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The "house stealer" people are still at it. They have persistence, but not spelling. Unless, of course, they are implying that the owners are fortifying their house with steel, which I doubt.



And some more.



And some more. Not really sure who Jim and Brett are, and I can't find anything about this in the news. Government conspiracy, perhaps.



Now, spray-painting sidewalks is one thing, but actually putting in on their house?



Out of the Closet, one of the thrift shops, has parking lot sales every once in a while. They just dump the clothes in piles for people to dig through.



This is just stupid. Especially the examples on the right.



You'd think people would notice the giant sign and the fact that traffic is slowing to a crawl, but they still keep going in the left lanes. Of course, they probably saw the sign and are trying to go farther up the the fast lanes before pulling in. Cheaters.



That's a great welcome-home sight.



To think that some people would actually need this notice.



BevMo (Beverages and More, although there's not a whole lot of More) has free sampling on some Saturdays. This time they had about 4 beers, 4 ports, and a chocolate wine. Plus hors d'oeuvres. Well, actually, hors d'oeuvres are appetizers, so they go before the meal, and they had us eat the food afterwards, so I'm not really sure what to call them. But then again there really wasn't any food to go before. Plus, it took me 10 minutes on dictionary.com to find the correct spelling of hors d'oeuvres.



The toilet paper in the BART station at Ashby. That's real useful. At least the BART bathrooms are open in Berkeley; the ones in San Francisco are closed due to terrorist threats. Because we don't want the terrorists to relieve themselves before blowing everyone up, I guess.



Ah, the fun stuff people put up on posts.



Some people are apparently in such a hurry to get to wherever they're going that they feel the need to stand a foot into the road rather than wait on the sidewalk. Of course, most eventually scramble back when the cars come flying by at 40mph. Personally, I value my life and my feet more than the 1/4 of a second head start you would get.



Birthday cake at work from Baskin Robbins.



Those are some important trash bins to get their own red ropes. I guess they take St. Patrick's Day seriously here.



St. Patrick's Day. The road on the block where I work is sectioned off and there's a life band.



And the aftermath.



You should be able to see the new section of the map they put on. I think they added it when they extended BART from Daly City to Milbrae. I could never figure out why they made such a huge piece to add rather than just a little bit for the track change itself. I think I've got it now, though. I'm fairly certain they didn't want to have the new section cut across any words, and that was the smallest piece they could add to fit that requirement.



Now the neighbors are putting up signs in their yards for this crazy house thing.



And I still have no clue what's going on.



This is not the sight I want to see when I get to BART in the morning. The Fremont train was supposed to have come and gone around 10 minutes ago. Apparently two guys at West Oakland said they saw a bomb. Well, all the trains that go to San Francisco from the East Bay go through West Oakland, so they were turning all the trains around before then. So, my options were (1) wait for service to resume (2) walk back home and then drive to work or (3) take the bus. Since I had no clue how long BART would be down (it could be anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours) and the rush-hour traffic would be gridlocked right now, I decided on the bus.



Of course, they only take exact change, and I only had $20s, so I ran to the little hot-dog vender and bought some Skittles so I could pay the $3.50.



Then, as luck would have it, a guy on the bus started having a seizure about halfway across the Bay Bridge. So we detoured to Treasure Island and waited there for about 15 minutes for another bus to come by. Thankfully, the guy seemed to be fine. And, in the end, was there really a bomb? Ha ha, you must be joking. There's NEVER a bomb. The last one turned out to be a box of Christmas decorations. If this were really a free country, they'd say, "Hey, there's a bomb threat at the West Oakland station. It's your choice to risk it or wait here until it's figured out." I'd even sign a waiver promising not to sue if I did get blown up. I now really hate terrorists, and they haven't even actually done anything to me. Oh, and they got BART going in about 30 minutes, so it would have been faster to wait.



Sigh.



So, the internet stopped working. It's something V or his computer does, because when he's gone, everything works perfectly. Justine said she really needed the internet for school, so I hooked it up so one person (her) could get online. Since it usually fixes itself by morning, I decided to just go to bed.

Then I hear V talking to Justine, asking what's going on, and then I hear a crash. I really didn't want to deal with anything, so I just went to sleep. Upon waking, I notice the modem isn't working. Not in the, "it's not connecting to the internet" way, but in the "none of the lights even turn on when it's plugged in" way, as the picture shows. Apparently someone must have dropped it. So I went to the thrift stores and buy a new one. It didn't have the power cord with it, but I figured no big deal, they're all the same; I'll just use the power cord from the old modem in the new one.

Ha ha. Joke's on me. All power cords are not created equal. The power cord for the old modem didn't fit in the new modem, even though the modem is exactly the same model. I tried some other cords and found that the router's cord was the same. However, since the router is what allows more than one person to get on the internet, we still could only get 1 person online. All this fun experimenting made me realize the modem itself wasn't broken; it was only the power cord on the old modem.

So I go to a couple of hardware stores, and you know what nobody sells? Just power cords. The guy at one place was really helpful and we figured out how to tape together a plug, some wire, and then wrap the wires around the connectors to make something that would work, but I figured one of my roommates would fry themselves messing around with it, so I declined.

Unable to find a power cord or a cheap modem, eventually I gave up and just went and bought a new router for $40 and stole the power cord from the old router to use on the modem. Ah, that was fun. And do you think the person who broke it has offered to pay for the new router and the gas I used up driving around for 4 hours, or even admitted to it?



They wrote, "Garlic salt. Caution, not parmesan." on it. Before the note, some people must have been less-than-pleasantly surprised.



I was walking the other day, looked to my right at something, and then looked forward. There was a tree on my left, though, and one of the branches got me right on the edge of my eye. I'm really thankful it didn't actually go in my eye; it was way too close of a call.



The girl in front of me at the dollar store bought 40 cards, so the cashier had to count through them one by one. Plus, they were all different sizes, so it took her even longer.



How do you know you're in a computer-programmers-from-India neighborhood? They're playing cricket instead of baseball.



12 items or less.



And this lady is lucky those kleenex are bundled together, because she has exactly 12.



While I have exactly 2. Personally, I think they need a "4 items or less" line.



My mortal enemy. I halfway slipped on this grate in the BART parking lot once when it was raining, and now I'm overcome with terror every time it rains. You might think that's hyperbole, but it's actually pretty close to true; I'm almost obsessive-compulsive about this thing. I usually plan my gait correctly about 6 steps ahead of it to pass over it easily, but if I'm not paying attention, I look like an idiot because I either take a really short step or a really long, half-jumping step so that my shoe doesn't land on the grate. I guess you have a pretty easy life if your greatest fear is stepping on a grate in the rain, eh?



A new pet peeve of mine. You're supposed to stand to the left or right of the black square so that people getting off the train can pass over it; then the people standing on the sides of it can go in after everbody is off. You're not supposed to stand on the black square to get on because then, when someone wants to get off, they either have to try to squeeze sideways between you and the train or you have to back up, and therefore push back everybody standing behind you. The stations in Embarcadero have arrows and signs explaining this, but you'd think people would figure it out on their own.



Ah, another BART snafu. At around 6:10 Dr. Vu called from the BART station and told us all to take our time as the BART computers were down and no trains were running. So I decided to eat at this Mexican restaurant in SF rather than sit in the station until the trains started up. This guy was being informed by his buddy that everything was still down. The worst part is that in the stations, the BART announcers said everything would be up and running in a few minutes, only to come back on in a few minutes and say it would be even longer.



Brendan Wong is a guy who comes over to our office every once in a while to chat when he's on a break. He works as a computer programmer at a Wells Fargo nearby. One day he came in and said that his mother's friend, a season-ticket holder for the Giants, wasn't going to the game that night, and that she had given 2 tickets to him. He was using one, and he was looking for someone else who wanted to go to the game that night for free (this was about 3pm, so pretty short notice). Both Nia and Anne had to get home, so I said I'd love to go. We were going to meet at the park. I hadn't taken Muni that much so I wasn't exactly sure how to get there, but as everyone noted, I just had to follow the people with Giants clothing.



The statue of Willy Mays, where pretty much everyone who's meeting someone meets because it's practically impossible to not see.



It was pretty empty since it was a preseason game, but it was still fun. Barry Bonds ended up hitting about 3 balls into the stands behind home plate, too.



Then it started to rain. Most people ran up to the highest, "worst" seats because there was an overhang that covered about 4 rows. It was fun to see a foul ball go into the lower stands because everyone would run down to get it.



Uh oh, that's not a good sign. It got rained out after about 4 innings, but that actually worked out well because we got home at a decent hour.



So the Ws are between the Fs and the Hs? Didn't know we were alphabetizing things by how they sound now.

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