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!

Visited 6 apartments today. Which was good for getting a feel for what’s available and what things cost.

We where originally contemplating a bachelor suite but we’re starting to think we just want the space of a one bedroom.

Looks like we’re going to end up spending between 1400 and 1900 a month. Which is alot I guess but as long as I can find a job we’ll be cool. Actually we’ll be cool even if I can’t find a job. Wages here are pretty high.

If you twist around and look at the situation from a very narrow angle we might actually be saving money by living right downtown since we won’t need a car. Parking spaces go for 300$ a month.

I don’t know what sets prices here. Everything could cost more, demand is rediculous. And quality varies hugely within the same price catagories.

The first place we went to today cost 1850 a month. It was recently renovated to a reasonable, but not great, standard and sits on the 7th floor of a fairly delapidated building. It was ostensibly 1 bedroom simply because they put a wall through a bachelor suite to bump the price. It had a decent view of… well other buildings I guess.

The 2nd to last place we saw today cost the exact same amount. It was the whole 2nd floor of a townhouse. They had accidentaly listed it as 1br. It had like a bazilion rooms (5) and a view down nob hill of the bay!

The only problem was that we couldn’t get a real good look at the place since every flat surface was covered by people filling out rental applications.

So it’s nice to dream about that place but there’s just no way. There were lots of roomate double-income pairs moving in who for sure look better on paper than us.

I’m starting to think we aren’t going to get a decent place until I find a job so we can look more renterworthy than some of the competition.

Also we’ve decided where we want to live. Which is kind of tricky because that really limits where we’re now looking. We really like Italy Town. Around Columbus and Broadway. It has good food and a happy, relaxed atmosphere. Right now we’re on Nob hill and it just isn’t cool. It’s too upscale. There are all these wine and coctail bars on the nob while italy town has all the cool pubs and espresso places. Plus italy town is close to china town. China town = grocery shoping horray.

So now a 1 bedroom above a cafe in italy town has to open up for 1500$. Just gotta keep watching craiglist. Actually we know a place is opening up in early October. Mabey I can be employed by then!

Also, just as an asside, do you know what pints go for at the San Francisco brew pub during happy hour (4:00-6:00)? 2.75$!! 2 dollars and 75 cents! What the fuck! Free beer! And that place is on Columbus and Broadway.

So anyway. I guess we’ll see what happens next.

In San Francisco we are.

So we’re getting set up. The piccy is the view from our room in the Gaylord Suites (awesome name). The first resident-hotel in San Francisco. Built in 1927. Or some such thing. It’s pretty fanzy.

We have a phone. I’m actually surprised what a decent deal we got. Shopping around we found t-mobile had the most european system available. We buy cards at the 7-11 and put money on as we use it. No monthly fee. Much like civilized countries.

The price isn’t as nice as thailand. 10 bucks for 30 minutes. But it doesn’t expire for 3 months(!) and there are literally no other fees. If we use the phone more we can get more minutes for a better rate. I guess we’ll see. If we get the hang of messanging then communication will be very cheap.

So now it’s finding an appartment. We already have some calls/emails off to some places. We have a good idea where we want to live. We like the china town/nob hill/commercial kind of general area. West of Union where we are now is a little high brow. north and east looks more our style. And is closer to San Francisco brew pub.

A few places mentioned they wanted to see credit scores. I never really knew what credit scores where. Just that rental places went and dug them up before they rented to you. I was stressed about credit scores crossing borders. Since people where asking us to bring our own I did some reasearch and we paid equifax to tell us what Sarahs score is.

Turns out Sarah’s score is really good. So it should be pretty easy to convince someone to rent to us on the spot. First open house is at 3:00.

A yay for San Francisco moment: surfing a google maps/craigs list mashup on free wifi in union square with a really good iced tea in hand.