Paula, one of my high school classmates, is visiting her daughter in Oakland this week and we went up to see her today. I don’t think we’d seen each other since graduation, but the years fell away as we chatted.

Her daughter lives in Tower Lofts near Jack London Square; the water tower atop the building fell into disrepair but was historic enough that the HOA replaced it with a statue of the tower.

It was a good visit, and I may go back to explore the area. There were lots of interesting wineries and breweries and restaurants to entice us to return!

A new member of the District 101 Toastmasters team has volunteered to take over the back-end code I wrote; we spent much of this evening getting all of the necessary prerequisites set up on his machine (things like a current version of Python, MySQL, and the like).

It took a long time, with lots of head-scratching on my part. One of the hardest parts was installing Python packages. It was easy to find out what packages had to be installed, but some of them (for example, the Python bindings to the MySQL database) are referenced by one name (MySQLdb) but have to be installed by another (mysqlclient). It’s not terribly difficult to find the right name, but it requires searching, and I found myself wishing I’d documented what really needs to be installed.

I had – three years ago. And it’s on GitHub. I’d just forgotten about it until after we’d fought our way through the installation process.

Maybe I’ll remember next time.