For the last year or so, I've had an on-and-off online pen-pal. He's exotic and German. I can tell you're all jealous. Well you should be, because of that exotic German business.
I like this international pen-pal thing. I get to learn. I get to learn about Germany, about Europe, about the rest of the world across the pond. I'm learning about the German education system, and how everyone must go through job training before starting work, whether they're a computer scientist or a baker. I'm learning that German college is a real bargain at 500 Euros a semester, but you have to go to a specific type of high school to get in, and if you don't finish your last year, you have to repeat the final three to be eligible for college.
One of the most valuable part of this is getting a sense of what some of the rest of the world thinks of Americans and this country. Granted, my source is a bit too rational, and concedes that while many Germans protest the U.S. and everything it stands for, a lot of these same people leave protests and go home and listen to Eminem and other fine, upstanding pillars of our society. Regardless...
It turns out that we can't keep too many secrets from our German friends. I found out one other disturbing disturbing fact today: Germany knows about Fox News. Our national dirty underwear is a bastion of neo conservative alarmists with only a passing acquaintance with fact and the world knows about it. I'm getting hit with hard questions like, "It's so obviously false. None of this is true. I can't believe anyone would ever believe any of this. They don't, do they?"
It's time to step it up. The world is watching, people.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Find the Humans!
No great thoughts today... just an AMAZING website that gives you the phone codes you need to get to an actual human being without navigating the automated menus. Here it is!
Thursday, July 05, 2007
LiveJournal, You Suck
A few days ago, completely by accident, I found out that this blog is being syndicated on LiveJournal, and people over there are leaving comments on the syndication. This is great. Pretty much anything can be syndicated through LJ and I know it makes many people's lives easier if they only have to worry about one RSS collection rather than paging through 12 different sites. Fine.
However. There is a problem with LJ's syndication. Only LJ members can leave comments on the syndicated posts. No one can log in anonymously, or with OpenID (which blogger doesn't support anyway). Fine, whatever, I'll create an account and log in so I can post comments. But wait, what's this? UserID meleemistress has been taken?! By whom?
Can you guess?
My userID here, 'meleemistress', was used as the owner of the LJ syndication. So now, I can't create that user because technically I already have it, but I can't log in using that name because it's a syndication account and therefore has no password. I honestly don't care how cool LJ is, or how many features it has. If they can't figure out that, regardless of where it's being printed, I might want control over my own damn content, they need to start over. This is just basic respect for the author of the blog. I know it would be hard to prove that I'm me, and I don't really care. That's their problem.
I sucked it up and made a different LJ account, so here's the pertinent info:
syndicated LJ feed: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/meleemistress/
my new userID: AttackTheGazebo *
I will not be actually posting entries with this account, just comments. So if you see anything under that name, it's me.
*And for those who don't get the reference, or who just want to reread for amusement value, I give you, straight from the annals of gamer legend, Eric and the Gazebo.
However. There is a problem with LJ's syndication. Only LJ members can leave comments on the syndicated posts. No one can log in anonymously, or with OpenID (which blogger doesn't support anyway). Fine, whatever, I'll create an account and log in so I can post comments. But wait, what's this? UserID meleemistress has been taken?! By whom?
Can you guess?
My userID here, 'meleemistress', was used as the owner of the LJ syndication. So now, I can't create that user because technically I already have it, but I can't log in using that name because it's a syndication account and therefore has no password. I honestly don't care how cool LJ is, or how many features it has. If they can't figure out that, regardless of where it's being printed, I might want control over my own damn content, they need to start over. This is just basic respect for the author of the blog. I know it would be hard to prove that I'm me, and I don't really care. That's their problem.
I sucked it up and made a different LJ account, so here's the pertinent info:
syndicated LJ feed: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/meleemistress/
my new userID: AttackTheGazebo *
I will not be actually posting entries with this account, just comments. So if you see anything under that name, it's me.
*And for those who don't get the reference, or who just want to reread for amusement value, I give you, straight from the annals of gamer legend, Eric and the Gazebo.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
The Sofa Saga
I've lived quite a few places since I started college. I had 3 different incarnations of college housing, as well as 2 places in Sri Lanka, and now I'm here in San Francisco. Every time I move, I have to spend time figuring out all the little intricacies of the new place, or I risk stumbling upon them by accident. The second place in Sri Lanka, for example, possessed the quaint little feature of a water tank on top of the building which had to be filled by pump every night. It also had a toilet that would, if not supervised, run indefinitely. The combination of these two factors caused me to run out of water in the middle of a shower, producing an explosion of profanity and incoherent yelling rivaled only when I stepped on a colony of fire ants a few days later.
Or take my most recent house in Pittsburgh which had cheap caulk around the shower. Fortunately we knew immediately when it had rotted through, because we'd discover a stream of water coming through the kitchen light fixture.
The lease started Sunday, and so far there really haven't been any issues. The space is huge, it was just remodeled, everything is new and in pristine condition. So there really haven't been any issues...except for one: the front door.
If you'll allow me to digress a bit, I'd like to talk about a job I had a few years ago as the chair of a campus production organization. We supplied lighting and sound for on campus concerts, fashion shows, culture nights, and anything else that other student organizations could dream up. As long as we had the time and the man power and no one felt the need to pulverize the potential client with the clue bat, we took the gigs. They were all over campus, and some locations off campus, and they ranged in size from a 1 hour long karaoke night with 1 speaker to a multi day multistage carnival involving all our gear, a good amount of rental gear, and all of the help we could scrape out of the alumni. If we were lucky, the alumni doubled the size of our crew and if we weren't so lucky, things didn't go so well.
As chair, my main job was to talk to potential clients and figure out if and how we could make their events happen. Because we work in so many places, we need to think of a lot of different things to make this all work. We need to make sure that the space has enough power, that we have enough set up and tear down time, that we have crew, that we can get the gear there and back, that we have food for the crew if the event is really long.... etc etc etc. Basically, we need to think of everything, because our clients rarely do. It is our job to know what we need, to figure out what the client needs, and how best to combine the two. Let me say that again. It is our job to figure out what we need to know and we must take direct responsibility for any oversights.
Now, I only held that position for a year, which wasn't really enough time to get good at it. Just when I felt like I was really starting to get the hang of things, it was time to elect the next people. But for all that, the chairs generally do a pretty good job of getting things done. So who the hell let an architect design a house that was so close to the adjacent structure that I now can't get any furniture into my apartment?!
This, folks, has been my discovery, and it is a sobering one. My main door (35 inches wide) opens into a narrow little alleyway (30 inches wide). Any furniture I bring in needs to fit both the alley and the door without turning, because there's no room to rotate anything.
I discovered all of this when the sofa delivery men showed up on Sunday to deliver a sofa, and they couldn't get it into the apartment. So, for now, I have 2 dining room chairs, a dining room table, a coffee table, and a bed. Fortunately, the chairs are fairly comfortable, because otherwise I'd have nowhere to type this.
Architects, this is your job. It is your stated duty to ensure, when designing a structure, that it will be usable by its inhabitants. And it is imperative that you get it right, because once the structure is built, it is not likely to be changed. This is a failure on your part, which is a shame because the rest of the unit is so nice. But for now, it will be nice and empty, until I find something that fits through the door.
Or take my most recent house in Pittsburgh which had cheap caulk around the shower. Fortunately we knew immediately when it had rotted through, because we'd discover a stream of water coming through the kitchen light fixture.
The lease started Sunday, and so far there really haven't been any issues. The space is huge, it was just remodeled, everything is new and in pristine condition. So there really haven't been any issues...except for one: the front door.
If you'll allow me to digress a bit, I'd like to talk about a job I had a few years ago as the chair of a campus production organization. We supplied lighting and sound for on campus concerts, fashion shows, culture nights, and anything else that other student organizations could dream up. As long as we had the time and the man power and no one felt the need to pulverize the potential client with the clue bat, we took the gigs. They were all over campus, and some locations off campus, and they ranged in size from a 1 hour long karaoke night with 1 speaker to a multi day multistage carnival involving all our gear, a good amount of rental gear, and all of the help we could scrape out of the alumni. If we were lucky, the alumni doubled the size of our crew and if we weren't so lucky, things didn't go so well.
As chair, my main job was to talk to potential clients and figure out if and how we could make their events happen. Because we work in so many places, we need to think of a lot of different things to make this all work. We need to make sure that the space has enough power, that we have enough set up and tear down time, that we have crew, that we can get the gear there and back, that we have food for the crew if the event is really long.... etc etc etc. Basically, we need to think of everything, because our clients rarely do. It is our job to know what we need, to figure out what the client needs, and how best to combine the two. Let me say that again. It is our job to figure out what we need to know and we must take direct responsibility for any oversights.
Now, I only held that position for a year, which wasn't really enough time to get good at it. Just when I felt like I was really starting to get the hang of things, it was time to elect the next people. But for all that, the chairs generally do a pretty good job of getting things done. So who the hell let an architect design a house that was so close to the adjacent structure that I now can't get any furniture into my apartment?!
This, folks, has been my discovery, and it is a sobering one. My main door (35 inches wide) opens into a narrow little alleyway (30 inches wide). Any furniture I bring in needs to fit both the alley and the door without turning, because there's no room to rotate anything.
I discovered all of this when the sofa delivery men showed up on Sunday to deliver a sofa, and they couldn't get it into the apartment. So, for now, I have 2 dining room chairs, a dining room table, a coffee table, and a bed. Fortunately, the chairs are fairly comfortable, because otherwise I'd have nowhere to type this.
Architects, this is your job. It is your stated duty to ensure, when designing a structure, that it will be usable by its inhabitants. And it is imperative that you get it right, because once the structure is built, it is not likely to be changed. This is a failure on your part, which is a shame because the rest of the unit is so nice. But for now, it will be nice and empty, until I find something that fits through the door.
Monday, July 02, 2007
(not) Driving in San Francisco
My first draft of the Inquirer article included a segment regarding the standard Sri Lankan driving practices, which seemed to me to be mostly a motley collection of lawless vagaries committed in the spirit of artificially advancing entropy. The editor rejected that version on the basis of the fact that driving styles are inherently regional, and complaints on the matter make for uninteresting copy. It is therefore with some trepidation that I attempt to tackle the same subject matter a second time, albeit for different reasons.
I have been in San Francisco since Tuesday night. It is now Monday afternoon, and I have resolved never to own a car here. There are the expected differences in automotive piloting tradition, such as a disturbing tendency of the locals to double park anyone, anywhere, anytime, but those can be learned. The reasoning behind this decision comes from a condition that I have never before seen in any city, which is that private transportation is the lowest priority of the the local government.
Inklings of such a state appeared the moment my mom and I started driving. The parking fees, in particular, we felt to be particularly egregious. 25 cents buys 10 minutes on a good day. Various sidewalk colors indicated loading zones, drop off/pick up areas, and others, all of which equal no parking. Of course, this is all still just a system and therefore can be learned with a large investment of small change. My rebellion against the San Francisco driving institution was not cemented until two days ago, when I read an article in the local paper.
Driving discontent is not at all limited to out-of-towners. Not in the least. San Francisco locals are completely fed up with the lack of parking, the meter rates, and the high fines for breaking the rules. And it gets better. Discussions are in the works for meter rates and fees to be raised *again* for the purposes of....wait for it....subsidizing the public transit system here. Now, for all I know, it's the practice of every city to use parking money to support public transportation infrastructure. But here, I definitely get the feeling that drivers are being punished for driving.
The sentiment expressed in this newspaper article regarding subsidized public transit was mostly negative. Those interviewed felt that public transit should be self-sustaining, and if money is a problem, raise the ticket rates. Now that I've found out that a monthly MUNI pass is $45, I can understand the sentiment. That being said, I'm glad MUNI rates are cheap, and I'm glad I'm not driving.
I have been in San Francisco since Tuesday night. It is now Monday afternoon, and I have resolved never to own a car here. There are the expected differences in automotive piloting tradition, such as a disturbing tendency of the locals to double park anyone, anywhere, anytime, but those can be learned. The reasoning behind this decision comes from a condition that I have never before seen in any city, which is that private transportation is the lowest priority of the the local government.
Inklings of such a state appeared the moment my mom and I started driving. The parking fees, in particular, we felt to be particularly egregious. 25 cents buys 10 minutes on a good day. Various sidewalk colors indicated loading zones, drop off/pick up areas, and others, all of which equal no parking. Of course, this is all still just a system and therefore can be learned with a large investment of small change. My rebellion against the San Francisco driving institution was not cemented until two days ago, when I read an article in the local paper.
Driving discontent is not at all limited to out-of-towners. Not in the least. San Francisco locals are completely fed up with the lack of parking, the meter rates, and the high fines for breaking the rules. And it gets better. Discussions are in the works for meter rates and fees to be raised *again* for the purposes of....wait for it....subsidizing the public transit system here. Now, for all I know, it's the practice of every city to use parking money to support public transportation infrastructure. But here, I definitely get the feeling that drivers are being punished for driving.
The sentiment expressed in this newspaper article regarding subsidized public transit was mostly negative. Those interviewed felt that public transit should be self-sustaining, and if money is a problem, raise the ticket rates. Now that I've found out that a monthly MUNI pass is $45, I can understand the sentiment. That being said, I'm glad MUNI rates are cheap, and I'm glad I'm not driving.
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