BrianB's year in Review: 1996

 
1996 has been a year of interesting changes, although many things stayed the same.
The first of the year found me flying across the Atlantic ocean between Boston and London, in search of new and interesting experiences. Work was stale and I had lost interest, after a long period of 1995 building a product that I finally realized wouldn't be accepted in the marketplace. That trip took me around the world, and that story is elsewhere.
After coming back to the Bay Area, which has been my home for 7 years, I found myself purposefully homeless and threw myself on the mercy of friends. All part of my master plan to force me into a new mode of life. I decided to live in San Francisco, because I always wanted to live in The City, and because my research showed that housing in the South Bay where I worked at the time was awful. Awful expensive, and few good things available. Yeech, wall to wall carpeting.
After a few weeks I found this great place on Tennessee St. (Maps courtesy of Yahoo (SF)). It has all the advantages. Hardwood floors, nice lighting, industrial surroundings, parking, good freeway access, nice landlords. It's perfect for me, as it doesn't have the noise and cramped feel of the more urban parts of the city (like the mission), but it is near a few good restaurants, a natural food store, cafes, and the bay.
Here are some pictures of the place. Some of these images are large. Here's the front of the place, in its full peeling glory. Mine is the one on the left, and my poor late lamented honda sits in my garage.
Out my front door I see my neighbors, the industrial foreign bookstore, and just to the right out of the picture is the printing press.
This is the view when I walk up to my cafe, Thinker's.

This is my kitchen table and bookshelf. It's an old picture, and that bookshelf is overflowing already.

 
 
 
I wanted to settle down a little. My work project for Starlight Networks, Starware 2.0, was just being released and I had worked like a dog on it. A one man show, it was. It was a Netware-based video server, and I was quite proud of it. Then I had this nice house, and thought I'd like to spend some time living in it. I tried that for a little while, not working myself to death, but got bored. So I started looking at new jobs. As I changed jobs, I crashed my motorcycle, broke my leg, and got a great chance to stay at home. Broken legs do that.
 
After a few months, I realized my dream of having a cat in my life. At the SF SPCA
I found this great gray tiger, and I adopted him. SF SPCA is an neat place. Big holding cells, nice people, unusual policies. Just looking at their web page you can see how organized they are, with pages of adoption pictures updated weekly. Their amazing success in 1996 was a "no kill year", which means that no animals were euthanized unnecessarily. The only ointment is that they only accept a certain number of pets, and let others kill the ones they don't want to.
My cat, who they called Pippin, was kept for nearly 4 months. An older couple adopted him, but returned him because he was too aggressive. He bites and scratches. They gave the cat to one of their volunteers for "fostering", which means a trained observer can keep an eye on the animal to best judge the problem. Their resident cat psychologist, De Laur, spent a huge amount of time understanding him. She put him through a series of medications before deciding that the problem was behavioral. Before I adopted him, I spent two hours with her talking about the cat and his problems, and how I should relate to him. She decided I would be OK for him, and let me take him.
He is an aggressive cat. According to De Laur, it's because he's easily bored. He is, without question, the smartest cat I've met. It took me a while to trust him outdoors on my street, but now we get along fine. His failings are ones I see in myself, so it's easy to forgive him. I call him Cato because the name Pippin does suit a mischievous cat, but not such a strong and forceful cat. I found that every evening I was coming home and opening the door slowly, wondering where he was, expecting to be pounced on at any minute. I'd feel like Inspector Clouseau, saying "Cato? Cato? Where are you?" He would never attack me then. It would always be after I was home for half an hour that he would punish me for leaving.
 
 
A few months later I met this woman that I like a lot. We did lots of things together. In that right hand picture, we're about to take off for a mountain bike ride, and at the end of it all we got to spend a few hours in the Alta Bates emergency room getting myself sown up.