Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Since today is the first of the year, I looked at my records to see how much I used my car last year. I have a little notebook in the car where I record every time I do maintenance or put gas in the car. And according to this, I drove my car 1705 miles in 2005. I was actually a bit surprised by this. I thought it would be less. I guess that the 274 miles I put on going to San Diego this week made a difference. In any event, I guess I’m about due for an oil change. The last time I did it was May 1, 2004.

This afternoon, I went to Downtown Los Angeles to meet my friends Kathleen and Richard and Kathleen’s daughter Jenny. I used to work with Kathleen at Hughes Aircraft back in the late 1980s. At the time, I remember her saying that I’d have to meet Jenny some time, because she thought we’d be friends.

So yes, I like Jenny a lot. We’re a lot alike in many ways. I once taught her how to pick locks for fun. We used to go to the astronomy club together when she was in high school. I’ve known her now for something like 15 years, and she’s gone from being a little kid to being an actual adult. She lives in London now, sharing an apartment with her boyfriend. She was back in L.A. just for this week, so it was a treat to get to see her again.

Today’s weather forecast was grim, at least by Los Angeles standards. Chilly and wet, with the chance of rain increasing throughout the day.

So I went down to the park to see if anyone else was going to ride. When I got there, Michael was ready to go, so we decided to head up to Montrose. As we started out, Jon came down the road, so there were three of us for the ride.

We started out heading up to La Cañada. We took a little detour up Chevy Chase to Figueroa, then down Linda Vista and back up Chevy Chase, so we got in two big hills. Then we headed down Hospital Hill into Montrose.

Along the way, Jon told me about how they had recently filmed a scene for CSI in his living room. Apparently, a location scout had liked his house and asked if they could use it. This has no bearing on the ride, but it’s just a sample of how along-the-ride smalltalk is just different here in L.A.

When we were riding through Montrose, we noticed that we’d lost Jon. So we stopped, and about a minute later he came down the road. He said that he had to stop when he looked down and saw a dead bird lodged in his crankset. He had no idea how it got there, but he had to stop and remove it. I told him that if that ever happens again to be sure to call me so I can take a picture.

After passing through Montrose, we continued on into Tujunga. The weather seemed to be holding, so we decided to head over La Tuna Canyon. It got kind of cold during the four-mile downhill, but it was all right.

At the bottom in Sunland, we took a right on Sunland Blvd and headed up towards the mountains and Foothill Blvd. This was where we saw a road-killed dog. I didn’t take a picture because it was actually a very disturbing image. Its end was obviously violent, as it was torn in two.

We had a brief stop at a Starbuck’s in Sunland. I had a somewhat-dry bagel and some orange juice. Then we continued on back towards Tujunga.

I had to stop for a brief photo-op at Stan’s Liquor. I always make a note of any business that has my name on it. I also had to take a picture of the sign for the Poo Ping Restaurant. It was about now that we started to notice a few raindrops. It was also getting colder. We decided that we probably should just head straight home and not stop any more.

We took Foothill all the way back to La Cañada, then went back down past Descanso Gardens. At the bottom of the hill, we all split up to go our respective ways home. I took the standard route back on Woodbury Road. I stopped briefly to snap a picture of the towers on top of Mt. Wilson shrouded in clouds.

When I got home, I had a hot shower to bring my numb toes back. Despite the cold and wet, it was a nice ride.

43 miles
cycling

So on Monday we got the call that we dread. My father is retired and lives in a luxury retirement community in San Diego. It’s an ‘independent living’ facility, but the staff watches over the residents and helps them out as needed. And on Monday they called me and said that they had sent him to the hospital. They said he had slurred speech and weakness in his right hand. The first thing I thought was that he had had a stroke.

I called the hospital and they confirmed that he was there and they said that the doctor would call me after they had done some tests. About an hour later the emergency room doctor called and confirmed that my father had had a mild stroke. The doctor said that he would probably be in the hospital for several days, but that he was already improving. I also talked to his nurse, who said that he was doing well.

When I got there, he looked rather forlorn, sitting up in the hospital bed. They had him hooked up to the usual machines. This was hard for me to see, since it brought back memories of the time when he was poisoned by methyl iodide back in 1974. He tells the story of this on his web page, but his perspective was very different from mine. At the time, I was 14 years old, and I found it profoundly frightening to see my seemingly-invincible father brought low by neurological damage. When I was little, he was strong and seemed capable of anything. He could do gymnastics, walk on his hands, and ride a unicycle. And after being poisoned, his coordination never really came back. He seemed physically just a shell of his former self.

It’s been more than 30 years since that happened, and we’ve all grown accustomed to the new Paul, but now with the stroke, he was having new problems with coordination and vision. And seeing this brought back all the old memories from seeing him in the hospital in 1974. I could still feel the fear of a kid afraid that his father might die.

The physical therapist came soon after I got there, and she gave him a set of tests of strength, coordination, and vision. She gave him some instructions for exercises to do to help regain his right-hand coordination, along with a little tub of silly putty to do hand exercises with. She found that he was having vision problems with a blind spot on the right side. She said that this is fairly common for stroke patients. After that, the emergency room doctor who had examined him when he first came in stopped by. He said that my father was improving well and that he would be able to go home soon.

Around 15:00 or so, they moved my father to a different room, since they had decided that he did not need to be monitored as intensively as before. So he was wheeled over to a room in the ‘regular patient’ wing of the hospital. Then, a short time later, his new nurse came by and said that she had heard that he was going to be discharged that day. The actual discharge order came through at about 18:00, and I drove him back to his apartment. I stayed with him until bedtime to be sure he was all right.

The next day I came back to his place and we spent the day together. He did some of his exercises with the silly putty. He was concerned that his signature was now different due to his right-hand coordination problems, so I took him to the bank so he could make a new signature card. Late in the day he tried to play the piano, just to see what would happen. He was able to do it, but had a lot of problems with the right-hand parts. But overall, he is doing very well, considering what has happened.

Route map and photo locations

(With major apologies to Clement C. Moore, and thanks to www.rhymezone.com)

‘Twas the day before Christmas, and here in L.A;
We went for a bike ride, no snow for a sleigh;

Then down back to home, a nice downhill glide;
Merry Christmas to all, and it was a good ride!

51 miles
cycling

I have a home-made CAPTCHA on my pages to keep out comment spam. It uses an image with a random character string. I noticed that once in a while, the image would be broken and have unprintable characters in it.

I finally figured this out, so I figured I should write it down for my records and just in case anyone else ever has this problem.

There is a function that makes up a random string like ‘DGQZA’, which is then run through mcrypt to turn it into garbage. This renders it as an encrypted string that may or may not be printable. So then I run it through base64encode to make it into a fully printable string so it can be passed to the image-generation script to make up the image. The problem was when the base64-encoded string had a ‘+’ or ‘/’ or such in it. These characters break the URL. So the fix was to run it through the urlencode function to render the string as something like ‘wDhn8h%2BI2hg%3D’.

Nota Bene: The act of sending the encoded string through to the image-generation script automagically decodes the special characters in the URL, so it is not necessary to send it through ‘urldecode’. In fact, doing that breaks it.

So now it works.

I think.

If anyone notices it behaving badly, please let me know.

I was reading Digg today at lunch, and they had an article about another method of stopping bandwidth theft by hotlinking:

www.thesitewizard.com/archive/bandwidththeft.shtml

So I went and implemented this in my blog photos and also in my photo albums. Take that, myspace.com.

Here are the most popular photos with the hotlinkers:

1134.org/blog/images2005/IMG_0667a.jpg
1134.org/gallery/albums/random/ace.sized.jpg
1134.org/blog/images2005/IMG_0453a.jpg

All together, these three photos account for 2.6% of my total bandwidth for the month. Hmm. Maybe this isn’t as big a deal as I thought. Still, it’s annoying.

Route map and photo locations

Today’s ride was a new route that Gene made up. Newton had been saying he wanted to do more hills, so today we did hills. Fortunately, I like riding up hills, too.

It was kind of a chilly day by SoCal standards. About 50 degrees, so we were all relatively bundled up.

We started out heading east to Sierra Madre. But where we usually just go through the town to get to Arcadia, we turned and went up into one of the canyons above the town. It was a steep climb. The route made a loop, and we came out of the canyon at the same place where we’d gone in. Then we went east a bit more and then headed down Mountain Trail.

We rode all the way down the hill, almost to the 210 freeway. Then we went east a bit to Santa Anita. A left turn pointed us back up the hill. We rode up the hill and into another canyon. Up near the top we hit a portion with an 18% grade. It was about here that I said ‘uncle’ and shifted to a lower gear. Normally, I never shift, and apparently I have something of a reputation for riding up hills in ridiculous gears. But this time I shifted.

At the top, we got onto Highland Oaks and rode down the long hill all the way to Foothill Blvd. There, we turned left and went just a bit to 5th Ave. Then we turned left and headed back up towards the mountains.

Crossing into Monrovia, we went up yet another canyon. This one was also steep, and I had to shift again near the top. Shifting twice in one ride is nearly unheard-of for me, so I took a picture.

The roads in the canyon made a loop again, and we came down into Hillcrest right by where we’d turned off to go up. Then we turned left and continued on into Monrovia.

We took Hillcrest and Greystone and then turned on Norumbega. This made yet another loop up into a canyon. This time the climb wasn’t quite as hard as the others. I managed to make the whole thing in my 39×17, which is my usual all-purpose gear. And on the way down out of the canyon, we saw three deer grazing near some houses. This was quite novel to see, since the San Gabriel Valley is generally pretty urban, and we don’t see actual wildlife very often aside from the occasional coyote early in the morning. So I took some pictures of the deer as we rode by.

At the bottom of the hill, we turned left on Mountain and then headed east a bit more through Bradbury to Duarte. Doug got a flat on the bike path in Duarte, and so became the latest entry in the Flat Tire Gallery. We rode all the way out to the edge of the San Gabriel River wash. Then we went south on Encanto to Foothill Blvd. Turning right, we made our way back to Monrovia. We stopped for a snack at the Coffee Bean at Myrtle and Foothill.

After the snack stop, the group sort of split up. Some people had to head directly home. The rest of us went south a bit to Colorado and took that back to Pasadena. I rode with Vikki all the way to her street near Old Town.

Passing through Old Town, I took Prospect to get to Arroyo and Windsor Road. At the trailhead across the arroyo from JPL, I saw some people with horses. This is also a bit novel, although it’s still more common than seeing deer.

Heading east on Ventura, I started for home. I went up to Mendocino St. At Fair Oaks I had to go north a couple of blocks to get to Mariposa. That was where I passed the Little Red Hen CoFFee Shop.

After crossing Lake Ave, I went down to Mendocino and headed west across Altadena. At the country club they were having a snow day. They’d brought in a huge amount of shaved ice to make an ersatz snow slope for the kids to sled on.

The final part of the ride was to head down the hill and back to Victory Park.

It’s a good thing I like riding up hills. This was a fun ride.

46 miles
cycling

Route map and photo locations

A couple of weeks ago, I read an item in the paper about Dicks Street in West Hollywood, and how the neighbors are lobbying to have the name changed. It turns out that Dicks St. is just off the stretch of Santa Monica Blvd which is commonly known as “Boys’ Town”, due to the large number of gay bars there. And of course, just like when I heard about Dork St., I started planning a ride to go and see it. I figured it would be a nice 50-mumble mile ride from Pasadena.

I met Matt at Victory Park at 7:30 and we set out on our pilgrimage. We went west on Orange Grove, intending to go across the Colorado Street Bridge. But when we got there, the bridge was closed off and a sheriff’s deputy indicated that we should take the other fork, which was the freeway entrance. We decided that we didn’t really want to try riding on the 134 freeway, so we took Grand Ave down into the Arroyo. A right turn on La Loma and a couple of hills later, we were in Eagle Rock.

After a turn on Fletcher, we crossed the L.A. River and headed into Silver Lake. A few turns and one small hill later, we were on Hollywood Boulevard. At this point, Matt pulled out his camera and played tourist a bit.

We rode down Hollywood Blvd all the way to the Chinese Theater. Then we headed south a bit to get on Fountain Ave. We took this all the way to its end at La Cienega.

A few quick turns later, we were at Dicks Street. I took a picture of the sign for my collection. Then we headed up the hill on Doheny up to the Sunset Strip.

Riding on the Sunset Strip is always a strange experience. We rode just a few blocks east to get to Sunset Plaza, then we turned left and headed up the hill.

On the way up the hill, we stopped to look at a sign that pleaded for quiet on the streets. We also stopped at the top to admire the view of Century City and West L.A., as well as to look at the steel giraffes and ostrich in front of one house. Also, we saw a house that had what has to be the single most imposing-looking front gate I’ve ever seen on a private residence.

Continuing down the other side, we went down towards Laurel Canyon. Then we turned left and headed up Laurel Pass Rd and Allenwood, coming out on Mulholland Drive at Fryman Canyon Park.

After a brief stop to refill our water bottles, we headed east on Mulholland. We stopped again for some more sightseeing at the Universal City overlook. I snapped a picture of the flying saucer house up on the hill above us. A little bit farther down the road, we saw a sign offering us the void, For Sale By Owner.

At the bottom of the hill in Cahuenga Pass, we crossed the freeway and headed up Wonder View toward Lake Hollywood. Coming down off the hill, we got on Barham Blvd and cruised down into Burbank. A quick right took us past Forest Lawn and into Griffith Park.

After the park, we went into Glendale, going up Sonora and Graynold to get to Kenneth and Mountain. We took Mountain over to Verdugo and headed up to Hospital Hill. From there, it was all downhill back to Pasadena and home.

56 miles
cycling

After the follies on Monday with the collection agency who was looking for someone who’s not me, here is some additional stupidity involving them.

On Monday when I called them, they said that they would take me out of their system. But that’s what they said the time before that. Then yesterday, they called again.

So I looked up some information about what to do in cases like this. I found this page at the California Attorney General’s Office:

http://ag.ca.gov/consumers/general/collection_agencies10.htm#bill

It says:

Not Your Bill. If you are not the person the agency is looking for, write and explain the mistake. You may be asked to provide a drivers’ license or social security number to prove that you are the wrong person.

So I called them back (800-227-4000 x3036) again this morning. Once again, I explained that I’m not the person they are looking for and they said that they will take my phone number out of their system. But that’s what they said the two times before. So I asked for their company address so I can send them a letter like the CAG advises. The guy became belligerent, refused to give me the address and then hung up on me.

So I called back to their main number and asked to talk with his supervisor. They connected me with a woman who also refused to give me their address. She insisted that I don’t need to write them a letter and she flatly refused to give me their address. Then she hung up on me.

So, through the magic of Google, I put in their phone number and found:

NCO Financial Services
507 Prudential Road
Horsham, PA 19044
800-220-2274

NCO Financial Systems Inc
150 Crosspoint Parkway
Crosspoint Business Park
Getzville NY 14068
800 227-4000

NCO FINANCIAL SYSTEMS INC
3850 NORTH CAUSEWAY BLVD 3RD FLOOR
METAIRIE, LA United States 70002
(800)227-4000

I don’t know which of those is the actual office that’s harassing me, or if it’s yet another offce, since they seem to be just about everywhere.

I also found that they apparently have a lot of people unhappy with their business practices, and a lot of unsatisfied complaints against them with the BBB. I can’t imagine why, what with the obviously professional crew they have working there…

So just for grins, I filled out the online form to file a complaint about them with the Federal Trade Commission and another with the BBB.

Addendum: I got back a response from the FTC. They also said that I should write to NCO and tell them to stop bothering me. They pointed me to USC 1692, which is the relevant law governing this sort of thing. Offhand, I’d guess that this may be why they didn’t want to give out their address. And perhaps this also implies that their refusal to give out their address is a violation of the law. Maybe I can find a lawyer to file suit and we can split the $1000 punitive damages…