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no more ramen
Thursday, September 16 1999
Yesterday as I was biking home down Cable Street, I caught a distinct whiff of a familiar aroma that reminded me of my less extravagantly funded days: ramen. It came as no surprise, really. You'd think that in a town so overrun with slackers and young people that the salty fragrance of ramen would overpower the barbecues and possibly even the aroma of the mighty Pacific itself. For my part, I haven't eaten ramen in almost a year. How times have changed!
I was in a Radio Shack today for the first time in awhile, trying to buy an AC to six volt power converter. Such devices used to be little black bricks with prongs sticking out of them that generated something in the general ballpark of what their labeling indicated. Radio Shack doesn't make AC-DC converters like that anymore. The ones I saw today were white and a lot of them were light-weight models built around switching power supplies, not the bulky old big-transformer technology. These were outrageously expensive, however, so I opted for a cheaper model that, despite its superficial resemblance to an old-school brick power supply, actually contained regulator semiconductors. What I actually would have preferred would have been a transformerless system based around hefty resistors, diodes and capacitors. I think that's how the new ZIP disk power cords work.
This evening as I was walking Sophie, she and I encountered a huge fearsome-looking Ridgeback Dog (I notice they're suddenly in style; I'm told they were originally bred for the purpose of hunting lions). He was just running around on his own, casually marking his territory without a trace of sheepishness. He was an intact male, the kind Sophie goes nuts for. She would have gladly spent the rest of the evening following him around through the streets and alleyways of Ocean Beach, but I'm not nearly as casual with Sophie's freedom as the Ridgeback's owner, so we had to bid him adieu.
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