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COVID-19 came home again, but not for long!

Thursday, Oct 26th, 2023 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

When I returned from my trip to Las Vegas, I tested negative for COVID-19 and happily re-joined my family. The next morning I had a cough, headache, and the general fatigue that were all too familiar. A second line on a COVID-19 test confirmed my fears, I had it.

At that point I had already exposed everyone, and we were all suddenly stuck at home for two weeks. I decided to go on Paxlovid due to my asthma, but it was still a brutal infection for me this time around, and for over a week I found myself having to take naps every afternoon. The medication caused the dreaded “Paxlovid mouth” for me, which leaves a nasty taste in your mouth that I could only really combat with fruit snacks and sweet candies, not optimal, but it actually made it hard to sleep some nights otherwise. Thankfully, the kids were fine. Aaron never even developed symptoms or a positive test. I joked that since he was born in 2020 he was issued full immunity (pandemic baby!).

Being sick is never fun, but perhaps the most frustrating thing out of it this time was how bored the kids were. Every day it was the list of places they were begging us to take them to, from Target to a train ride to a restaurant. We do get out a lot with them, so the swift reversion to isolation life was hard on them, plus Adam being out of school.

They still played outside and after the first week we went to some unpopulated playgrounds a couple of times. One day we made apple cake!

Another day we did do-it-yourself pizzas, where I enjoyed some turkey pepperoni and the tomato sauce we made over Labor day.

We had a little lamination machine delivered and made some clever bookmarks, along with bunches of other crafts.

And we observed Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, both of which our isolation totally clobbered and made the choice for us of whether we wanted to go out and attend services in-person. Ultimately I think we would have done them remotely anyway due to various factors, but it would have been nice to have the choice. We did decide to switch to virtual services away from our synagogue in San Francisco and instead dialed into the more local congregation. We haven’t joined the more local one yet, but it does seem like that’s the one we’ll ultimately be joining in the not to distant future, so it was nice to start getting familiar with their space and culture, even if it was over video.


By the end of the month most of us were testing negative and I got to enjoy a family-only birthday celebration and then got BBQ from a place down the street for a lovely birthday lunch!

On the first weekend of October we were feeling well enough for an adventure! Boo at the Zoo had begun at Oakland Zoo and we discovered that kids love hay mazes. It was actually a nice mix of something both the boys could have a lot of fun with, which can be tricky given their very different interests and temperaments.


The following weekend we took the train up to San Francisco for some transit adventures. We had sadly missed MUNI Heritage Weekend due to our COVID infection, but I was delighted to learn that the historic Blackpool 228 “boat tram” was out running that weekend for Fleet Week.

We didn’t intend to go up during the height of Fleet Week weekend, it’s just how our schedules landed, but it did mean the city was hopping and it was fun to see a few fighter jets and a massive battleship anchored at a pier. Our route took us up to Union Square, down past Jeffery’s Toys, then down to the Market Street Railway Museum and Ferry Building, and finally to lunch on the Embarcadero at Delancey Street Restaurant.


It was a delightfully transit-full day with rides on BART and MUNI Metro, but we skipped everything but viewing the historic fleet this time around due to how incredibly packed they were. Next time!

Filed under: family, health, kids, life, rails, san francisco

Enjoying Las Vegas, a little

Thursday, Oct 12th, 2023 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Before the pandemic, MJ and I traveled a bunch for work. It was quite the shift to not only cease travel, but have both of us home all the time. At first it was great to have a lot more time together, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to spend so much time bonding with our young children, but the change was challenging. I missed experiencing new places. I missed having time to myself. I missed being able to go somewhere for a few days and just focus on work and making connections with people in the tech industry, rather than whether everyone I live with had enough socks for the week.

Last month I took the opportunity to travel to a multi-day conference again. Finally! It was energizing and inspiring. I gave two talks and was on a panel, and got to meet dozens people I’ve been working with over these past few year but had never met in-person. I got to see some folks who I hadn’t seen in years, in one case we were both working on open source at a different company the last time we saw each other in person, and we are now both with IBM working on mainframes. I came home with new ideas and connections, both personally and project-wise. It’s hard to understate how important these industry conferences are to being thoughtful and inspired about the work ahead of you.

As the first time away from my family for more than 36 hours since 2020, I took the opportunity to sleep. And enjoy the spa tub in my hotel room each night as I wound down from the conference. Truly, life with young children is exhausting and the opportunity to curl up with a book in a comfy place where I was only responsible for myself was a treasure. Plus, I’ve been to Las Vegas several times, and it’s an easy place to go again, I wasn’t going to miss out on anything by using my evenings after brief socializing to quietly unwind and be fully rested for the next day.

By Thursday afternoon, as the conference was concluding and I was finishing lunch with some colleagues, I decided it was time to do a little exploring, starting with the pool. The last time MJ and I were at the MGM Grand pool complex was before we had kids, and we rented a day bed to snack and snooze all day by the pool. This was a much shorter and less luxurious visit to the pool, but I left my phone in my room and was able to swim a bit, then soak up some sun while reading an old paperback scifi book. Bliss.

From there I went for a walk on the strip to find stamps and a post card to send home to my kiddos. I used to travel with domestic stamps so I wouldn’t have to go on so much of a journey, but I cleared out all my travel bags during the pandemic and they never made it back in. I appreciated the walk though, it gave me a purpose and led me to stumble upon a cute Stranger Things gift shop that was all decked out, designed for selfie taking. I bought a vinyl record of the first season soundtrack, which thankfully fit on my carry on luggage.

I also stopped by the M&M store, ran into a couple more colleagues there, and picked up gifts for the boys, including some M&Ms with their names stamped on them.

Postcard written and posted, gift shopping complete, it was time for an extravagant dinner at Morimoto.

Pro-tip: don’t be shy or self-conscious about dining along when you travel. I’ll never turn down company if the opportunity arises, but I now find solo dining in fancy spots to be one of my favorite things to do. I did some reading, took some lovely food photos, ate some amazing food, and enjoyed a flight of sake. What’s not to love?



I even ordered the fabulous dessert that comes with a whole entrance and dry ice (video). AND IT WAS ALL MINE.

The next morning I flew home, and with a greater appreciation of time with my family and how much I missed them. Still, I would have loved a couple more days in Las Vegas. I don’t gamble and drinking alone is no fun, but there’s so much to do there!

Filed under: food, travel

IBM TechXchange 2023 in Las Vegas

Monday, Oct 9th, 2023 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

A few days ago I wrote about the Open Mainframe Summit 2023, which took place on community day of the IBM TechXchange conference, but I also had the rest of that conference to enjoy!

The first week I was with IBM I went to IBM TechU. Given the technical nature, the new IBM TechXchange conference feels like the spiritual successor to this event, so I was really happy to have the opportunity to attend this inaugural event. I will start out by saying it was personally a real pleasure to finally meet so many people I’ve worked with over the years in person, so it was a bit of a selfie extravaganza!


Naturally, after the event you realize how many people you didn’t get photos with, especially and paradoxically, if you spent a lot of time together! Next time, my friends.

To set the stage for the week I attended a few keynotes here and there. The first was In a world where AI writes code, what is the role of the developer? following much over-hyped discourse around the obsolesce of developers if AI is writing code. It has long struck me as an odd position to take, so it was nice to see IBM pushing hard against it and stressing how importance it is to have humans in the mix who can focus on the problems that computers simply can’t solve. We still get all the interesting work, and there will always be more of it. I’m looking forward to using AI-infused tools to help me write Ansible playbooks for scenarios that I’m not fully familiar with the syntax of yet.

The thing about the keynotes is that they’re recorded, so I could go back and watch them later. Since there were regular, unrecorded sessions happening during the keynotes, I generally preferred to take advantage of my on-site presence there to attend those instead. Since this was my first time at this event and it had been quite some time since I’d been to an IBM-focused event, I decided to focus on my particular area of interest, IBM Z and LinuxONE, rather than branching too much out into other sessions around Power or Quantum. Part of my role at this event was also as a room moderator, so there were several sessions that I was required to be at, thankfully the colleague who was assigning the room monitoring duty was aware of our interests and they were sessions I wanted to be in anyway.

Of particular note, were the sessions about the rack-mount IBM z16, and there were a pair of sessions that dove deep into this. The first was Explore IBM Z’s first-ever rack mount options for IBM z16 and IBM LinuxONE by the legendary Kenny Stine. It was a real pleasure to meet Kenny after years of me begging him for technical review and early access to IBM Z internals photos so I could prepare my technical “tour” blog posts that I publish on IBM Developer. Given that I’m already pretty deep into the technical territory here, including a blog post on the topic, I knew what I was getting into when I joined his session, but I always leave these with a few more tidbits than I knew before. In Kenny’s talk I really benefited from the historical perspective that he brought to the discussion as he was comparing the systems over time and explaining just how different the IBM z16 with the IBM Telum chip is from its predecessors.

Bonus, he had a Telum chip with him that he passed around the audience. It was my first time getting to hold one!

The other talk of note on this topic was Interactive Step-by-Step Planning for new rack mount format for IBM z16 and LinuxONE 4. This session featured hands-on experience from Jim Fyffe of Evolving Solutions, Inc. where they received a rack-mount z16 and shared the unboxing, installation, and general impressions of putting it into production. I listened to an IBM z/Action! podcast that he was on back in July, but I loved this presentation because it had photos of their installation process! And a lot more details than the 20 minute podcast. Plus, I learned about the IBM z16 Rack Mount Bundle (3932-AGZ) section of the documentation that has lots of cool documents around installation, port planning, and cabling best practices. I’m not even being sarcastic, I used to work in data centers and this stuff is pure gold when you’re planning a setup.

I went to several sessions around implementation of a hybrid cloud design, with the mainframe remaining a key component of the infrastructure while bringing in cloud-based services, and Kubernetes. One of the last sessions I went to of the entire event was even focused on breaking up the monolith, and clarity around the journey you’re about to embark on if you’re migrating very old systems that still work.

I was also invited to participate in an open source on IBM Z panel on Tuesday afternoon, “From Ansible to Zowe: Opening the mainframe for a modern, scalable, inclusive & secure enterprise.” Due to shifting travel schedules, the panelist lineup was shuffled up a bit last minute, so I was a late addition and we only had a single sync up call prior to the panel. Thankfully, Joe Winchester was a great moderator, all of us panelists seemed to work quite naturally together, and we had a thoughtful and engaging audience.

The event featured a “Sandbox” which was basically an Expo Hall where IBM, partners, and related organizations showed off their latest featured products. It was particularly fun for me though because I finally got to “meet” the life-size IBM z16 LEGO model! Since I first learned about it via Think 2023, I’ve been quite enamored with it and I even took some time to interview the masterminds behind it for a blog post on IBM community: All about the life-size IBM z16 LEGO® brick model!.

I even got my wish granted to flip the colors to “orange” so it was effectively an IBM LinuxONE (sans badge, bummer!).

It was also technically the first time I got to see an IBM z16 in person. I haven’t been traveling as much this year, so I haven’t made it to a client center or otherwise to see one, with the proper doors. This was the plexiglass version though, which has all the fun lights that allow you to see the internals.

It was the first event I’d been to since 2020 that lasted more than a couple days, so I received a fast refresher in what these longer conferences are like: tiring and inspiring! I walked away with a lot of notes based on conversations I had with people that inspired ideas and plans. Once this year’s IBM Z Day extravaganza is behind us and I have some breathing room, it’ll be great to get to work on those ideas.

Filed under: events, tech, travel, work

Changing the font… on a typewriter!

Thursday, Oct 5th, 2023 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

If you’re at all familiar with mechanical typewriters, you know that changing the font isn’t really an option. That changed with the emergence of some of the most popular electric typewriters, the IBM Selectrics. These are notable for being driven by a typing ball which can be easily swapped out. Voila, new font! Many models, like my IBM Selectric II even support pitch of both 10 and 12, with different balls, of course.

When I had my Selectric professionally tuned up a couple months ago, I started my ball collection by buying a Script ball from the repair shop. I’ve since expanded to Etsy and eBay to expand what is starting to become a funny collection.

I’m particularly interested in the fact that it wasn’t just IBM creating balls, I have a pair of GP Technologies balls that are specifically labeled “Aetna” which leads me to believe they were fonts used within said insurance company. They Aetna Elite and Aetna Gothic are nice fonts though!

The variety of containers for storing the balls has also been notable. The GP Technologies balls came new (unsealed!) in little transparent ball containers that have a cap, and a couple of the IBM ones had the red holders, which are probably my favorite aesthetically. I may even 3D print some additional ones for my homeless type balls when I have the time for that project.

The third step in this collection process has been ordering modern fonts. Modern fonts? Indeed! There has been work done on creating 3D printer files of type balls with more modern and distinctive fonts, which lead me to the for Austin Selectric Rescue where the owner prints various balls. I swiftly made a purchase and eagerly awaited the delivery, which happened while I was traveling for work.

Unbeknownst to me, I was one of the first people to order and there was a small snafu with the printing of the balls. On the bright side, that means I now have some spare type balls that I can use for art projects. Plus, as one of the first orders he tossed in a couple extras that also weren’t suitable for use, but will make some fun projects.

But it did mean I had to wait a few days for replacements. It was OK though, when I returned from aforementioned work trip I discovered my Selectric wouldn’t power on. Oh, no! I had nearly resigned to taking it back to the repair shop (25 minutes away!) when I instead decided to scour reddit and was pleasantly surprised by a 9 year old post that solved my problem. In my case, it was the switch in the back right corner needed to be nudged, and removing the case is quite simple.

The balls I ordered were:

  • Vogue – a classic art deco typeface, because I like art deco
  • Comic Mono – a monospace version of Comic Sans, because it’s funny to do that to my poor typewriter
  • Papyrus – it’s… the Papyrus font we all know and love, or hate? It’s distinctive, and familiar as a modern font, so that’s fun

There are several others in the shop, including some other classic typewriter fonts. Your Selectric can really get a new life masquerading as all kinds of old mechanical typewriters!

Then I was able to try out the new type balls! They work great.

Folks have commented that they won’t last as long as the originals and some efforts are under way to get some metal 3D printers involved, but typewriters are a hobby of mine, and I have 5 of them, so none of them are getting daily use. Plus, I now have 9 type balls, and so they’re only used very, very occasionally for small projects.

My next project will be making a cloth cover for my Selectric, because dust is the enemy of typewriters. I’m not particularly adept at using a sewing machine, but I do have one and I think it might be fun to try.

Filed under: typewriter

Open Mainframe Summit 2023

Wednesday, Oct 4th, 2023 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Back in September of 2022 the first major in-person Open Mainframe Summit was held, I wrote about it here: Open Mainframe Summit 2022. After a year, it was a delight to get back together this year for an Open Mainframe Summit in Las Vegas with project participants and see how much progress had been made across projects.

The event was co-located with the 2023 IBM TechXchange Conference, which provided a venue and platform for the event.

The day began with a series of keynotes, led off by a welcome from IBM’s Jason Gartner, directly followed by the Open Mainframe Project Executive Director, John Mertic, who shared various stats and updates about the project.

From there, Joe Winchester showcased a series of clients, personas, and use cases for Zowe, which makes everything from critical operations to training easier on z/OS.

A diversity panel followed Joe, where several women from various aspects of the mainframe ecosystem offered up their experiences, and an ally on the panel shared how you can help support minorities in tech by elevating their voice and offering a seat at the table. The final keynote was on mentorship, and it was mine!

I was really thrilled to be asked to give this keynote session. I was wrapping up our summer session with a pair of great mentees when I pulled together this session, so it was especially nice to have that fresh experience as I put together an overview of the program, along with suggestions for both mentors and mentees. I have uploaded a PDF of my slides here: Open_Mainframe_Summit_-_Illuminating_Pathways_for_Our_Future_Innovators.pdf


Thanks to Sudharsana Srinivasan for taking a photo during my talk!

While I was there, I also was able to meet up with John Mertic who signed my copy of his book, Open Source Projects – Beyond Code. He also signed another copy of the book that another participant brought, and told us then that these were the first two he had signed, exciting!

Later in the day, I teamed up with my co-lead of the Linux Distributions Working Group, Sarah Julia Kriesch, to give a talk on the progress the group had made over the past year. Of particular note, we’ve continued on the path of collaborating on bug fixes and were excited about the launch of openQA for several of the distributions that includes the health of s390x too. It was also a nice time to showcase the new listing of Developer Resources available to open source projects for development on s390x. A PDF of slides from our talk are here: Open_Mainframe_Summit_-_Linux_Distributions_WG_2023.pdf

Throughout the day I spent a bit of time in COBOL sessions, learning about the latest with the COBOL Programming Course and how COBOL Check has been incorporated into the latest installment of their course. COBOL Check itself had a dedicated session, where we learned about how they were influenced by JUnit to support test-driven development for COBOL.

I also attended a couple sessions about work being done around z/OS Open Tools, which includes a sort of software “package” manager, and an example of how one organization is managing program versions and environment in production. I also enjoyed a session around hybrid cloud where IBM Z is being incorporated into environments that also include the cloud, with a strong focus on the use of OpenShift. In another sessions, they went deep into how they maintain air-gapped OpenShift deployments on IBM Z, an important topic that doesn’t just impact IBM Z, but is important to keep active for other environments that are more sensitive to network connections inside their environments.

In all, it was a very rewarding event for me. There were some great conversations and I have some new ideas of things to work on in the coming months. I had a debriefing meeting with the rest of the program committee this week about ways we can improve things for attendees, especially around making sure people know where/when the sessions are in such a big venue! I’m happy to chat with anyone who has further feedback though, so please do reach out.

In case you missed it, there will be a second Open Mainframe Summit coming up on November 1st in New York City, and co-located with Open Source in Finance Forum. I won’t be at that one, so I’ll need people to tell me how it went!

Filed under: events, mainframes, tech, work

Labor Day weekend delicacies

Friday, Sep 29th, 2023 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Over Labor Day weekend half the household was sick, and the rest appeared to be heading in the same direction. In a sense, I’m glad we didn’t make plans for the long weekend, since we wouldn’t have been able to keep them.

So instead of going anywhere, we stayed close to home and did some cooking and baking. I like baking, but I wouldn’t say I do a lot of it, and cooking is quite unusual for me, but we have a plum tree in our back yard and our neighbor gifted us with a lot of tomatoes. What was I to do?

First up, I decided to make fresh tomato sauce. I used this recipe with the Instant Pot. We picked up some fresh carrots and onions at the local farmers market, and used the fresh tomatoes we had.


The cooking method meant I didn’t have to chop things too finely, they cooked up nicely and then a handheld immersion blender made short work of the cooked vegetables, quickly turning them into a sauce. The handheld immersion blender was a purchase for this project, but one that I am quite impressed with. When I saw all those whole vegetables in the pot I wasn’t sure how they’d turn into a sauce, but it worked great! And a small can of tomato paste brought it all together.


Honestly it was a bit bland, but it was a solid tomato sauce that I’ve been enjoying. It only used half our tomatoes though, so the next day I decided to try and make a more spicy version with several hot peppers, and made an overly spicy version. Oops. I froze most of that sauce, but honestly I’m not sure if we’ll end up eating all of it.

Next up was going out to our plum tree! We have way too many plums, our poor tree is being weighed down by them. But the boys and I went and gathered a harvest, even though it barely put a dent in the bounty.

We took them all inside, rinsed them, and I got to work on turning the first 2lbs of them into a jar and a half of plum jam (recipe), and then later did another 2lbs for a total of 3 jars. I’ll mention now that I’m not actually a raw plum enthusiast. I’ll eat a couple here and there, but that’s about it. Plum jam, on the other hand, is a sweet delicacy that I’m very much enjoying!



It’s also easier than I thought to make jam. I think I’d always known this in the abstract, but a jar of jam from the store is not very expensive, fresh fruit is expensive, and there’s the time invested in cutting up dozens of tiny plums, simmering them, and then cleaning up the mess afterwards. I’ll probably do it again just so the fruit doesn’t go to waste and because it was a fun activity to do with the boys.

Finally, the dessert! I decided to make plum cobbler (recipe). Like the jam, the plums in the cobbler cook up very nicely and end up being a dish that I had an unexpected fondness for. But at 8 cups of plums, it’s a big dish, and I think we all tired of it after a couple days. Maybe I’ll do a smaller batch or plan with larger pool of diners if I do it again.


It turned into a nice way to spend the long weekend, and by the end of the weekend we were starting to feel a bit better. This particular illness came in waves that hit us all pretty hard and caused a couple nights of very little sleep for us parents. But at least we had some tasty things to enjoy!

Filed under: family, food

Summer fun and chores, chocolate, cars, and fish

Friday, Sep 8th, 2023 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

The first Tuesday in August is National Night Out. I seem to recall it was held at the BART station last year, and we stumbled upon it accidentally while passing by the setup earlier in the day. Now that I’m more hooked into the local parent groups, I’m starting to discover these activities quite a bit earlier, so this year I actually made plans to meet up with our friend (and sometimes caretaker for the boys) Rebeca at Lake Chabot for the edition of it this year.

They had police horses that Aaron gathered the courage to pet, firetrucks that Aaron could climb up in, all while Adam explored the large grassy fields, marina, and generally enjoyed being outdoors in a park we haven’t spent a ton of time in.


Another evening Adam was rummaging around in my stuff in my home office (hey!) and found the Linux license plate that Compaq gave out back in 2000. I wasn’t the original owner, but it has been kicking around my office for some time without a home, and he excitedly told me that we should hang it up. Sounds good!

We did.

We wandered around the house replacing light bulbs and batteries another night, and the air filters for our HVAC system and air purifiers another. It actually turned these chores that had been piling up into a more fun and present experience. Instead of the boring manual labor of doing this tedious around-the-house work, I had a couple pint-sized helpers who would follow simple instructions like “bring me the screwdriver” or “bring me that trash bag” and enjoyed doing it.

One evening while out in the yard I even fixed the irrigation sprinklers. We had a monthly gardener for a while last year and on one of his visits he clipped one of the sprinkler heads and caused it to crack, which made the whole system unusable. Now, we don’t actually use it, so fixing it seems a bit silly, but the heads are less than $3 each and replacement is easy. Why not fix it? Plus, it was hot out, so it might be fun for the boys to play in the sprinklers!

Well, I quickly learned why we don’t use pop-up irrigation sprinklers with little kids. The damage a gardener did once was nothing compared to what a soggy kid who wants to clean his Cozy Coupe will do to a sprinkler head. I started with one broken one, and ended up replacing three. Oops. Though I guess I should be grateful that it was so easy to fix and they didn’t break anything more severely.

One of the reasons I’d been so eager to get out on a weeknight, or have more activities like fixing things, was that Adam hadn’t begun TK yet, and we had a (wonderful!) babysitter filling in while we were between au pairs for a few weeks. Unfortunately, due to the large price tag of hiring an hourly babysitter for what was effectively full time, we had her precisely cover while I was at work, not a moment more. That meant I had a bit more time with the boys than usual on weeknights, and that meant coming up with more activities to keep them engaged. At 2.5 and 4.5 years old, both are maturing in the direction that they can do solo play for longer stretches, so I’ve been able to get more chores done while still caring for them (and sometimes a little more work), a fact I was especially grateful for while juggling so much each day.

The week we matched with our new au pair, we went out to a local book shop to pick up some locally themed gifts and discovered the Ghirardelli Ice Cream and Chocolate Factory Outlet over in San Leandro. Having played tourist in San Francisco many times at the founding location that isn’t actually a factory now, it was a lot of fun to park in the lot for the actual current factory and enjoy their new ice cream parlor that opened up inside. The boys and I shared a brownie sundae.

Afterwards, we had dinner at The Original Mels Diner just down the street, which is the cousin of Mel’s in San Francisco, which we used to go to relatively frequently. The boys got their dinner in little paper cars, which I was pretty envious of until the amazing cornbread that went along with my turkey dinner arrived.

The first full weekend our new au pair was here turned out to be quite an eventful one. First was the Castro Valley Cruise Night. The town doesn’t shut down roads like for some of our annual festivals, but the boulevard is packed as people from all around the area make loops down the road in their classic and exotic cars. “Cruising” is frowned upon in most places, illegal in others, but for one night a year it is fun to get out with the rest of the community and enjoy seeing cars.

The next day we went up to San Francisco and showed our new au pair some of the classic tourist spots. Earlier that week we had ventured up to the city to check on some things at our condo, and ended up at Fogo de Chão where we made the surprising discovery that kids eat free there (though only Aaron was really into the whole experience). Our weekend visit was a much more exciting one though. We started off doing a near round-trip on the California Street cable car!


We got off near Grace Cathedral and walked down to the Cable Car Museum, which I was a bit worried would be too loud for my sound-sensitive kiddos, but Adam surprised me and spent the rest of the day asking to go back.

After the museum, we did the steep but thankfully mostly downhill walk down to Pier 39 where we had lunch and visited the sea lions. The big adventure for the afternoon though was visiting Aquarium of the Bay. Aaron loves fish and other swimming things, so I’ve been wanting to take him to an aquarium for months. With our half off discount via the Oakland Zoo membership, this was the perfect opportunity, and it didn’t disappoint. It’s not a huge aquarium, but it has some wonderful fish tunnels and overall Aaron had a blast there.


Our final stop was to to the Musée Mécanique, which was quite crowded and everyone was getting tired at this point. I think the boys would have enjoyed it more if the circumstances had been different, I’ll have to keep it in mind for the future. From Fisherman’s Wharf, we hopped on a vintage street car and made our way back to BART to go home. A fun day, and a successful one of showing off how the Clipper cards and public transit around San Francisco works to our new au pair.

Living in beautiful-all-year California, the end of summer is kind of a vague thing, but with work getting busier, Adam going to TK, and generally some things changing in our household, these adventures actually did feel like a close to summertime.

Filed under: castro valley, events, family, food, kids, life, san francisco

I finally came home with an IBM Selectric II

Monday, Sep 4th, 2023 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I have a small collection of vintage typewriters. Until very recently, they were all completely mechanical and I’d avoided getting anything electric.

But since I work at IBM, I routinely get asked if I own an IBM Selectric.

The Selectric used to be ubiquitous in offices in the US, and it is memorable because it uses a “ball” to type with. The machine is still rather mechanical, but it has a motor drives the ball mechanism which is considerably more complicated than the traditional key slug design that traditional typewriters use. As an interesting bit of history, the USSR also bugged a series of US-based Selectrics in the 1970s in what may be considered the earliest keylogger.

I wasn’t going to get one. I’ve been advised that they’re incredibly complicated, take specialized expertise to fix them, and when they go wrong, they can really go wrong. But that nagging feeling was there, and when I saw a lonely IBM Selectric II for sale for $19.99 at a local thrift shop, I scooped it up and brought it home.

It was really loud when I plugged it in. But hey, the motor still worked!


Over the next few weeks I watched some videos about how they work, popped the lid off to see if I could identify the problem. I was able to pull out some super gross padding on the bottom and so it started to smell a bit better, and it is fun to poke around with.

Ultimately I had to admit defeat though. If I had more time, I may have tried harder to fix it myself, but the truth is I wasn’t actually enjoying the fix-up of this machine, like I have with the simpler fully mechanical ones. There were too many things going on, and when I noticed Berkeley Typewriter’s website has a “We Specialize in ALL IBM Typewriters” line front and center, I decided I wouldn’t delay any longer, and I should just take it in to have the experts. $400 later I had a repair receipt and a promise that it would be done within a month.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post our four year old son Adam came with me to the shop. Pretty much the most adorable thing to come out of all this was that the shop owner gave him a gutted President typewriter as a toy, and when he realized it was non-functional, he decided to try and fix it …”like mom does.” He popped open the top and started poking around inside with his toy tool set, an activity that took up a ton of time for several days. I’m so proud.

After a couple weeks I got a call that it was ready, and as soon as the weekend rolled around Adam and I piled into the car and went to pick it up. It turns out that it needed several parts replaced, so I suspect I would have struggled some in my attempts to fix it myself unless I went part hunting (again, with more time maybe I would have been up for it!). While I was there, I also decided to pick up an additional typing ball – this time in Script, which he sold to me in a beautiful little red IBM ball holder.

After browsing some listings, I’m certain that I’m going to end up collecting Selectric typing balls for use, it’s the only typewriter I have that you can change the font in!


Now safely at home and living happily behind me while I work, it’s actually quite lovely to use, and it’s been a huge hit with my kids. The keys are much easier to use than on any of my mechanical typewriters, so they can swiftly punch out a whole line without much effort, which they’re really enjoying. It’s a lovely little machine, and I am actually glad it joined my collection.

But really, this is the last one!

Filed under: berkeley, typewriter

Critters, typewriters, and cable cars

Tuesday, Aug 29th, 2023 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Our summer adventures have continued with a lot of trips to the zoo. We got an Oakland Zoo membership a couple months ago, and I quickly learned that our boys love going to the zoo, and since it’s less than 20 minutes away, it makes for a nice late afternoon getaway if I leave work a little early. It also makes for a simple outing on the weekend, which is what we did recently and went to the petting zoo part of the zoo for the first time.


Sadly, the rides on the outside of the zoo are not included in the membership, but with free parking it’s still an inexpensive activity that makes them very happy. Plus, we can pop into the zoo too! On one small day trip on a very hot day, the boys enjoyed a couple of the little kids rides, and then we took the gondola inside the zoo up to the top and right back down again before heading home.

In other animal news, we also spent one Saturday morning visiting the Sulphur Creek Nature Center. The only one of us who had been there before was Adam, who went with his first au pair back before the pandemic! They have a lot of birds that are being rehabilitated, as well as some rabbits and at least one coyote, and an indoor discovery center where Aaron really enjoyed visiting the snakes. Definitely a place to go back to.

I’ve recently taken some modified advice from my therapist and started taking the boys out on separate adventures that cater to their specific interests. It can be stressful to take them out together, since they have very different ways of experiencing outings. At the zoo Aaron loves to stare at the animals, where Adam would rather run through fields and quickly inspect each unfamiliar symbol on the zoo map. When they’re out with one parent, it can be tricky to cater to both, and even when we go out as a whole family, we find ourselves dragged from one thing to the next rather quickly to keep them both happy. I’m sure it’ll get easier as they mature and can each better cope with doing what their brother wants to do, but for now it’s sometimes just easier to take them out separately.

In the spirit of this, I took one weekend this month and did an Adam day and then an Aaron day.

Adam likes typewriters, and I wanted to get my IBM Selectric II cleaned up and repaired. So I decided to take Adam for a drive up to Berkeley Typewriter. It’s a 25 minute drive each way, so there was a bit of a risk, but I didn’t have to be worried. I got my estimate and turned over my typewriter, and then we spent a half hour exploring typewriters in the store portion of the repair shop. Adam delightfully went around to various typewriters writing his name.


And I got to see the typewriter that Tom Hanks donated to the shop! Tom Hanks rather famously collects and uses vintage typewriters, and I first learned about his shop donations after he donated a typewriter to Philadelphia Typewriter. It was a delight to learn that he had gifted one to my local shop as well. And it’s a beautiful red IBM Selectric at that!


As a bonus, we brought home a professionally gutted typewriter that the boys could use as a toy. Adam now regularly plays typewriter repair shop, where he tries to “fix” it with a variety of tools. It’s adorable.

On Sunday it was Aaron’s day! He’s been asking for MONTHS to ride a cable car. He knows about them because I like cable cars and some of his books about San Francisco feature them. In general, my little two and a half year old likes public transit anyway, so my goal with him on this beautiful August morning was to take BART (train #1!) up to San Francisco and take him on some public transit downtown. First stop, a cable car!

I made the mistake of going to Powell, somehow forgetting that at the height of summer there’d be a huge line for the cable car on a Sunday morning. Instead of waiting in that line, we hopped on a vintage street car to the less popular California Street cable car line. I was quickly reminded how tricky it was bringing a lively two year old, a folded stroller, and a diaper bag onto crowded public transit by myself. People are incredibly kind, and someone even gave up their seat for Aaron on the street car, but it was an ordeal. Once settled in, we did have a nice time on the street car though!


As expected, when we arrived at the California Street cable car stop we were able to hop right on board. Due to having a stroller, we had to sit inside, but it worked out well for his first cable car ride. He could walk around a little inside, and we did the full length of the line, and then took it back to where we began.


From there we walked past Ferry Building to where the MUNI Metro line surfaces and took that down to the Giants baseball stadium, which he enjoyed seeing. We then ended up with brunch at one of our old favorites, the Delancey Street Restaurant.


It was a long morning for Aaron, but ultimately a very successful one. We took the MUNI Metro back to BART and made our way home after brunch, wrapping up our weekend adventures!

Filed under: animals, berkeley, family, kids, life, san francisco, typewriter

TK and childcare

Saturday, Aug 26th, 2023 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Back in May we welcomed our third au pair. I noted at the time, “it’s a tremendous relief to have an end to childcare troubles in sight.” Well, it’s true that there were none in sight, but it sadly didn’t mean that they didn’t arise. The arrangement with that au pair lasted just a couple months as a cascade of issues arose that we ultimately couldn’t work past together. It was the first time we’ve had this experience, and I’m certain it’s going to be a blip in out experience with the program, but it was a stressful couple of months.

It also reminded me how challenging the childcare question is in the United States today. Our children are our most precious pieces of our lives, and yet I have to find it in myself to trust another person to care for them for 40+ hours a week so I can pursue my career. It’s what I wanted, but I guess I didn’t expect that I’d be leaving a chunk of my heart at my office door every day, or how painful (in addition to inconvenient!) it is when the childcare situation is not going as you’d like. It’s also left entirely up to brand new parents to figure this all out. We don’t have support from our government to find or secure safe childcare, and while there are a lot of options, many are expensive or so wildly exclusive that they take months or years to enroll. Ultimately, it’s a source of low-level stress even when things are going well.

But life goes on, and I’m hopeful that we’re on the path to a more settled time moving forward with a new au pair. With that, Adam transitioned from the program he was in to Transitional Kindergarten! He’s now going to his local elementary school, which just over a half a mile from home, allowing us to walk him to and from school most days.


Sign made by one of his former au pairs on his first day!

Moving to a school district schedule will definitely take some adjusting. We spent most of our adult lives traveling when it’s cheapest and taking vacations during unusual times. Now that we’re bound to the district schedule, we’ll be going with the pack. Even our visits back to Philadelphia will be more limited than before and during traditional break times around holidays, but it’s my hope that we can spend a nice chunk of the summer there most years. I guess we’ll see! With the last few years disrupted by so many unforeseen changes, including a pandemic, I’m reluctant to make too many definitive declarations of plans. It’s exciting though, our first little one is going to school!

Filed under: family, kids, life
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