Lee.org

Today I tried to install an EPUB reader to read my friend TJIC’s new books.  After more than an hour of trying this has stopped being fun. I just want to read a book and I’ve wasted a few hours pushing buttons. This is why paper is not dead yet. Or maybe this is why single-purpose Kindle readers are a good idea.

I have an  Amazon Fire HD 8 (5th Generation) and it continues to be a a pain in the ass. Every time I try to do something that isn’t akin to watching television on it, I get sucked into this vortex of things that don’t work. Here was today’s adventure:

I went to the Amazon Appstore and installed eLibrary Manager, which is billed as being “actually free” from Amazon. It worked OK but the default font is a horribly bland san serif font and the option to change the font didn’t work! Not happening.

I tried Overdrive, which has lots of tie-ins with public and university libraries. That seemed like a safe bet. But I couldn’t figure out how to get the book into into the app! How it’s supposed to work is that I install Adobe Digital Editions on my computer, link my account to my computer, and move it over to my Kindle. I spent 15 minutes wrangling with Adobe and some insane user registration system. Then I couldn’t get Adobe Digital Editions to see my Kindle when I plugged it into USB. I gave up.

Calibre Companion (demo version). After 15 minutes I figured out that it isn’t an ebook reader, just a way to move ebooks around. It works great, it just doesn’t do anything. Ugh.

Aldiko seemed like a really good bet. Super pretty. But I can’t create an account with the app. This is likely because the Amazon Appstore gave me a version of the software that is 3 years old and I’m not able to update it. I wrote to customer support. (update 9-1-17: they never wrote back :-(  )

Blah!

I hear that avocado toast is why I can’t afford a mortgage. To that I say “Yum!”

Studying for my occupational therapy board exam at Philz Coffee, drinking high-test and eating like a millennial!

Megan and I went to Oakland Art Murmur First Friday Art Walk, it was great! It was so refreshing to get out!

We saw great art, ate street food… lots of it,  and felt the buzz of ten thousand Oaklanders having a good time in the street

Yeah, we ate well! Had a  shimp po-boy, an allspice ice cream sandwich, and grilled cheese from the world famous Grilled Cheese Guy! We went to the uptown area. The best art (and grilled cheese!) was found on 25th where Jon Sarriugarte parked his beloved Golden Mean  art snail :-).

Local Language looks like an exciting art fabrication space.

Thea Schrack’s Seaglass 8 was amazing to see. An image of it is to the right but it is far more entrancing in person! When I saw it in person, I found myself saying “I could build a house around that image.” I became so wonderfully lost in it!

There was lots more great art at Art Murmur! Jeanne Jabbour’s work (see on the left) at Oakopolis  had “great lines”. We had a fun discussion about how her work would be great in a psychologist’s office.

Hurray for art!

[update 2020: read this post!]

I’ve been using a CPAP for mild obstructive sleep apnea since January 2015. It definitely helps me get a good night’s rest and keeps me from snoring which helps Megan sleep. I still take it off in my sleep most nights. Megan prods me and I put it back on (update December 2017: I wear all night most of the time now! Hurray!). Here is a list of hints, most of which I’ve tried, to keep my mask on. Do you have any tips to add? Email or comment!

– keep a log of good and bad nights and what I’m doing about it
– Set an alarm in the middle of the night to put it on
– cough syrup (helpful when I have a cold!)
– antihistamine pills (when I have a runny nose or cough)
– nasal allergy spray… Flonase, saline
– turn the temperature up to 80 degrees (didn’t help me)
– use distilled water in the humidifier (I don’t usually use the humidifier but the chamber potentially won’t get as much crud in it if I use distilled water)
– higher pressure… ramp pressure from medium to higher (waiting for the doctor to change the settings is for chumps. I fiddled with the settings a little and it helped. Just 1 small change every 2 nights and a log book helped dial it in for me!)
– Set a timer when going to bed so I don’t forget (I wait til I’m almost asleep to put it on. I sometimes fall asleep forgetting. So I set a 10 min timer when getting into bed for a while)
– Chin strap (didn’t help)
– shave before bed for a smooth face (helps! I do it nightly now)
– wash the facemask every few days with soap and/or isopropyl alcohol (if I don’t, I have to keep pulling it tighter to keep it from leaking… wash every week. My masks have lasted 3-12 months)
– rinse my nostrils with water and blow my nose before bed for clear nose.

I went to a few doctors to try to help improve my sleeping with it. Every time, they’d look at the CPAP’s computerized log, ask some obvious dumb questions and say, “I dunno. Keep trying, you’ll get it.” and charge me a hundred bucks. Every time, I left the office MUCH more discouraged than when I went in. Most recently at an office visit, I asked to try some different masks. I tried 3 masks in the office and ended up with a size Large instead of the Medium that I previously had. That has helped!

I’m glad I have a CPAP. Good luck to you!

August 2014-May 2016: four semesters of a very intense master’s program with a 5 hr/day, 4 days/week commute (see commuting footnote).

June 2016-May 2017: Two completed  internships, got only half way through another one due to a medical problem.

Married June 2014, two months before school started, just two years after we met.

New baby born a week before second semester started.

Two ongoing family conflicts that I won’t discuss  here. Both began around 2014. Well, the roots of each conflict probably go back way further but that’s how conflicts go.

Megan told me, almost demanded that I take some time off! So I’ve spend the last couple weeks NOT studying for the boards exam in occupational therapy. Thanks honey!

At the end of May,  my master’s degree posted. It’s now “Lee Sonko, M.S.”.

Looking forward, I just started studying for my board certification, hoping to be done in early August.

Footnote about my school commute:

Yes it was a 5 hour/day commute, Kensington to San Jose State.  Driving would have cut an hour a day but was far more stressful. When I drove, it usually took an hour for me to recover. And I couldn’t study while driving. Here was my commute: 15 minute drive down the hill, 55 minute BART from El Cerrito Plaza to Fremont Station, 45 minute bus ride to downtown San Jose, 15 minute walk to school. 2 1/2 hrs door to door. On a good day, I could study for about 45 minutes on the train and 25 on the bus. I got car sick on the bus every time I tried to study, and I needed/chose to study most of the time. It completely sucked.

These are the two most seminal comedy shows in my world, and they are (gulp!) 30 years old!
These are just links to IMDB, not the actual shows.

Emo Philips Live  at the Hasty Pudding 1987
I found the LP record of this when I was working at the Tufts radio station and I pretty much memorized it.

A Steven Wright Special  for HBO,  1985
He came to Tufts and completely killed it!

My sister-in-law, Gail got us a 6 quart Fagor Lux Multicooker (model 670041880) for Christmas. It’s great. We’ve used the slow cooker, pressure cooker, and even the yogurt maker settings (the yogurt came out perfectly!). I’m cooking a fancy bean soup in it right now!

Here is a local copy of the manual!  Fagor Lux Multicooker User Manual 2015

Lee Sonko, Master of Science!

I received a message from San Jose State University today:

I now have two extra letters after my name!

Lee Sonko, MS

More letters to follow after I pass the board exam!

Short form:  Dreamhost showed me how to implement a method of decreasing spam at the domain level called SPF. They implemented another domain level method of reducing spam, DKIM, a few months after I showed them that they hadn’t set up their system properly.

Long Form:

Until recently, there was nothing stopping someone from sending email from lee.org illegitimately (called “spoofing” email). A lot of spammers used it to send junk email “from” lee.org. This bothered me because:

1. spam :-(
2. Sometimes I’d get thousands of bounced emails
3. It reduced the assurity that my domain wasn’t hosting spammers, so sometimes real emails I sent would be marked as  spam

I talked to Dreamhost support and they showed me how to setup an SPF record for my domain. See here and here on how to do it yourself.

Dreamhost support also suggested I create the emails postmaster@ and abuse@ because “I have seen some cases even though they are very rare cases in which not having these emails set up can cause some problems with servers receiving email.” Ok, sure. So I set those addresses up.

I created an account at postmaster.google.com to periodically check if Gmail is getting any spam from my domain.

I read up on spam-proofing a domain and realized that Dreamhost hadn’t implemented DKIM. Actually, they set it up for my domain but it was left in test mode. Even in Dreamhost’s DKIM example the test flag was set (see “Example of a DKIM Record, they write: k=rsa; t=y; p=GIMfMA0G…). So I had several back and forths with Dreamhost tech support starting in February and yesterday I got an email, “Our devs finally got around to removing the test flag and now DKIM records are properly being served.” Hurray!

In conclusion, you might want to check the headers on your outgoing emails. Look for the “dkim” header. Previously, when my account was still in “test-mode”, headers looked like “dkim=pass (test mode)”. And now they look like “dkim=pass header.i=@lee.org” :-)

The art of Burning Man will take over an entire gallery at the Smithsonian Institution for 6 months in 2018! This is the first major national exhibition to focus on the event.

Original site

Grand Salon, Renwick Gallery (Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street N.W.)

March 30, 2018 — September 16, 2018

Michael Garlington, Totem of Confessions, 2015, photo courtesy of the artist

Each year in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, a city of more than 70,000 people rises out of the dust for a single week. During that time, multi-story art installations and buildings are erected and many are burned to the ground. Dedicated to principles of radical self-expression, decommodification, communal participation and a reverence for the handmade, the thriving temporary metropolis known as Burning Man is a uniquely American hotbed of artistic ingenuity and one of the most influential events in contemporary art and culture.

No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man is the first major national exhibition to focus on the large-scale, participatory work from this annual event. The exhibition will take over the entire Renwick Gallery building, bringing alive the maker culture of Burning Man through artworks, immersive room-sized installations, jewelry, costumes and ephemera that will transport visitors to the gathering’s famed desert city and highlight the ingenuity and creative spirit of this cultural movement. Photographs and archival documents drawn from the Burning Man Archives at the Nevada Museum of Art will trace Burning Man’s growth and its bohemian, counterculture roots.

The exhibition will include works by David Best, Candy Chang, Marco Cochrane, Five Ton Crane, FoldHaus Collective, Michael Garlington and Natalia Bertotti, Hybycozo, Aaron Taylor Kuffner, Christopher Schardt, Leo Villareal, Richard Wilks and others. Several installations were featured at previous Burning Man events, while installations by David Best, Natalia Bertotti and Michael Garlington, and Five Ton Crane will be commissioned specifically for the Renwick’s presentation and will debut in the exhibition.

Nora Atkinson, the museum’s Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft, is organizing the exhibition in cooperation with Burning Man Project, the nonprofit organization responsible for facilitating and extending the culture that has issued from the Burning Man event into the wider world.