August 2006 Archives
I was just saying to Jeff about an hour ago, as he was musing over last Sunday’s New York Times (his aunt had picked it up at the airport on her way back to SFO from Manila, go figure), that I wished that New York were closer to San Francisco, and that it really belonged out here in California. We used to go there once a quarter or so, and I think I will miss the easy access to all the great theater and museums.
Lo and behold, I check my RSS feeds, and Kottke had pointed out his “Manhattan Elsewhere” project, which I’d missed back in June when he first published it, and in which he inserted a map of Manhattan into maps of other places at the same scale, using Google Maps and Google Earth. One of those places was San Francisco, where the island fits snugly between the City’s downtown and Alameda in the East Bay, taking the place of Treasure Island. Seeing Manhattan in scale to San Francisco really amazes me, especially when I think of how much of Manhattan I’ve walked at one time or another. Some of my wanderings there would be almost like walking from my office near the Presidio to our home here in Daly City.
My friend David Levine was awarded the Hugo for Best Short Story at Worldcon this past weekend. Way to go, David!
His winning story, “Tk’tk’tk,” can be read online.
The Hugo (which is a really gorgeous statue; the rocket is based on the hood ornament of an Oldsmobile 88, while a new design for the base is selected each year; the photo here is of the 2005 Hugo) is given to the best science fiction and fantasy works of the previous year.
The San Francico Chronicle reports that up to 14 pedestrians, including one child, have been injured, as many as half critically, in a “hit-and-run spree” in western San Francisco this afternoon. One person was hit across the street from my office, where the sidewalk now is cordoned off, a bicycle with its wheel and frame badly bent and a pile of rags—clothing? makeshift bandages?—lying inside. The suspect, who was driving a black SUV, has been arrested just two blocks from here, at California and Spruce; a reporter-colleague managed to get a picture of the SUV—its passenger-side windshield, hood and bumpers crumpled from the attacks it perpetrated—surrounded by police cars.
“It was like ‘Death Race 2000,’” firefighter Danny Bright said at California and Fillmore streets, with an ambulance nearby. “Guys were walking down the sidewalk and the guy just came up and ran them over. The guy went crazy.”
The SUV was finally stopped—it had to be surrounded and rammed by police cars—just outside the Starbucks at Laurel Village just up the block, where I normally walk at lunch, as my bank, several cafes and a bookstore are there. Today, fortunately, I was so busy at work that I didn’t get away for lunch until after 2:00, at which point the events already were over.
Update: CBS5 in San Francisco has a map online showing the hit-and-run locations. The three red blocks at the left side of the screen are all near my office, the longish building immediately to the southeast of the third red block from the left (although that red block, at least, isn’t quite in the right place, as the hit-and-run was a little bit to the east of the location they’ve marked). And, in a particularly tragic update, the media is now reporting that that particular location was the scene of a fatality—from what I’ve heard from one eyewitness, it appears that the pile of rags I saw, and noted above, actually were the blankets that had been used to cover the body.
Update 8/30: As Gene notes, there’s been no report of any fatalities in San Francisco (the first victim, in Fremont, was killed), so it appears that my co-workers were incorrect about a fatality occurring across the street, where two people were hit.
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cool things to do with your Flickr photos or on your Flickr site
On the positive side, our house does seem to be reasonably secure, at least to the casual would-be burglar.
The negative side? The $185 bill for the locksmith’s services, pissing off the cat who was on the other side of the door, and the approximately hour-long wait in the garage—until about 11 pm—after I locked us out of the house last night. Oh yeah, and my embarrassing drama upon discovering that I’d locked us out of the house last night.
Newsweek International Edition has published a “Global Education Special Report” with a Web Exclusive feature ranking the top 100 “global universities.” Harvard and Stanford were ranked first and second respectively, and UCSF was ranked ninth, so my household’s alma maters and current employer were quite well represented. Yale, Cal-Tech and Berkeley were ranked third, fourth, and fifth, followed by Cambridge, MIT and Oxford at sixth, seventh and eighth. Columbia rounded out the top ten, finishing below UCSF. My adopted home state of California captured four of the top ten spots, with Massachusetts and the UK tied with two each. Also further down the list than UCSF were UCLA (12), Penn (13), Duke (14), Princeton (15), Cornell (19, sorry, Peg), and Johns Hopkins (24).
The really nice thing about this evaluation is that it seems fairly rigorous; often, rankings of “best schools” (and note that this list says nothing about the value of the education from the university, only its degree of global integration) are based on interviews with university presidents and chancellors and influenced by “common wisdom.” This, however, used a series of weighted measures: fifty percent of the total score came from equal parts of 1) the number of highly cited researchers in various academic fields, 2) the number of articles published in Nature and Science, and 3) the number of articles listed in the ISI Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities indices; forty percent of the total score came from equal parts of 1) the percentage of international faculty, 2) the percentage of international students, 3) citations per faculty member, and 4) ratio of faculty to students (probably one reason we did so well); the final ten percent of the score was based on number of volumes in university libraries (and that certainly helps Harvard).
Needless to say, we’re very pleased here at the office this morning.
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I would so love to get a bunch of these to make a mobile to hang in our living room.
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more and more whites are adopting black children domesteically
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a cute visual blog — effectively, life as a series of x-y charts and Venn Diagrams
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Ah, I’m sad we won’t be able to see this before it closes next month, though at least we saw Kiki and Herb in an earlier version of the show in DC. I love SF, but I do miss our quarterly theater trips to NY.
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Affordable food, lodging and fun in San Francisco, “the third most expensive city in the country.”
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ooh, so cool! if only my birthday hadn’t just passed
I got some good news from my property management company today: my condo in Arlington has finally been rented, to “two young professionals” who will be moving in this Thursday. There’s one less thing to stress about now, at least.
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I’m thinking very seriously about switching back to a Mac as my primary home PC, and using my current Dell PC as a file/media server
The past few days, after having been to Crate & Barrel over the weekend, we’ve been thinking again about the lack of furniture in the house. At Crate & Barrel we were quite taken by the Petrie sofa (as in Rob and Laura), with its tufting and retro 1960s look. Sitting on it, we found it really quite comfortable.
Some Internet research, though, determined that it was the sofa used in the recent Jennifer Aniston/Vince Vaughn movie The Break Up and is, in fact, the sofa seen in the promotional shot of the two of them sitting sullenly at opposite ends, looking straight ahead, she with her arms crossed, he with his hands in his lap. And I discovered that I wasn’t very fond of the sofa when people were sitting on it; it looked awkwardly bowed, with the cushions parting unevenly in the middle. So we went searching online for alternatives, at Room and Board and Design Within Reach (DWR), among others. The sofa that most caught our eye was DWR’s Bantam, roughly the same price and with the same midcentury aesthetic—including the same wonderful tapered wood legs—but with a much cleaner look, featuring an uninterrupted back, solitary row of buttons, and single long seat cushion.
Thursday night the DWR Studio Potrero in San Francisco is hosting an Eames film festival, and we had planned to go and to head over early to see the sofa beforehand (it turns out now that the festival is full—despite the email they sent me earlier this week mentioning nothing about needing to rsvp; I only discovered that we can no longer attend when I went again just now to get the link. Grrr.).
Today, however, I saw a posting on Apartment Therapy noting a Craigslist ad for the Bantam, at a little more than half off the retail price. The post was several days old already, so I figured the sofa had been snatched up, but I sent an email anyway. And it’s ours. Jeff took care of renting a cargo van from Budget, we each withdrew half the amount from our banks, and we drove down after work to pick up the sofa from a hottie in Menlo Park (a recent UCLA graduate who has just scored his first post-college job with an Internet company in SOMA). Our little olive Bantam is now happily ensconced in our living room, across from the fireplace and amidst the packing boxes.
This particular sofa was a floor model, though new, and as such it does have a few (very minor) scuffs; on the whole, though, its quite a nice piece of furniture, and it really fits our style and the period of the house. And, for $800 instead of $1,400, I’m very happy with it.
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Happy birthday, web! BBC offers an interactive timeline of the last 15 years.
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high dynamic range photography - I must try this
Speaking of birthdays, last Sunday we drove down to San Jose to celebrate Gene’s 40th birthday (his birthday really is the 14th, but he held his party on the 5th).
We had great food (munchies first, fajitas and barbecued chicken next, and a huge pink cake—I’m talking pieces the size of a person’s head—for dessert), fun music, frosty drinks, and we met an amazing number of really neat people, including Gene’s ex, Jann, and his partner, Mike; Gene’s mom and aunt (how in the world a free spirit like her survives back in Lynchburg, Virginia, I’ll never know); and the amazingly cool Sara Hickman and the equally cool husband, Lance, and daughters Lily and iolana.
Gene’s aunt lives not far from my great-uncle and aunt’s new house in Amherst, and has issued a standing invitation—nay, a demand—that we come see her when we’re out that way.
And Sara… well, I feel like I’ve known Sara forever. Meeting her was like one of those connections you make unexpectedly—at a squaredance weekend, maybe, or one afternoon at a gaming store when the guy running the D&D game comes over and starts chatting—that stays with you the rest of your life, one way or another.
Moreover, she’s a very talented singer and songwriter and a blogger and podcaster to boot. Check out her newest CD, Motherlode.
The Web turned 15 on August 6. The BBC, which offers an interactive timeline, dates the birth of the web to August 6, 1991, when “Tim Berners-Lee formally introduced his world wide web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup.” The first week of January 1995 I announced the availability of my first professional web site, for the Association of America’s Public Television Stations (APTS), hosted at http://www.universe.digex.net/~apts (it would be few months before we hosted on our own domain at http://www.apts.org/); around that time I believed it to be one of the first 10,000 sites online (seven months later, according to the BBC, there were just 18,957 sites online, with over 342,000 twelve months after that, so it seems quite likely that the APTS site was indeed well within that first 10,000 figure).
My original personal web site, back then also hosted at Digex, went online in 1994 even prior to the APTS site. A version from 1997, complete with original 1995 graphics and photos of a decade-younger me, is still available in the Wayback Machine.
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“People think juice is healthy, but it’s not. Drinking juice — even if it says ‘100% natural’ — is no better than drinking soda.” I might as well keep drinking my diet sodas, then.
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count us among the exodus; the political/social climate in Virginia towards gays certainly contributed to my decision to relocate to California
I experienced my first California earthquake this evening. At 8:08 this evening, PDT, while Jeff and I were in the middle of making dinner, the house shook a little and belongings rattled for somewhere around one to two seconds; it sounded and felt a little like a large truck going by, and not much more intense than the East Coast tremors I’ve experienced in Boston and DC.
Immediately I got on the computer (conveniently set up on the kitchen table at the moment) and checked the USGS site; sure enough, it recorded an earthquake about 76 km northwest of here (epicenter 3 miles west of Glen Ellen, California, between Napa and Sonoma) of uncertain magnitude. I fired up Google Earth, and it was showing the quake at somewhere between 4 and 5; by then (this was all still within the first three minutes after the quake), the USGS site had updated to show a 4.4 magnitude. The site asked me to give my impressions of the quake, so I dutifully entered my experience with my first quake—mild shaking, pictures mildly askew, items rattling, no damage, etc.—and it noted that mine was the first response from my area code, suggesting that my experience indicated an intensity of III on a I-X scale; within minutes there were hundreds of data points from others entering their experiences and now, just an hour and a half later, over 14,000 people have recorded their impressions of this mild quake. I think this must be a California pasttime.
I must confess that I was a little exhilirated by the quake, mild that it was. I’d been carrying around a low-level anxiety about earthquakes, nothing serious at the conscious level but creating some wild and uncomfortable dreams the past month. I said on several occasions that I wished we’d just go ahead and have a quake—a small one, I was always hasty to qualify—so I could get the experience under my belt, and put this nervous anticipatory uncertainty to rest.
Granted, this was a small one; even Alex seemed completely unfazed. I told him I was a little disappointed that he didn’t give us any warning, as the common wisdom, at least, is that animals have a heightened awareness of imminent seismic activity. He yawned. He’s just not earning his keep.
It’s been cool to be able to track information about the quake online in pretty much real-time. It’s especially neat to have tools like Google Earth to really help visualize the location and relative experience of it based on distance from the epicenter. I love the Internet.
Yesterday I turned 44, still a pretty neat number if not quite as geeky cool as this past year’s 43. My birthday itself was quiet; Julie took me to lunch, and gifted me with a collection of Ursula K. LeGuin (a shared favorite author) short stories, but otherwise the day was unmarked. Jeff, who had to drive his aunt to the airport, didn’t think he’d be home until late in the evening, so I stayed at the office until 6:30 and ate some packaged paleek paneer from Trader Joe’s for dinner once I got home.
On Sunday, though, we celebrated my birthday (the queen’s observed birthday, we mused) by seeing Leslie Jordan’s (Beverley Leslie on Will & Grace, and Brother Boy in the deliciously camp Sordid Lives, with Olivia Newton-John and Delta Burke) one-man, hilarious autobiographical show, Like a Dog on Linoleum. Afterwards we walked down Market Street, enjoying the unusual San Francisco sunshine and warmth, before heading back to Daly City for dinner at the Boulevard Cafe (yelp reviews), with its great googie-style architecture. I didn’t realize until much later that they completely forgot to bring us our calamari appetizer (though they also didn’t bill us for it, so no harm no foul). Service was friendly and attentive. The “early bird” special, which included an entree, soup or salad, and a drink for $12.95 was a great deal. We both had salisbury steak with mushrooms in a red wine sauce, garlic mashed potatoes, and steamed string beans. The only complaint we had was that the entree—albeit very moist and flavorful—could have used just another tablespoon or two of sauce.
We skipped dessert at the restaurant, though, in favor of frapuccinos at the nearby Starbucks, and then we headed over to Thornton Beach Vista, a spot on the edge of the cliffs overlooking Thornton Beach State Park and the Pacific Ocean, only about a mile from our house, where we walked the trails and took lots of pictures in the golden late afternoon sunlight (and Jeff, apparently, secretly fantasized my demise). I still just can’t get over that we actually live less than a mile from the Pacific Ocean.
All in all, a very nice way to observe a birthday.
