Ho John Lee’s Weblog

It’s the time of spring when all the flowering trees bloom. There are a lot of cherry and wisteria trees in our neighborhood, it looks nice and as the petals start falling in a few weeks off later it will look like every home held a wedding recently. Good weather for being out and about. Speaking of which…

The Wachovia Bank (formerly World Savings) branch over at the Stanford Shopping Center was robbed last Thursday. This is already a little unusual, but what caught my attention was that they were robbed by an elderly man in an electric wheelchair. And he got away! He apparently stopped by The Sharper Image and asked for a shopping bag on his way over to the bank.

Mike’s comment about Comcast and chickens wandering in Keith’s yard reminded me about my former neighbors. When we first moved into our current home, we soon discovered that the neighbors bordering our back yard owned several chickens. During the summer when we left the windows open overnight, we would hear their rooster crowing first thing in the morning. Their chickens never made it into our yard, although their cats came through regularly. They were an interesting couple, living kind of like they were homesteaders on a mountain farm, with a rickety greenhouse, garden, and a yard full of debris, on an oversized lot in the middle of Old Palo Alto. They sold a few years ago, at the moment there’s a brand new house going up, the chickens are long gone but we have had random construction work going on for a while.

We also have Comcast here.  I still use PacBell (now AT&T) DSL for the office network, but the house network uses the cable modem service. The download speeds are higher, but it does go offline sometimes, making me reluctant to run my office on Comcast’s internet service. This is a great fit for the rest of our family which mostly surfs the web, watching online video, web pages, or chatting. The DSL service is relatively clunky (I have one of the first lines rolled out in Palo Alto) and slow, but the continuous uptime is similar to my Linux servers in the back of the closet, running for years with uninterrupted service.

Looking at this heatmap, Palo Alto and Stanford are apparently a little blue oasis of solvency in the map of real estate foreclosures, surrounded by a sea of red.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 5:21 pm and is filed under The Internet, Personal Technology, Blogging, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.