Tea Party? No, these guys make those guys look reasonable . . .
I was on my way home and saw these guys outside the Mountain View Post Office. I looked at the Obama-with-a-Hitler-moustache and figured the Tea Party had set up shop. I snapped a picture, and then this guy asked if I was worried about the solar flares.
Solar flares? Tea Party people don’t worry about solar flares . . . I smiled and approached: these guys were doing performance art! I told them solar flares are good for cooking.
“Obama isn’t doing anything to stop the solar flares,” he began to explain.
I saw the name LaRouche and realized these guys weren’t parodying the Tea Party: they were actually way further down the rabbit hole of crazy. “Well, he likes solar power,” I punted.
As the guy began to explain that we should be performing nuclear fusion ourselves I edged away. I am an impressionable young man with a sufficiently unconventional belief system: I don’t want to catch their crazy!
Fans in Mountain View Celebrate India's World Cup Victory
As I was walking home from the cafe I encountered a growing crowd of shouting, chanting, singing folks waving Indian flags. I googled “Indian Holidays” on my smart phone, then thought to google “India cricket” and it turns out India has just beaten Sri Lanka to win the World Cup.
In my Sophomore year of college I was paired with a roommate from India. Tarun was a very serious EE major who left the room for only three things: 1) classes, 2) meals and 3) the India-Pakistan cricket match. He was a nice guy but since he was always studying in the room he wasn’t an ideal roommate.
Indian ex-pats I meet tend to be really serious, smart, hard-working people, so it is nice to see a crowd of folks reveling in a collective emotional experience. This is a great moment for anyone who has moved so far from home to make their life.
Yesterday, at the cash register of my local supermarket, I was asked by the cashier if I would purchase only one of the two packs of noodles I had intended to purchase. The unspoken implication was, in that way, someone else could have noodles too. Now, from the point-of-view of the supermarket’s profit, it makes no difference whether those two packs were sold to me as an individual, or sold separately. Yen is yen. But as an example of a society sharing its burden (even in this small way), it spoke volumes. I had my hand gently slapped, and was humbled.
I recall a story I heard on the radio, from I think it was Denmark, where a lady needed a medical procedure and was informed that there would be a two-month wait for the service. She explained this to her son, a Doctor, who offered to pull some strings to get her in sooner, and she shamed him because the right thing to do is follow the rules like everyone else: fairness before favoritism.
This sort of thinking in anathema in much of the world, but it is a way of thinking that I really like. I guess its because as a child I was indoctrinated with Socialist ideology at the water fountain, where we were taught to queue and each take an equal share.
Taken from the roof of a friend's fancy condo at a party in June, 2010.
At the party we explained that we would soon be moving back to California, but could end up back on the East Coast in a few years. The host said he’d put us down as “Bi-Coastal Curious.”
The southern terminus of the Steven's Creek Trail.
I visited a friend at El Camino Hospital before heading to work. From the hospital, I took Sleeper Ave to the Steven’s Creek Trail, which actually ends at Sleeper. They’ll be extending the trail over the next few years with a bridge over 85.
In the past few weeks I have been pimping out my cubicle.
The newest feature is I moved the bookshelf from shoulder height at the back of the cube to waist height on the outside of the cube, which I can do, since I sit at the end of a row. The new low shelf space is where I share coffee and where snacks can be distributed. This also increases my “visibility” and opens up opportunities to chat with coworkers. Sort of the opposite of when I worked remote last year.
Center, you can see the back of my work laptop, a Lenovo W510 with an SSD drive. (I love SSD drives.) Some low-light flowers, a tall desk chair I nicked from an abandoned cubicle, and to the right, my Lego Cisco logo, which I had disassembled for repairs and which I think I’ll keep in San Jose for now.
Near the end of the bicycle version of my commute I ride along a creek. I could tell from Stephen’s Creek that the water was high, so when I rode the ramp down to this underpass I wasn’t surprised. I took my bicycle around this water, through especially sticky mud that threatened to suck off my shoes, and which globbed on to my bicycle, smeared on my pants.
These potato chips did not succumb to my magic ass.
I was tipped off that a bag of potato chips was hanging loose in the vending machine. I wasn’t desiring potato chips, but I felt obliged anyway to whap my butt against the side of the vending machine to see if I might dislodge them and therefor acquire one of my favorite cuisines: free food! Many a time in college I procured errant candy bars from the vending machines in the Digital Computing Laboratory building by wielding what I refer to as my magic ass.
Alas, my magic ass did not succeed this time. “Dude, just put in 75 cents, you’ll get two,” suggested a coworker.
“But I don’t want BBQ potato chips. I’m only interested in dislodging free food!”
I did buy a Snickers bar, just because, but it is still in my backpack, uneaten. I’ll wash it down with a coffee at some point.
A bloated plate burrito, al pastor on the inside, parmesan cheese atop, at Taqueria San Bruno.
I have fallen off the bandwagon of late, but now that I have freed up some time I’m fixing to retroactively post photos. I make up my own rules.
I visited my team in the San Bruno office on Thursday. We grabbed Taqueria San Bruno, and it was good. The food came out slow so my coworker and I downed two bottles of Mexican Coke each. What is Mexican Coke? Coke from Mexico, made with cane sugar. The other coke we get from Mexico I think mostly originates in Columbia, and that is not my preferred formulation.
A 6 train pulls through the loop at the abandoned City Hall subway station.
Back in May I joined a New York Transit Museum tour of the abandoned City Hall station. This was the original Southern terminus of the Lexington Ave line, built on the loop underneath City Hall where trains would turn around and head back North. It was abandoned before long for several reasons, including the proximity of the Express station built at nearby Chambers St when the system was expanded, and also because when the trains moved to having middle doors, the gap on the curved platform became all the more dangerous. Lastly, it is impossible to lengthen this curving station to accommodate the longer trains run on the contemporary New York subway.
There was a plan to move the New York Transit Museum here, but folks became skittish of opening a subway museum beneath City Hall after 9/11.
You can get a quick glimpse of the station by hopping on a southbound Lexington local train at Chambers St. Our tour began at Chambers St, where we boarded the front car of a train ready to enter the loop and were dropped off by MTA staff at the station to take pictures. It was a bit dark for my camera, it is more compelling as a legend than it is in person.
New York City is full of hustlers. Some prey on tourists. Here, a tree-dwelling Manhattanite offers two backpacker girls some novel photographs and an adorable memory, in exchange for cookies. Of course, a shrewd Brooklynite like myself is not above taking quick advantage of the situation for his own cute photograph, but then the squirrels and I have an understanding.
So, one of my peeves is companies that charge new customers a lower rate, and then raise the rate after you have had them for a while. I think it is really weird that loyal customers are charged more than new customers. For example, I signed up for basic cable service with Comcast at $60/mo, but paid the introductory rate of $30/mo, which is about the most I’m inclined to pay for monthly television. (And I’m only willing to pay that much because I prefer to live with someone who likes TV.)
Anyway, my rate recently went up to, as best I can tell: $45/mo for the next six months, after which it will go up to $60/mo. “Homie don’t play dat.” So I called them and explained that I was only going to pay them $30/mo, either through them or DirecTV, which both offer new customers $30/mo. They transferred me to some other lady that said that it was $45/mo or bust unless I wanted the cheaper $30/mo package but no more Bravo. I said I’d check with my sweetheart and the lady on the phone said “okay, $30 package for you.”
Not sure if we have Bravo or not, I looked online. Aside from pirating shows, which is inconvenient for the non-techy sweetheart and the old analog television, Amazon.com offers “Top Chef” and “Project Runway” which is what we watch on Bravo, for $2/episode. If both shows are running then we’d pay $16 in a month, otherwise . . . ah and yes, Amazon on-demand service pipes straight through the TiVo: no technical expertise or computer connections required!
So, I think I’m paying Comcast $30/mo now, and if I don’t have Bravo then I’m purchasing shows a la carte. Vivé consumer empowerment!
Update: Comcast got in touch with me due to this post, and switched me back to the six-month $30 rate that includes Bravo. Thanks, Comcast! I guess I’ll have to blog about this again in August.
Walking to work Monday morning I passed a restaurant on Castro St that was closed. In their front window was this table of half-eaten food. That is a failure on multiple levels: you’re supposed to clean up at night: wipe down the tables, sweep, mop: multiple passes through the dining room. And if you’re going to somehow manage to not bus and clean a table, you shouldn’t miss the table in the front window.
I won’t name names, but I’ll note that they have 2.5 stars on Yelp. I tried to leave them a message through the contact form on their web site, but the contact form is broken too, so I left the message via an identical form at their web design firm, with the advice that they fix their client’s contact form and pass my message along.
Meanwhile, I was frustrated with my own photo. I can live with the glare from the dirty plate-glass window, but there’s way too much light bleeding off the styrofoam cup. As a naive post-processing rookie, I stumbled around through Gimp’s filters and couldn’t come up with anything good. But the Retinex filter thing got me funkeh goodness: the washed out food on the table has been crisped up, and all the reflections in the plate-glass have been brought out too, rendering a sad story as some sort of broken memory one would prefer to forget.
