Maybe because there is no incumbent but an interim appointee, there is a huge array of serious, qualified candidates for San Francisco Mayor this year (no Chicken Johns this year, thank goodness), and the use of ranked choice voting has ensured that the candidates are (mostly) running on the issues. Fortunately or unfortunately, the candidates largely agree with one another on key issues, so narrowing the field was a bit of a challenge. My method was a combination of their personal statements, their answers to the Chronicle’s questions on current municipal issues, and their ability to speak and think quickly in a debate setting.

My top three choices were:

• David Chiu. He’s hands down the best one for the job. He’s smart, has a strong big-picture plan for the city, and has already proven he can get things done.
• Jeff Adachi. He seems to me a bit like Gavin Newsom in that the mayoral office is a stepping stone towards some larger ambition, but he has a detailed and comprehensive plan for improving the city, and years of experience in public office.
• Joanna Rees. I didn’t expect to like her—certainly think she is a bit too much of an outsider to be effective in office right away—but her no-nonsense answers to the debate/interview questions and common-sense plan for the city make her a good third choice.

As for the propositions:

• A – yes. School bonds are more or less the whole reason we do ballot initiatives. And who’s going to vote no on seismic improvements to old school buildings?
• B – yes. I hate to keep signing away money that has already been misspent, several times, for the same thing, but our roads suck, and they have to be repaved. Reluctant yes.
• C – yes. Weak sauce, but it’s a start, and it is a consensus plan.
• D – no. Goes further in the right direction, but was written entirely in isolation, and has some potential legal issues.
• E – hell yes. Give power back to the legislators at the expense of ballot initiatives? Oh, yeah.
• F – no. Seems like a good idea, but the rider that allows the ethics commission and the board of supervisors to change the ordinance without voter approval kills it for me.
• G – no. No ballot-box budgeting.
• H – no. Seems like a poorly-thought-out solution to a small part of a big problem.

Let’s hope good things result.

For my entire computer-using life until then, I’d been a die-hard Windows user. I was about as anti-Apple as you could get, talked with a faintly mocking openly scornful voice when I spoke of Macs—conveniently forgetting that the first computer I’d ever been really excited to use was the shiny new Apple IIgs in our junior high school computer lab, or even the comparatively ancient IIe that sat next to it. Exciting because they were different.

Fast-forward to about 10 years ago, and Mac OS X had just come out. Having been exposed during my college years to Unix—the first computer science class I took was learning Scheme in a lab full of gorgeous and much-missed NeXT machines—and having had a ridiculous amount of trouble with my custom-built Windows box, I was ripe for a change. But what I was really excited about was trying out a real, user-friendly consumer OS based on Unix^*.

So, the TiBook. From the moment I opened that box, I haven’t looked back. Every computer I’ve bought since has been a Mac. For the last ten years, I have spent probably more time with my various Macs and iDevices than I have interacting with humans, or doing anything else. I have worked, played, procrastinated, produced, entertained myself, connected, communicated, laughed, taken a reprieve from fear and grief, escaped, found my way, lived with one of these devices as a constant companion. And Steve Jobs made that all possible.

It’s a little crazy to think that someone you’ve never met can have such a profound impact on your life, but Steve Jobs and the work he did had that impact, for me and millions of others. So thanks, Mr. Jobs.

What I hadn’t realized, however, was just how bad it was. Check out this blistering review of the game:

It’s not racy, it’s not funny, and it makes you feel dirty. Every time I put the controller down, I felt the need to rub my hands on my jeans as if the game were making me physically dirty. It’s like watching your uncle tell racist jokes at Thanksgiving and praying someone has the guts to tell him to cut it out, but this time it’s interactive—and you’re the uncle.

Ouch.

Sugary bottled teas strip out antioxidants, health benefits

I’m shocked. Shocked.

• Safari reader, a feature that works much like Arc90′s popular Readability bookmarklet by detecting when the currently loaded web page has an article, and allowing the user to reformat the page in an easy-to-read, scrollable view that cuts the obnoxious ads out. What’s more, they actually go through every page of multi-page articles and concatenate them together for one seamless, easy reading experience. Say it with me: ?!?!

  Now, you might be thinking, “How are the content providers going to let this stand, when it could wreak havoc with their ad sales?” Well, grasshopper, its at least partly because when Safari is concatenating the pages’ content, it does a full HTTP request on each page, so the innocent kitten publishers who artificially split up short articles into 3 and 4 and more pages just to maximize ad annoyance views don’t have to worry about losing their accustomed number of ad-frame loads.

• A smarter address field, that no longer requires you to remember exact URLs; it searches within (rather than at the beginning of) the URLs and page titles in your history like Firefox has been doing for months (perhaps years) now. I’ve got two things to say to that: hallelujah, and about damn time.

• Never expected this, but sanctioned, easy to install, secure extensions, that can be developed in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. ?!?! Also, ROCK.

• Then, of course, is the improved HTML5 support and the ever more feature-packed web inspector, the icing and the cherry, respectively, on the sundae.

All in all, pretty ?!?! for me.

^† I gotta tell ya something else. Humble pie tastes terrible. Turns out my new cheapie phone doesn’t have much going for it other than its cheapness. I can at least get calls on it more reliably than the iPhone 2G, but text messages don’t work. At all. Seriously. All my friends have stopped sending me text messages, because literally more than half of their messages to me never get there. Not get there late, which sometimes happens too, but never get to me at all.

Then there are the times when I myself am trying to send a text, and the phone (a $*@#!^% Motorola i465) reports that the message was sent, though it actually wasn’t, and I’ll have no idea that the message never got out the door until I happen to reboot my phone days later, and all the recipients are asking me why they’re getting replies to their messages so late.

In fact, if I had an actual piece of crap the size of my phone, it’d be more useful, because then I could use it as fertilizer. This…thing isn’t worth the plastic it’s made of. So, well, iPhone 4. As much as I loathe and detest the idea of giving AT&T my money again, at least I’ll get a nice phone in the bargain.

In other news, the headline of the day is: “Adobe, You Brought An Advertisement To A Gun Fight.” Ha!

Update 2009/07/15 18:06—Here’s reaction from Keith and Zeldman.

In all seriousness, though, for all the disgust and schadenfreude being aimed at his head, it appears that Sanford honestly loves this woman, and while infidelity is unforgivable in almost any circumstance, at least this is better than him boinking some intern for the hell of it.

Keynote Systems reported this evening that its monitoring showed performance problems for the web sites of ABC, AOL, CBS, CNN Money, MSNBC, NBC, SF Chronicle, and Yahoo! News. “Beginning at 5:30pm (EDT), the average speed for downloading news sites doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds,” said Shawn White, Keynote’s director of external operations said. “During the same period, the average availability of sites on the index dropped from almost 100% to 86%. The index returned to normal by 9:15pm (EDT).”

I knew the nerds would come through.

But musically? As I said, Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam had a far greater influence, and Prince a greater talent. Yes, he’s odd – a smaller, more agreeable set of demons, though, and he has an inexhaustible desire to create without freeze-drying every note into a crystalline framework, with every manufactured Yelp and Yip dropped in at the expected perfect moment.

I wouldn’t have felt any of this if the event wasn’t being treated as a near-fatal blow to Western Culture in some quarters. He called himself the King of Pop – after which fame and sales ebbed. Of the many lessons in his life, that may be the oldest.

That said: it’s no shame to have your best work behind you. It’s a pity to die young. It’s a testament to the work you did to be mourned by millions.

Talent of his caliber will be missed. And has been, truth be told, since around 1992.