I first moved to San Francisco twenty years ago. It was a different city then, and I was a different person, but it’s been a great place to live. It’s felt like home since just after I got here.
It was my sophomore year of college and I had been told to take some time away, grow up, and figure out if I really wanted to be in school. I had never been west of the Mississippi. On April 22, 1986, I took a People Express flight from Newark to San Francisco, paying $99 on the plane. I stayed at the Embarcadero YMCA, where I paid $20 per night. The desk clerk told me I had a room on the fifth floor and asked if I minded something facing the street; I thought it was fine, not realizing until I got to the room that there was an elevated freeway about a car’s length from my window.
That, of course, encapsulates a few of the changes to San Francisco. The Embarcadero Freeway is blessedly no more, a casualty of the Loma Prieta earthquake and San Francisco doing some sensible urban planning. The YMCA hotel is now the Harbor Court, which runs $220 per night, according to Trip Advisor.
I’ve had a bunch of different lives here: single, part of a couple with Susan, and as a parent; working for CalPirg or in Silicon Valley or as a consultant; renting and as a homeowner. Every life change has made me see new parts of San Franciso. In my early time here, AIDS and homelessness drove the tone of the city, which had a “we’re in this together” feel in those days. During the boom, geeks like me were (almost) the cool kids, though I never made it to cool kid. Now, as a parent, the awful state of the public schools, the frothy housing market, and the consequent flight of the middle class leave me depressed; at the same time, the physical plant of the city is better than ever: the new De Young Museum, the ballpark (which I voted against, but now approve of), Octavia Boulevard, the Ferry Building, and the soon-to-open Third Street Muni Line are all good things.
San Francisco feels more divided to me than it has before. There used to be some cohesion to being the most liberal big city in America, but now it feels like the infighting in local politics is dominating all the big issues. It almost feels like the city, after a long time as a forward-thinking place, has just fallen off the map.
I’ve lived and traveled elsewhere since I first arrived — back to finish school, some time in the UK — but I’ve been here for a total of about fifteen years of the last twenty and expect to call it home for as long as I can see.
Appropriately for tax season, I recently finished reading David Cay Johnston’s Perfectly Legal. The book describes the current state of the U.S. tax system; the description is of a no-longer progressive, mostly flat system which systematically offers loopholes to the richest while hunting for cheaters among the poorest.
Johnston covers taxes for The New York Times. I’ve read Johnston’s articles for years and I had expected the book to have the Times’s grand, objective style. It doesn’t; it’s an angry, muckraking book about what he rightly sees as an injust transformation. The message of the book, ultimately, is that the tax code is promoting income inequality.
Johnston blames the current situation on the power of the “political donor class,” the rich few who make the bulk of political donations in this country. That’s undoubtedly true, but I think it’s only part of the story. I think that the rise of an anti-tax ideology as the key pillar of the dominant political party in this country — and the attribution of Republican success to the party’s opposition to taxes — has meant that, regardless of how it happened, taxation doesn’t need explicit opposition from the political donor class anymore.
His chapters on the lack of enforcement of the tax code among the rich and the tax-deniers were, I thought, the most interesting and informative. He also goes into great and informative detail Alternative Minimum Tax; the AMT has been discussed a lot, but Johnston makes clear how far from its original purposes it is today.
The book does has flaws. The biggest is probably that it’s very repetitive. On the other hand, for a book on taxes, it’s not in the least dry — this is a book which should make you angry.
The question, of course, is how to do anything about it. As a political donor, it makes me want to give money to candidates who’ll fix the system, even if that runs counter to a narrowly-constructed version of my self-interest. But nobody’s even running on a “collect the taxes we’re owed” or “make the tax system more progressive” ticket — as Johnston points out, people run away from those ideas today. I don’t think the American political mainstream includes the notion that taxes can be done well; ultimately, I don’t think the country can survive that for very long.
About five years ago, I bought life insurance for the first time. We’d bought our house in the previous year and our son was about to be born, so it seemed like a prudent thing to do. I shopped around and got a good deal from Western Southern Life on a five-year term policy. For the next five years, they debited $19.50 a month from my checking account and, in case I died, a significant portion of our mortgage would be paid off; I thought we were both happy with this arrangement.
For reasons not related to my satisfaction with the company, I was planning on letting the policy expire. Then, earlier this week, I got a letter from Western Southern saying “The recent change in your Pre-Authorized Check payments will become effective with the next withdrawal from (my bank account).” Hmm, what’s this about? No “Would you like to renew?” note. No “Here are some policy options for you” call. Just “We’re changing your billing.” (Admittedly, we recently moved, and perhaps some mail was lost in the forwarding process? I don’t think that’s been happening, but how do I know for sure?)
But the stupid part is how much they changed: the monthly premium went up to $244.50. (More than twelve-and-a-half times more.) When I called to not-so-politely decline this coverage, I was told that, as I hadn’t called to change my policy, they just put me on one of their “standard rate” policies.
So, this company, which I’d had a good feeling about before, just became a swamp of leaches and con-artists in my mind, luring customers in with good deals and waiting for them not to notice the increased debits. How many people fall for this trick? For how long?
Why would a company that’s trying to build long-time relationships with customers do this? Don’t they see that this gives them a sleazy, fly-by-night reputation? Don’t they see that anyone they do this to will never work with them again?
We just saw Inside Man and I’m pleased to say, it’s a great, entertaining, and exciting movie. I’m reminded how much I like Spike Lee’s movies, from the early, funny ones (She’s Gotta Have It) and the overtly political ones (Do The Right Thing or Jungle Fever) to his later, harder-to-categorize ones (Malcom X or the truly terrific Summer of Sam). I haven’t seen everything of his, and some of what I have seen hasn’t been as good as I had hoped it would be, but there’s no question that he’s both a genius and an incredible movie-maker.
Inside Man is, first and foremost, a caper movie. And like the best caper movies, it combines suspense, great tradecraft, and a stylized look. On top of that, it captures the look and feel — and attitude — of New York (and real New Yorkers) in a way that only Spike Lee movies do; this movie was not filmed in Toronto.
Just go see it.
I finally read Vannevar Bush’s essay As We May Think for the first time this week. For something written in 1945, it’s amazing; for that matter, if it had been written in 1975, it would have been just as amazing for its uncanny predictive power. He outlines something very close to the modern digital era. If you haven’t read it, you should.
Of course, it’s off on many details, comically so in some cases. His discussion of “dry photography” and the process of distributing books in microfilm form remind me of the pneumatic tubes of Brazil. With transistors still two years out, I guess “thermionic tubes” were the right technology to talk about; that they’re now used only by die-hard audiofiles might surprise him.
Where Bush falls short about technology is in not predicting the pervasiveness and connectedness that we have. Yes, scientists and researchers use modern day “Memexes,” but so do people looking for people, movies, restaurants, travel, trivia, porn, and a million other topics. The information in our memexes is distributed among a wider array of machines, all connected, giving a much larger field of information available to everyone. We also use the internet for forms of communication — blogs might have been predictable but eBay probably wasn’t — that I don’t think Bush envisioned.
Bush was better on technology than social trends. He didn’t foresee shifts in gender roles; these days, scientists type for themselves and “a whole roomful of girls armed with simple key board punches” are not transcribing the thoughts of great men. He predicted that books would be the unit of transfer, where the web “page” model is much finer grained. That almost all of us are still typing, rather than speaking for human- or machine-transcription, is an artifact of something else that I think is hard to predict: when we’ll adapt machines to our behavior and when we’ll adapt our behavior to what machines do easily.
But all that’s incidental to the astounding accomplishments of prediction in this essay. Search engines are trying to deliver on the potential of the Memex and he described information retrieval better than most people can today. The combination is digital photography and “radio” (or, as we think of it, “wireless”) is probably ahead of where he predicted and book digitization is almost there. His description of browsing and navigation make an interface of windows, scrollbars, and a pointing device (though not a “lever”) seem almost obvious.
(Props to The Atlantic for being true to the spirit of the essay by making it easily accessible.)
I was a vegetarian* for 16 years, which included the time when I learned to cook. So, I’ve never learned to cook meat and most of the meat I’ve cooked has been on a George Foreman grill. (It’s a supersized waffle iron on an angle, but the results are surprisingly good.)
Since I started eating meat again, though, I’ve loved short ribs, which I was introduced to at Charlie’s cafe. So tonight, we cooked the short ribs from Judy Rogers’s Zuni Cafe Cookbook. And, I have to say, I’m very pleased with how they came out: tender and savory.
The cookbook is different from most I’ve used. The prose sections are a lot of fun to read. As Deborah Madison says in her blurb, the introduction alone is worth the price of the book. The recipes are also more textual than algorithmic, if you will — prose descriptions of what to do, rather than more mechanical steps. And it seems to demand a little more from a cook; for example, you need to understand the adjectives she uses (”scant” appears a lot; how much do you cook something to brown it “gently?”). But at the same time, it’s actually a very easy recipe to execute and I felt confident that the dish would turn out well the whole time.
[* Actually, I was, as a friend describes, an ovo-lacto-pescatarian. That is, I still ate dairy, eggs, fish, and seafood. Within that, though, I was very strict.]
When we were recently at the Ferry Building, we picked up some burrata mozzarella at the Cowgirl Creamery shop. Eating it is an amazing experience. It’s soft, it’s sweet, it’s salty. A few tomatoes — even if there are no good tomatoes this time of year — and a good bread, with a little bit of olive oil, and you can’t do better.
It’s worth going out of your way to try this out. I’ve heard that, in the bay area, the fabulous A-16 serves it, but that I can pick it up and take it home makes me happy.
This is rainy season in San Francisco. It’s also, unfortunately, the time of year when Pacific Bell SBC at&t delivers new yellow pages.
I just about stopped using the yellow pages nearly a decade ago, long before I started working at a search engine and long before there was good integration of local information with general searches. Certainly by the time I had always-on internet access at home, I gave up using a printed yellow pages except in the rarest of cases. If the local business has a website — almost always true for a restaurant, for example — and you can find it, the web is great. If it doesn’t, the presence of online yellow pages means you’ll at least get the basic contact information and, in some categories, third party reviews and discussion.
On the other hand, I have at least one friend who swears by the physical yellow pages these days. He loves how easy it is to find the big, credible players, because they buy display ads. And those big ads contain lots of information, often including open hours, manufacturers whose products the store carries, a map, and details that might give you a feel for the business. Exactly what you’d hope to find on a website.
Many of those display ads are placed by local businesses that don’t have a website. For example, one of our local hardware stores (Tuggey’s on 24th) has no website and the other (Cliff’s Variety on Castro) appears to have added a website only in the past few weeks. (Go, Cliff’s!)
So, when this year’s yellow pages turned to a pile of liquidy grey sludge after a couple of hours of waiting for us on the front steps, I wasn’t particularly disappointed. What surprises me is the people who would still be disappointed. And more surprising are the merchants who spend a significant amount of money to reach those people, but don’t even attempt to reach people like me.
Given my long commute, I swear by audiobooks. I used to borrow books on tape from my library, but for a little more than year I’ve been a customer of Audible.com and download books. While no service is comprehensive, Audible does have a very good collection of books.
Audible’s site, however, has always been terrible to use. This makes no sense: they’re a web-only business, so they should have put some effort into their site. But the navigation was always difficult, downloading was awkward, and, most importantly, the site was always too slow. Fine, the downloads take a long time, but navigating the site should be quick and zippy. (Here’s a hint, folks: put the big downloads on a separate pipe from your home page.)
Audible recently changed their fee structure (a little more money, but credits roll over from month to month — probably a good thing) and, at the same time, redesigned the site. I’m not going to comment on the new green-on-green look, but the substance of the redesign has two good changes and a few bad ones.
Good change #1 is that downloading is much more straightforward and is now set up for downloading multiple files at a time. Good change #2 is that they no longer make use of broken JavaScript for every link, so that middle-button-click now opens pages in new tabs for me.
The bad part is that navigation seems even worse than before. Each page used to have genre and category links in a sidebar and a search box in the upper right; both are now gone, replaced by, respectively, a tips box that always seems to say “Great choice! You spent money with us!” (my paraphrasing) and a viewer for the current contents of your shopping care, which seems useless for those loyal subscribers who tend to pick one audiobook at a time, as their plan allows.
Unfortunately, the site, if anything, is slower than it was before. So slow that images time out all the time, breaking their fragile HTML layout in odd ways. So slow that one of every ten of my page views ends up with a “couldn’t contact server audible.com” message. So slow that I find myself needing to do other things (like write flames about Audible) while I try to navigate their site. Sigh.
It’s not as if there’s not good examples of online bookstores…
While I’m grumbling about Audible, why do they give the same filename to all the parts of the same book? For example, I just downloaded Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. It comes in three parts. Why are all three files, when I down load them to my Mac, named “OnBeautyUnabridgedPa_mp332.aa“? I assume the “Pa” is a vestigial reference to “part 2,” but why doesn’t that get precedence over “Unabridged” or “mp332″ — both of which, from my perspective, are boilerplate.
So, I used to write a blog by hand in HTML. Then I wrote some tools to generate it from XML. Then I went back to hand-written HTML. And that explains why I average about six posts a year.
Perhaps blogging software isn’t a bad idea at all…
My next task is to pull the old, handwritten posts into WordPress. Then maybe I’ll play with themes.