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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?

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.

did you know that the easiest way to peel a banana is by pinching the tip of the banana? Not cutting or pulling at the stem area, as most of us have likely grown up doing. Really. Just pinch the tip, and the peel comes right apart. It’s amazing! This apparently is how monkeys eat bananas. No lie.

My colleague blew my mind when he told me about this last week. What the hell have I been doing my entire life? Man…years, wasted eating bananas the wrong way. Sigh. What else have I been doing wrong?

So I had a bit of an adventure tonight. My cousin was doing a hit-and-run visit, and after hanging out this evening, I had to drop her off to meet up with the rest of her party so they could head back to Sacramento for their flight out tomorrow morning. It turned out that the rest of her party was having a late dinner in Sausalito, so we made the trek over the Golden Gate to find them.

Ever tried to find your way around Sausalito’s labyrinth of ridiculously winding streets? Not a fun prospect in full daylight, but at night, it’s nearly impossible. On the way there, I had my cousin to navigate for me, and we still made a few wrong turns. On the way back, it was just me…by some miracle, though, I only made a single wrong turn. So now I’m safe and snug in my own apartment, but I would still be wandering around Sausalito if it wasn’t for the iPhone, which saved my ass on several occasions tonight. Without Google Maps and the triangulation function (mine’s the 2G edition without the GPS), we’d still be trying to find the restaurant. Three cheers for the wonders of modern technology. Banzai!

love this. You may recall me mentioning that my company is on an extended consulting assignment in Knoxville, TN. The way it works is that every three weeks or so, we fly out there for a full week—this was one such.

Problem is that there is no direct flight to Knoxville from San Francisco. Depending on the airline you take, you have to connect through its hub airport: Chicago for United, Dallas-Fort Worth for American, Atlanta for Delta, and like this week, Charlotte for US Airways. Now, let me make it known that there are no words vicious enough, evil enough, to capture the intensity of my bone-deep hatred for this airline, though the tale I am about to tell may go some way to explaining.

Charlotte, like all the hub airports I mentioned, suffers from the increasingly common malady of not being big enough to handle the level of traffic that comes through it. Flights are booked with very short connection times, and the slightest amount of delay wreaks havoc in a schedule not built for flexibility. On any given day, Charlotte is filled with disgruntled travelers who have missed their flights or had them canceled, etc., etc.

Problem with Charlotte is that it is built pretty much in a straight line, and inevitably the two gates I am arriving to and leaving from are at opposite ends of the airport. Combine this with a 50 minute layover and the likewise inevitable delay, and you’ll understand why most of my memories of CLT are blurry because I am always sprinting across the airport trying to make my connection.

Today, I had the same 50 minute layover, but my incoming flight from Knoxville was 40. Minutes. Late. There was no chance of making my original flight without divine intervention, so when we landed in Knoxville, the flight attendant announced that passengers going to San Francisco should see the gate agent.

When I got off the plane and found the gate agent, she informed me that I had been rebooked on a flight to SF leaving at 9:45, leaving from gate A14. As it was 5:50 at the time, I figured I had plenty of time to get dinner—the Charlotte airport is something of a culinary wasteland, but that’s another blog post—so I pocketed my new boarding pass and made my way to the food court.

It was about 6:30 when I finished dinner, so I started to make my way to the A concourse. I got to the beginning of it, but realized that there were—wait for it—only 12 gates. There was no such thing as gate A14. After wandering around a bit to ascertain that this was in fact the case, I went back to the monitors to look for flights to San Francisco, in hopes that my boarding pass had somehow been misprinted, and discovered none at all. There appeared to be no flights to San Francisco leaving for at least the next 5 hours, or whatever the upper limit is for the upcoming flights monitors.

Only then did it occur to me to take a closer look at the boarding pass, which was when I realized that the boarding pass I had was from Las Vegas to San Francisco, not Charlotte to San Francisco. Huh? What the hell was I supposed to do with a boarding pass from Vegas to SF when I was in Charlotte?

After taking a moment to think about it, I figured that I had been rebooked onto a flight with a layover in Las Vegas—which, can I just say, is just mean on a Friday night—but the gate agent had neglected to give me the boarding pass for the first leg. Pretty irritating, but not the end of the world. So back I went to the monitors, and there I found a flight leaving for Las Vegas at 7:41. I figured this was the flight I was intended to be on, so I went to its assigned gate, told the gate agent there what had happened and asked him to reprint my boarding pass for that flight.

He couldn’t find anyone by my name in the passenger manifest.

He did find, however, that the previous @#&*!$ agent had booked me on the earlier flight to Las Vegas, which had departed at 6:15. By this time it was 6:45, and I had, you guessed it, missed the flight. And the 7:41 flight was—shocker—oversold. This gate agent appeared to be as dumbfounded as me, but he directed me to the airline’s special services desk a few gates away to see if they could help me.

They were as astounded by my story as I was—lots of head-shaking going on—but managed to get me on the 7:41 flight, which would get into Vegas just a few minutes before the one leaving for SF.

Long story short, I ended up getting back to San Francisco after barely making the second leg of the flight—I literally got off one plane, ran to the second gate, then got on the other plane—a grand total of 3 hours late.

Again I ask: why does this stuff always happen to me? God.

I was going to write a fluff piece on getting some SIGG water bottles, but then, as I often do, I did some research so I would know what I was talking about, and this isn’t going to be fluffy anymore.

So a few years ago, it was discovered that 95% of Americans^* have levels of a chemical called bisphenol-A (BPA for short) in their urine. BPA is an estrogenic chemical (i.e. mimics the hormone estrogen), and its structure and presence can “duplicate, block or exaggerate hormonal responses.” According to its critics, which are legion.

BPA is present in polycarbonate (as opposed to polyethylene or polypropylene) plastic cans and bottles—like the Nalgene sports bottles most people have no doubt owned once or twice in their lives—and has been found to have leached into the water or food contained within.

Now, there is some debate (mostly between plastics-industry sponsored studies and government-funded studies) about the relative harmfulness of having BPA in your system, but the news is quite alarming nevertheless. Government agencies at this point are not concerned enough about potential deleterious effects of ingesting BPA to have banned its use, so policing, if it happens, has to happen at an individual level.

I had only heard (or to be fair, absorbed) the barest minimum of facts about this when a colleague of mine was telling me why he had shown up to work one day with this gorgeous aluminum water bottle, and I asked him where he got it from. He focused more on the fact that no water bottle he’d ever had didn’t alter the flavor of the water inside if it was left overnight, and that only bottles like the non-reactive aluminum ones that SIGG, a Swiss company, made had your water still tasting good after a day or two. And, as I said, these particular bottles are powder coated in a huge variety of beautiful designs, so I wanted one, just because it would be pretty.

So I got a couple, a large one and a small one, and when I was in the store, I noticed that popular water bottle manufacturers like CamelBak and Nalgene are now making BPA-free bottles, no doubt in an effort to reach out to disgruntled consumers.

As for me, I’m going to keep my pretty SIGGs and get rid of my old Nalgene bottles, if only because the water does still taste good after it’s been in the bottle a while.

^* This is according to my single source article, which is admittedly a couple of years old. Prachee, I’m sure you’ll know more or be able to find more relevant scientific data, and be able to tell me if what I read is wrong or disingenuous.

on my way to the Metreon to see The Incredible Hulk (more on this in a bit), and I get to 4th and Howard, the southeast corner of the Metreon complex, and I see this enormous line of people snaking down the block all the way from the main entrance. Complete with camp chairs and blankets, many of the waiters were busily playing with their PSPs and DSes, and I was like, “huh?”

I walked down the block, puzzled, until I got to the main entrance, and there, on a single 8 1/2″ by 11″ piece of paper, was written: “Line begins here. Metal Gear Solid 4.” Really? I mean, I know people are excited about it, but come on.

Anyway. About the movie. I’ll give it a high 3 star rating. It wasn’t as compelling or entertaining as Iron Man, but it was solidly good, well made, and leaps and bounds beyond the Ang Lee debacle. Here’s why it worked:

• The action does not let up, not for one minute.
• The talented cast turned in understated but still powerful performances; Ed Norton delivered, as usual, as did Tim Roth.
• The script was completely devoid of cheesy monologues, relying instead on the cast to convey the thankfully unspoken emotion.

Good stuff, worth seeing on the big screen. Oh, and OMG, did you know? If you get up at the ass crack of dawn to go see a movie before noon, it only costs you $6!

Also, and I can’t believe I forgot to mention this in my summer movie preview, but the other movie I’m totally excited about seeing this summer is The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. I love John Hannah.

two years ago, my romantic imaginings of living in the city entailed a lot of evenings like the one I spent last night.

First, I met some friends at Craft Gym for the Lotta Prints event, a chance for people to play with artist Lotta Jansdotter’s stamps and stencils^*.

We followed that up with a truly excellent sushi dinner at Sebo, and rounded out the evening with hot chocolate and conversation at the new Christopher Elbow store/lounge.

The lounge space at Christopher Elbow is cunningly designed, with the seating area consisting of one long banquette that faces a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, making the customers a living window display. The seating arrangement, along with the inspired use of lighting, makes the space magical at night. That, on top of their, oh yeah, excellent chocolates, will no doubt make Christopher Elbow a San Francisco landmark in the near future.

Luckily for us, though, Hayes Valley was very quiet last night, and we had Sebo and Elbow almost to ourselves, which lent the whole evening a rare idyllic overtone.

I love this city.

^* This was entirely too crowded, so we ended up leaving quickly, but I did come away inspired. Look for the result of that inspiration in a new blog template soon.

right after I moved to the Bay Area: “I don’t know what it’s like where you come from, but public transportation really works here.” That, as it turned out, was a load of horse shit. But that’s a rant for another day.

What I’m writing about today is that, despite the fact that public transportation here does not work very well at all, riding it has become one of my favorite activities in recent weeks.

You may have seen me mention before that we’ve instituted a rotating office at work, and the three full-timers at my company (of which I am one) switch off hosting work at each of our places every week. So two out of every three weeks, I commute to work, almost always by taking public transportation.

Now, I live on what I consider to be one of the prettiest Muni routes in the city: between the Caltrain station and the Embarcadero station in the Financial District. It runs along the Embarcadero, next to the bay, past the ballpark and the Bay Bridge. And three times a week, two out of every three weeks, I ride that route to begin my commute to work.

It’s stunning. And the never-tiring beauty of that view, combined with the warmth of the morning sunlight, makes me feel like I’m in a Hou Hsiao Hsien film every morning. Not a bad way to start the day.

Unless you’ve seen my new digs, you probably haven’t heard the story about how I got the best TV in the known universe^* a few months ago. And when you go all out like that, you really need to have a professional come out and calibrate the TV after it’s been watched for a sufficient period of time that its electronics have stabilized. For me, that calibration date was last week.

Before I continue, let me digress a bit here: most TVs’ color, out of the box, tends toward the blue part of the spectrum, which along with the high default brightness setting makes the TVs look bright and vibrant on the display wall at your local electronics megamart, but which is not actually true to life, and ends up looking rather cartoonish when you get it home. Hence the need for calibration.

This leaning toward the blue part of the spectrum is referred to in the jargon as having a high color temperature (via DF), and in the case of my TV, running at around 9000˚K by default (remember, color temperature is not a measure of physical temperature, but I’ll let you read up on that yourself). The goal of calibration is to get the color temperature down to around 6500˚K, which equates to the color composition of sunlight at noon in the summertime, or in other words, a balanced and neutral lighting situation.

Now, if you’ve ever talked to me for any length of time, you’ve no doubt heard me rant about how I hate calling tech support, because usually the person on the other end of the phone is some kid who took a 3-week training course and I often end up (well, start out) knowing more than they do. Making the whole phone call an exercise in futility.

Anyway. So for my TV, a Geek Squad, er, geek (I bought my TV from the Magnolia Home Theater store in Best Buy), was to come out and do the calibration, and while he in general gave the impression of competence, he let slip that he really didn’t understand some of the fundamentals during the process.

One of the other things plasma TVs do out of the box is run a bit hot, and calibration is supposed to make it so that they run cooler and consume less power. This young gentleman seemed to not understand the difference between color temperature and actual temperature, and was under the impression that the TV was actually running at 9000˚K, and boy howdy, was this running up my power bill.

By way of reference, the surface of the sun is about 6000˚C, or 6273.15˚K. If my TV had actually been running at 9000˚K, my apartment would have been incinerated within moments of first plugging it in, and forget about the power bill. Heh.

^* I am not kidding. I also got it just a little while before Pioneer announced that they are no longer going to produce plasma panels and are outsourcing production to their bitterest competitor, Panasonic. Neener.