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I had a very pleasant Sunday in San Francisco. Each day I try to go outside for about an hour and explore the local area on foot. I’m always happy to see colorful houses, painted murals, interesting restaurants and local community efforts. Living in San Francisco has its benefits.

After a light jog I wandered past the “Little Bear School” with a painted mural.

The Little Bear School

I passed by some colorful houses including one in pink.

Pink House in San Francisco

I then decided to jog to the library. Just down the street from it I was pleased to encounter an entirely different local library in the form of a neighborhood outreach project called the LittleFreeLibrary. It was an enclosed book stand about the size of a phone booth with a collection of free books inside that could be borrowed or added to.

LittleFreeLibrary Book Stand

The LittleFreeLibrary project looked absolutely delightful. I opened the case and discovered God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I decided not to borrow the Vonnegut book, however, I do intend to return and contribute additional books to the neighborhood collection.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I finished my walk to to the public library but discovered it closed early on Sunday. On my way back I encountered a working payphone. Calls have increased to 50 cents vs. 25 cents when I was a kid.

Payphone in San Francisco

Much to my surprise, a few blocks later I encountered another!

Second Payphone Encounter in San Francisco

I then headed home and concluded my lovely Sunday in San Francisco.

About a year ago I bought a refurbished Dell Inspiron M5030 laptop. The specs on the machine were good, I’d had positive experiences with refurbished Dell’s before, and the price was right (aka very low).  I also bought an extended warranty which cost about as much as the machine itself.

My philosophy was that the laptop and warranty were a long term investment. I wasn’t nervous about a refurbished machine — I expect laptops to die or have issues within a year or two of purchase. The warranty was a guarantee that I would have a laptop at some future point when it might be more difficult or inconvenient for me to replace one.

Yesterday my laptop failed to start with 7 beeps that indicated a processor failure. I notified Dell immediately and today Dell called to tell me one of their service people would stop by my house tonight to replace the motherboard. Thanks to my foresight a year ago I won’t be without my development computer for long. I won’t even have to deal with shipping.

My warranty runs out in mid 2015. It’s nice to know I’ll have this level of service until then.

Update: Dell successfully replaced my motherboard and all is now right with the world.

Today I used Mailstrom, an email management service, to clear out and refresh my personal Gmail account. Getting to the point where I could do this has been an ongoing project, and to give you some idea, as of last night I had 33,228 received messages in my Gmail inbox.

Mailstrom

Mailstrom is a free email management service designed to quickly and accurately sort, archive, and delete large amounts of email. Messages can be sorted in groups or individually by sender, subject, lists, time, social, shopping, or size. The messages can then be archived into a Gmail folder called “Archived by Mailstrom”, moved to other folders, or sent to the Trash. I signed up for Mailstrom and received an account in March, but I was reluctant to use it without first making a backup.

Backing Up Gmail

Prior to to clearing out my Gmail account I wanted to do a full backup. I used Thunderbird for this and carefully followed a number of online tutorials (Google: Thunderbird gmail backup). After Thunderbird downloaded all of my messages and folders, sent mail, the works, I used WinRAR to save them into 12 split archives of 500MB each. I then burned them onto two DVDs.

This backup strategy worked for me in that it got the job done, but the archived messages are hard to reach. Restoring a backup requires installing a compatible version of Thunderbird and then adding the data back to it. I saved the messages uncompressed within Thunderbird itself (so they could be opened with a text editor if need be), but this worst case strategy makes them hard to sort through in the very long term. I’ve been backing up systems long enough to expect that by the time I go through this archive I may not have a compatible system that can run Thunderbird without lots of fiddling and emulation.

Moving Forward

My early attempts at email management involved filters and folders. This strategy worked for several years and hid the messages from my main inbox. However, it didn’t remove them from search results.  Over time, as my inbox increased in size, I had many messages I wanted to keep without seeing them regularly in search.

Mailstrom is brilliant for a one-time spam clean up marathon. I also found archiving messages I wanted to keep (which sends them to the “Archived by Mailstrom” Gmail folder) made me feel better about their continued online storage. However, the archive folder doesn’t help with search clutter issues. I think I’ll eventually delete the archived messages when I feel ready to let go of them.

A few days ago I was offered a free copy of The Drowning Girl by Kaitlin R. Kiernan. The book was generously provided by @Skullulele on Twitter to celebrate its recent win of the Bram Stoker award.  Thank you!

It’s been awhile since I’ve read a paper book and these days my reading speed is much faster with electronic gadgets. But I’m going to give it a try this weekend and see if I can finish it. The cover is also dark and beautiful, something that’s still a bit lost on ebooks.

I’m having my groceries delivered today from a wonderful service called Instacart. Instacart delivers groceries from Trader Joe’s, Safeway, Whole Foods, and Costco to San Francisco and nearby areas. I don’t have a car, so this service is perfect to bring in heavy bulk items, especially from Costco.

Prior to using Instacart I felt a little weird about having groceries delivered. A Groupon convinced me to give their service a try in exchange for free groceries. It only took one delivery for me to become a fan and decide to delegate all of my grocery shopping to them. In particular, their shoppers and drivers were outstanding and I was called when items were out of stock to ask for replacements. The groceries I ordered were also delivered promptly.

Probably the best thing about Instacart right now is that it’s free if a certain threshold amount of money is spent on groceries. For Trader Joe’s this amount is around $70 and for Costco it’s $100. For lower amounts, they appear to charge between $3.99 and $13 per delivery.

This ends my Instacart promotional rant. And I’ve decided if they become a fully paid service I will subscribe.

I lived in Florida for many years and I used to watch the space shuttle launches from my backyard. My house in Largo wasn’t comparable to the Kennedy Space Center but it was fun watching the orange trails and seeing the space program first hand.

A couple of weeks ago I spotted a plane flying into the sunset with an orange trail:

I miss NASA’s space shuttle program.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc., also known as SFWA, is a non-profit organization that informs, supports, promotes, defends and advocates for its members. The organization includes professional writers and others who work in the publishing industry. I contributed four years of volunteer service to SFWA from 2009 – 2012 and I’m presently a member.

One of the many SFWA membership benefits is a subscription to The SFWA Bulletin: a quarterly printed/glossy professional trade magazine produced by the organization. It features content about writing, publishing, and other industry topics and is also available to the general public by subscription. For the past four sequential issues (about a year’s worth) The SFWA Bulletin has had a problem: consistent and increasing derogatory content about women.

Jim C. Hines has a link round-up of the many discussions, and the latest Bulletin article of interest is posted in full (after the extracts) at the end of this blog post at Radish Reviews.

SFWA has previously promised to correct some but not all of these problems internally, they also have a policy which includes text content that is not being followed. In fact, quite the opposite. Jean Rabe, the editor of the magazine, mentions in her latest editorial that she reviewed the latest content and thought it would “keep the SFWA forums busy”. Well, it has.

And this is another reminder of how insidious sexism really is. I have enormous amounts of respect for the current members of the SFWA board of directors and I consider some of them my friends. I can think only the best of the current staff members I worked with, their hard work, and their generosity. And yet for an entire year under the organization’s watch this was happening. And is still happening.

My membership is due for renewal in November. I’m going to be watching the actions that follow the organizations statement closely, because this is a deal breaker for me if things don’t change. It’s also a reminder that volunteer work and organizational pledges to do better are sometimes not enough. I can’t contribute the change I want to see — through time or money — if by action or inaction the editors and board decide differently. It’s been a year.

I recently resumed playing NetHack, one of my all-time favorite video games. NetHack is a very old and magnificently complicated rogue-like dungeon adventure game with terminal style graphics. I’ve been playing since high school or maybe early college and while I don’t quite remember my first game I’ve enjoyed it for what feels like a very long time.

Each year devnull.net hosts an annual NetHack tournament in November. I always felt I could do better in these tournaments so this year I committed to improving my game. My goal is simple: I am hoping to win the game 13 times by ascending all 13 character classes during the tournament.

Ascending 13 times in NetHack is not an easy task. The game is incredibly hard and features many opportunities for fast permanent death. I’ve only beat NetHack a handful of times and only with 3 or 4 of the character classes available. There are a few months left for me to up my game and that’s what I’ll be doing.

The tournament administrators at devnull.net have a “Best of 13” grand prize described as “Awarded to the player with most ascensions in 13 consecutive games with no multiple ascension of the same race/role/alignment/gender combination.” I don’t expect to ascend sequentially, but I’m going to see how far I can get with my own personal best but not quite perfect 13.

One of the many things I love about living in San Francisco are the colorful houses. Here’s a picture of one I took close to sunset. This yellow house is just a couple blocks away from my mine, and elevated slightly over on a hill.

I’ve been using RunKeeper to exercise while exploring my neighborhood and I continually circle around this house as a landmark. There are pink houses that almost stand out just as well, but this yellow house wins because the coloring and its position on the block seem to give it extra visibility.