This is the summer session at school, the air, as I said, cooler (so I could wear my new with many pockets jacket, the one that doesn't look like a photographer's tool kit) and I took my time, watching the people pass. Bought a copy of a magazine called computer Arts special at Tower Records, published in England, that came with a CD glued to the cover, "Photoshop skills & techniques" it said on the cover. How could I resist? I need "PhotoShop skills and techniques". I bought an Eurythmics best of CD collection and a funky on sale tenor songs and arias CD, which you would expect from an old fart. I've been listening to the new Cowboy Junkies lately and felt I needed something in the way of diversion before the Buffalo Springfield boxed set arrives from Amazon. In retrospect, I was just jacking off, filling time, spending money. The American affliction.

(The Eurythmics greatest hits CD had both Sweet Dreams (are made of this) and Missionary Man on it, but nothing much else. I've only heard their stuff on the radio and seen a couple of videos on TV over the years, all of which I liked, thinking, at the time, well, one day I'd figure out which of their albums were the better albums and buy them when I regained the ambition and the money. Maybe I missed something. I'll play it again a couple more times, but otherwise there's nothing there and it's back to The Junkies.)

From Telegraph Avenue, still fearing my apartment, I drove to Rockridge BART and took a train to San Francisco, walking around for a while at the foot of Market street, the first BART stop when you get to San Francisco, the site of the ferry building and Embarcadero Plaza. Crowded during the work week, not so many people on a weekend. Some sort of exercise group doing jumping jacks out on one of the lawns, but New Age jumping jacks, nothing too rude or pedestrian, people sitting at tables overlooking the various fountains and small parks, kids on skateboards flying along the sidewalks. I felt good just cruising around, taking the sights as the sights presented themselves, shooting the occasional picture, black and white. Thought, well, why not just get on a bus and see where it might take me? Maybe tomorrow. How long since I've been to Fisherman's Wharf or North Beach up toward Telegraph Hill? A long time, a long time.

I redid my journal pages back to January for Netscape users. Netscape 4.x users. I realize I'd better find a copy of Netscape 3 and see how they display in a browser that doesn't support Cascading Style sheets. Changed the menu at the left side of the page so the links don't wrap and changed some paragraph markers so Netscape would break properly. I ran across an early January entry in which I'd groused about Netscape in almost exactly the same terms. I claimed I was going to go out and "look at some Javascript solutions". Nice (and maybe frightening) to see I'm consistent.