Back in the Bay Area for another whirlwind tour…for those of you I don’t catch this time around, rest assured I will the next time—I’ll probably be back in June or early-to-mid July. And ain’t it great that I landed in the middle of a typical heat wave. It’s just warming up at home, but fortunately I came prepared with shorts and summer accoutrements.
So far it’s been a good trip—I’ve had a chance to see my sweetie and my friends in the office, and went on a 9-mile hike Monday that was breathtaking. We went up one of the side trails at UC Santa Cruz to almost the top of campus. The day was completely clear, and you could see the power station at Moss Landing from where we turned around. I also broke in my new hiking shoes (very comfy) and tried out a synthetic wicking t-shirt, which I will never hike without again if I have a choice—I stayed nice & cool in spite of the enromous effort involved in carrying myself uphill.
Tonight is dinner and a movie with an air-conditioning chaser, for sure.
The new Fray story got me thinking about driving and the road. I used to spend a lot of time driving for fun, taking my Mom’s car up into the Saratoga foothills. I still love it, even though the hills have changed.
I spent 3 months of my senior year of high school driving around Silicon Valley every day after school. Mom worked at home then, and I was “looking for a job,” which basically meant driving in circles for 3-4 hours every afternoon, hanging out with my friends, and stopping every day at Tower Records to buy something I’d just heard on the radio (The Quake, for any Bay Area folks). It was a great life, and was the first time in my life I really felt a sense of power and control over my own time and space. I knew how to get around somewhere, which is still the first way I try to get my sense of self set up when I’m in a new place.
Well, the time has come, according to the Walrus. I’m beginning to have more ambitious plans for this site, and so have decided to switch over to Greymatter. I feel a bit of trepidation and excitement about the whole process—I’m hoping to learn a lot about coding, design, and webmaster-type stuff from redoing everything and trying to make it standards-compliant. It’s all to the good. In the meantime I’ll still be posting, but probably more infrequently. One thing this new system encourages is longer posts, so hopefully that will make up for it.
Anyway, this is mostly to say thanks for reading, whoever you are, and there will be a lot of changes coming up here soon—don’t let the plain look fool you. And if you want to say hi and let me and your fellow WanderingMind readers know who you are, well, there’s a handy form below.
Even more unbelievable. The amount of information people are digging up on this whole Kaycee situation is amazing. It appears that not only are both journals and a bunch of previous websites fakes, but the person in the pictures on those sites may have had her identity hijacked. And that Debbie, the person who created and maintained this elaborate put-on, doesn’t think she did anything wrong.
For those interested in further investigations as they unfold, a Yahoo! Group has been started to take some of the burden off MetaFilter. I just spent a couple of hours in the chat room there while Matt (founder of MeFi) was being interviewed by a reporter and reporting live on his own conversation. Don’t be surprised if you hear about this somewhere bigger soon. If the reporter was who he claimed to be (and who can really be sure, after all this), it should be showing up on CNN and a lot of other places. Hopefully I won’t have to eat crow on that one too.
This has been the most bizarre and engrossing event in my 9-year online life.
And here, true to Internet form, is the FAQ, in case you don’t want to slog through all of that other stuff.