Gay Pride Kinda Sucks When You're Driving
You know that feeling, when you realize that your forgot about a parade across the main street of town and then that feeling when you remember that the parade started at 10 AM and it's now 3 PM and then that other feeling when you get close to the street you're going to cross to find that it's bee shut off and then that other feeling when you remember that it was Gay Pride day and that's what the parade was all about? Don't know that feeling? Good!
That's one thing that you always have to watch out for in SF. On any given weekend, there is some kind of parade that is shutting down Market street, which in effect pretty much bisects the town because of what an important street it is.
I don't know why they always do it there and I don't know why people usually get caught up in them, but they do and we do, so that's how it goes. I guess it better than how I used to just hide inside in Berkeley whenever a football game was in town, since that always dominated the entire place. At least SF parades are somewhat localized.
28 06 2004 0 comments
A Fine Sign of the Times
Okay, so the amount of jobs still isn't very good and apartments still aren't that cheap and let's face it, things in general aren't the amazing for San Francisco and the general Bay Area, but there is one thing that has improved greatly. Maybe improved is the wrong word for it, since it's more of an anomaly that has been corrected.
So, here's how it used to work. Basically, parking was a huge problem during the dot-com boom. For some reason people were convinced that, upon moving to San Francisco, they had to bring their damned cars from the Midwest, or East Coast, or wherever else all these imports came from. This in turned created a parking nightmare that was something to behold. I remember one time when I was helping a friend move, we had to drive around for an hour and a half before we could even find a driveway to park in, in order to help her move! Now, that's crazy.
What was even crazier were people who even tried to do street parking. They did this amazing thing of driving up on the sidewalk and just parking there overnight. While this may seem ridiculous, the fact of the matter was, these were all commuters who would be leaving the next morning and meter maids didn't go around very much at all during the night and when they did, if they really cared, they'd give people a ticket for parking on the sidewalk, which was only about $25. So, as you can see, the risk was slight and the gains (a stupid parking spot overnight) were great.
Naturally, this all ended when the dot-com fallout happened. All of the sudden, you could find a spot again in a "reasonable" amount of time. So, that is definitely a nice plus from the post-2000 days in that we have far fewer grease spots on the sidewalk.
21 06 2004 0 comments
I Can't Think of a Damn Thing to Write
I'm at one of the unfortunate states in life where I'm a bit numb to things and there is little witty commentary of verbose descriptions to describe the things around me.
I don't know what exactly happened, but I think work is partially to blame. Perhaps there have been solar flares, or badly timed events, but the workload has gone on overload. I get in, I start up the machine and already have ten waiting trouble tickets before I even get a morning cup of tea. From there, I blink a few times and I'm either back in the carpool or bumping along on the Bart. It's this vacuous place in time out there at the office and it seems to always mean that there is something I forgot to do, or some bit I didn't switch which I have to pick up when I get home.
To this end, I found myself crashing on my armchair, watching the widescreen stupid box the minute I got home. Didn't seem to much matter what it was, since I would watch anything that came on in order to empty my head of the daily nonsense that had just blazed past me, sardonically laughing at my attempt to grasp a linear span of events from a circular funnel cloud of digital disaster.
I cancelled the cable. I didn't hook up an aerial antenna to the widescreen stupid box. It lies dormant now. It only breathes when I pop in a DVD such as "The Office" or something else that someone else has created which mocks the fact that my film is still being edited.
Thankfully I did find someone else to edit the film, since the progress on that was nearly null due to the length of time at work. All the bits and pieces of my labors sit at another's home in the San Francisco hills getting spliced together into something meaningful.
Maybe I'm no fun anymore. Maybe I just talk about all the things that are bothering me. I look at the above paragraphs and that certainly seems to be the case.
I keep reminding myself that this job is a temporary thing I'm doing in order to get rid of student loans and get more established in the IT field. Of course, its difficult for me to do anything half-assed as that just seems like a cop-out and begs the question as to why you're even doing it.
Everything is coming along though. It's funny how winter can set in, in the middle of June. I never liked summer anyways. I guess that's why I moved to San Francisco; in order to avoid the screaming sun and gleaming 100+ degree days of my hometown.
I'm of the opinion that I could definitely use another trip to London very soon. Maybe that will be my reward once I get this OS X migration done for the company. Oh that damned migration. It occupies nearly every thought. Look, it just popped up in here! Damned Mac OS X. Such a pile of Jenga sticks. You get everything just right, start to make a move and then the whole pile comes crashing down on you. I've never been confronted by a more difficult puzzle. I think I've come to the solution that there is no graceful method to do it. There is no way to get everything just right so that people walk in, in the morning to find that their new system is up and running. Nope, can't be done in the time that I need to do it in.
Okay, fine, on to other things.
It's really not that back around here. I just got awoken while in the middle of a dream (not that I can remember it) and so I'm walking around in something of a dazed state. I think it's Friday again, so that means, much more importantly than it being the weekend tomorrow, it's Bagel Day out at the office. Mmmmm, bagels…. I swear that I'm the Jewish incarnate of Homer Simpson, not that I'm Jewish or a Simpson, but I'm just saying. Now, if I get out there and find out it's Thursday, I am going to be very put off.
Yippee! Orinda station is up next. Well, onwards and upwards.
19 06 2004 0 comments
Lowest Common Worker
Okay, so do you know what a NID is? Probably not, unless your in some kind of networking trade as I am. That, in technical terms, is a J-Box, where in the Trunc line is dispersed to its nodes. For the lay person, that's the box in my apartment where the main phone line comes in and is spread out to all the apartments.
You may be thinking, "Huh, hard to make it out, it looks like a mess." You're darn tootin' it is. It is a hodge podge of all the wires that have been run for phone lines over the last few decades. Now, why on earth wouldn't anyone clean that up? Simple, they don't care.
You get these guys out here to work on a phone in one of the 35 units in the building and all they care about is getting whatever they need to do done. In addition to this, know you've got several different companies all doing it AND you've got data lines like DSL coming into the mix. Toss all that together and you get a wire salad.
It's most annoying because, I just won't stand for junk like that at my office. If someone wires up something in that fashion, they're going to redo it, or never touch the junction box again, because with time, that all gets to be a mess. But, here we are in short-sighted Corporate America and we end up with things like this, since people don't want to take 30 seconds to label the stuff they've done.
I'm not a big fan of the work they do, so I usually try to do it myself and I've labelled my lines. It's pretty funny that someone along the way labelled my line as being the Manager. I guess it's because most building managers don't do much telecom work and one guy ended up talking with me about it and now I get asked questions a lot. If it means that my DSL and phone don't get nixed, then I'm more than happy to oblidge.
15 06 2004 0 comments
Solace in San Francisco
Ever notice how San Francisco seems to get spared in film? It's true. Just look at "Independence Day", "Armageddon", "Deep Impact", and most recently, "The Day After Tomorrow". But, it's not just in film. In the television world of Star Trek, the Starfleet headquarters of the future are based in San Francisco. No, it's not just because it's one of the best cities in the world, it's because it made it through the third World War relatively unscathed. Hell, San Francisco even gets equated to heaven, as you could see in "Angels in America" where, when Al Pacino asks and angel what heaven is like, to which he replies, "It's like San Francisco."
The only movie I can think of showed SF getting hit was "The Core" but that was a fluke, since that wasn't a good movie.
Maybe it's because we have enough natural disasters here and people think that it'd just be ridiculous to hit us some more. But, if they were basin that on real life, then New York wouldn't be such a target, since it definitely gets injured in real life quite a bit, due to its massive population density.
In all honesty, there are other cities that really don't get picked on like SF. Seattle comes to mind, but honestly, regardless of how SF is portrayed as this foggy city, I'd much rather live here than Seattle, where Summer is all of five days long and the rest of the year, it's winter.
14 06 2004 0 comments
Big Business Environmentalism
Just saw "The Day After Tomorrow". It's not a bad movie overall. Something along the lines of an action/disaster romp. It's not Shakespeare, but hey, that's not what I went to go see.
Anyways, the interesting thing about the film was how it and others like it have taken care for the environment and somehow turned it into a big-budget film, while at the same time, getting something of a message out. Whether or not the people who went to see it would listen to that message is yet to be determined, but at least its put out there.
I've been rather bemused how all of this has been working these days. I hark back to the days of a cartoon called "Captain Planet" which was, more almost any definition of the word, extremely lame. It was pretty much the same thing up until the mid nineties, when disaster movies started coming out in droves. Of course those followed in the vein of shit happens most of the time, or if they blamed anything, it was due to some weapon gone awry, or overtaken as you saw in, "Golden Eye" and "The Core".
It seems that with a film like "Tomorrow" that there are people out there who realize that the war against the ecosystem of the planet is to blame on all of us and not the work of one evil genius, hell-bent of global domination. The film doesn't offer any real solutions, but that's fine, since I think that's where most informative films go wrong, since people don't like to be told what to do and with how fast technology progresses, any solution they offer will more than likely be out of date before the film gets to be released.
I guess what's finally settled in is the fact that we've started seeing all things start to go wrong that crazy-haired scientists have been telling us about for so many years. And now that people can quantify it to some extent, they are able to identify with it. Once you get that relation established, it's very easy sensationalize it and thus make money off of it.
The media has seemed to be priming us for this for years. Oh, you powerful silly media! What won't you think of next?
13 06 2004 0 comments
Propeller Flies Redux
Argh! They're back!
Well, I should say that only one of the damned choppers is back. The others seemed to realize that there was no news going on down along Market Street and this whole biotech protest coverage thing is teh result of a couple of tragically slow news days.
Needles to say, the solo moron was in the skies at 6AM this morning. We need to get some kind of initiative to stop this sort of ridiculousness, or start handing out rocket launchers to concerned citizens. Grrrrr....
09 06 2004 0 comments
Propeller Flies
Suffice to say, it isn't the most wonderful of things to be woken up by five helicopters hovering a few blocks away above Market Street covering a protest of hundreds of people (that ain't many people for a protest.)
This obssession with on-demand 24 hour news has just gotten ridiculous these days. The helicopter is just one example of this, but it has to be one of the more annoying, since I can't turn them off like I can a television. Of course, helicopters covering news can be important, but they can also be a complete nuisance to tell the truth. But, there's the problem; they've got these damned thigns for when they really really need them, but them they have them for when they don't, so they go out and try to find news, which usually means buzzing around my apartment for hours on end until something happens.
When I turned on the TV to see what all was going on, it turns out there is a protest against biotech. Fine. Sure. Whatever, that's good. There are protests here everday, but do it goes. What amazes me is the fact that the choppers decided that this was newsworthy, since all the footage they showed looked like any other day donw on Market with smalls groups of grubby looking people looking about slowly and without real cause. I mean, it was just pathetic. You could have covered rush hour on Montgomery or Battery street and seen more action than this.
Anyways, just to add insult to cacaphony, they had the damn things flying overhead this evening as well. For some reason, the inactivity of the morning just wasn't enough and they had to get more footage of nothingness and people who apparently don't work standing around Civic Center, protesting biotechnology; a science, that if it saved their life one day, they'd have no problem with it, but now, it's just baaaad.
So, I guess I some up all of this into two statements:
--Morons with drums
--Morons with wings
08 06 2004 0 comments
Cafe Escobar in Zagreb
This is a hip little spot in central Zagreb, HR (Croatia) If you're there and need a good spot to chill out, stop on by. There are three floors to hide in, including a main floor, an upper floor and then a slick basement area, which is where the picture at left is from. There are even some spots along the stairs which are amazingly cozy and discreet.
The music is good and the selection of coffee and what have you is great as well. The guys that work there are cheesy and the girls are snooty. No Internet, but plenty of "scene" to go around. It's a perfect Croatian cafe!
More Info: www.inyourpocket.com/croatia/zagreb/en/venue?id=CRZAENX0032
06 06 2004 0 comments
Self-Affirmation Through Spam
So, I'm an IT (Information Technology) guy, which means that at my workplace I'm responsible for just about everything that gets plugged in. This in turn means that I'm responsible for email as well. Obviously there are quite a few steps between a wall plug and an email system, but that's pretty boring to the normal person. Anyways, being responsible for email means that I'm responsible for Spam. In case you ahven't noticed, or have a brilliant email provider, Spam is getting to be one hell of a monster these days and is infiltrating every email account there is. Naturally, I'm not responsible for the amount of Spam, but I am indeed responsible for keeping it out of everyone's way.
Naturally, people have started figuring out ways to stop Spam and I use these ways. I'm not too thrilled by the system that I use, but it works pretty well, generally catching about 250,000 unwanted messages in a given month. Here's the funny thing though; I can crank up the filtering system more than what I have it and this result in nearly no Spam. You'd think, "Oh, then the answer is easy. Crank that puppy up." But, no. No, you can't do that, because if you do, then people automatically assume that email isn't working because they're getting no Spam. Weird huh?
It's perplexed me for some time and I think that the answer lies in the fact that people need this Spam, crap email in order to verify that they exist somehow. It's a bizarre thing, but I know that when I didn't get any junk mail for credit offers via standard postal mail, I wondered if my mail had bben stolen. We seem to be creating this constant hum in our lives that we require to keep us afloat some kind of an information life preserver. Without it, we apparently cease to exist.
I can't really tie this in to anything in the past, since I think that's its a new occurence in the being called human. It's unfortunate too, but honestly, it may come down to the fact that it's just a coping mechanism we use so that we don't go insane in the end.
Whatever. Let a couple Spam through I say. Without them, people feel stranded.
