Santa Monica Farmers' Market

Actually, there are several Farmers' Markets in Santa Monica. This is one we can walk to from my mom's place.

These prickly pears were growing on the wall of a house we
passed on the way to the market.

We went to the Saturday Market at Virginia Avenue
park at Cloverfield and Pico.

I bought half a dozen vegie-jalapeno tamales. Mmmmmm.

The juice was soooo good.

You can double click on the picture to see all the details. For all the environmental consciousness, there were sure a lot of big cars in the parking lot and I don't recall seeing a bike rack. But I'm sure I just needed to look harder. (I know Ropi what you're thinking - more on where the garbage goes.)

Yes, they're potatoes.

This is the underside of the orchid flower, but this 'mask' caught my eye.

Walking home with our bounty.

As you may have guessed, we got my mom's internet working again. J and M, the wifi info is under the router.

Brian the WLA Bike Guy

When we walked home from the Farmers' Market Saturday morning, we passed this garage with bikes. Brian, it turns out, is an out of work carpenter who told us that he's always worked on bikes. With the economy so bad, he's now getting old bikes, fixing them up and selling them. Since we'd been thinking about getting some bikes to use while in LA, we looked around.
Here's his office. He checks various sources for bikes and then gets them back into shape. J rode her 'new' bike home. He was still working on the one I chose.








I told Brian I had a blog and got his ok to post this. This is one veteran's way of eating during a recession. And it's a great service for people looking for a reasonably priced bike AND it's great for recycling. (Pun intended.)

In the water at Venice Beach

We parked about ten blocks from the beach where there was free on street parking and enjoyed the walk down Rose Avenue to the beach. Unfortunately, we don't have bikes here, it would have been an easy bike ride, but we didn't have time to walk all the way from my mom's and back. Having grown up here, I took this beach for granted. But how many big cities have a natural sand beach like this with fair to great surf right in the city? (OK, now someone is going to say that no, the ship the sand in, but the beach is way to wide to do that.) But coming down for a visit from Anchorage, I always see it with different eyes. This is the view from the parking lot at the end of Rose at Venice Beach.
And this is from where we parked our towels.



J took her time getting into the water. It does feel chilly when you first go in, but your body quickly adjusts and it feels great. The easiest - and hardest - way to go in is to just run in a dive when it gets deep enough or white water from a wave is coming at you. It's cold fast, but then you are in.

Here's J all the way in. There were a bunch of sea birds out beyond her having some sort of party.

When J got out it was my turn. The surf wasn't too big, but I was able to catch three quick waves and ride them in. Heaven.




But I had an appointment with the eye doctor so we reluctantly tore ourselves away and walked back to the car. This is the parking lot at Venice Beach along the boardwalk. Not sure why they call it that since there are no boards and I don't remember there being boards.



Table top shops are set up in both directions.

Snow Leopard Black Screen Disease Cure (Maybe)

So far it's looking good. My computer is hooked up with the adapter cord and I don't touch the keyboard for five minutes and the screen doesn't go black. If you can't wait to find out what it is you can skip down to the solution at the bottom.

In hindsight it's 'obvious' but as previous posts show, I've been in contact with an Apple Help expert for over two weeks, we've tried all sorts of things, and nothing solved the problem, including a new power cord.

But two hours with an Apple Genius (I think using that word as a job title tends to diminish the word itself) named Hannah, and it appears we solved the problem. That two hours doesn't count the hour it took for them to see me when, for some reason, my appointment was lost. Fortunately, David who made my appointment yesterday was there and confirmed I had a 6pm appointment. David's sitting in the blue t-shirt on the left.





There was one more clue that emerged tonight. Up til now I haven't actually timed how long it took for the screen to go black. I knew it was around five minutes. But since we kept doing things and then turning off the computer and then waiting to see if it went black again, I was timing it over and over and it was always exactly five minutes after I stopped touching the keyboard.



They finally connected me with Hannah who tried a few things. One thing she did to see if it was my hard drive or something in the software I had on my hard drive, was load Snow Leopard from a separate hard drive onto my computer to see whether it would still shut down. At this point I don't remember what happened. I think it still shut down, but I'm not certain.

She set up a test identity to see if we logged on as another user. It didn't have the problem as the other user.

Then she checked for applications that loaded when I - as the user - turned on my computer. She took them out of the startup. That didn't fix it.

She did some other stuff with other things plugged into the computer.

I wondered why it was always five minutes. And she said, "hmmmm, what is set to happen in five minutes?" She checked my screen saver. That was set for five minutes and when she tried to change it the round rainbow came on and the screen locked.

THE SOLUTION

I had as my screensaver a slide show set up in an older iPhoto, maybe iPhoto 06 or 08. It was set to start in five minutes after I didn't touch the keyboard. She took one of the generic Apple screensavers and set it up instead. After five minutes instead of going black, it went to the screensaver and I could still use the computer.

Why Snow Leopard can't handle this old iPhoto slide show screensaver I don't know nor does Hannah. But once we turned it off and put on another screensaver, it stopped going to black.

But why only when the power adapter cord was on? We went into the sleep preferences. I had changed to sleep preference for the power adapter to an hour after it came back from the MacHaus and they'd both been reset for one minute. (I'm not exactly sure what I did at this time, but I know at some point I put it at an hour hoping that would stop it, but it didn't.) At that time we thought it was related to going to sleep. I didn't want it to go to sleep for longer so it wouldn't shut down. But I hadn't changed it for battery so it still went to sleep in one minute. So it would go to sleep before the screensaver was set to go on (which was five minutes.)

As I say, in hindsight the answer was 'obvious.'

This doesn't guarantee that the rest of you getting here searching "Snow Leopard Black Screen" or "Snow Leopard Blank Screen" (between 10 and 20 people a day) have exactly the same problem. Something in Snow Leopard is getting screwed up - on my computer - with something on the old iPhoto slideshow I was using as a screen saver. So if you have an old iPhoto slideshow for a screensaver, I'd change that first thing. If you don't have an old slide show as a screensaver, is there some possibility it is related to an old slide show or just even to an old photo shop picture coming up?

So far I've tested this about three times and it's worked fine. It never worked fine before this. One good part of this for others with the problem is that the software that is messing it up for me is an Apple product - iPhoto. So it is Apple's responsibility to figure out why this is happening and fix it. Not some other company's responsibility.

Good luck. And if this turns out to be your problem too, leave a comment.

Santa Monica Pier

It seemed we drove another mile in the parking garage in Santa Monica. This view is from the the almost top level where we parked. But the first two hours are free. This was yesterday. From there to the Apple Store, then some Israeli food, and off to the Santa Monica pier.

We parked a bit away where we could find a reasonably priced parking meter and could spend some tme on the beach walking to the pier. The weather was still feeling hot to our Alaska blood and plenty of people were there for an October Thursday afternoon.

Here's J getting her feet wet - her best birthday present.
(Today she got to go in all the way, but that'll have to wait.


Here's the pier from the beach. We found a stair going up to the pier.

Pier parking turned out to be fairly cheap. But you had to give them the $6
when you parked and if you were under the max, they refunded the extra.


Trapeze school anyone?

This is Orlando.

These two are looking south.

I'm back in the Apple store after seeing the eye doctor. But my appointment for 6pm was lost. Fortunately David who made the appointment was here and verified it and I'm now on standby.

Anchorage to LA

The terminal was pretty empty at 8:30am

I don't think the artist who did this mural anticipated that the airport would put ads up on top of the mural. Was this part of the 1% for the arts program? Is it legal to put ads on top of art works? It certainly shows a complete lack of aesthetic sense. Or is this an ad for people to become whale hunters?

Some of the destinations in the domestic terminal.

The flights are pretty full these days, even on a Wednesday in late September. I guess that's good to have full planes - less pollution per passenger.

Seattle's airport was a lot more crowded.

We scheduled a long enough stop in Seattle to meet our daughter for lunch.
But first we went out for some fresh air.

The eating choices inside security are pretty good.
But outside security they are pretty limited.
Since our daughter didn't have a ticket, we had to eat outside security.

Waiting at Seatac to take off.

A little out of Seattle.

I think these are the Channel Islands near Santa Barbara.

Closing in on LA.

LA's Hot

It feels really hot, though the car thermometer says it's only 77˚F.

I'm in the Santa Monica Apple store having them look at my MacBook checking out my Snow Leopard black screen. I'm for changing the name to Black Leopard. I guess they retired panther. Anyway, my trip photos are on my computer which I can't use it right now. And my mom's internet isn't working so I couldn't post last night. I'll put some up of the trip from Anchorage to LA. We did get to have a two hour lunch with our daughter at Seatac.

My mom is doing quite well, walking around with a cane.

[Update Oct. 3 - see this later post for what the problem was for me. Doesn't mean it will work for you, but it seems to have solved my problem.]

Happy Birthday Dad - Goodbye Sylvia

Today's my dad's birthday. He'd be 98 if he were still alive. He was born into a totally different world. Before electricity, cars, airplanes had taken over the world. His father was a wine merchant who would travel around Europe filling up people's wine cellars. He lived through WW I in Germany, often hungry. Then, without going anywhere, he landed in pre-Nazi Germany. He was lucky. He had an aunt in Chicago, a sister of my grandmother, who sponsored him to come to the United States. After several years of working on this, he arrived in 1934. By the time the US got into WW II, my father was a citizen and in the army. He got a good break, not sure why, and was stationed in Key West, Florida. So my mom, whom he'd just married, could go along.

After the war they moved back to Chicago and then to LA where my mother's brother had ended up. But the marriage between two German Jewish refugees didn't work out. But they maintained very amiable relations for the rest of his life and I stayed with my dad many weekends as I was growing up. When we were together, his time was totally spent on me and we had a lot of great adventures, especially when we went off for two weeks in the summer. He introduced me to so many things that are still important parts of my life - the outdoors, foreign films, art, theater, critical thinking, to name a few.

He's been gone 21 years now. And tonight, as we are getting ready to go visit my mom in LA, we learned that another close family friend (relative through marriage on my wife's side) died in her 90s. You can't be surprised when someone dies in their 90's and logically you can't be too upset. But it still tears a hole in your soul when anyone important in your life dies. Sylvia had a good and rich life til the end. She was bright and caring and alert and someone I always looked forward to seeing. I did stop by and visit her and Mose on my last trip to LA. I'd been hoping to see her again this trip.

I've got a little more to do before going to bed and taking off tomorrow. If all goes well, we'll get to visit with our daughter for a couple of hours at Seatac.