Assuming I can drag myself from San Francisco to Palo Alto early enough tomorrow morning, I’m planning to be at Stanford Law School for Dave Winer’s “unconference,” Bloggercon III. If you’re going to be there (and can figure out who I am), feel free to say hello.
I used to think that Donald Knuth was merely a being a crotchety old academic when he famously swore off email in 1990. Now I know better: in fact, I think he was far ahead of the curve in realizing what an enemy of productivity (and sanity) email can be.
When I was given my first email address, back in college, I eagerly awaited new messages, compulsively checking Pine during any lull in CS lab activity. Now, between PodWorks support, Cocoal.icio.us feedback, communications with friends and family, mailing lists, electronic billing notifications, weblog comments, and other assorted communications, I’ve come to dread opening Mail (and that’s just my home account!). I currently have something like 50 flagged messages at the top of my inbox, going back to the beginning of the month. They’re all messages I was glad to get, and all are worthy of a reply, but I don’t know when I’m going to be able to get to them.
Why am I breaking my long weblog silence to tell you this? Two reasons: first, to explain part of the reason it’s been so quite around here (I used have a weblog, now I have email!); and second to plead for your patience if you have sent me a message that I haven’t replied to. I assure you that I consider your message important—it’s just that somtimes I need to sleep.
Well, gentle readers, you can stop holding your collective breath now: my tortured San Francisco apartment search seems to finally be at an end. No longer must I roam the streets of the city, like a lost soul shuffling dejectedly from open house to open house. This past weekend I put a deposit down on a one bedroom in a handsome, 1930s Spanish Colonial Revival building high above the city, in a neighborhood usually referred to as Corona Heights (or, occasionally, among older residents, Mount Olympus).
Though the Spanish Colonial style certainly has its detractors (Steve Jobs, for example, has referred to his historic Woodside mansion as an “abomination”), I kind of like it. Perhaps I’m just a sucker for its sheer “Sunset Boulevard-ness,” but I can’t help but feel a touch of old California romance when I see the place. I think it certainly beats the decrepit Victorians that dominate the San Francisco real estate market, anyway.
The neighborhood isn’t bad either. It’s positioned on top of a lightly traveled hill, so the views are fantastic and the parking is shockingly easy, yet it is still within fairly easy walking distance of three major San Francisco neighborhoods (the Haight, Cole Valley, and the Castro). As it happens, I’ll also be living adjacent to one of my immediate coworkers, which opens up carpool possibilities.
Interestingly, a Google search reveals that the neighborhood even has some cult literary cred, having rated a particularly foreboding description in H.P. Lovecraft disciple Fritz Leiber’s “Our Lady of Darkness”:
The solitary, steep hill called Corona Heights was black as pitch and very silent, like the heart of the unknown. It looked steadily downward and northeast away at the nervous, bright lights of Downtown San Francisco as if it were a great predatory beast of night surveying its territory in patient search of prey.
Hmm—I knew there had to be some sort of downside. No matter, though—living near a source of nameless supernatural dread is a small price to pay for easy parking.
Last weekend, The Summer of Buzz™ continued apace with another trip out to Yosemite. This time, though, some friends and I took things up a notch with an ascent of one Yosemite’s most famous landmarks: Half Dome.
The hike we did, which covered about 16 miles with an elevation gain of approximately 4800 feet, was without a doubt one of most difficult walks I have ever done. The difficulty wasn’t so much in the length of the hike (though at approximately 10 hours that shouldn’t be understimated) as much as in the constant uphill march and the seemingly endless series of knee-punishing stone steps we had to surmount to reach even the foot of the granite dome. Once we were there (after about 4-and-a-half hours of walking), we still had to climb the steep, curved back of the formation via some fixed cables, which was no picnic either.
Even despite all that exertion, though, it’s rather surprising just how many people seem to make the trip (or maybe it’s not, and I’m just a complete wuss—your call). Yosemite is so heavily touristed that you really do see all kinds on the trail: purse carrying Paris Hilton-types (with boyfriends hauling gear), obese midwesterners wearing “All I Need to Know I Learned From Star Trek” shirts, European parents taking their kids out for their August holiday. A few people from our group even claim to have spotted a guy in slacks and a pristene white shirt preparing for the final ascent (this despite my own shirt having been thoroughly soaked to the point of salt buildup)!
I held up fairly well until the last couple of miles, when my knees really started getting the better of me and I began to develop a seething animosity toward anyone slowing my progress toward the end of the trail. At a certain point, I actually found it less taxing on my knees to simply run down the inclines than to plod painfully along at the pace set by the average tourist on the John Muir Trail. Thankfully, I drank loads of water and wore a stylish cowboy hat and lots of sunscreen, so my only other problem had to do with a bout of horrible nauseau back at camp, which someone diagnosed as low blood sugar (that’s what I get for not Powersaucing my way to the summit), and which a tall glass of lemonade and a nice shower seemed to fix handily.
So was it all worth it? I would say yes, primarily for the sense of accomplishment it provided me. Though I might not have said so during the last two miles, it was also a lot of fun and a bit of an adventure, and it had the lovely side effect of making the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches we ate at the summit taste like the best food ever created by human hands. The view, for the record, was definitely beautiful, but I don’t think it was really significantly better than the view of the valley from Sentinel Dome (where Bobby and I hiked a month ago), which requires about a tenth of the effort to reach.
As proof of having summited, I offer the following photographic evidence…
Though I was way too busy to mention it, last Wednesday marked my one year anniversary at Apple. It seems like just yesterday that I was saying goodbye to Denver, embarking on my own odyssey through the American West, and getting my first taste of life in Silicon Valley and at Apple. Though, as a confirmed Silicon Valley and Bay Area skeptic, I had a lot of trepidation about leaving my home of two-and-a-half decades, I have to say it’s been one of the better decisions I’ve ever made. One year later, I’m an order of magnitude more active (I even started learning to snowboard last winter—something I never did my entire time in Colorado), 20-odd pounds lighter, significantly more engaged socially, infinitely more fulfilled professionally, and a whole lot happier. I’m told California often has this effect on people.
I still find myself missing Colorado often, but I guess I might just have to stick around out here for awhile…
As I mentioned on Scott Knaster’s weblog the other day, the fancy Cupertino apartment building I call home has decided to flee the weak Bay Area rental market and unload all of its units as condos. Consequently, I have been given an offer I can’t refuse: either purchase my one bedroom apartment for a price that would shock most non-Californians, or move out by the end of my lease (October 1st). Fortunately, I’m not as annoyed about this as you might think, since this development has given me the perfect incentive to do something I’ve been debating for a long time: I’m going to move to San Francisco.
Now, before anyone attempts to help by talking me out of this, I’d like to stress that I have given the decision far more than adequate consideration. I’m fully aware of the length of the commute to Silicon Valley, the climate in the city (which I actually kind of like, truth be told), the hassles of parking, the difficult rental market, etc., etc. The irony of this decision, given my early criticisms of the city, isn’t exactly lost on me either. So what possessed me to take the plunge? A combination of things:
Now that I’ve justified the decision, though, one problem remains: finding a place to live. For a neophyte like me, the difficulty inherent in this task can be bewildering. As DeWitt Clinton (the recent New York to San Francisco transplant and A9 employee, not the 19th century New York politician) relates in an excellent essay on his weblog, finding a place to live in San Francisco can be one of the most bizarrely consumer-unfriendly shopping experiences you’ll ever have. Even in today’s reputed “renter’s market,” most landlords and brokers act as if it’s a privilege to fork over your hard earned cash for their wildly overpriced, often under-maintained, real estate. Calls aren’t returned (at least not in a timely fashion), appointments are forgotten, and 30 minute open houses (often scheduled for 5 or 6 PM on weekdays) are often the only windows of opportunity to see a place.
Even once you get past the difficulties of dealing with the people involved, the search for the ideal place can be a maddening exercise in making large economic commitments quickly and with less than perfect knowledge. To a far greater extent than in the suburbs, finding an apartment in a city like San Francisco requires the tenant, who starts out with a certain set of ideal requirements, to determine which of those requirements he is willing to sacrifice to come in under budget. Every apartment I have looked at so far has had some drawback: either it was beautifully remodeled but lacked parking, or it had parking but was in a less desirable area, or it was in a great area and had parking but was too expensive. For every new listing, the apartment hunter must quickly consider all of the variables and decide whether to hold out for a better opportunity that may or may not come along in time. In the case of open houses, the poor schlub often has to make this determination while other hungry sharks are circling, pondering whether they should fork over a deposit check (I already missed out on the best apartment I’ve seen so far because someone beat me to handing in a check). It’s truly not a game for the indecisive.
To make things even more difficult, I’ve decided that the area I’m most interested in is Cole Valley, a tiny, low turnover neighborhood south of Haight-Ashbury. While Craigslist seems to have 10 or more listings a day for, say, Pacific Heights, my Cole Valley/Ashbury Heights RSS feed is lucky to turn up two on most days. This only intensifies my frequent internal debates about whether I should simply accept a given place that is less than ideal or hold out for the elusive dream apartment that may be just around the corner.
Yes, any way you slice it, looking for your place in the big city is an unpleasant (and, it seems, damn near full-time) business. That’s why I’ve decided, out of sheer frustration, to take my sob story to you, the LazyWeb. If anyone out there has any words of advice, apartment leads (I’m particularly keen on Cole Valley/Ashbury Heights, although I’ve considered Noe Valley and the Haight proper as well), or even interesting war stories to tell, I’d be very grateful to hear them.
I’m still a bit too preoccupied to post much these days (more on this later), but I thought it might be worth mentioning that my little brother has spent a large part of his summer vacation (including a fair amount of his time in California) designing icons, and he now has two new sets posted over at the redesigned design.scifihifi.com. The first, “All You Need Is Aqua,” is a collection of the most common toolbar icons needed by app developers these days, all rendered in that colorful, shiny style Mac users crave. The second, “Circulosis,” contains a variety of circular buttons, each provided in four different color variations. Selected icons from these sets are also available individually.
I should also note that Bobby’s recent application icons have been reaching new heights of pictorial sophistication. Check out the slick icon he was hired to do for the Mac version of a scientific visualization app, for example!
If you’re in the market for icons, be sure to give Bobby’s site a look.
(Update: Bobby’s redesigned yet again, and I think this is his best design yet. Be sure to check it out.)
You know how The New Yorker does a big, fat “Summer Fiction Issue” every June, and then disappears from your mailbox for a few weeks while the magazine’s staff enjoys a well-earned holiday? Well, that’s pretty much how you should think about my recent weblogging hiatus. I haven’t lost interest in weblogging at all, and, in fact, I’ve actually got a rather large backlog of post ideas tucked away in VoodooPad. But, taking a cue from George Costanza, I made a decision earlier in the year that this was going to be the Summer of Buzz (a “…time to taste the fruits and let the juices drip down my chin,” to quote the man himself), and, unfortunately, my irrepressible lust for life and resolve to really get out there and explore California just hasn’t left a lot of time for cranking out copy.
I plan to get around to posting regularly again soon (I still regret that I never managed to write a WWDC wrapup, considering what a great time I had), but until then, I’m posting a recap (and a bunch of photos) of my recent activites for journaling purposes.
I have to apologize to anyone who has been polling my RSS feed tonight. I decided to go live with a new Blosxom plugin I’ve been working on (more details tomorrow), and inadvertently managed to do quite a number on my Blosxom installation’s all-important entries_index cache in the process.
A word of advice to Blosxom users: changing Blosxom’s $datadir path after you’ve already been using entries_index can cause erratic behaviour (including the appearance of duplicate posts) since entries_index uses full paths to story files as hash keys in a post date lookup table. Oops.
When I first moved to California, I made a real effort to stay abreast of what was going on back home in Colorado. Now that I’ve lived here for a good 9 months, though, I can’t say that I’m very good about keeping up with the Denver news. In fact, most of what I hear about these days comes in the form of oddball news items forwarded to me by friends and co-workers, which tend to reinforce a decidedly South Park-ish view of the 38th state. A few cases in point:
In Granby, a small mountain town near the west entrance of Rocky Mountain National Park, a man “barricaded inside a fortified bulldozer” went on a rampage, firing shots and knocking down walls from five buildings. This event was especially odd given that it wasn’t the first time such a thing has happened in Colorado—a man in Alma used a front-end loader to do the same thing in 1998. No word yet on whether either was yelling “they took our jobs!” (Thanks to Ammon for the link.)
My Mom tells me that the local TV news does a story on this at least once a year, but I personally had never heard of Bishop’s Castle until Ammon Skidmore forwarded me a link he saw on Metafilter. Basically, it’s a huge, 30+ year, one-man building project—sort of like the Watts Towers in LA, the Coral Castle in Florida, or Opus 40 in upstate New York. Odd, quixotic, yet somehow inspiring and definitely on my itinerary next time I visit Southern Colorado.
In other architectural news, a link I saw on the front page of del.icio.us awhile ago alerted me to an odd development in suburban Denver that will surely be a source of great angst to urban hipsters everywhere: someone has actually built a subdivision of single family homes designed to resemble old factory buildings converted into lofts. Yes, Baudrillard would have a field day.
Meanwhile, in the world of politics, Jens Alfke’s del.icio.us links pointed me to an amusing Salon article detailing a creative proposal the Bush administration came up with to ease the reconstruction of Iraq: make Denver Baghdad’s “sister city!” Of course, no one seems to have actually asked Denver before the announcement, and reaction from the mayor’s office, which is struggling to deal with a large budget deficit, seems to be a bit non-committal. Pity—just think about the South Park plot possibilities a Denver-Baghdad relationship would create!
