Monday, December 15, 2003

 
The Switch:

Switching to AT&T wireless for one reason: I want that phone. And they're giving it away free with the new account.

How can they afford to do that, you ask? By firing all of their customer service representatives! Great move, guys!

The only reason I haven't written the whole thing off is because I'm sort of stuck now, straddling my switch from SprintPCS to AT&T. I've been on hold for an hour now. At least I'm not the first to go through this.
posted by Red Worm 9:51 AM

Thursday, December 11, 2003

 
Canvas Cafe, 9th and Lincoln, SF.

whoa.

There's a guy hunched over his laptop. He is sitting on a low couch, facing away from me. I can see over his shoulder. He's logged on to Friendster, looking through gallery after gallery of pictures of girls, occasionally clicking through to the pages of info about height, weight, etc.. There are two seriously cute girls sitting to his left, on a couch perpendicular to his, sharing the coffee table with him. They are within an arm's length of him. He hasn't said a word to them or, as far as I've been able to see, so much as looked at them.

This girl keeps looking at me from the corner. I have to get out of here.
posted by Red Worm 4:50 PM

Tuesday, December 09, 2003

 
sighted at 268 Carl St.: a fellow talking animatedly on his cell phone while doing an Austin Powers-style 28-point parking job. His ride: green Toyota Camry with a 10-inch-tall Godzilla doll for a hood ornament.
posted by Red Worm 12:15 PM

Sunday, November 30, 2003

 
Ah, commerce.

Black Friday, 2003, Orange City, Fla.: The woman at the front of the Wal-Mart line (she'd gotten there at 3:30 a.m. to be the first into the store!) gets trampled and has a seizure as fellow-shoppers step over her spastic, prostrate body. At least her hands were still clutching a $29.87 DVD player when the paramedics arrived.

Nice work all around. Not sure what's worse - stepping over a seizure victim to get to the goodies, or showing up at 3:30 a.m. to be first in line. Makes you proud to be a part of the thriving market economy, no?
posted by Red Worm 4:57 PM

Monday, November 24, 2003

 
"When you walk along the street and talk on a cell phone, you are not sharing the experience of urban life. You are there, but you are not there."

-excerpt from a great essay in Metropolis mag on how cell phones dilute the significance of physical location. Makes you wonder why you'd bother to travel any place where your cell phone would work. Great kicker to the piece:

"Now calling across the street and calling from New York to California or even Europe are precisely the same thing. ... Every place is exactly the same as every other place. They are all just nodes on a network--and so, increasingly, are we."
posted by Red Worm 10:23 AM

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

 
Working on a piece about U.S. tech jobs going offshore, specifically, to India. I think part of what's so hard for people to deal with, as you can see in recent coverage of the phenomenon in the SJ Merc, Business Week, Time, etc., is that the legend of America's technological unassailability that went hand-in-hand with the tech financing boom survived the equities crash and even the recession pretty well. People figured that the Troubles were mainly due to the overheating in the stock market, and once that mess evened itself out, we'd be back on track. The people who got put on pedestals/magazine covers - the heroes of the late 90s - were engineers and programmers.

Now the economy and employment pictures look to be coming around or at least stabilizing, but suddenly everyone is freaking out about India, which is where a lot of the new software engineering and programming jobs are being created - by U.S. tech companies. Smart people are smart enough to know that America has no monopoly on smarts. There was some noise in 1997 about tech-savvy immigrants coming to the U.S. and doing formerly high-paying jobs for rock bottom prices.

But that gripe was nothing compared to this - having the jobs done in a place where the cost of living is a fraction of what it is here. Easy choice for U.S. companies, and are their shareholders going to complain that their labor costs suddenly dropped by 60%? Not likely.

But there's more to it:

first, the U.S. companies save money and perhaps get stronger and bigger and hire more people in the US who can do stuff that can't be done in India; or they just keep hiring more and more people in India and growing bigger and bigger and their stock prices get bigger too, which their shareholders like.

second, the end product is still being sold by a U.S. company - maybe to customers in other countries, even India. So that's money to the U.S..

Everyone I've talked to agrees that it sucks to be in a job that gets offshored. The remedies I've heard suggested are: 1. lots of retraining (as soon as you've figured out how to do one thing, get ready to learn something completely new). 2. Some kind of insurance pool that goes into a retraining fund for displaced workers.






posted by Red Worm 2:49 PM

Friday, November 14, 2003

 
insolence!
Jedediah Purdy is on a mission to chip away at irony. I have a different bee in my bonnet: insolence. Am I getting stodgy? Probably, but I've never been dissed like this before.

Three instances of short-fused service-worker aggro flippancy in the last week, and they've got my ire up.

#1: Saleswoman in Williams-Sonoma, Chestnut Street. I'm in there with Mags doing wedding registry stuff. I ask whether the in-store signup we are about to do carries over to the website or whether we have to go online to set up the website registry stuff.

Her response, spat over her shoulder as she walks off to get the registry-ation forms: "That's what registering means."

Nice. Granted, it's Chestnut Street and we're indistinguishable from the rest of the yuppies swirling around her, and maybe she's bitter about dealing with registry stuff for some reason, but damn, that is cold. What did I do to you, angry woman?

#2 - Another yuppie stunt, down at Cherin's, the appliance store in the Mission. The place is busting with stainless steel stoves and fridges and fricking dumpster-sized wine chillers. The salesman, Peter Black - hey Peter, relax! - snapped when Margaret distracted him from his ripping rendition of the history of the Maytag corporation and its many subsidiaries; she asked if the one he was showing us was a skinny one that doesn't stick out past the counter too far.

"I heard you say what type of refrigerator you're looking for, and that is the kind of refrigerator I'm showing you, okay?"

The guy sort of just went off the rails for a moment, then regained control and went on selling fridges. The first instinct is to look around to make sure he actually said what he said.

What do you do, get the manager and go through the whole "this person was very rude to us" tattletale thing? It doesn't seem to make sense to make things worse for someone who's already clearly not in a good mental/emotional place. So you kind of try to brush it off and a couple of days later you call back and order the fridge from Cherin's because it's $5 cheaper than it is at Sears, and the guy gets credit for making the sale after all. I mean, you need a fridge, do you not?

#3: The tow-truck guy. A little more subtle, but overall, way more aggressive than the others. Young burly guy rolls up in his Ted & Al's wrecker to tow the Sea Donkey, my '85 Grand Wagoneer, asks what the problem is. I tell him I think it's the flywheel - the teeth are stripped off. A sly kind of look comes over his face. "Do you think ALL of the teeth are stripped off the flywheel?"

"Maybe."

A few more quiz questions, and he's got me. I have to admit that I don't have a degree in car maintenance. THe questions keep coming. I keep having to admit I don't know much about the engine of my truck.

Now the only reason I ventured to mention the flywheel is that a mechanic who was up inside the guts of the truck just last week [different rant] had told me that the truck was making that heinous sound every so often when I turned the key because a number of the flywheel teeth had been stripped off, and that I ought to think about replacing it. [I would have, too, but he said it would cost $1,400] I had heard the exact same thing a while back from the guys at Cole Garage.

Grinning, the guy mutters something about "the dot com age" under his breath. After I fail another question - this one about a pulley and some kind of bar he's suggesting I use to crank the flywheel around 90 degrees – he goes on to ask me, in a totally antagonistic way, what I do for a living. I say I'm a journalist. He shakes his head, saying "yeah, I can write too." The guy is basically standing there saying I'm useless. As in the other cases, I figure the guy has a screw loose. I don't say what's going through my head: "if I knew how to fix the car, I'd have fixed it already and I wouldn't be here taking sh*t from you."

WTF? I mean, I'm standing there with no shave, bird's nest hairdo, track pants (okay, a little suspect) a mellow flannel jacket and a banged-up 1985 automobile, definitely not in the kind of condition that might make one think I was a millionaire, not on the list of yuppie cars. How can this guy possibly be deriving pleasure from sticking it to me like this?

And then he won't tow the car because it's too close to the car parked behind it. Sweet, bro. I'm ratting you out.

The bile rises as I recount these incidents.

I am aware that the very use of the word "insolence" is rather pompous, and implies some kind of inferior-to-superior relationship between the insolent one and the object of said attitude. That's exactly the joke - to wit: why give me a hard time for asking a pretty innocuous question while I'm looking for something in your store? Why patronize me when my rig is broken down?

My first thought after the tow-truck-guy experience was that it was just me getting old and the younger guy busting my chops. But at Williams-Sonoma and the appliance store, the salespeople were significantly older.

Is it a general, Adbusters-y anger, aimed at anyone who is buying stuff? (Buy Nothing Day is on Nov. 28. There.)

Or is it me? Do I exude the need to be taken down a peg? I'm not haughty. As a general rule, I tend to be nice to people I come in contact with. No obvious "kick me" sign equivalents. I dunno.

update: called my buddy The Rat in Brooklyn. Told him about the above. His opinion: I've gotten really soft living in California.

Damn.

nother update: The guy fromTed & Al's who came to tow my rig this morning was a mensch. Super nice. He said the other guy was just lazy. He gets my vote for whatever office he wants to run for. Parking commissioner, maybe.

posted by Red Worm 6:14 AM

Monday, October 27, 2003

 
New, open, deliberately public WiFi networks at my two favorite Ocean Beach cafes, the Sea Biscuit (data-bearing 2.4 gHz waves courtesy of SF Surf Shop), and Java Beach. Offshores, hot weather and a long-period swell roping in. God I love this town. Wow are my arms tired.
posted by Red Worm 5:57 PM

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

 
Attending the Quattrone trial. Hard to guess which way it'll go.
posted by Red Worm 6:02 AM

Friday, September 26, 2003

 
Exit Zero

I'm in Cape May, NJ at the Magic Brain Cyber Cafe on Perry Street. I've spent quite a bit of time in here recently. The price for internet access here is $12 an hour, $7 a half-hour and $4 for 15 minutes. Not a typo. Yet here I sit.

I'm in Cape May for the annual Murphy family get-together. I've gotten very used to being able to find a relatively comfortable place to post up and use some friendly neighbor's wireless LAN. There are a dozen or two dozen of them around town, I've found via "war"-driving but many are password-only and I made the mistake of parking it right in front of the only house I've found with a strong signal and 1 Megabit throughput. Ended up in a conversation with the lady of the house, who was nice enough, but I could tell she was a little uneasy about the whole thing and now it's a tad awkward.

Plus, sitting in a car is okay for checking email and maybe a surf report, but it sucks for actually doing work. Too cramped, with the possibility that the owner of the network will turn off the connection or prop a baking sheet next to the base station or whatever.

I got charged $35 last night for just under 3 hrs and another $25 for 2 hrs today. That's what I pay for like 2 months in San Francisco. Yowza. A little competition and it'll be a different story right quick.

posted by Red Worm 1:36 PM

Sunday, September 07, 2003

 
Good for Ted Koppel. He tore into the Patriot Act and its vile sidecar, the Victory Act (a.k.a. Patriot 2) last week on Nightline.
posted by Red Worm 8:46 PM

Friday, September 05, 2003

 
Okay, to the point: People who stand in public places talking loudly on cell phones are arrogant jackasses. This is not new.

However, people who stand in public places talking loudly on cell phones via "hands-free" headsets come off as *clinically insane* arrogant jackasses. You - standing in the doorway of the corner store subjecting everyone within earshot to the mundane details of your private life or business dealings, perhaps pacing a little while belting it out - you have never looked more foolish in your life; in addition, the side of your conversation we can hear is just plain annoying. We despise you. You - e-boy in the raver pants - we don't want to hear your observation that "that girl was hot." You - frowning ding-dong in the suit with the legal pad - do not tax us with your whine about "the client." Again, we despise you. You look like an idiot.

Can we get the Phonebashing folks to move to San Francisco?

Then again, I probably look like an idiot right now - I'm writing this outside Tully's at Jackson and Fillmore. They probably despise me. I may well look like an arrogant jackass. I wonder if these guys have an outlet I can plug into...
posted by Red Worm 1:18 PM

Monday, August 25, 2003

 
Getting ready to head up to the Burn tomorrow. Will be based at The Temple of Twisted Truths - intersection of Literal and Creed, around 7:30 on the circle.

Hilarious police blotter report from Reno on Tom Haan's site about some very Burning-Man-esque activity in the greater Reno area.
posted by Red Worm 11:53 PM

Thursday, August 14, 2003

 
Ho-lee shee-it. Wrote a piece in Wired about how Apple rocks and how some distribution muscle from Sony could help them boost their market share, whether it be via a Sony investment/purchase or a deal like the Disney/Pixar arrangement. I had heard about what happens to one when one writes about Apple. But since the piece was pretty complimentary, it never occurred to me that I would get gooned.

Wow. Scores of emails. The piece got picked up by a bunch of blogs, and the emails started pouring in. Here's one:

--
From: Mark Dymowski
Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 14:13:34 -0500
Subject: Apple shouldn't be bought period

Josh,

Leave the Apple buyout thing alone. Steve Jobs IS Apple, and nobody else should control that.  We don't WANT everyone using the Mac. It's special!  It's unique! And to lose that niche would destroy the Mac. Don't destroy a good thing. This is our little secret place that nobody else knows about and once you ruin that, you'll ruin what the Mac is all about. Get it?

Mark Dymowski
--

You can almost see this guy shaking a pitchfork. Here's another:

--
From: Ian Bruce
Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 10:33:49 -0700
To:
Subject: Apple/Sony

Dear Josh,

As we know, an acquisition of Apple by Sony is a pleasant little though[t] experiment and unlikely to ever occur. But, applying your logic to yourself, wouldn’t it make sense approaching Rupert Murdock and NewsCorp to pitch the sale of Wired?Even though Wired clutches much less than a meager 3 percent of the Magazine market, I’m sure you can manage to sweeten the pot somehow.

Sure, he’s a rabid conservative scumbag, and is fundamentally opposed to virtually everything Wired is known and respected for, but hey, bidness is bidness.

Ian Bruce
Los Angeles
--

What a blast. Apparently, not only is it verboten to say bad things about Apple, it is, with some people, verboten to write about Apple at all. Amazing. THere have been a bunch of anti-Apple responses as well, and a few civil ones, though just a few. I must say that nothing I've written has caused such an immediate and vociferous reaction. I like it.
posted by Red Worm 3:18 PM

Wednesday, August 13, 2003

 
Got into a fun blog-on-blog exchange with Heath Row, who reviewed buzzkiller.net in Fast Company's blog. His review pointed out that the tagline I'd put up there was shaky in the chemistry dep't, gave some props to the various features, but ended by saying it had "more promise than punch."

I concur, but, blogs being blogs, looked around a bit and realized that the NYT had - that very morning - done a pretty sour piece on the re-invention of FC - and that Heath Row had characterized the NYT story as being positive. So I mentioned that, juxtaposing quotes from the NYT piece with his comment on it. Snark attack. Then he emailed me (took the conversation off-blog?) and things got very cordial very quickly. Funny how that happens.
posted by Red Worm 9:18 PM