An internet startup? In West Hollywood? What is this, 1998?

So I said I was interested, and I interviewed, was hired, and now I’m  System Administrator at Geni, Inc. There are about 35 of us working there, building and operating the www.geni.com web offering.The work is interesting, the people are friendly, the food is great, and I consider myself to be in for the long haul.

In order to accomplish my daily participation, we had to consider how and where to live. We moved the trailer from Temecula to Van Nuys, and we’re staying at the Birmingham RV Park, a mostly residential RV park on Balboa Avenue. Two months ago, I didn’t even know where Van Nuys was. Today I live there.

Living in L.A. is a trip. I’ll be writing more about this in a future article.

Last week, we were in Florida for Passover.

We got into Ft. Lauderdale Airport on Friday night about 10 PM. Flights were uneventful (thank G-d) and my folks picked us up. Delray Beack is about 45 miles north of FLL airport, so we drove back, hit the IHOP for some late night food, and then went to my folks newly purchased winter-condo.

My folks bought a two bedroom, two bath unit in something called Kings Point, which should have been called Fort Dix. It looks like an array of army barracks.  Here’s a photo (more…)

US-95 here is the typical road through the desert. It offers the usual road-goes-on-forever-through-nothing trip that makes one glad for XM Radio. WIth a total trip of 101 miles, it wasn’t too bad. We enjoyed the trip, driving straight through from Henderson to the Needles Elks Lodge without a stop.

Needles is a Route-66 town, and there are lots of indications of such. I took the obligatory photo of an old Rt-66 era motel.

We’ll be here till Sunday morning, then, we think, will head over US-93 to Phoenix.

On Friday I went back for the morning davening (prayer) and second reading. At this point, I expected a bunch of adult men who would perform the service with the usual weekday efficiency, but what I found was very different. There were adults in costume, children in costume, great joy, and a very friendly bunch of folks. A few photos are below.

Tomorrow (Thursday) is Purim, and we’ll go to hear the Megilla read at Chabad here in Las Vegas. It’s time to make dinner.

Today the truck turned over 200,000 miles.

Usually, on the first day of a trip, I’m thinking about how far from home I am, how long it will take to return, and whether anything isn’t quite right, before we get too far away. This time, I realized that, although we are getting closer to various destinations, we’re not really getting any farther away from anything. If a problem occurs, it will be resolved on the road, where we choose.
As the day wore on, this feeling of disconnectedness got stronger and stronger, until by end of day, it was replaced by a bit of homesickness.

When we got to our overnight stop, the Elks Lodge in Wasco, CA, we were greeted in the Lodge with such friendliness and welcome, that all my doubts and troubled feelings were banished. I went to bed happy.

Since I run Linux, I have somewhat special requirements. I didn’t want something that would be bound to iTunes or Windows Media Player. After careful Googling, I got a Sandisk, Sansa View. It holds 8 GB (and there is a 16GB version out as well.) It’s possible to mount the device as a USB drive, and to drag and drop files, so no special software is needed. A nice device, well designed, well built, easy to use.

What I learned. Media players communicate in several ways. There is a protocol or mode called Media Transfer Protocol and another called, I believe, MSC, where the device appears as a drive. Windows Media Player uses MTP to communicate. This allows transfer of playlists and other data besides simple song files. I was interested in standards based stuff, so I wanted to put the device into MSC mode and mount it as a drive.

The undocumented feature on the Sansa View is accessed as follows:

1. Turn on the Sansa View by pressing the slide switch UP.
2. Now put the player in Hold mode by moving slide switch DOWN.
3. When the Lock icon appears, hold the left button (left part of the thunbwheel) down until the padlock blinks off then on again.
4. Now plug in the USB cord to the player.

If you are running Gnome, or KDE, you should automount the player on /media/Sansa Disk. If not, you’ll have to locate it’s /dev/sdX device node and mount it somewhere. Note that this will also work on a Macintosh, since it’s really a Unix box underneath. Shhhh. Don’t tell!

Once I had the player mounted, I just used rsync to syncronize my music directory with the player:
$ rsync -rvp /path/to/music/* /media/Sansa Disk/MUSIC
This assumes that under /path/to/music, you have a directory structure full of MP3s.

When the rsync or other copy is complete, UNMOUNT the player (right click on the player icon, or use the umount command at the command line) Then unplug the player. A window will open on the player that says “Refresh Database.” There may be a long pause where you think that the player is crashed, but stay with it. You’ll be listening to music soon enough.

Remember to unlock the Hold switch, or you won’t be able to do anything with the beast.

Enjoy.