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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…

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…

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…

The Real World


Mmmm. Yummy long-haired boy…

Damn Mark for writing something about that Real World – New York marathon before I had a chance to. I was watching it too. Even stayed up until 1:30 in the morning to finish it, at which point I promptly turned off the TV before being assaulted by the London brats, the SF brats, or, God forbid, the Hawaii or LA wankers.

Didn’t much care for Eric the gym clone; despite his chest and all, he was just too well-scrubbed and plastic (and a bit of an asshole). Predicatably, the one I craved was Andre. He’s in an LA band called Milkweed now, in case you care. But Andre aside, the whole New York cast was the only one I really liked. They were people whose party I would have gone to. Most of the subsequent youngsters were people I’d avoid like the plague, which is probably why I never watched the show much after 1992.

And yes, I’m skipping Survivor too. I just can’t imagine caring what happens to ANYONE in that collection of Blind Date rejects.

I think “The Real World” was a brilliant idea for a show, despite its “casting” since the first year. In 1992, of course, I’d just moved from the south to the big city. I wasn’t Julie (I most certainly wasn’t anything approaching a virgin) but I got the concept all the same. And, of course, this show was the direct precursor to today’s web journals, spycams, blogs, etc. It gave a whole generation the idea of enjoying intimate gimpses of complete strangers doing more or less nothing.

Unfortunately, it also led to Friends…

The Weekend

The weekend’s passed pretty damned quickly, I must say, even though I haven’t really done all that very much.

Friday night was dinner with Jamie at this coffee shop by Lake Merritt in Oakland which serves grits. Had a big glob of them with my chicken-fried steak, while these two creepy fags in matching shirts kept staring at me. A consequence of having been recognized in public a few times because of your website is that you never know if you’re being cruised or just recognized. In this case, I didn’t much care. They both gave me the willies, and it wasn’t just the matching outfits.

Went out Friday night, and everyone I saw gave me a similar case of the willies.

On Saturday, I had Dan and Jamie over for jambalya (frozen), collard greens with cabbage (fresh), jalapeño black-eyed peas (canned), corn bread (mix), and strawberry shortcake (fresh). We watched Roadside Prophets, which is one of my favorite movies no one’s ever seen. Two more people have seen it now, and this is a good thing.

Today, I’m working on a website I don’t much like as a favor to a boss at a part-time job I very much hate. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether I meant that I hate the job, the boss, or both right now. Either way, it’s not a great way to spend an afternoon. Of course, it’s not entirely without compensation. I get a percentage of every video which will never be sold on this site no one will ever visit. And I get to spend my Monday morning at work in relative peace.

Off to cruise the Monster Board again.

Video Memories

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been engaging in the tediously entertaining task of dubbing all my 8mm camcorder videos (dating back to 1994) to VHS. I’m in the middle of 1998 now.

A couple of things I’ve realized in the process:

  • My hairline has remained pretty constant since 1995.
  • The early videos (where I was using the video camera as a video camera rather than as a glorified still camera to get screen shots for the website) were much more entertaining.
  • I really porked out in 1997 and 1998. I think a good chunk of it’s gone now.
  • My apartment used to be the most disgusting, nasty pigsty in the world.
  • I hate my “conversational voice”.
  • I like my mom and dad a lot and I miss being around them on a regular basis.

It’s kind of fun going back and looking at the old stuff again. I’ve seen people I forgot I knew and places I forgot existed. And this is only after 5 1/2 years. It’s amazing how much San Francisco has changed (mostly for the worse, I’m afraid) in this short period of time.

I’ve watched Sarah’s hair grow from millimeters to inches. I’ve enjoyed close-ups of food from every diner and dive imaginable. I’ve seen myself having sex on numerous occasions. I’ve re-lived road trips and visits from friends. And, as always, I’m still more concerned with what I didn’t shoot than with what I did. South of Market, before it succumbed to yuppie cancer, would be one thing I’d like more of. More sex would be nice too, but I imagine I already have more of that on tape than most people anyway.

It was not a bad way to kill a few days, all things considered.

Dating

A good friend emailed me this week. At the end, he off-handedly asked if I was seeing anyone lately. I stifled a little chuckle when I read it. I can’t even remember the last time I was actually dating someone, but 1995 comes to mind. I can’t even remember the last time I met someone who satisfied the three main criteria by being:

  • Worth the effort
  • Interested
  • In the same time zone as me

Being both a hermit and not particularly adept at relationships anyway, it’s probably a good thing for all concerned that no one really qualifies. I don’t really want to be dating someone right now, although I’ve been just socialized enough to feel a slight lack of self-esteem due to my terminal bachelorhood. I’ve often though that the right dog would give me much more satisfaction than almost any boyfriend I might find.

Yeah, I think I’d like a dog. But I’d probably change my mind the first time it took a shit on the carpet. Which suggests that a kid is pretty much out of the question as well. But that’s no surprise either…

The Problem with Websites

For those of you who have asked, I am indeed the adorable brown-haired tyke on the left in Wednesday’s front page picture. I have no idea who I was holding hands with, although I remember that I was vaguely related to him and he lived in Florida. I did, after all, warn you that I’m bad with relationships.

Don’t you hate it when you go to the grocery store just to get a gallon of milk, end up spending thirty bucks, and come home to find a phone message from someone you’ve really pissed off with an old (and now swiftly removed) journal entry? Especially when the last thing you wanted to do was piss them off?

It’s happened once or twice before; I was writing something that I thought revealed (comically or otherwise) what a head case I was. But it was read by another person in the scenario as a slight to them instead. And probably with good reason, as I read it again. As I mentioned in a desperately apologetic email response, the sponteneity of the web is both a blessing and a curse.

OK, you’re right. The average person probably doesn’t hate it when that happens because the average person’s evening probably ends with the thirty bucks worth of groceries. Which is probably best. After this, I think my evening’s going to end with a beer. Or seven.

If anyone has a spare hole around the house, I’d like to borrow it so I can crawl in and die, please.

Smoking Bad

A hangover without even gettng drunk the night before. That was Friday, with the lethal combination of not sleeping well the night before and then getting up and smoking like a chimney while finishing a mockup for a new porn site for hire the next morning.

I have to quit smoking very soon. But dammit, I’ve quit almost everything else. Smoking is all I have left. And when I’m working on websites, I’m a little like the stereotyped reporter in old movies: a cigarette constantly burning as I hover over the keyboard. I’m not sure how I’d function otherwise.

Yesterday’s unpleasantness is now smoothed over and I no longer feel like crawling into a hole and dying of embarrassment. OK, I still do, but it’s not nearly as severe as it was yesterday.

Dinner at Tad’s with Dan and Jamie last night. It’s nice knowing the owner; he’s a complete sweetheart who may not be long for this world. He gave us dessert and told us corny stories. We like Don.

And today my mission is to save Mark from becoming a lonely, psychotic old man sitting around the apartment training his killer cat to do God knows what…

Pride

I’m really proud of myself tonight.

I did my laundry without having run completely out of socks and underwear, and with only two months having passed since the last time I did it. This is pretty major; doing the laundry is, at best, a quarterly occurence in my washerless world.

Afterward, I made this glop with chicken, macaroni, and broccoli for dinner. I’m not nearly as proud of it. It’s good enough that I’ll finish it, but not good enough that I’ll ever make it again.

Things I love today:

Things I hate today:

  • Lukewarm onion rings with a double cheeseburger combo.
  • Laundromats.
  • A significant portion of Daly City.

I took a bit of an email break this weekend. I should be caught up tomorrow night, so if you think you’re being ignored, you’re happily mistaken…