Korean Market

The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure - Michel De Montaigne

Mrs.Chaos has always been excited about Korean food.  After we went to Korea she knew what it was like in it's original form for delicious Bulgogi and Kalbi.  We headed over to the Korean market in Sacramento and she was in heaven!  So we got all sorts of delicious marinades... mmm... Also we got beats like ribs and "pork butts" for delicious Korean BBQ.

Fruits and Translucent Openings

After all, just one virus on a computer is one too many. - Glenn Turner

I've been on a multi-year kick to watch all of the old Doctor Who episodes that my Doctor Who friends have told us we need to watch.  I have a lot of friends and there is a lot of classic Doctor Who so the list is long and many of the episodes are not yet available on DVD.  Yet I have this one very special friend, "huh?  Oh, yeah, I can give you all of the 80's Doctor Who not available on DVD.  I have old CDRs of them from VHS transfers."
Modern Apple computers have very picky SuperDrives inside of them.  If you take a CDR that was burned over ten years ago and stick into a modern Apple there is about a 50/50 chance the computer will actually be able to read the disc.  Instead the computer will swallow it whole and hold onto it refusing to eject it.  Eject button?  No.  Disk Utility eject?  No.  Command line eject?  No.  In fact the only way to get a swallowed disc out was to reboot the computer and hold down the eject button.  Disc released!

I also have an external SuperDrive for the MacBook Air I no longer own and so I thought maybe I would have better luck with it.  After inserting the disc into it I had no better time reading it, but even the reboot while holding down eject trick didn't eject it.  To be fair, that SuperDrive is only supposed to work with a MacBook Air, but if that is the case, why did it agree to swallow a disc never to release it?
The only solution was to head down to the Apple Store at the mall and make use of one of their floor models.  This seems simple enough, but the moment you pull a DVD drive out of your pocket and plug it into one of their floors models things get a little dicey.  Immediately one of the floor people swooped in on me and asked what I was doing.  I explained, "I have a stuck disc and I don't own a MacBook Air, so I just need to use this to eject the disc."  They nodded and walked off.  The disc didn't mount and Disk Utility eject wasn't working so I was just going to reboot and be done when a different employee swooped in on me to ask what I was doing.  I explained, "I have a stuck disc and I don't own a MacBook Air, so I just need to reboot and eject the disc."  "Sorry, we don't want you to reboot the floor models out here.  You need to make a genius appointment. I can help you with that!"  I sighed heavily as she began to look up appointments for me on the calendar.  "Well, it looks like the soonest we can help you is tomorrow night."  "Really, I just need to reboot.  It will take 30 seconds."
A third Apple Store employee across the way overheard the discussion and decided he could help out.  "What seems to be the problem?"  At this point, I wasn't being my happy bubbly self and was starting to get terse. "The disc is stuck. I don't own a MacBook Air.  I need to reboot to eject it."  "Well, instead, why don't you open up Safari and the do a Google search for how to get out an unstuck di..." Cutting him off, "I just need to reboot.  I've already looked it up."  He got a little annoyed back at me.  "Look, I was just trying to help you think creatively so you didn't have to come back tomorrow."  It wasn't very Applely.
Quickly stopping the conversation before it came to fisticuffs employee #2 gingerly said, "Yeah, so the best I can do is same time tomorrow night.  Does that work for you?"  "No.  Really, it's 30 seconds.  I just need to reboot.  I'll find a friend or something who can actually be helpful."  She paused, clearly centering herself and evoking all of her Apple training.  Somewhere deep inside she must have remembered the "We're Awesome" policy and said, "come with me."  She took me back to the Genius Bar and interrupted one of the Genius, "hi.  This man has a stuck disc and says he just needs to have in a laptop when it reboots and that it will take thirty seconds, can you help?"
"Sure thing!" he pulls a MacBook Air out from under the counter, sticks in my drive, boots it holding down the trackpad and continues to consult with the customer he is helping.  Thirty seconds later my disc ejects, I bow to him and leave.  They're not kidding about the geniuses being at the bar. Apparently the staff walking around are not.

Not related to fruit, but related to windows, my dad gave me a call the next morning about a computer issue he was having.  If you are your parent's tech support, you will understand the gripping fear that overwhelms you as something like this is relayed to you.  "So I got a weird e-mail from your sister sent to a bunch of people and it had a link of something she wanted me to check out.  I opened up the link but then a window popped up saying my Content.exe was infected and it needed to download an update to fix it.  So I downloaded that update and I started to run Setup.exe and it said it was from an untrusted publisher and..." Children of the world are gripped in fear over what the next sentence will be "...I decided I should call you about it."  !!!  "Say no!  Close it all down!  Offer a sacrifice to the computer gods and then run your virus scanner."  While it amazes me how red flag after red flag was just bypassed during this process, it was heart warming to see that at least one of the last checks was enough to stop it.  (I love you dad!)

I know I know... I grew up in this world and I am a trained professional in this industry.  The other one that happens to me a lot from both parents and from friends is when my fancy mail program decides to put a fancy attachment onto the message (ATT00008.dat or smime.p7s) and I get the response, "How do I open your attachment?  I tried double clicking on it and opening it in Word but I can't seem to figure it out."  To which I say, "why are you trying to open a strange attachment you don't recognize that I have made no mention of in the message?  You should just assume it is junk or a virus and move on."  Though, to this date, I don't think I've ever sent either a virus.  As far as I know, I haven't been infected with a virus since the early 80's when everyone traded disks with each other without using any protection.

Book Club: Let the Great World Spin

Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion: to refuse to tape yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge - and then you are going to live your life on a tightrope. - Philippe Petit

Book club finished up reading "Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann and had our nearly-monthly meeting last Friday.  The book?  Pretty good.  I really enjoyed reading (and by reading, I mean listening on Audible) it as it spanned a bunch of different stories in NYC that intertwine with one another.  One of the central stories that bound things together was that of Philippe Petit doing a tight rope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in NYC.  When I first started reading the book I assumed that the story of the high wire routine was fictional, like all the other stories in the book.  Later I learned that it was a historical event.  In fact, there is a documentary "Man on Wire" that has interviews with everyone involved.  The movie was awesome.
The other stories in the book were fiction, but good fiction.  There are even a few stories on about computer scientists and phreakers that I thought were basically accurate.  That is hard to do and I was impressed by it.
Of course, the other part of book club is just about the company.  Everyone else is a group of friends that met in grad school - and we are connected because Mrs.Chaos worked with some of them.  They are such a different group of friends from what I am used to from college - where everyone I know works in technology, all of them do jobs for the state of California (more or less).

Equipment Failure

It is better to go skiing and think of God, than go to church and think of sport. - Fridtjof Nansen

Every year my company makes a pilgrimage from the office on the peninsula to Tahoe for a ski trip.  I've gone nearly every year, though not skied all of them.  This year was looking to be interesting and different.  The last few years that I've gone skiing there has been a beginner in my group, either a friend, or a coworker or Mrs.Chaos.  This year Mrs.Chaos' school schedule got in the way of making the trip and most of the coworkers I am good friends with have moved on to other places.  I had coworkers going, but many are from India and its their first time in the snow or they are on the exec team and so have do nothing but play in the snow all winter of the double black diamond runs.  It was going to end up being me going solo.

This year we've gotten the long summer and there wasn't a winter.  There hasn't been snow in Tahoe the entire season and the roads have been open and relaxed.  We bought chains for the car in December in case we needed them for a trip through the mountains, but had never opened the box--because of that 'no snow' thing.

On Sunday it was raining in Sacramento and I checked the weather report.  Still no chain requirements by Sunday night.  Monday's forecast was "chance of light snow."  So went to bed warm and cozy and woke up early to discover it raining and see that there were chain requirements to make it to Kirkwood.  That's okay, right?  Light snow and we had the chains we bought back in December!  So I jumped on the road at 7am excited for a good ski day and maybe a chance of a little powder.

They started requiring chains at the second spot where they do that sort of thing and I pulled over and put on the chains.  I've only put chains on a car one other time way back in college.  I'm no expert, but they sure looked loose to me.  But then I thought, "well I'm no expert, and the guy at AutoZone came out and looked at the car and then gave us chains, and he probably knew what he was doing."  But they sure did look loose.  So I crept forward a little bit just to see they had a good bite.  One of the chains just flopped right off the wheel. Flop.

Well, that's not supposed to happen and that confirmed my nagging suspicion: "I am smarter than the dude who works at AutoZone."  At this point it's only 8:30am.  I threw the chains in the trunk, took the exit, and headed back towards Sacramento to my father's house to see if I could borrow his SUV.  The gods were good to me (Note: "Game of Thrones" reference, not paganism) and he was home and the car was in working order.  So I tossed all my stuff into the car and headed back up.

The road was rough and it kept going into and out of chain requirements.  Luckily for me I had a 4WD with snow tires so there was no need to keep switching the chains on and off, but it made traffic slow and I didn't get to the mountain until 11:30am and didn't get on the slope until 12pm.  As I was leaving the lodge for my first run I pulled my goggles over my head and *crack*.  A small little crack appeared in them.  It didn't seem like too big of a deal.  Then I thought, "well I could just get my sunglasses which are... in the car sitting in father's garage. /sigh."  So I jumped onto the slope and started going.  There was fresh snow falling the whole time and it was beautiful.

I did my warmup run and had a great time and then jumped on the high-speed quad for the top of the mountain.  That's how I was trained--do one warmup and then go to the top of the mountain.  Yet once I reached the top I realized the only paths down were black diamond.  There was a time in life when I would proudly boast, "I'm not concerned about my ability to get down any hill.  Some I just can't do very gracefully."  Looking over the top of that black diamond, 10-years since I could call myself a skier, I would not make that boast.  Thankfully knowing how to get down a tough hill is more intellect than muscle and I worked my way down without my fanfare but also without much difficulty.

Except it was warm enough that the snow wasn't staying frozen.  It was melting.  Are my gloves waterproof?  Not so much.  Each chair lift ride up I'm getting coated in snow and my gloves are getting wet through to my fingers.  At least my jacket was fine?  Nope - the zipper kept separating on the bottom side and I would have to unzip the whole thing and struggle through the mismatched separated part and then re-zip it.  All the while my googles were slowly falling apart more and more.  Every time I got off the ski lift the operators would say, "dude you goggles are broken."  "I know, they just broke."  "That's dangerous you need to get off the mountain."  It looked far worse than it was.  They were holding together pretty well with my hat and the back side of the mountain opened up so I was struggling to make it over there.  *crack*  My goggles disintegrated on me.  I did my best to mold them into a semi-solid state and made a break for the lodge--making it there without any kind of problem.  A quick check at the ski shop to learn that a new set of goggles was going to runme $120-$160 and I decided it was time to be done for the day.  But golly-gee, those goggles look awesome!

The car got snowed on - but not that much.  I think that's just business as usual.

Museum Day

I was everything, patriarch, priest, father and judge. - John Sutter

I really love Sacramento and like most people, I spend less time indulging in the city as I wish that I did.  It's the standard thought that people have who move to cities as and adult, "you know, I never go and see the local sites."  I was somewhat lucky to be a kid in this town and be able to go see Sutter's Fort, the Crocker Art Gallery, the Zoo, Safety Town, and dozens of other places on various field trips growing up.
As and adult, I don't indulge that much in the history of this place and all the nooks and crannies around town.  Sacramento has an annual museum day where it opens up all state city and state museums for free entry to encourage us to get out and enjoy the town.
Mrs.Chaos and I went downtown to see Sutter's Fort.  We part in front of the fort almost every weekend when we go swing dancing, but she had never been inside and I hadn't been there since I was in a grade school.  Of course, for a place that hasn't changed in hundreds of years, it hasn't changed much in the past few decades.  It was still fun to see and I really enjoyed reading all the history - especially about what a really good man Sutter was.
There were cannons in all four corners of the fort and it was heavily fortified for attack.  Yet, no one thinks it ever was attacked.  Perhaps it was because Sutter let any travelers come in and stay and share in the meals without paying him.  Perhaps it was because he entered into trade business with the Indians instead of trying to swindle or convert them.  It was nice that least his early years at the fort seemed happy and prosperous.
One of the quotes from an interview late in life had the historian saying something like, "though he was swindled and cheated out of most of what he had built in California he remains a man full of smiles and complimentary of all the kindness around him."  I think some dust in my eye made me a little tearful as I read it.

Sutter's Fort

I say - whether you live in Sacramento or some other town - take some time to visit some historic spots or museums or whatever.  It's cool.  Ya know?