7 miles, 500000 hits, etc.

Photo by Sarah

The second annual Planet SOMA Memorial Day Walk Across San Francisco is now complete. Sarah came along this year, since it was also her birthday. It was fun. More pictures and exciting observations may follow. As may pictures of Sunday afternoon’s long drive, which ended up hitting Sacramento, Auburn, Isleton, and other stray spots.

I’m really beat, which is frightening because we did our seven-mile walk 30 hours ago…

More excitement: half a million hits on the old front page counter. Wow. What can I say but “thanks for coming by and keep hitting that “reload” button often!” And thanks also to Fitz for capturing the moment in a screen shot since I was still fast asleep at the time. I wasn’t really expecting to cross the mark until mid-morning.

There is very little further excitement, save for the fact that I’ll be making a quick trip to LA with Duncan in a few weeks. More details to come, but this probably won’t be the long road trip I’ve been promising for a couple of months. Should be fun anyhow, though…

Randomly Saturday

So maybe I’m the last person on the web to catch on to The Dreamweaver Depot and the Dreamweaver Supply Bin, but they’re still pretty cool. I like to fantasize about keeping Planet SOMA pretty low-tech, but not all my design clients are necessarily so inclined, and one can ever have too many navigation tools at one’s disposal, after all…

Maybe next week I’ll start having the Planet SOMA logo flying around the page. Maybe not. But I sure do like the idea of making collapsible outline menus, ,especilly when they’re also usable by that significant number of people who (wisely) browse with Javascript disabled.

But enough tech talk. Does anybody else remember this show? I watched it every week as 12-year-old, but all the other kids didn’t know about it even THEN. Probably because they all had actual friends thay played with on Saturday afternoons. I do remember it was little bit silly, but, since puberty was striking at the time, I remember even more clearly that Mike Darnell (who played the older brother) had a really great butt.

It’s Memorial Day weekend, of course. No telling what other best-forgotten memories will surface. I’ve already been digging through the “American Top 40” book. Stay tuned for more…

Parking Crisis

Interesting feature in yesterday’s SF Weekly. Its suggestion, more or less, is that the best solution to San Francisco’s “parking crisis” is to do absolutely nothing about it.

I couldn’t agree more.

The last thing San Francisco needs is more parking. The very idea of making the city more comfortable for cars is ludicrous. San Francisco is an amazing, pedestrian-scaled place for one reason: the fact that it’s damned near impossible to drive or park in most of the city. This is what sets us apart from LA, Sacramento, or San Jose; San Francisco is a dense, urban area which more closely resemebles New York or Boston than other places in California.

And I say this as someone who lives in the city and owns a car. Early on, I realized that, in San Francisco, my car has two main purposes: to get me to the supermarket and to get me out of the city on a moment’s notice. I haven’t used it for commuting in years, and there are very few places I drive within the city anymore. Rather than bitching about the parking in, say, Chinatown or the Financial District, I make the bold step of NOT TRYING TO DRIVE THERE.

It’s amazing how simple this is. Strangely enough, most of the areas with the worst traffic problems also happen to be some of the best-served by transit.

Frankly, I think that anyone who voluntarily drives to a job in downtown San Francisco during rush hour is a flaming idiot who deserves whatever inconvenience he or she has to face in the process. And guess what? Building even more parking spaces (which will encourage even more cars) will make it even worse.

It’s amazing how quickly the “parking crisis” diappears when you finally realize that you can avoid it simply by, well, avoiding it…

Stupid AT&T

I stepped outside a few minutes ago, almost got knocked over by the breeze from the bay, and thought “it’s chilly tonight”. The weather is normal again. I am happy.

This afternoon, I was not happy. I finally told AT&T to fuck off after being a long-distance customer since 1986. I’d been thinking of it for quite a while, mainly because of their erratic billing (bi-monthly? quarterly? hell, who knows?) and all their miscellaneous semi-hidden charges.

Today’s bill, though, was the last straw: they charged me $16.00 for a 20-minute call from Fresno to Greensboro for using 102880 (the method they pushed for so many years) rather than dialing their fucking toll-free number. I could have gotten a better rate using a pay phone owned by the Mafia. And, of course, none of their phone people were particularly helpful (and none would connect me with a supervisor) so I ditched them for Working Assets. Simple. Took 15 minutes, and now I get free ice cream for a year too…

It’s been a bad month for me and phones (not to mention other customer support issues). I’m probably on some 1-800 blacklist now, too; I have a pretty short fuse when I’m getting fucked over. Especially when I’m getting fucked over by idiots at some call center who may well be convicts for all I know.

And your day?

Half a Million

In a few days, this front page will by accessed for the half-millionth time. I find this fact absolutely frightening, but I’ll think about that in a few days. It’s still hot and unpleasant inside my apartment (although the temperature outside has gotten a little more bearable), but I don’t want to think about that now either.

I’m also frightened by the fact that I’m starting to get email from the occasional headhunter. Must be a tight labor market indeed. But that, too, is a thought for another day…

No, today I’m frightened by McDonald’s. I switched on the VCR tonight to watch something I recorded last night. As the tape started, the McDonald’s commercial on the broadcast channel was replaced by yet ANOTHER McDonald’s commercial at the beginning of the tape. Jeez. It’s not like every breathing soul on the planet doesn’t already know about McDonald’s…

Corporate ethics and labor policies aside, wouldn’t it be nice if they invested some of that advertsing budget on making their food suck a little less? I’m not anything resembling a food snob. I eat a good bit of junk food. But McDonald’s is pretty much the bottom of the barrel. It’s the fast food I eat only when nothing else is an option.