Just a little shorty for you today. Sorry I haven’t posted lately I’ve been rather tied up. (I was thinking through this recently) there have been about 25 weekends this year, and I have had to work over 20 or 21 of them, I’m a little worn out, er thin, but not actually thin) These large crane things are used to unload the massive trans-pacific freighters as they come in to dock in Oakland. Every couple of years they get another couple of them delivered. It’s quite a spectacle let me tell you. These things are built over in asia and then floated over here on the same type of ship they’re used to unload. They are just a few feet shy of the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, so when they actually get here they have to wait out in the ocean for a day when the tides are lowest and the water is calm. They then take a bunch of ballast on to lower the ship as much as possible into the water and they creep through into the bay. Usually there are crew members all the way up at the top of the crane that can touch the bottoms of the bridges as they go through. I was on-hand this year to watch. From the sidewalk near the Ferry Building it’s not as impressive as it may sound – but it gives all the boat-owning bay area residents a chance to show up to cheer them on, and show off their boats, and cool deck shoes.

On another note – i received as a gift a small electronic device that plays games, music, movies, shows pictures etc… I find this thing rather interesting as I have figured out how to convert my DVDs into a format playable by this thing. The problem is that each one takes like 2 hours to convert. Music CDs used to take this long to convert to mp3s back in 1996 when i started down this road of questionable ethics, now I can crank out a music CD in about 90 seconds. Does this mean i have to wait for 9 years to work the videos that way!!? Blasphemy! – faster computers must be procured immediately!