Peeking into the rock

What is the actual difference between a drone and a remote-control device?

At the dog park I saw a couple with a flying object a bit over a foot in every dimension, which had four rotors (horizontal blades) and a payload that looked like a video camera. They were controlling it with a rig that one of them was wearing which looked like it had a video camera on it also. I didn't know what to call the thing and this raised this question.

I didn't go talk to them because I had the dog with me (dog park, right?) and it seemed like more than I could handle to get their attention and talk to them.

Meanwhile, barbie pink laptop just got turned into a brick by a short in its cord and I'm borrowing this slow Windows 8 machine while I'm shopping for the laptop of my dreams. My prejudices have been confirmed. I want a windows 7 machine, with CPU of 2.7 GHz or more, a small, textured touchpad, a smallish laptop-style keyboard without all the redundancies, a gamer's dedicated graphics card (I have lists of what will work for my needs), and not a wide screen. Also its fan shouldn't be loud and weird and get louder and weirder when I press the shift and tab keys. Seriously, that sounds frightening. Also what is this function called that keeps zooming in and out on the screen when you're trying to line up the cursor you can do things? I want to turn it off and maybe not even have it on my new laptop. I think I know how it's supposed to work but I can only get it to work properly on purpose a quarter of the time so I keep having to simply accept giant text and having to scroll to see it. Like, just now I seem to have temporarily fixed the zoom by accident after having tried to do ikt on purpose for several minutes.

Tomorrow K and I both go to work at the polls. He's an inspector at the University and I'm electronics voting specialist at my neighborhood voting center (which generally has either two or three precincts at it).  So today I intend to cook us food to take with, and also go to bed early.

About the last chapterlet of Jackson and Marek . . .

I got it off the rocks and turned in another direction, and it's kind of floating, but it's sort of somewhat becalmed: there are breezes blowing from two contradictory directions, but neither quite enough to blow it into port. I've got a pilot out there but it's not entirely sure where the channels and shoals are, so we're doing a lot of semaphore work with the shore crew (who we suspect of being pirates). In other words, it's almost done, again, for the third time. The original ending I had talked about -- the creepy one -- didn't develop, because the creepy midstages didn't happen. Then the ending I was complaining about last week -- I don't mind telling you it was Marek meeting Jackson's parents -- well, I learned a lot about Jackson and Marek and their respective families (Marek, for example, has a three-year-old half-sister! Who knew? Not me, until then!) but it wasn't exactly a story with that scene in it. I really like Jackson's parents. But the one with the stereotypical Chinese relatives is, of course, Marek: that affinal uncle is a farmer in the Delta, and his children are a dentist and a software engineer. And there is a great-aunt who lives in that apartment building just above Grant Street, you know, the one with the strange inset dragonish ceramic breezeblocks and the amazing red and green color scheme. She has the "Chinese grandmother dishes" that Kate Gould and Mark Yim used to talk about.

I miss Kate too, Ken. I might miss Mark more, if only because I think it's possible I'll see Kate again someday. It has been years, and I still get upset when I remember hearing that Mark was dead (just now I decided not to trust hearsay and I searched all over for any evidence of Mark living or dying, but I only uncovered a younger Mark Yim who is a roboticist at U Penn). Mark made me eat lap cheong and moi, and while I never developed a taste for them, it was fun trying them with Mark.

When Kate and Mark and I used to truck around Chinatown -- and Kate said "You have to truck when you're in Chinatown" -- he used to get the bitter comments. He looked much more Chinese than Kate, and he wore his hair to his butt (it being 1969 and all), and he was accompanied by these two hippy girls. I think at that time it was worse that Kate was "some of each" than that I was definitely not Chinese. I think that's mostly changed now. It was this culinary thing we did on Saturdays. Kate and Mark -- who were some kind of cousins -- would call various relatives and get instructions for cooking things and then we'd take the Number 30 bus and buy food we'd bring home to cook. Including the infamous crab in black bean sauce.

At Fisherman's wharf they'd boil the crabs, crack them and clean them, and charge you some multiple of what you'd pay to get a living crab from a Chinatown shop (as I recall, the animals to be eaten were mostly set up in boxes and tanks on the sidewalk -- this is definitely different now, because of animal-welfare activity in the City. I am not complaining. I hated that aspect of Chinatown). So we got this living crab and carried it home on the bus along with a pile of veggies and things. Nowadays you buy these little jars of fermented black bean sauce with garlic and chili oil. Back in the Ice Ages when we had to walk five miles in the snow uphill both directions to get anywhere you might mention, we also had to start with a tiny can of extremely nasty-smelling fermented black beans. While we were washing the black beans and cutting up garlic and stuff, that crab walked right out of its paper bag on the table and on to the floor, reducing Kate to hysterics. Mark came to the rescue with a really long pair of cooking chopsticks, which he used to pick up the crab and dump it into the boiling water.

I don't truck with live crustaceans anymore, myself. That's what we pay butchers for.

On another front, Keith(the guy with the painted face), the young man who's staying with us while he earns enough money for an apartment of his own, has just heard back from Harvard saying that they will accept his law school application. Last week he was struggling with their website and he couldn't get part of it to work on his computer, Frank's computer, or mine (pcs, and both Mozilla and IE): later, he was able to get that part to work on Emma's Mac, but there were other parts that wouldn't (website monkeys not talking to each other, maybe?) -- anyway, it took him till an hour past the deadline to get all the parts submitted. Harvard said "we're not picky about the deadlines, and we certainly won't disqualify you for 50 minutes." He's cheering and grinning and stuff. And Frank has finally gotten in touch with Peter Nash, our old GP, and he's arranging to go up and "shadow" him at his clinic up in Humboldt County. There's long reminiscences about Peter and his wife Judy but I will save them for another time.