lesson is: don’t ever upgrade anything, ever. Just don’t.