San Francisco Warning

Beware of parking signs in San Francisco.

The AAA guidebook for Northern California and Nevada does clearly warn, and gives accurate estimates of the costs. One thing it doesn't emphasize is that they really mean it.

San Francisco has a serious parking problem. There are more automobiles than there are parking spots. With typical California ingenuity, they have turned this problem into an opportunity.

Big money.

In parking meters, a quarter will buy only 5 minutes (in some, less desirable places, as much as 10). So, come equipped with three dollars in quarters if you want to park downtown for an hour. And one hour is the most you can get. Not enough time for lunch in a fancy restaurant, like the one we visited, Aqua.

Organized parking is very rare and comes at a cost of $2.50 per twenty minutes, or more. Doesn't look all that trust-worthy either.

So, we hunted around and found a spot that looked all right, several blocks away. After lunch, we walked to the spot which was empty. Looking up, we saw a sign that said no parking from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. To make a long story short, we called the number on the sign and took a taxi there.

We found the location doing a booming business, with long lines. A steady stream of tow trucks was arriving, unloading, and going out again. We expected to pay maybe a hundred bucks, but the bill came to $238.75 and when we finally did get the car, there was a ticket on the windshield for an additional $60! Wow.

Big money.

Three hundred dollars--the penalty for not seeing a sign 15 feet above the ground. Or, for being unwilling to hand over $15 for parking even further from the restaurant. During the evening the restaurant offers valet parking (price unknown), but nothing at lunch time.

Since that experience, we noted other parking dangers. Further out, there is two hour parking where there are no parking meters. There is an exception for local residents, whose cars carry a neighborhood sticker. Overnight parking is allowed. If you can find a spot. Park in an illegal location (several per block) and you will be towed. Exceed the time limit and you will be ticketed. More than four tickets and you will be towed.

Further, each side of each block has a sign warning of tow away for a two or three hour period each week. We befriended a local merchant, who asked us each time we passed, "Where did you park?" Upon hearing our reply, he told us the details of the difficulty of that side of whichever street.

Wow, what an expensive ordeal! Our conclusion is that San Francisco is not a friendly city for automobiles. Leave yours across the bay in your hotel parking lot and take the ferry into the city. Or, take your chances, but you have been warned.

We won't be returning unless we absolutely have to--we didn't leave our heart there.

"If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair" may have been good advice in the 60's. Today, better advice is to leave your car behind, or bring lots of quarters.

Holiday Travels

Really, one should write one blog entry for each day of holiday travels. Oh well, we didn't.

Day 0, Thursday, December 20, 2007

Board the Amtrak "California Zephyr" just before midnight, and get some sleep in the bunk beds of our private roomette.

Day 1, Friday, December 21, 2007

Enjoy the train ride and the pre-paid meals in the dining car. Arrive in Emeryville late and take the bus into San Fancisco. Check luggage at the Amtrak station just at closing time. Walk to Ben's restaurant and then to his van, mostly uphill. Wait an hour for him to finish work. Cold. Drive to his apartment and stay up late listening to his room mate talking until early in the morning. Sleep on Ben's bed. Cold.

Day 2, Saturday, December 22, 2007

Go pick up a rental car and drive into Marin County. Visit with Tony and Anne. Lucas drops in. Cold. Drive to Emeryville and find the train station. Sleep in the Hilton Garden Inn. Comfortable.

Day 3, Sunday, December 23, 2007

Church in Cupertino. Drive to Monterey and enjoy eating near the beach. Sara gets her feet wet in the Pacific. Sleep in a Ramada Inn room. Comfortable.

Day 4, Monday, December 24, 2007

Drive along Highway 1 and enjoy the beautiful scenery. Windy and cold. Stop at Hearst Castle, where tours are sold out, but watch the video. On to Morro Bay and enjoy seeing Morro Rock, but not much of an ocean view. Sleep in our chosen motel. Burn one fire log in the fireplace. Comfortable.

Day 5, December 25, 2007

Burn two more fire logs. Drive to Cambria. Check in to chosen motel very near to the beach on Moonstone Road. Cold. Return to Morro Bay to eat crab.

Day 6, December 26, 2007

Drive to Hearst Castle and take the tour. Cold. Walk on the beach. Cold. Another night in the Moonstone Inn.

Day 7, Thursday, December 27, 2007

Drive to San Francisco. Hotels there do not honor their coupons, so we check into Marin Suites in Corte Madera. Very nice room.

Day 8, Friday, December 28, 2007

Eat Breakfast with Tony at Max's, and he gives us the key to Lucas' apartment. Drive to San Francisco and late lunch with Ben at his restaurant, "Aqua." While there, our rental car is towed! So, we go redeem it for $240. Move into the apartment on California in the 3200 block. Comfortable, but very cold.

Day 9, Saturday, December 29, 2007

We fly Helaman out to Oakland and go pick him up at the airport, after treating Ben to lunch at Max's in Corte Madera. Dinner at "Conduit" where a friend of Ben's is our waiter.

Day 10, Sunday, December 30, 2007

We try to go to church on Pacific Avenue, but get there too late. Helaman and Ben go to a Raider's game in Oakland.

Day 11, Monday, December 31, 2007

Drop our luggage off at the Amtrak station in Emeryville. Check into the hotel. Drive back into San Francisco to return the rental car. Help Helaman get ready to drive Ben's van back to Utah and say goodbye to Ben. Helaman drops us off in Emveryville, where we spend our last night in the area at the Hilton Garden Inn. Comfortable but not quite warm enough.

Day 12, Tuesday, January 1, 2008

The hotel has a shuttle, but no shuttle service! So we walk to the train station, and board the train, which leaves at 8:05 a.m. Enjoy the day on the train. Sleep in the bunk beds of our private roomette.

Day 13, Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Arrive about 5:15 a.m. and Helaman picks us up. End of holiday travels, and I actually work that day.

Caffeine

A few weeks ago, I decided to stop ingesting caffeine.

After the withdrawal headaches, things settled back to normal.

However, I notice that my head feels "fuzzy" and I'm not sure how clearly I am thinking.

No worries, though. Even though I can't remember why I decided to go off of caffeine, I trust that my mind was sharp back then, and I must have had a good reason.

More things not working

Thanks for the comments to my previous post. I found a setting so that the program will ask me before downloading an update. And, I took Andrew's suggestion and re-installed.

Today, I decided to make a list of things that didn't work right.

When trying a new web application, it failed with a nasty stack trace including the information, "Unable to find class for xyz.jsp" (name changed). Ok. But, where did it look? Why not give more information?

Leaving the office building, I hit one of the four exit doors and it was stuck. The one next to it was too. That's fine because after hours I need to swipe a badge to get it. Still, shouldn't you be able to get OUT? Well, the other two doors worked for getting out. After they closed, I turned around and tried opening them. That's right, they both open just fine.

Then, I need to cross a busy intersection, in two directions, to get to the opposite corner. The pedestrian lights don't operate automatically. You have to hit a button. That's fine, but the button to cross East is 15 feet away from the button to cross South, and I have to do both of those. That's a lot of steps to hit the buttons. Then, when I hit it, I just miss the green light for the cars. It doesn't work, even though there would be plenty of time. Apparently a pedestrian has to hit the button BEFORE the light changes. So, I wait to cross the other way first. When the light changes, there is the little chirp for blind people. But it is the WRONG CHIRP! Good thing I'm not blind, or I might have started crossing the wrong way and been hit. Having crossed, I race the extra 15 feet to get to the other button and get it in time. But the crosswalk leads directly into construction, so I have to take a big detour. Again, good thing I'm not blind.

Got home and my cell phone gave another little chirp. Oh yeah, that's right. It had been chirping like that the whole time I was trying to work on the web application. But, there wasn't anything I could do to get it to stop, and the charger was at home. Now, it's plugged into the charger, but I will most likely forget about it, and if I don't get the ONE chirp when it finishes, it will sit there for days maybe.

Well, I'm just going to have to deal with cell phones needing to be recharged.

But, somewhere, someone probably cares about doors not opening and opening when they shouldn't. And someone probably cares about blind people getting hit by cars. But, I don't know who it is. Who does one report this kind of thing to?

Things stop working

These days it seems to me that nothing is working.

Reminds me of a time almost 35 years ago when I had trouble with a particular computer. Back then, very few people owned a personal computer. I was an undergraduate in a new Computer Science department, and one of my professors owned a mini-computer, a PDP-8. It was available for student use, and we had to sign up in advance for 50 minute time slots.

Every time it was my turn, I would walk in, set my notebook on top of the console, and start to work. After just a few minutes, the machine would crash, and I would have to spend the rest of my time slot trying to get it working again.

I asked my fellow students, but no one else had that problem.

What was going on? It turns out, that you already know enough to figure it out, if you'd like to take a minute to think about it before reading on.

* * *

Yeah, it was the notebook on top of the console, causing it to overheat. Stopped putting the notebook on the console and never had the problem again.

It's not always quite so easy to figure out why something that always worked before doesn't work any more.

* * *

Recently, my email client software, Mozilla Thunderbird, has stopped doing its automatic updates. Here's what happens instead. Without telling me, it goes out to the network and downloads the latest version. Once that's all been received, it pops up this alert (interrupting whatever I happen to be doing at the time--ARGH!):



I've tried it both ways. Closing everything and giving it the go ahead, and clicking on Later. Choosing "Later" gives this response:



Okay, that's fine. Either way, I am always very careful to shut everything down before restarting Thunderbird.


Doesn't matter. It always fails. After a few moments, it lets me know that it didn't work. Again. I've lost track of how many times it has tried. The bottom line is that Mozilla Thunderbird update doesn't work.


The error message is not helpful. All other applications ARE closed. WHICH files do I need permission to modify? It doesn't say!

And, I have no confidence that restarting Thunderbird makes it actually try again. Because all future attempts to restart Thunderbird happen without incident. And yet, over and over again, it is downloading and readying the update. Only to put me through the same process and the same failure yet again.

Where can I turn for help with this kind of problem?

On being average

There's nothing wrong with being average. Most people are. Another word for average is "normal" and certainly there's nothing wrong with being normal.

I have recently heard a couple of jokes about "average" that bear repeating.

One claims that a national leader expressed dismay upon learning that half of all Americans are below average.

Another claims that 80% of university professors surveyed rated themselves above average as professors.

What makes these jokes funny is that, in any population, half are below average and half are above average. That's just what "average" means. In particular, 80% of the population cannot be above average; exactly 50% are.

Suppose you look at an entire population and measure any naturally occurring property (height, weight, intelligence, bank balance, etc.). Suppose you then count the number of people with each possible measurement. Now graph the values of the property across, from smallest to largest value. Finally, show the number of individuals at each measurement as the height of the graph. When you do this, the graph will look something like this:

Image courtesy Wikipedia.

This graph is called the "normal distribution" by statisticians. You may recognize it as the "bell curve," so called because of its shape.

The vertical line at the very center is labeled with the Greek letter mu, which is the symbol used for the "mean value" (which is what statisticians call the average measurement).

This is the highest point in the graph, which means that there are more people who have the average measurement than any other measurement. Fully 68% of the people are "close" to this average measurement. Most people will be close to normal.

And, as I have said, 50% of the people have measurements above average; the other 50% are below average.

To indicate how far a measurement is from average, statisticians use the term "standard deviation," indicated by the Greek letter sigma. Only about one in a thousand people will be more than three standard deviations above average.

More than 2/3 of the individuals in the population will be within one standard deviation of the average measurement. Only one in six will be abnormally above or below average. Of these, only one in fifty will be "way" above (or below) average. And, as mentioned earlier, only one in a thousand will be off the chart.

Almost everyone is average. That is normal. And being normal is nothing to be ashamed about.

Disclaimer: The statistics here are simplified, as this is just meant to be thought-provoking.

Time travel

I have always been very much aware of time. Not that I am a good manager of time--that is a different matter.

This awareness is so much a part of my life that I chose this tagline: "traveling through time at the usual rate of one second per second," hoping for something pithy, memorable, and evocative.

Looking back at the past, and looking forward to the future, are both favorite passtimes. And I mean "passtime" in the more literal sense of something to do while time passes; for meanwhile, the world continues to move forward at the usual rate, etc.

There is nothing like a photo to plunge me into a state of nostalgia and reflection.



Pictured are four of my favorite people. I think I was the photographer. I was certainly present when the photo was taken. That was a wonderful moment that was captured; one of many that day, visiting my parents in Canada.

All of the people in the photo are gone now. My children's grandparents gone the way of all the world: dead and buried, but not forgotten. The children are still living, so they are not gone in the same sense of the word.

But the children are now adults. Of course, I love them just as much now as I did then.

It is them as they were then that I miss. Gone is the naiveté, the innocence, the simple delight in being alive. That moment, that day, those innocents, are gone forever.

And that is one of the consequences of traveling through time--not that I have any choice--at the usual rate of one second per second.