Big winds are blowing in from the South. The electricity is going out around the valley. The trees are howling and pine cones are crashing down on the deck. Garbage cans are rolling around in the street. Any moment we’ll be be under a foot of snow. I’m thinking that it would be really great to live a little further south, perhaps in the Highland Park district of Los Angeles.
Taco, on a bench at the Letterman Digital Arts Center, San Francisco, 2011. In this pose Taco is staring at our Staffie, whom he hates.
Today’s chores were the same as last week’s chores. Truly, there must be a loop in time that repeats on a weekly basis: laundry, vacuuming, cooking. It’s not a rut — it’s a groove.
I cooked up a batch of a highly-touted vegan cheese-like sauce. The creator guaranteed that even carnivores and omnivores would mistake the sauce for actual queso. My review: it’s okay, but, as a former cheese-eater, I wasn’t fooled. Listen up, vegan Youtubers: overselling a recipe raises my expectations so high that I may feel that an otherwise decent recipe doesn’t live up to the hype. Skip the sales pitch — you’re preaching to the choir, remember — and let the food speak for itself.
Ocean Beach, San Francisco, California, 2010
Yesterday I tried to open a file with Photoshop and got the message: Photoshop could not complete your request because of a program error. After a little digging in the Adobe Dumpster, I learned that the latest version of Photoshop won’t work with my antique 2014 graphics card. The solution, I read, was buy a better graphics card. Hummph!
Instead of spending $300 for a new GPU for my 2014 computer that’s worth about $100, I moved my 2017 iMac from the sidelines into the production line. It took all afternoon to transfer files and set up my Wacom Expresskeys and CIntiq, and then update Clip Studio Paint EX and Rebelle 4 to the latest versions.
The iMac is definitely has a faster GPU than my antique PC, but overall, my old PC is just about as fast as my iMac. Besides being a a little newer and an iota faster than my old rig, the iMac has a sweet 27-inch 5K monitor. My only reservation about switching from Windows to macOS is that I really like the Windows file manager more than the Mac Finder.
