overt.org

2955 Telegraph Ave Berkeley, CA 94705 (510) 843-1992

Yesterday, George and I went up to Berkeley to investigate the local climbing gym and take a class at Berkeley’s only ashtanga yoga studio, with plans to get dinner somewhere afterward.

The climbing gym was very nice. 45-foot lead walls, many, many routes, a complete attached fitness center, showers, everything. Along with the niceness came a nice pricetag: $60/mo. I suppose if I’m able to get down to it several times a week that will make sense for me, but a lower student rate would have been nice. We didn’t actually climb, since there was no time before the yoga class started at 5.

7th Heaven was great. It had all the things yoga studios that I’ve seen in the bay so far lacked. Multiple rooms, nice, hard-wood floors, heaters, a broad selection of classes. The classes run $12 a pop, or $10 if you’re a student. A reasonable discount, I guess… I paid $8/class at Yoga Yoga in Austin. Unfortunately, the ashtanga class we came in for had been cancelled, so we went to a “Vinyasa flow” class instead, which was good, but not quite as punishing as I’d like.

After yoga, wiped out and ravenous, we started trolling around Berkeley for a restaurant. What we found was Ethiopia Restaurant. The place was nearly empty when we walked in, and it never got much fuller. I always feel a little out of place eating Ethiopian, because I seem to inevitably be part of the only white table in the place. Still, the waitress was very nice and conversational, helped us pick something from the menu where our experience flagged, and came back several times to check on us. We ended up with a family-style combination of two combinations: vegetarian and meat. I don’t know exactly what it was called, but it was basically a huge plate with about eight different things on it ranging from mild lentils to spicy red lentils, spicy chicken, cabbage, spinach, and lamb all spread over a giant piece of injera bread. There were no utensils–just an accompanying basket of little rolled-up slices of injera you use (we guessed) to just scoop the different things up, curry-style. The food was delicious. It went across the whole range of spicy to mild, and it all had a slow-cooked taste and heartiness that really hit the spot after yoga. I also tried an Ethiopian Bedele beer, which I’ll just say was yummy because I’m really not qualified to describe beer in more complex terms.

It ocurred to me during dinner that I would probably be eating at many, many different and great restaurants while at Berkeley. So I decided to set a goal: before I graduate, try to eat at 100 different restaurants. And I’m going to try to write a little about each of them up here when I do. So consider “Ethiopia Restaurant” #1 / 100.

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Comments

cameron — 2004-08-02 18:46:08

ooo, a new “topic”

i’m excited about you and leslie coming to texas in around a week! :)

bryan — 2004-08-03 12:01:32

me, too. i wonder if there’ll be anyway to get down to austin while i’m there…

nicole — 2004-08-18 22:30:42

a few MUST-EATS in berkeley: intermezzo cafe (HUGE-ass sandwiches and salads for $5) christopher’s nothing-fancy cafe (shrimp chimichanga. SO good) zachary’s pizza there is a place on college & ashby that is burmese food. i can’t remember the name, but it is yummy, yummy, yummy of course, chez panisse oliveto, for a high-priced dinner truly mediterranian on college also, for amazing ethiopian, the red sea le cheval, for vietnamese (original in oakland) good luck with your epicurian searches.

bryan — 2004-08-18 23:22:40

wow, thanks! I’ll be sure to get by them each. so exciting… are you an alumna?

nicole — 2004-08-19 16:15:56

no, but i worked in berkeley & emeryville for 7 years. so i know the area!

We’ve put up some pics from the move to Fremont.

It’s now tuesday. It’s been a busy week.

Friday was my last day at Apple. It was only a little surreal. Much different than a last day of school, where everyone is getting ready to wrap things up. You walk around the halls, everyone sort of going about their business as normal, but you suddenly feel like a visitor, an outsider. My team (four people) had lunch together at a decent sushi place; I didn’t have to pay. I expected an exit interview or something, but the HR people were a little slow and never got one scheduled. So I grabbed the last few things of mine from the office, handed my badge over to my boss, and drove away. It was a little sad, but mostly just exciting.

We started packing up things in the apartment on Wednesday. By Friday we were mostly done. Leslie had some teacher certification test on Saturday morning, the day our lease started, so our plan was to head to Fremont after her test, sign all the papers, then bring a u-haul back down to Santa Clara to move everything. The plan went great until we got to the “bring a truck back” part. We called about ten different u-haul and budget rental places, and none of them had an appropriately-sized truck for us to use. Granted, it was a saturday in the middle of the summer, but there are just so many truck rental places, you’d think there’d be a glut of trucks.

We decided to head back home (still Santa Clara at this point) to get lunch, and planned on reserving a truck for Sunday. Leslie had a craving for In-n-Out, so we headed over to the one nearest of apartment. On the way, we spotted a Budget truck place, and resolved to at least drop by and check to see if they had any trucks for rent. It turned out they did, and so while I scarfed my double-double (ack. arteries. clogging.), Leslie stepped up to fill out the paperwork necessary. First he asked for a driver’s license; she handed hers over. Then the guy asked, “so who’s actually going to be driving the truck?” to which Leslie responded, “me.” You see, every other time I’ve moved, it’s either been alone, or with a girl who thought it was my job to drive the truck. Leslie is not inhibited in any such way, so she decided to do the driving this time around.

We took the truck home and called Phil over to help us. Jeff, my big, strong brother, and George (also big and strong) both managed to be out of town for the day. So we were only three, and it was 3:00pm, when we started the move. It went well enough. We had to be a little creative to fit it in the 15-foot truck, but it was no real struggle. Phil was great and helped for over three hours before heading out to SF for the evening. At about 6:45 we got everything in the truck and drove to Fremont. We arrived a little after seven, already pretty exhausted. Did I mention the truck had to be returned by 8am Sunday morning? So we started to unpack. And we unpacked. And unpacked. We made many, many, trips from truck to apartment. At least a hundred. So many trips. So tired. The hardest items for us to do alone were the couch and the tabletop. Luckily, friendly passersby were able to give us a hand with each of them. Nearly delirious with exhaustion, we finished at about ten.

What better state of mind than delerium to drive a giant truck? So Leslie climbed back behind the wheel and we headed back down to Santa Clara, filled it up with diesel, and dropped it off at Budget. We were getting a bit giggly at this point, but we did make it back to Fremont, stopping on the way for some questionable milk and powdered doughnuts at the “Foodmaxx.” We collapse on the living room floor of our new place, nestled between boxes and furniture that coated every horizontal surface, guzzled coke and milk, doughnuts and corn chips until our blood sugar rose enough to get us upstairs. Lacking a shower curtain, we took turns in the bathtub doing our best to get clean, then collapsed in bed. I’ll save the events since then for another post…

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Comments

Susan — 2004-07-28 09:03:11

Yes, that’s my girl! I’ll bet she can drive the tractor, too. We’ll find out next month!

bryan — 2004-07-28 12:07:03

I think she was born to operate manly machines.

This Saturday I went to my paternal grandfather’s 90th birthday. My aunt had rented a swank little party room in an ocean-view restaurant in Pacifica. The whole gang was there: the three children (Rich, my dad, Don, his twin brother (younger by 5 minutes), and Laurie (little sister)). Their spouses were each their, and all the kids except one. This is a rare collection of Klingners and it was pretty cool to see everyone. My Dad was going picture crazy, so I expect some pictures of the event to show up soon on my parents’ new gallery.

On Sunday, I mostly relaxed, burned transcoded netflix DVDs and played Sim City 4, in which Leslie and I are recreating great communist capitals of the past in idyllic green virtualness. You’ll all be happy to hear Bejing has topped 30,000 citizens.

In the evening we headed into SF for dinner at a random excellent tandoori kitchen with Jeff and George followed by Eve Ensler’s new “play” The Good Body. The tickets were our present to George for his 23rd. It was entertaining. I don’t think I’m allowed to critique it in detail given my Y chromosome, but I will go as far as saying that I liked the Vagina Monologues better.

4 more work days. Today I called Comcast (sigh) to set up our cable and internet in our new apartment. I had long entertained notions of getting satellite TV and DSL, but it’s hard to make that economical, especially when you don’t know if your balcony will even work for satellite. I’ll postpone my dreams of Speakeasy for another year. I think of it as all part of acting financially like the grad student I’ll be in a month.

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Comments

cameron — 2004-07-20 21:53:55

i really like the captions of the pictures in your parents’ new gallery! (and my, how many pictures of portugal!)

So, I just recently switched my website from postnuke over to WordPress. As part of the process, I wrote a simple PHP script to convert all of the entries from the postnuke site over to WordPress. Although postnuke is a pretty heavy-duty CMS, there might be a few people out there who will make the same switch, so I decided to clean up the script a little and post it on the site for anyone who needs it. You can get it here. I put it under the GPL, so you can probably use it with no worries. If you do use it, send me an email or post a comment or something. I should add that it would be generous to say that I’m a novice at PHP. I’m sure there’s plenty I did wrong writing the script, but it works (for me), and that was enough.

Update 12 August 2005: I should have mentioned that this script was written for Wordpress 1.2, and will require some massaging to work with 1.5. Check the comments for more info.

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Comments

Kind of a question — 2004-09-30 16:39:35

Could I ask why? I am really curious?

bryan — 2004-09-30 17:32:12

you’re asking why i switched from postnuke to wordpress? or why i wrote the converter?

Mattz — 2005-01-06 05:06:53

I really need this script but it doesn’t do anything. I try to run it under my OS X iBook MySQL server but nothing happens. Any ideas?

bryan — 2005-01-06 10:52:40

Well… it’s a PHP script, not an SQL script, so you should be running it on your webserver. Also, it doesn’t work “out of the box.” You have to change the table names where they are indicated in the comments to the ones that you use.

Wolf — 2005-02-22 18:10:14

No matter what I do I keep getting this when I try to convert:

INSERT INTO wp_categories ( cat_ID, cat_name, category_nicename, category_description ) VALUES ( ‘2’, ‘Linux’, ‘Linux’, ’’ );Fatal error: Duplicate entry ‘2’ for key 1

Any ideas?

Wolf — 2005-02-22 18:23:00

figured my last comment out, but now when I convert - categories go over nicely but the stories seem stuck. I get this repeating message:

Just inserted ID 1

bryan — 2005-02-22 23:04:37

I think it might be that your ID column for stories is not autoincrement? ‘autoincrement’ means that whenever a new record is created, it increases the number by one and uses that for the column value. If it doesn’t do this, the script is going to try to insert a new row that has a primary key that’s identical to another, which is an SQL no-no.

jk — 2005-03-27 20:08:17

Hi there.

What version of postnuke and wordpress is this written for ?

I’m converting a postnuke .750 to a WP 1.5 I’m having trouble with the script it seems to fail to insert the story data but has success inserting the category data.

Thanks in advanced.

J

bryan — 2005-03-28 09:25:51

Yes… this converter was written for WP 1.2, so I’m afraid with the new wordpress version it probably won’t work “out-of-the-box” anymore. still, it shouldn’t be too hard to take a look at the new WP table structure and update it.

jk — 2005-03-28 11:38:17

Bryan- I took the liberty of changing the code “just a bit" I removed these four vars for a quick fix. I hope this helps the other pn converts :-)

Lines:

125 post_lat , 126 post_lon ,

—- and this —–

148 NULL , 149 NULL ,

Michael — 2005-07-06 10:47:22

Hi,

Thank you so much for the script - it is exactly what I was looking for. I ran it with limited success. It seems that it did not import the entire stories, only the lead-ins. I am also going from pn .75 to wp 1.5, and made the adjustment in comment 10.

Take a look. The original pn site is at: www.bullnotbull.com/bull, and the wp site at www.bullnotbull.com/wp.

I’m a relative newbie, so I’m not sure what kind of adjustments to make to import the enitre story parts. Assistance greatly appreciated.

Michael

Michael — 2005-07-06 12:03:54

Still working with it…now its really screwed up. Would you be able to give some hints as to how this thing is supposed to work…I mean, what is going where, and what is supposed to match up with whatelse?

Thanks a million. Michael

bryan — 2005-07-06 13:29:42

Hi Michael…

When I wrote this script, my goal was basically to grab the stories out of the pn tables and insert them with all the fields that WP wanted. I don’t know much about postnuke, wordpress, or php, so chances are that I didn’t do things the best way possible.

The first thing to do is look at your pn tables using a mySQL administration program (phpMyAdmin is my favorite). Figure out what columns you want moved into WordPress, and for each record in postnuke, copy those columns into the corresponding WordPress columns. Where WordPress has columns that don’t exist in pn, you’ll have to insert default or null values. My script is just a simple implementation of this procedure.

Unfortunately, I haven’t touched pn since last July, so I don’t know what might have changed in its table structure since this script was written. I did look at your site, and it seems like whatever column in postnuke stores the body of your stories is not getting copied correctly to the “yourblogprefix_posts” table “post_content” column.

You could add some debug output to the script I posted to make sure the post content is being read correctly. Something like:

printf(“Just read post content %sn”, $myhometext);

right after

$myhometext = mysql_escape_string($myrow[‘pn_hometext’]);

Good luck!

RC — 2005-09-15 15:06:32

THANKS A LOT! You have no idea how much time you saved me. All I did was take the script and deleted the 4 lines like jk said and it worked beautifully the first time!

Anthony — 2006-02-23 00:58:46

Hey, I’ve got a WP 1.5/PHP 5 version of this working if anyone wants it.

Anthony — 2006-02-23 01:03:33

oh, forgot my email address. catch me at spartan.ii [at] mac [dot] com.

George — 2009-08-13 00:24:22

Oh man, how does it work on wp 2.8.4? I would just love your script for he site www.kohtao-community.com. It’ a charity site that urgently needs an update…. Can you help?

bryan — 2009-08-13 08:48:39

Hi George,

I’m sorry, but I wrote this script almost 5 years ago, and wordpress (and postnuke) are a lot more complex than they used to be. I doubt I’ll be able to update it.

George — 2009-08-13 19:10:17

Thanks for looking into it anyway.

bryan — 2009-08-14 15:00:58

George:

I actually just noticed this updated version of my script that someone made and that works on Wordpress 2.5, at least: http://www.thereitis.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/pnconvert_250.txt. Maybe that can help?