Ah. God. Finally.
We have an internet connection. No more living in cafes waiting for my laptop batteries to die.
Now I can live on the bare floor waiting for furniture!
All we have so fars is a matress and a screen. Hold on.. I’ll take a quick couple of pictures. There we go. Some bad pictures of the apt.
Still unemployed. Going to make myself a sandwich. More to come later.
We have a place to live!
It’s humble but it’s a great location. It’s a fairly large studio appartment with hardwood floors a view of the inner courtyard.
What really sells it though is it’s location. It’s right on the end of Haight street across the street from golden gate park.
Turns out Haight Ashbury is the place. We really wanted to live downtown within walking distance to Sarah’s work (I’m still looking) but it was hard to find a place we really liked. South beach was the best downtown but it was pretty touristy and not real functional.
Then we ended up checking out haight Ashbury. Aunt Diane said it was cool and it was the centre of the beat movement way back when (actually the beats started in south beach and ran out of room). Then it became the centre of the hippy movement in san francisco. But as soon as we wandered down Height it was pretty clear that this was the place for us. It feels alot like Victoria. All around San Francisco we kept wondering where the clothing places were that _we_ could buy clothes at. Downtown it’s hard to find a place that isn’t gucci or macy’s or in some way owned by the mediocre giants of the fassion industry.
Great coffee places and a ton of restaurants make it remind me of Comercial st. in Van. There are three bike shops within 4 blocks. One of which is next door. It’s just a really nice place to be. So Sarah’s gonna have to do the 1/2 hour bus trip to and from work every day. When I find work I’m going to ride. I’m so keen on getting a nice road bike. The bikes in this city are really really cool.
And yes there is a brew pub on Haight and Mason, easy stumbling distance from home. Called the Magnolia we’ve already been four times. They have some really good beer. Standouts are their very hoppy High Time Harvest which is very beer-fest 2007 and their fruity, floury Red Rose which is very beer-fest 2006. We were chatting to our waitress and she welcomed us to the area and talked about how she wanted to move to Victoria.
Oh wait yeah. I was going to mention, alot of people jokingly said we’d better have a place big enough to put them up when they visit. So by _not_ having a place that big we save easily enough money every month to put you up in a hotel instead :)
Althogh for those of you who really aren’t picky the floor will still be available. Asuming Sarah doesn’t mind.
Union square is an interesting place. There’s almost always something going on in the square. It’s always called something ‘in the square’ too. art In The Square. concert In The Square. movie In The Square. Today it’s bad hotel art In The Square.
Westin hotels has built a rock garden In The Square. I wish I had the camera but my satchel is filled with the laptop today (I’m posting from the square now) and there aren’t any pics on flickr yet.
I’ve become fairly inured to bad hotel art. It’s so omnipresent. Salus had some particularly egregious examples. Tasteless watercolours of golf courses purchased, literally, from wallmart. But even these took me months to notice. You just end up tuning it out.
But for some reason I’m not glossing over this rock garden. I think it has something to do with the uncanny.. ahhh gah! An air raid siren just went off. Ow my ears. “this is a test of the outdoor announcement system” jeez it works.
ow. Anyway I think it has to do with the uncanny valley principle. Most bad rock gardens (I think there are about 10 good ones) are just so rediculous that you don’t register them as rock gardens.
But whoever designed this one was clearly inspired by the real thing. It has a Mount Fuji like the garden in Ginkaku-ji and a rock formation extremely reminiscent of the garden in Ry?an-ji (pics easy to find of both).
Unfotunately the mount fuji is a small unordered pile of gravel and the Ry?an-ji bit wasn’t copied closely enough to maintain any of it’s ‘restfull dynamism’ (you like that? i just made that up). The rakeing is uneven in the extreme where it follows the contours of rocks and Mt Fuji. They ended up with some dirt mixed in with their gravel so in the middle of a very long empty stretch the grey gravel turns all brown. But the absolute nail in the coffin is the moss.
So real rock gardens have been around for a couple of hundred years. Which means that carefull tending has left these lovely formations of moss around the rocks. Here they had an hour in the morning so they couldn’t really grow moss. So instead they dug up clumps of moss from somewhere and planted said clumps in the gravel between some of the rocks. They don’t even make up a coherent moss bed. They left gaps between all the clumps so it looks like ten or twenty green toupes crawled into the garden. Not a great effect.
So yeah. Their slogan is ‘this is how it should feel’. So stay at Westin if you want to feel uncomfortable and out of place.
In the gardeners defense he looks very earnest if completely lost and his boss looks like a douche.
Wow who knew I could write at length about that?
Hey quick off topic post just to get this out of my head.
At the risk of seeming like an actual blog I’m going to post on something almost topical.
I’ve spent a good chunk of the day reading through the MediaDefender emails.
boingboing: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/15/giant-email-leak-fro.html
the actual emails: http://www.mediadefender-defenders.com/threads.html
I’ve read some of the responses to these emails visa vi – MiiVi and can’t help but think people are getting it wrong.
People are mining the emails to support their pre-existing belief: MiiVi is a honey pot built to harvest IPs that can be used to extort money.
And yes there are a few quotes that support this theory in a round about kind of way. Mostly stuff in the EULA saying that they can report you to the cops if you break copywright. I don’t find this convincing. There’s all sorts of shit in EULAs. The wording in this one doesn’t sound any more threatening than the last one I didn’t read.
What I do find compelling is
1) Consistent efforts to find monetary streams outside of their core business model. Like building facebook widgets.
2) A genuine desire to make MiiVi really good.
These guys spent days on tiny interface issues. They sat down users and did actual interface testing. Something that noone does even though it’s the only way to get a decent interface. Most importantly they where brainstorming ways to keep people comming back day after day.
If you’re building a honey pot you don’t spend this kind of money on it. You hack out a front end and go fishing. At the most you make something servicable and then advertise the fuck out of it for a month so you can harvest all those IPs from the initial boom.
You don’t worry about user retention. By the time that becomes an issue you’re first law-suits are hitting the courts with your URL emblazoned all over them.
I think these guys were genuinely trying to make a go of it. They looked at all these sites they where trying to shut down every day, thought about how well they understood the market, how well they understood the technology, and decided they could do better.
Is that really more far fetched than them trying to make a buck off of facebook widgets?
Of course they still had to keep their name off of it. Not to keep it a secret from pirates but to keep it from their day-job clients. Universal had, according to emails sent from Universal employees, around 1000 properties under the watchfull eyes of MediaDefender. Media defender charges 1000$ a month per property to work their mediocre magic. Even if Universal got a deal that’s still a ton of money to lose.
So when you’re little moonlighting endevour gets outed by the pirates do you cop to playing both sides? No. You complain about everything being unfair (because your feelings are genuinely hurt) but don’t provide any explination of what you were actually doing.
So anyway it just looks to me like everyone read this the wrong way. Don’t get me wrong. I hate these guys too. In fact I think they’re even slimier for playing both sides.
Anyway hopefully this was written poorly enough and was lacking enough in cited evidence that it doesn’t come off as a respectable blog post. This is not a blog it’s a Travelogue.
Also, Tabish Hasan, I hope you found work. You’re a good guy even if things didn’t work out at MediaDefender.
Quick post about the money here: wtf
First off it looks like it’s from the turn of the century. A thai guy told me that there are 10 seperate anit-forgery traits built into thai bills. Yank money looks like it has about 4.
But you can only see those if you look for them. They’re all of the hold-it-up-to-the-light variety. The bill faces themselves just look like grainy pictures. They’re so un-sharp they looked photocopied to begin with!
I just got 100$ out of wells fargo, a big bank, and all the 20s are wrinkled and weathered. No nice crisp monies, just ancient stuff that feels like it went through the wash a couple of times. I don’t feel rich with 200$ in my wallet, I feel like I’m carrying around a handfull of greasy rags. Please can I have a sandwich? I’ll trade you this piece of cloth I ripped off my painting-shirt.
So I figure either get used to looking at every bill you get through a light or go down to the copy-shop and supplement yourself for the inevitable loss.
And they still have 1 dollar bills. Arg. This is such a bad idea. I figured out how to determine what your smallest bill should be: whatever it costs to buy a decent but cheap lunch.
You can get lunch for 5 bucks. You can get lunch for 20 baht. You can get lunch for 1000 yen.
You can’t get anything substantial for a dollar. Bus fare is over a dollar! If you can’t buy lunch with it then it isn’t a significant enough amount of money to be worthy of a bill – it’s change.
AND they don’t have 2s. So now I have twice as much change, all in bill form! Plus everything is the same damned colour and the same damned size. So a 1 and a twenty are at first glance exactly the same. You have to actually read the number to figure out what bill you have. So good luck paying for something that costs 26$ Finding a 20 a five and a one in the wad is going to take you all day.
And don’t pay the 26$ with two twenties because you’re going to get back 6 bills. 4 ones and 2 fives. They have no 10s! How do you not have 10 dollar bills! Our god damned number system is base 10! It’s a basic unit of currency. That’s what a burger costs!
I cannot believe the money in this country. I have to meticulously arrange the contents of my wallet to keep all the bills in precise increasing order or It takes me an hour to pay for anything. I’ve started keeping the 1s outside the wallet with the rest of the change.
Oh god and the loonie is worth 0.987 yank now. So the point of using this inferior currency system is getting pretty acedemic.
Ah well. In a couple of days when CAD > USD we’re going to go have a ‘do you take real money’ party with my Canadian debit card with Canadian dollars! w00t w00t!
