There was a man strumming his guitar and singing "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd at the Powell Muni/BART station last night around 10 pm. He had a pretty good voice, and could definitely play guitar.

Memories of other troubadors crooning in public places flooded my tired brain.

The guy with the beautiful dreadlocks at the Picadilly tube stop in London, singing "Wonderwall" by Oasis. The escalator leading down into the station was steep and reminded me of the escalator at the Dupont Circle station in DC.

The man's voice drifted up to me as I rode the escalator down, and his beautiful face came into view at the bottom. I smiled at him and he smiled back, and the I hurried on my way to catch a train to Earl's Court.

When I was vacationing in Bali for a month, I stayed at a hotel in Kuta Beach that had a piano in the foyer. There was a man from Boston, playing "Knocking on Heaven's Door" on the piano at all hours of the day and night. He didn't sing, but played beautifully, slowly, meditatively.

Hearing the song at night was beautiful, and it blended wonderfully yet at the same time eerily with the sounds of the gamelan player who played in the gardens at night.

Then of course, I have many memories of hearing some guy playing a saxaphone in downtown San Francisco during the evening rush hour, serenading the commuters home. There is nothing like hearing a jazz saxaphone soundtrack with its music floating to the top of the highrises to make you feel like you're really lucky to be living and working in a big city.

Where there's a will, there's a way. I was all set to buy a usb to parrallel cable to connect the free office printer my friend gave me, when I decided to try to connect it to my ethernet 10/100 base_tx network and the home portal device I bought for my DSL connection.

After much searching on the internet and stumbling around, and even calling the people who made my home portal who blithely told me that they don't support printer sharing, I figured it out and now I have two printers. YEAH!!!

I used to curse the time I worked for that startup and had to work the helpdesk for six months, but not anymore. The best thing I learned from the "Hi I'm the helpdesk" experience" was how to troubleshoot a computer problem.

I mean, it was the three of us at the startup and if we couldn't figure it out it's not like we could ask anybody else. I learned how to fix things out of sheer survival. It would take all day sometimes, but at least I got it fixed.

The laserjet printer is great. It prints so fast!

As a California resident and voter who remembers all the media hype during 2000 election about Bush winning California, I wonder if the same thing is happening again with Schwarznegger and the recall election.

I remember Senator John McCain even saying one week before the presidential election that Gore would lose California and Bush would win. The polls even showed Bush winning. Yet, Gore won California by a huge margin.

I mean this is the same media after all, who hyped the dot com market and never said anything about it the stocks being overvalued or even talking about the possibility of a crash. We didn't get any of that, except maybe the mainstream media scoffing at the doom and gloomers who said to get out of the market before it crashes.

So let's see ... in March 2000, Nasdaq was at what 5,000 + and today it closed at 1,824.

Does the mainstream media ever get anything right?

I saw "Underworld" on Friday night, and loved it. The critics hated it, and I can see why, but I don't care. Word has definitely gotten around about its suck factor, because there were only about ten people in the theatre.

I think I loved "Underworld" because I love vampire movies. I've seen every single one of them including the original silent screen edition of "Noseferatu", which made weep at the end.

I was googling the movie afterwards, and there's like all this gossip about the movie. At the time the movie was being filmed, Kate Beckinsale was living with the head werewolf guy, Michael Sheen. They also share a daughter Lilly. She probably helped to get him the part.

After filming, Kate breaks up with head werewolf guy Michael and says it was was because they were incompatible.

Months later, Beckinsale ends up engaged to the director of "Underworld" Len Wiseman, who was married to someone else during the filming of the movie.

I wish I'd known all this juicy gossip before I'd seen the movie, because it might have been fun to check out the interaction between the two actors.

Maybe I'm depressed because in the process of studying the modern art of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Alberto Giacometti, art informel, Jean Fautrier, Jean Dubuffet, Antoni Tapies, Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, I've had to read up on existentialism.

Reading the philosophy of existentialism will, I'm convinced, depress anyone.