A robot at Comcast Cable send us a letter today, stating that they have "exciting news" regarding the Mandarin and Cantonese language channel Jade. The news: while it's currently included in our cable package, it will now cost $10.95 per month and require a digital cable box. I guess I won't learn those two languages after all.
The full letter:
When I was about 10 years old my parents bought me a brand new BMX bike. We didn't go down to the local bike shop to pick one out: we went to the local Sears outlet and ordered it out of the New York City Yellowpages-sized Sears catalog. Thus began one of many Great Tortured Waitings, whereupon young Joe would barely sleep at night, rush home after school only to be emotionally crushed by the package's absence, and wait at the kitchen window for the UPS man. The only saving grace, other than the short attention span of young Joe, was that every day was a bright new beginning, a day of great potential, a day when it might arrive.
Now the Great Tortured Waiting has been upgraded to the Big Sad Knowing followed by A Brief Anticipation. Automated package tracking has supplanted any warm, human surprise with cold, android facts. You will not get your precious Saddleback Leather man-bag today: it's been in MESQUITE, TX, US for 24 hours. How about today? Nope, it's been sitting in SAN PABLO, CA, US for 36 hours. Oh, look at me complaining about the wonder of efficient tracking of items across space and time, but I don't care -- I'll take the bliss of package-arrival ignorance over there-is-no-Santa knowledge. I love technology and make my career of it, but after a week of obsessively refreshing ups.com I think I'll become a package tracking Luddite.
On April 6, 2009, the city of San Francisco held a public meeting regarding the proposed $5 entrance fee to the San Francisco Botanical Garden. About 200 people showed up to profess nearly unanimous disapproval for the plan.
Here are some of the points I found were noteworthy:
Personally I feel that we need to explore other funding alternatives. Charging an entrance fee would shift the Botanical Garden away from an easily accessible San Francisco experience into an exclusive tourist destination. No locals would wander through 3 days a week at $5 a pop. We need fund raisers, benefit events, and political lobbying. I'm a realist: I realize that that money does not grow on the international trees planted there, and I usually roll my eyes at anyone who wants a free lunch. But, I truly feel that a $5 flat fee would kill the place for locals. There must be some other combination of funding for fees: what about a $1 fee plus heavy fund raising? What about a "suggested fee" donation that is heavily pushed and manned at gate entrances, such as at the Museum of Natural History in NYC? Despite the income that the Botanical Garden might generate, this income will not make up for the cultural loss to the city, especially to those who low-income folks who frequent the Garden multiple times per week.
Check out my sideshow on Flickr:
I just received this email from the wonderful Parkway Speakeasy Theater in Oakland, CA. What a tragedy! This was one of the few places where you could get pizza, a beer, and sack out on a couch to watch a movie on the silver screen.
Dear Loyal Supporters:
This is a sad but true message from Kyle Fischer, CEO of Speakeasy Theaters, and Catherine Fischer, President of Speakeasy Theaters.
After more than twelve years of serving the great cultural crossroad of Oakland, the Parkway Speakeasy Theater will be closing at the end of business day this Sunday, March 22, 2009. From African Diaspora to Thrillville to lesbian fashion shows and educational porn, the Parkway has offered an eclectic array of movies and events. It was the first theater in California to offer food, beer and wine service in a lounge style movie theater. With a nudge or a push from the community, there was little programming the Parkway theater would not try in order to better be a community center and a safe haven for diverse ideas. The Parkway brought Baby Brigade for the shuttered and abandoned parents of newborns, the first international black gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender film festival and Sunday Salon, a free event for cultural and community enhancement. We, at the Parkway Speakeasy Theater, are deeply proud of the Parkway and will profoundly miss serving its community. Thank you for your patronage.
Programming at Parkway will remain as scheduled this Friday and Saturday, March 20 and 21. Stay tuned for special announcements about this Sunday, the final day of operations.
The Speakeasy Experience lives on at the Cerrito. Most special events booked for Parkway, including regular attractions like "The Rocky Horror Picture Show," will be moving there. Stay tuned to our web site and this newsletter for updates.
Please direct all inquiries to Kyle Fischer, kf@speakeasytheaters.com. Messages should be brief and pertinent, out of respect for this difficult reality, but will be appreciated. This is a tough time for all of us.
Cheers.
On 03/05/2009 at 5:39pm, about one hundred well dressed San Francisco loonies gathered at the Powell St. cable car turn-around and lobbed shaving-cream pies into each other's faces. Everyone seemed to be in good, if not gooey spirits.
Why shaving cream instead of whipped cream? For the vegans? For the lactose-intolerant? Who knows, it's San Francisco!
Some wondered why the event wasn't scheduled for 3/14... get it, geeks?
As I've motioned before, I'm consolidating my web presence here using aintablog. This means that my Google Reader feed, tweets, Flickr uploads (tagged 40withegg) are all showing up here. If you want Joe, and only Joe, then you can subscribe to Articles, which are posts actually written by me:
After a couple of years running Mephisto, I've switched to Pat Nakajima's aintablog feed-aggregation and posting framework. Here are the details:
I've written Mephisto-migration code and will contribute that back to Aintablog.
The visual pun was irresistible: "The Muddy Bottom: more than just mud." I pulled out my Canon Elph and snapped a few photos with the exhibit sign in the foreground and the squatting, ass-crack-flashing employee in the background. This is how I became an accidental pornographer.
As much as I hate to admit it, I want a little fame. Just a smidgen. I get this fix by taking photos and uploading them to Flickr, tagging and organizing them with an eye towards maximum visibility. If I take a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge, I'll name it such, tag it with "Golden Gate Bridge", goldengatebridge, and ggb, then add it to as many Flickr groups associated with the famous span as possible. Each evening I eagerly scan my Stats and Recent Activity pages to see how times my photos were viewed and whether anyone has commented upon or "faved" them. Perhaps someone even added me as a Contact and will be notified of my future uploads! Oh boy!
The real buzz for me is when I take a photo that I feel is interesting to San Francisco locals: MUNI fiasco, parking travesties, fanboys camping outside the Apple store for days (really), or even beautiful city sunsets. For these I add the coveted "sfist" tag, whereupon my photo will automatically appear in the Contributor section of SFist.com, a hyper-local blog catering to the San Francisco scene. And if my photo is deemed worthy, the Deciders at the SFist will promote it to the home page or perhaps even label it the Photo du Jour (score!), a micro-validation of my wit and artistic ability. My stats will spike!
This 15-seconds-of-fame thinking ran though my mind at the California Academy of Sciences' "The Muddy Bottom" exhibit. The exhibit's purpose is to teach us how the mucky, nasty sea floor is teaming with life that is essential for a healthy ecosystem. Life as we know it depends upon the muddy bottom! Which is exactly what the low-rider wearing female employee was telling tourists as she squatted at the water's edge, displaying 5 full inches of crack and about half of her cheeks.
The Muddy Bottom. "More than just mud". Miles of butt-crack. My head exploded. My camera shutter snapped.
About one hour later I was distributing soft-core, though I didn't realize it at the time. You could not see the employee's face or any other distinguishing features (well, too me, anyway,) so I uploaded 3 crack-tastic photos to my Flickr account, tagged them "buttcrack sfist," and watched my view counts go up. And up. Several users added me to their Contacts and added those photos to their Faves; oh sweet, sweet popularity! Who were these appreciative viewers? I started checking out the people who doing the Contacts and Faves thing, and I kept getting the same warning:
So-and-so's photostream fall outside your current SafeSearch filter. You can click through to see them if you want.
What's this? This warning is presented to browsing users to prevent them from seeing something they might find offensive, such as adult-only content. Porn. What's up with that? It didn't take me long to figure out that the people who dug my snarky Muddy Bottom photos also hosted adult content their Flickr accounts.
Then struck me: I had become an accidental pornographer. Because of me, dudes with science-museum-employee-butt-crack fetishes might be... you know... doing stuff. I felt icky. Initially I changed the Safety Level of the photos from "Safe" to "Moderate," but then I realized that this was only reinforcing their unsavory nature. Was my photostream also outside most people's SafeSearch filter? Am I an "outside your current SafeSearch filter" kind of guy? No, no I'm not. The only decent thing to do was to delete the photos, which had been viewed over 400 times.
I can hear the rational part of my mind arguing that I didn't do anything wrong: the girl at the museum was flashing her ass around to hundreds of people; she cannot expect a right to privacy in a public place; she was an idiot for wearing those pants; more flesh is displayed on reality TV shows than what I photographed at that exhibit, not to mention Mardi Gras or any given day in Las Vegas. All valid arguments. But, for me, they do not stand up to the gut test. My gut says that I should not have uploaded those photos, and deleting them was the right thing to do. Yes, the photos are out there now, since anything that's on the Internet for a nanosecond is there forever, but I tried to hinder further distribution (even the word "distribution" sounds dirty.)
I feel that I have learned a lesson: sometimes it's hard to know where the line is between your own personal right and wrong unless you cross it. I crossed my line because I desired to seen as witty, artistic, and even a little Internet famous. I'm better than that. I'll use better judgment from now on. Sure, I'll sill bait the SFist, but not at the expense of others, even if they don't know it.
Have you heard of Safari Books Online? Geeks love it. It's a service that lets you "search across more than 4000 leading books simultaneously" by either downloading or browsing the (mostly computer programming) books online. Offered y O'Reilly Publishing, the service costs $23/month or $43/month, depending on how many books you need access to at the same time. But, if you are a member certain public libraries, such as the San Francisco Public Library and Seattle Public Library, there service is free*. Damn, I love a good deal! Here's what you do:
* Libertarians can shut up about how my tax dollars were illegally used without my permission.
Here are the panels from the Google Chrome comic that either intrigued me or made me laugh.
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Google decides to rewrite something from scratch!
Ouch! Take that, Firefox! And doesn't that guy look just a little like Firefox CEO John Lilly? 
Downloading the entire Internet, also known as Web 3.0
Extremely violent reaction to an application's feature. Clearly this man works for Pivotal (please don't fire me.)
No need to use that crappy iGoogle anymore. Oh, wait…
Finally someone else uses the term "hosed."
Clearly not San Francisco malware, as it would never have apologized for letting it's dog drop a steaming pile of poo on sidewalk. Have you been to the Haight?
