or On the Perils of Living in California: item #23

So I was reading Derek Powazek’s Ten Tips on How To Be A Driver in San Francisco, and while I agree with what he says for the most part^*, there was something to which I simply had to take exception:

1. Bikes are our friends.
   I love how San Francisco has gotten so bike-friendly over the last few years. There are a lot more bikes on the road now than there used to be, and I think it’s rad. So be a good driver. Really look around for bikes. Note where the bike lanes are (they’re not always where you think they are). Stop when a bike is approaching. Smile and wave to let them know that you’ve seen them. You’ll often get a smile in return. That kind of brief moment of pleasantness can fill my sails all day.

OK, not to put too fine a point on it, but are you fucking kidding me?! Bicyclists in San Francisco are a scourge upon the face of the earth. The vast majority of them are rude, share the amusing misconception that they are indestructible, and in general display a troubling lack of regard for the safety of those they share the road with, to say nothing of their own. They can’t just be people who need to ride a bike to get from point A to point B because it’s convenient and inexpensive, like in most other cities. Oh, no. Not here in San Francisco. Because you can’t do anything here without turning it into a political statement.

And nowhere, nowhere, are bikers worse than in the neighborhood I used to live and still visit often: the Mission. These fedora-wearing hipsters on their idiotic single-gear bikes put the rest of the SF bike maniacs to shame. Let me tell you a little story. Now imagine the scene, if you will:

I parked my car for the day just past the corner of Valencia and a mid-block side street, and I’m just getting ready to leave so I can head home. An enterprising driver has noticed I’m leaving and is waiting behind me so he can pull in as soon as I leave. I put my car into reverse and start backing up, looking in the rear view mirror to make sure I don’t accidentally hit the guy behind me, and that’s when a biker decides it’s a great time to squeeze between my still-reversing car and the car parked just a few feet behind.

Seriously?! I mean, think about it for a second. Who’s going to win that contest? The…foolhardy…biker, or the two two-ton steel vehicles she’s sandwiched between, where the gap is narrowing? She’s—grrr…flames…heaving!

And don’t even get me started on the SF coalition of bicycle lunatics who shut down Market Street at regular intervals so that they can, with a fricking police escort, alienate and enrage beyond reason the drivers of San Francisco. Jesus.

Well, one thing is quite clear. Derek Powazek is a much nicer person than I am. Also: rad?

One of my pet peeves is the bastardization of music for the purposes of crass commercialism. Specifically, using music whose sound invokes a certain mood that its lyrics don’t match—often times actively oppose—in TV commercials.

One example is the use of Nick Drake’s Pink Moon—a song many believe was either Drake’s suicide note to the world, or at the least a song about death—in a VW Cabrio commercial about driving on a summer night.

The latest affront is the LL Bean backpack sale commercial that features the Harry McClintock recording of Big Rock Candy Mountain which was on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? sound track. This song is about a hobo’s idea of utopia, not about recapturing some kind of lost feeling by going camping with your family:

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come trickling down the rocks

You’d think the people putting together these ads would actually listen to the music they choose before they put it in an ad that gets seen by millions on national television, but that bit of good sense is evidently too far-fetched. &_&

It’s gorgeous, of course. And in accordance with the international laws of humor, existentialism and cellular service, the very first call I received on my spanking new iPhone…wait for it…dropped.

The iPhone shipped last Saturday, is supposed to arrive Thursday, and every day in between seems 3 times as long. Aargh.

?!?! over iPhone 4, and I kind of am too^†, but I gotta tell ya, what’s really making me go ?!?! is Safari 5. Included:

• 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.

I’ve just done something most of my friends will find shocking. I’ve just cancelled my mobile phone service with AT&T and switched to another carrier. More importantly, I’ve switched away from the iPhone. Really. And I’m sleeping better for it.

This is about the point when my iPhone-owning friends look at me like I’ve been hitting the egg nog a bit too hard. Upon hearing this story, one of them followed the look up with: “You’d have to pry my iPhone out of my cold, dead hands.” Not so long ago, I might have agreed with her. So what changed my mind?

One thing I have to point out is that I have the iPhone 2G, which I ordered online the very first day they became available some 2 1/2 years ago. (Personally, I like the way they look in comparison to the 3G models.) Having a general-purpose pocket computer improved my daily life in a thousand different ways, and I soon came to rely on it to function.

Now, I live in San Francisco, which along with New York City is one of the two most iPhone-heavy cities in the country—it seems like everyone and their dog has one here in SF. What this means is that AT&T’s at-best-lackluster service is truly awful here. There are entire swathes of the city where I get little or no service. In the Mission, one of the only flat neighborhoods in SF, I could not use my phone indoors. I had to stand out on my driveway to get a signal, and even then I had a less than 50% chance of connecting a call or keeping it up on a weekend. The EDGE network, there and in the rest of the city, was nothing short of unusable. I can’t count the number of times I stood at a bus stop trying futilely to load the pure-text website that would tell me when the next notoriously slow bus would arrive, only to see the damn bus beat the iPhone. It became painfully obvious that I was paying $80 a month for a data plan I couldn’t use at all. Correction: $80 a month for nothing.

In fact, it became painfully obvious that what I had wasn’t an iPhone, but an iPod Touch with a camera. So for the past few months, during which time AT&T’s service has been growing steadily worse—you’d think that instead of spending however many millions of dollars on those ridiculous Luke Wilson commercials, they’d, I don’t know, put a few more fucking towers in SF or NYC—I’d seriously been considering divorcing AT&T and finding someone who cared about me. Or at least didn’t piss me off daily.

The last straw came last weekend, when AT&T tried to quietly stop selling iPhones in NYC. It seemed clear then, if it hadn’t before, that things will only get worse before they get better. If they ever do—it’s arguable that they’ll never get better for the 2G network. The very next day, I stopped by my local Best Buy and spent $50 for a Boost Mobile phone. 10¢ a minute to talk, 10¢ per text message, pay as you go. It’ll pay for itself within a month. Less, even.

Even though it’s a cheap piece of plastic, and I have to put numbers into the address book manually (how quaint!), I can actually make (and receive) calls on it.

Have a happy new year, everyone. I know my AT&T-free one will be.

So I went to Safeway during halftime today to get a sandwich for lunch, and imagine my dismay when I find out that they’ve taken my favorite sandwich, the Hail Caesar, off the menu. I don’t get it. Why? Why would you take clearly the best sandwich on the menu off the menu? I feel betrayed.

Charles Arthur is an idiot—he appears to be telling people that it’s perfectly all right to violate Apple’s EULA by upgrading straight from Tiger to Snow Leopard and still only paying the $29 upgrade-from-Leopard price, and that since you can get away with purchasing just one copy of the OS and installing it on multiple computers, that you should. No, what surprises me is that this piece of “journalism” apparently got past his editor and got published on the Guardian‘s website. Last I heard, editors are supposed to pay attention to pesky things like laws, or barring that, ethics.

No, I take that back. Maybe he’s not dumb. Maybe he’s just a charlatan. Jesus. (hat tip: George)

So I just got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and I thought, as I often do, that I need to do something about this. See, I have a routine when I get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night:

I’ll shuffle over to my bathroom, which coming from my bedroom is just before the corner I round to get into the kitchen. Then what I’ll do is, standing just outside the bathroom, I’ll lean forward, turn my head away, squinch my eyes shut, then grope for the kitchen light switch to turn it on. Then, still looking away, I’ll back up quickly and go into the bathroom, using the light shrapnel from the kitchen to see by so that I don’t fall into the bathtub and crack my head open, because my bathroom is pitch black.

After I’m done, I do the whole squinch-eyed groping-for-the-light-switch routine in reverse, and all because I don’t want to blind myself. Clearly, I am in need of a night light. Equally clearly, it has to be a blue canary night light. Lite.

But tragically, there is no such thing. And I can’t understand why. Google searches for “blue canary night light,” “blue canary nite lite,” and “blue canary night lite” all turn up song lyrics and forum posts from frustrated souls like me bemoaning the lack of a purchasable blue canary night lite. I mean, wtf? If I can get a leg lamp, why can’t I get a blue canary night lite? God.

Entertainingly, however, every one of the sponsored links on a search for “blue canary” is night-light-related. But this situation still sucks.