Trip Post-mortem

Home again. Bags unpacked. Clothes put away. Car stowed in a relatively legal parking space. Ears still popping from the flight.

Coming shortly, essays and photos related to:

  • Squirrel shit.
  • Raccoons.
  • Okra, collard greens, and sweet tea.
  • A party in Dennis Hopper’s place which Linda Lavin and I were at.
  • Sleeping in the same motel room with my parents.
  • Condos, apartments, and even houses I could afford.
  • Thoroughly adorable Bosnian young’uns.
  • The Raleigh-Durham airport and the evils of air travel.
  • A 50-year-old supermarket on Walker Avenue.
  • Mom and Dad’s anniversary party.
  • The iMac.
  • Tearooms (or lack thereof).
  • Cheap cigarettes.
  • How much I don’t want to live in San Francisco anymore.

But I’m tired, so all of this will have to wait. I wouldn’t count on a lot of email responses for a couple more days either, but I’ll be working on it. Soon…

Quake and Quiver

This was just plain creepy. At about 6:00, I walked up to the corner store to get a pack of cigarettes. The owner was watching the news about the earthquake in Turkey. We commented on how awful it was, and as I walked out, I just happened to utter the following words:

“We’re gonna have another one here before you know it.”

About ten seconds later, we did. The owner ran out of the store to tell me. It was a small one. I didn’t even feel it. But things were shaking and quivering inside the store. As I walked home, I noticed some neighbors talking about it on the sidewalk. I turned on the news. Channel 4 was already into its predicatble hype mode.

I predicted an earthquake with precision accuracy. And I didn’t even know I was doing it at the time. Much better than last time.

Things I love today:

  • Safeway Select Grapefruit Soda
  • The Safeway at 7th Avenue and Cabrillo
  • The fact that, after tonight, I will finally have every episode of “The Streets of San Francisco” on tape, including the one filmed near the aforementioned Safeway.

Things which suck more than usual today (which means they suck a whole lot):

  • Microsoft
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer
  • Microsoft Active-X

Habits

My friend Rae is about to leave on a major road trip as she moves to Chicago. I’m jealous. She’s excited. We shared our respective emotions several times today. We never spoke in person; everything was said via email or voice mail. I’m not sure if this is good or bad.

Bad habits I’ve obtained since I became “wired”:

  • File extensions: Being a Mac supremacist, I’ve never really had to deal with them on a regular basis. But since the internet is a Unix environment (despite what Bill Gates may believe), I’ve had to start. Now I add file extensions to anything I’m working on. It’s like a curse.
  • Saying “directory” rather than “folder”, even when I’m talking to another person using another Mac.
  • Giving out my email address rather than my phone number in bars. This just seems wrong somehow.
  • Using my video camera as a glorified still camera and shooting things more with the assumption that they’ll be used on the site rather than watched on an actual TV.
  • Expecting printed books and newspapers to have a “search” button.

Good (and somewhat anachronistic) habits I’ve maintained:

  • Very rarely, if ever, using the term “wired”.
  • Reading newspapers: somehow the physical article still excites me in a major way.
  • Driving thousands of miles at a time and staying completely away from email for most of that time.
  • Used bookstores: there are still few things I love more.
  • KABL and the sounds of Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Astrid Gilberto, and Louis Prima while I work.
  • Avoiding chat rooms and IRC like the plague (except for that brief and unfortunate period in 1995).

Healthy balance or not? You be the judge. I really don’t care…

The Loft That Ate Langton Street

So the piece of shit yuppie slum across the street just gets taller and taller and uglier and uglier, once again begging the question of just who pays $350,000 or more to live in a drafty condo constructed of plywood? And given the IQ level of these individuals, do I really want them as neighbors?

There’s a good article in the generally useless SF Weekly this week about the Planning Commission’s latest “live/work reforms”.

All the same, I know the neighborhood is not completely sanitized yet. I watched a guy break into a car the other night from my office window. It was a BMW and it had a loud car alarm, so it was hard to find much sympathy. Besides, what was I going to do? Call the police? By the time they arrived, the guy would have been long gone. I, on the other hand, would have been kept up way past my bedtime.

Note to assholes in BMWs: car alarms do absolutely NO good and often make people even LESS likely to help you out.

Also on this exciting Friday morning, I’ve been spammed by voice mail. I’m not talking about a telemarketer who left a message. Someone apparently got a list of voice mail boxes within Pacific Bell and spewed forth an ad within the system suggesting that recipients call his “information line”. Of course, Pac Bell’s response to my complaint did little to inspire confidence that it won’t happen again.

Still working on naming those plants and still thinking about that bathhouse issue. And look for some other really bitchin’ cool stuff tomorrow or Sunday…

18 February 1999

What is SOMA?

Since I’ve had several email messages about this recently, it’s time for the annual reminder, mostly directed toward non-San Franciscans and those who came in via search engines.

SOMA is the official acronym for South Of Market Area, which is my neighborhood in San Francisco. It has nothing to do with any prescription painkiller nor is any reference to Aldous Huxley implied. SOMA is nothing but a mildly annoying real estate term.

This is an amazing neighborhood and Planet SOMA was originally all about South of Market. A large part of the site still is, in one way or another.

Love and hate:

Things I hate today: HTML-formatted email; beets, green peas, and pickles; TCI Cable; sunny days in February…

Things I love today: Nikko’s Diner in Oakland; NewsRadio (still…); the rain’s coming back…

AOL Sucks

AOL sucks, reason #591: I’ve been working for weeks now on a client site which features a searchable database. Everything works beautifully.

Except on America Online…

Apparently, AOL’s system of proxy servers makes lots of sites unusable. In addition, their system does all sorts of really strange things to sites which do work. All the same, lots of people still use AOL, although the reasons for this continue to elude me.

So I find myself coming up with a half-assed fix to accommodate the ineptitude of a large corporation with unlimited resources. It’s the same disgust I feel when I use Microsoft products…

Things I really love this week: NewsRadio, Minute Maid Lemonade in the gallon jug, this pre-Falwell Teletubbies site, Better Telnet, and this week’s SF Weekly feedback.

Things I really hate this week: AOL (see above), idiots who put me on “press release” email lists I never asked to be on, parking tickets, and Nash Bridges location shoots.

28 January 1999

Score one for the SF Weekly. I usually have no patience with this paper as it’s little more than a Guardian wannabe with a badly-designed website. In the past two weeks, though, the Weekly has risked alienating its core yuppie audience with George Cothran’s columns on San Francisco’s loftominum invasion.

Last week’s column focused mostly on the insensitive architecture and scale of the new developments. This week’s report talks about the loss of jobs and institutions thanks to the complaints of yuppie crybabies who get pissed off because they were too fucking stupid to check out what their new neighborhoods were like before shelling out that half a million bucks.

Too bad the battle’s already pretty much been lost in my own neighborhood, although I realize the issues are are a little more complex here.

Intel:

As if I needed another reason not to buy a Wintel machine…

Hands down, the superlative award-winning idiots of the month have to be the fine folks at Intel. What the hell were they thinking? Did someone in the boardroom suddenly get the idea that people would be just silly happy to have a computer which identifies its user all over the web? Did this idiot have some sort of revelation which convinced him (it HAD to be a “him”) that people were just itching to give up their privacy and reveal their identities to anyone with a website?

Of course not. Someone with actual intelligence realized that corporations might pay big bucks for the ability to collect this sort of data on unsuspecting potential customers. The idiot in this scenario is the marketing fool who thought that a positive spin (security, my ass…) would keep anyone from noticing what was going on. They were wrong.

This is the same sort of marketing idiocy that makes banks babble on about how destroying competition through mergers will unltimately benefit customers and bring down fees.

I Just Don’t Understand:

I was talking with someone the other day about the irony of the fact that there’s a Taco Bell right in the middle of San Francisco’s Mission District and that it always looks crowded. Surrounded by some of the cheapest and best Mexican food in the country, I have to wonder just who the fuck eats there? And why?

More collards this weekend. Saw an ex at the supermarket tonight. Life is very busy this week. This and more will come later, if at all. Right now, another link I’ve been promising for two months.

And I’m going to bed.

Collards and Websites

So who would have thought you could find fresh collards in California in January. And at someplace as generic as Safeway yet? This bodes well for Sunday dinner, a belated New Year’s Day “good luck” meal at a friend’s house.

Web work makes for strange bedfellows. It seems there will be a Wintel machine in my house this weekend. I’m getting it ready to serve up a database for one of my sites. Until now I’ve managed never to have a Windozer in my home.

I’ll have to keep it away from all the good computers lest they become contaminated by it. I’d hate for my Mac to start displaying everything with big ugly fonts and for it to start calling itself “My Computer”. Sounds a little too much like a Fisher-Price toy.

Long weekend ahead.

Random Stuff

Between all the leftover work I avoided over Christmas and all and the fact that I’ve been sleeping off a really nasty bug all day, I am neither caught up on the website nor the email. I have, at least, managed to upload the first part of the North Carolina trip.

Other things I could be writing about but I’m not (just yet) might include whining about whatever this bug is that I’ve managed to pick up. I could discuss how pissed I am that I can’t get ADSL, even here in San Francisco’s most “wired” neighborhood.

I could include the fact that I got email from Strange de Jim (of Herb Caen fame). I could write about how I’m really starting to get serious about leaving San Francisco. I could tell the story of the disturbing graffiti which appeared on my front door this weekend.

I could even talk about that Leif Garrett documentary from Sunday night.

But I’m not going to get into any of this right now. I’m going back to bed.

iMac Watch ’99

This afternoon, I watched a lot of TV with the folks. We were waiting for Steve Jobs to spill the beans about the new iMacs, since my mom was planning to buy one. We must have looked like an odd neo-techno version of the Waltons, huddled around the radio waiting for FDR to give a Fireside Chat. Or at least it seemed that way to me at the time.

After the announcement, I took pictures of abandoned motels. Why should this be any different from any other road trip, after all?

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