The on-going renovations at Babycakes now involve the room in which they had been keeping their WLAN router. The router apparently had to be moved.

Unfortunately, it has been moved pretty much as far back on the property as it can be while remaining in-doors. As a result, the back patio is just about the only part of the premises open to the public where one can get a good signal, though a few people have computers that can handle the signal that reaches the rear of the interior dining area. Those who do still get slow and unreliable connections.

I don't know why the router wasn't instead moved into the attic or somesuch. I've heard some dark mutterings that the new owners no longer want to support a WLAN, but I've overheard one of them explicitly saying otherwise, and they strike me as honest guys. Further, I think that they have made a practice of preännouncing every prior change that they thought might disturb customers, rather that yanking rugs out from under anyone.

In any case, after a few days of the new arrangement, I noticed that there are now far fewer people in the place at night. I cannot say with certainty that this results from the withdrawal of the WLAN, but that's my inference. It's a pity because I had noticed business picking-up significantly in the days prior to this change.

This photo was taken at night, in the yellow glow of lights illuminating a parking lot. It's of the same building that has the collapsing staircases and balcony photographs of which I've posted to this 'blog.

There was a seemingly derelict fellow on a bicycle in the parking lot as I set up to take the photo. He was amazed that I would want to photograph the building at all. I responded that the building had many interesting features. He declared that an amazing feature is that shown here: I'm not sure what sort of room is immediately on the other side of that window, but beyond the pile of stuff there is what appears to be a shower curtain. The fellow on the bicycle has decided, in all seriousness, that the pile of stuff is being thus hidden by the occupant from his friends, in a shower stall or tub — a theory which seems to imply a distinct lack of privacy for anyone previously using the shower, and that the occupant doesn't anticipate his friends ever looking into that window.

The bicyclist and I discussed the exterior staircases and balcony. He railed against the landlord, and thence against rental prices in San Diego. He opined that the Arabs (pronounced /ˈeɹæb/) might be responsible.

As I packed-up my stuff, he pedalled off into the night.

Phillip made a surprise appearance at Babycakes yester-day. When I called him earlier, he gave no hint that he was in San Diego (as opposed to the Solipsistic Bay Area). During the course of our conversation, I walked from my home to Babycakes. I inferred from the noises from his end that he was running errands in his car. At some point, he was heard ordering coffee. Then I spotted him in Babycakes; he had ordered the coffee there.

Phillip hadn't been told of my mutton-chop sideburns, but now understands indeed what sort of change to my appearance has been effected such that a few people have since failed to recognize me. (For his part, Phillip has grown a mustache and goatee.)

Setting aside further discourse on what is and should be called the Midwest, I guess that the largest part of our conversation involved politics. (Phillip and I disagree on many issues, but neither of us looks forward to the next Administration, as we both see the two major-party candidates as each a technocratic centrist not really all that much different from his opponent.) We also talked about mutual friends, at least one of whom Phillip hopes to rope into hanging-out somewhere during his visit, about relatives, about the changes at Babycakes, about computers, and about hats.

Our conversation continued until Babycakes closed; we went thence to City Deli for a late dinner. Afterwards, we walked back to where he'd parked and talked until about 01:40.

Although I was told that the baby grand piano of David's Coffee Place would be replaced by an upright piano at Babycakes, the latest that I'd heard is that they'd since determined not to do this. Now, I'm not sure that they've really determined against it; it may be merely that they are postponing installation of the upright piano until after renovation of the south room (in which the baby grand piano used to be).

I don't actually know where the mass of opinion is amongst the present customer base. Chris, the regular pianist, used to do 90-minute medleys, drawing largely upon popular music from the age of Gershwin and Porter. Some people find it hard to connect to such music, and for them it was made harder still because Chris chose other than dance arrangements. Many people are only comfortable with music with the rhythms of dance, even if no one is going to be dancing.

The other thing that has happened, musically, at Babycakes, is that they are drawing on a different sort of music for the sound system, and playing it much louder. I was told that this change was because they now sell beer and wine, as opposed to being just a coffee place. I'm not sure how to interpret this reasoning unless the idea is that, because they sell some of the same product as would a bar, they feel that their music should be more like that of a bar.

On this score, I can tell where the mass of opinion is amongst the present customer base; it's mostly negative. People want to be able to converse without raising their voices, and they're not pleased to have the sins of the '70s and '80s return.

Now, I refer to the present customer base, because the new owners presumably want a larger customer base, and that may mean a very different customer base. None-the-less, I don't think that many people are particularly going to want to shout over Olivia Newton John as they sip merlot or nibble on raspberry tarts.

A few days ago, Phillip asked to just what the term Midwest refers (this question leading towards a more vexing question). I told him that the region was somewhat vaguely defined, but that in my mind it included the states from Ohio to-and-including Nebraska, and those to their north.

(The more vexing question is then of why it should be called the Midwest, when it is geographically centered to the east of the geographical center of even just the contiguous United States.)

In the course of our conversation, I consulted a 1975 edition of The American Heritage Dictionary, which said that the Midwest ran roughly from Ohio through Iowa, which is one state to the east of Nebraska (thus centering the Midwest even further to the east). Later, I discovered that the United States Bureau of the Census includes Nebraska in the Midwest. Further, some would include West Virginia and Kentucky, and some would exclude Missouri.

For now, it is the Question of Nebraska that exercises me. I have placed a poll at my 'blog.

I often pass this granite building: Erected in 1912, at the south-east corner of the intersection of Robinson Avenue and Third Avenue, it was originally the First Church of the United Brethren in Christ. According to what I've read, it served a Free Methodist congregation from 1950 until the late '60s or early '70s. (In 1946, the United Brethren in Christ had merged with the Evangelical Association to form the United Evangelical Church; perhaps they'd consolidated places of worship.) From 1971 until 1988, the building housed a gallery for art (with a theme of the American West), and still has doors carved to read Thackery Gallery. In the late '90s, it was turned into six apartments.

In the interval since I installed a new Linux driver for my AMD ATI video adapter, I have had fewer incidents of being logged-out when using Firefox, but there were still a few pages such that I would be logged out of my Linux session when I attempted to scroll through them with Firefox.

Yester-day or to-day, AMD ATI released a newer version of the driver, which seems to have resolved the remaining problem.

[Addendum (2008:08/27): Ah, I wrote too soon. The frequency of the problem has dropped further, but Firefox will still cause me to be logged out of the linux session when I scroll at least one of those pages.]

Last night, walking from Robinson Avenue to University Avenue, I took the alley between 4th Avenue and 5th Avenue. At about the half-way point, a grimy fellow was standing before a dumpster, laughing without pause, in a manner reminiscent of Dwight Frye.

Amongst other things, I've been hacking at the theme for this 'blog, fixing bugs and simply tweaking things more to my liking. While I'm at this task, visitors are occasionally going to find the 'blog either cosmetically flawed or just plainly dysfunctional. (And, tragically, they may find it thus after I'm finished.)

In the course of my hacking, I wanted to use the PHP function file_exists() to check amongst files within the theme directory. One possibility would be to hard-code a relative specification of the theme directory (the theme slug appended to wp-content/themes/), but that approach isn't robust; it would increase the ways in which the theme could be broken by external change or by cloning.

While WordPress has a function call to return a specification of the directory, it does so in the form of an HTTP URL, notwithstanding that there is a call that explicitly requests the theme URL, to the same effect; meanwhile, PHP function file_exists() will choke on a URL. I went prowling around the WordPress documentation, and did some code-diving, but didn't find a function call or global variable for anything more like a relative specification of the theme directory.

However, there is a function call for the URL of the 'blog — get_bloginfo('template_directory'). My hack to get the relative specification, which could preface file-specs that could be usefully handled by file_exists(), was

substr(get_bloginfo('template_url'),strlen(get_bloginfo('url')) + 1)

The + 1 is to account for the fact that returns to queries to get_bloginfo() for directory URLs don't have a terminal slash.

I received an IKEA catalogue in the mails to-day. They shouldn't have bothered, as I will not buy from them.

In 1999, IKEA proposed to the City of New Rochelle, NY, that they use eminent domain to steal the City Park neighborhood, so that IKEA could have the land for a store.

On the cover of the catalogue, it says

Home is the most important place in the world.

I imagine that some of the people in the City Park neighborhood felt that way about their homes.