guapacha.com

Update: Amazon tells me that the tracker is wrong, according to their mole at UPS, the item is right now out on the truck for delivery.

My copy of Leopard is supposed to arrive today but according to UPS they haven’t even picked it up yet, they have only received notice that there is a package to deliver. Maybe it is in the mail and their tracking system is hosed so I’ll wait until tomorrow to ask them wtf is going on.

Oh, my mandolin arrived last night but it will be Friday before I get to see it.

Talking of Macs, here’s a good deal on a 24″ iMac 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 1GB RAM for $1300. Wish I had some money to replace the Mac Mini.

• During the Cedar Fire 4 years ago we got a day of smoky air, brown and smelly but so far we’ve had none of that with these fires, which seems kind of odd. Maybe with the winds shifted it will come out way? Not that I am complaining if it does not.
• Wednesday night we got a flat tyre (on the Camry) on the outskirts of Westmorland and while waiting for AAA we could see what looked like a huge flare up in the fires over the mountains to the west. We looked 10 minutes later and it was gone. Very odd.
• Not being a smoker I don’t understand the addiction but it beats me how with all the bad air in San Diego during the week I saw plenty of people still lighting up. Yeah, we’re being told the air is unhealthy (or unhealthful as ABC news was saying), full of smoke, but a ciggy still hits the spot.

I’m still in San Diego though will leave for home in a short while, my office has now been closed for the rest of the week. It’s somewhat surreal to be part of this disaster and at the same time not to be. Other than a smoky coloured haze and some light ash falling from the sky you would not know that there are/were fires just a few miles away. I’ve read complaints of difficulty breathing but I’ve noticed no such symptom here. Even walking around the zoo yesterday, I felt nothing.

Was at Montgomery Field yesterday hoping to see the City helicopter at work but it was absent. While there, a convoy of military police humvees arrived and organised into missions. Many of them rookies, I think, as they had to be reminded to not leave their guns in the vehicles when they went to the latrine.

Still no fire-fighting birds in the air and that is amazing. Three San Diego congressmen had to spend hours on the phone with the head of CalFire to persuade him to allow military helicopters to help. Wtf?! Why isn’t the guy asking for everyone with a Cessna and a bucket to take to the sky (ok, slight exaggeration)? News 8’s special investigator says it is because there are private contractor buddies who CalFire wants to do the aerial drops – there are profits to be made, even when people are losing their homes. Unbelievable.

Introducing a new site in the guapacha.com family – thewailingcat.us. This site will document my journey from mandolin noob to Grand Ole Opry headliner (my objections to country music notwithstanding). I’ll post my progress, throw in a few samples of my, er, playing, gonna be huge.

google map of fires

I left home this morning for my regular Monday morning commute to San Diego not sure what I would find. I knew that I-8 was closed to high profile vehicles and they weren’t joking. At Ocotillo the freeway was closed and we had to take the off-ramp – trucks were made to park nearby (I estimated 40-50 already parked), cars were allowed to re-enter the freeway. Just in case someone didn’t want to obey, a snow plough had been parked across both lanes of the freeway.

The winds were fierce going over the Tecate divide and all the way into Alpine. There were numerous roadsigns that had been blown over, including many emergency roadside assistance phones. I had to dodge several large tumbleweeds crossing the freeway and there were times when the dirt and sand blowing in the wind had me worried for my paintwork.

To the south I could see a lot of smoke from the Harris Fire, coming down the hill into the greater San Diego area I could see a dark haze from the smoke and ash falling from the Witch Fire to the north. I got to work to find the car park empty, a note on the door said that the office was closed today so I came back to the apartment and watched the events unfold.

A crazy amount of people have been evacuated from all points north, south and east of San Diego. The strong Santa Ana winds aren’t expected to die down until Wednesday, the CDF planes can’t fly to super-douse the fire, and I can’t even begin to imagine how bad it will get before it gets any better. Looking at the fires it isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine them combining at some point, I don’t think there are many more scary things out there.

Coming home from work I passed a high school which is acting as a shelter. Lots of people sat by their cars, trying to keep their pets and children occupied no doubt worried about their homes. Pretty crappy stuff.

I’ve decided to while away my boring weeknights by learning to play an instrument. In school I played the cornet for a short while, I think I could play Oh When The Saints by the end of it, but that’s about it for my musical career. So, the question is – what to play? So far I have it narrowed down to the following:

1. flamenco guitar – I love flamenco music so it would be cool to be able to play it
2. banjo – there is some great banjo music and today I heard jazz banjo which was uncanningly awesome, and there is something about the banjo that appeals to my sense of wanting to do something a little different
3. mandolin – they’re small, sound good and are supposed to be amongst the easiest of the stringed instruments, and my wife really likes it
4. saxophone – I really wanted a sax when I was a kid and I still do, but the type I want to play is very expensive, tough to learn and just seems impractical.

So I’m going to think about it for a while, but not too long or I will end up doing nothing: I know me somewhat. Maybe we’ll see mandolin.guapacha.com in the near future??

Fifth Judicial District of Pennsylvania

In order to shame people into paying their fines, the city of Pittsburgh has put up a website where you can enter any surname or any street name and see any Summary Offense charges for that name or location. I entered Sanders and there were plenty of hits, oh the shame! The only person I know in Pittsburgh doesn’t seem to have any though – well done Vanessa.

If you’re an Apple fan boy (Josh) then no doubt you’re wetting yourself today with, at last, the official announcement of a shipping date for the new version of OS X, Leopard. It sure does look sweet and I’ll admit that I’ll be in the queue at some point to get my own copy. $129 ain’t bad, but if you can find four friends, you can have it for just $40 a head.

The side business has all but died these days but recently I had someone ask me to make a ‘backup’ of some 8mm films for them before they lent them to someone. Sure no problem I say. I set everything up and when it comes time to calibrate the digital camera onto the projector lens I see that the picture is totally grey. Doesn’t matter what I do, the camera can’t see anything. A little web research – looks like the CCD chip has died. At one time I had three camcorders:

1. A Sony purchased pre-8mm film business which turned out not to have a good enough optical zoom; I gave it away when I bought:
2. A Canon Optura 20, very nice quality but one day the firewire port gave up and I was no longer able to transfer the image to the computer. Next!
3. A trip to Cost Co for something cheap resulted in a Samsung SCD103, it worked great until this CCD chip business

How hard is it to keep a camcorder running? I’m not doing much film transfer work so I don’t really want to buy yet another camera but I have some potential work that I’d like to do. The alternative is to send one of the cameras for repair at a minimum $157, but a brand new replacement at Cost Co is not that much more. Sometimes the digital world is a PITA.

I just love this song from Kate Nash, called Foundations, and you can get it on the iTunes Music Store for 99c!