May 4, 2010
9:17 pm »
Oh look, a new car.
After eight and a half years and 192,000 miles—yes, that’s over 20K miles a year—I’d started looking about for a new car to replace my Acura RSX. As much as I liked it (and the engine still seemed to be in pretty good shape), it needed work: squeaky brakes were a must-fix and tires were due to be replaced within the year, and it had annoying and expensive non-critical problems: a blown air conditioner compressor and an ugly dent in the passenger side door. A median estimate for all that would be around $2500, notably more than the car’s actual value at this point.
I’d made a short list of cars to look at—the Ford Focus or Fusion, the Mazda 3, the Hyundai Genesis Coupe. Nothing by Honda, Toyota or Nissan particularly grabbed me this time, which surprised me. (Which isn’t to say that I’d turn down a 370Z, but it’s out of my price range.) The Hyundai appealed to me as something similar to the RSX but more powerful, with rear-wheel drive, and just an all-around great driving machine. And even less practical than the RSX. The Mazda 3 surprised me by being as interesting as it was—for what’s basically Mazda’s answer to the Accord, it’s aggressively styled, has some interesting standard electronics and even with an automatic transmission is as responsive as the stick-shift RSX. (And it’s a five-speed auto with a “manual shift” mode, to boot.)
The Ford salesman was pretty cool, managing the neat trick of seeming laid back and attentive simultaneously. He didn’t fail to close the sale—the car did. It may be that nearly nine years with a quasi-sports coupe has changed my perceptions, but the Fusion seemed to take the steering wheel and accelerator as suggestions rather than commands. It’s a distinctive ride style I imagine some people would like, to be sure, but those people are not me.
I hadn’t actually expected to buy a new car now, either way, but Mazda was offering a 0% APR deal expiring on Monday. Gnaw gnaw gnaw. So I took a deep breath, went back, signed all the papers, drove away from the dealer five minutes before they closed, and the car immediately died.
No, seriously. A mile away from the dealer the “check engine” light came on, which isn’t necessarily serious, but so did the “automatic transmission malfunction” light, which is drive to the shop now do not pass go do not collect $200 serious.
As you may guess, this caused a great deal of stress for me, and more than a little consternation at the dealership. Their service department wouldn’t re-open until Monday (yesterday). I got a loaner then—apparently a very ad hoc “don’t strand the customer” choice of cars, as they’d actually just closed when I rolled the ailing car back up—and then swapped it for a somewhat more official “drive this while we figure out what’s going on, please” loaner on Sunday.
To wrap the story up somewhat more quickly, yesterday I checked in with the service manager in the morning, who optimistically said, “It’s probably just a loose connector.” I wasn’t so sanguine, and had been preparing myself to politely but firmly suggest that perhaps they should look into getting me a different car. As it turned out, the return visit in late afternoon made that unnecessary. When I walked in, they greeted me with, “We’re getting you another car and it should be here in a couple hours.” They couldn’t determine what was wrong with the original car (“something’s wrong with the transmission”) and didn’t want the deal to be permeated with lemon scent. I’ll give them points for handling it proactively.
So, bottom line: new car. Payments for five years, but slightly less than the payments on the RSX were, and with no interest. A lot of the gadgetry that’s become standard in the last decade, too—the advancements are remarkable. I may be a nerd and post pictures later.
I’ll take it out for a long drive—well, maybe not for three weeks: this upcoming weekend is booked for Mother’s Day stuff, and the weekend after that I’m keeping open for potential visitors.
After that, though, I drive somewhere stupidly far away.
(Also: props to Menlo Mazda and Jessica, the saleswoman there who helped me out and handled what’s surely on the list of Things You Do Not Want To Go Wrong With Your Sale with grace. And, if you’re in the market for a Ford, Zach at Sunnyvale Ford gets cool points. Hopefully he won’t lose them when I say I’ve bought a Mazda elsewhere.)
Mar 21, 2010
6:53 pm »
Random updates
(Presented for your perusal in no particular order.)
- I transitioned from being a contract employee to a direct employee of the company I’ve been working for since October. In practice this doesn’t make a huge difference in terms of my role and responsibilities (or salary), but it’s nice that they’re hoping to keep me around for a while.
- I’m experimentally moving my journal back end from LiveJournal to Dreamwidth. So:
- If you’re reading my journal on LJ or at ranea.org, you shouldn’t have to do anything; if you also have a DW account and want to read me there, my username is (surprise)
![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chipotle. - If you want to comment on my journal, you still shouldn’t have to do anything, at least for the indefinite future. I expect to check both sites.
- Eventually, if DW works out, I may first request and then eventually require comments to be only on DW. But I’m not sure. I’d rather things be a little more of a pain in the butt for me than for you.
- Why bother doing this at all? In very short form, I don’t really trust LiveJournal’s commitment to their “old” userbase (i.e., people like me).
- If you’re reading my journal on LJ or at ranea.org, you shouldn’t have to do anything; if you also have a DW account and want to read me there, my username is (surprise)
- While this journal is probably going to remain moderately quiet, just for the occasional life update, I have a tech blog now, although it’s also something of an experiment: Coyote Tracks.
- My goal is to update it with something at least once a day and with something substantial at least once a week. It may be a little something like Daring Fireball in content mix, focusing on web stuff, Apple stuff, and publishing stuff, musings about the future of computing which will undoubtedly look ridiculous in as little as a year’s time, occasional commentary on commentary, and—the secret ingredient—cocktail recipes.
- For a “brand new blog” it got a fair amount of attention from being linked to by Marco Arment (the creator of Tumblr and the amazing Instapaper). We’ll see if that lasts.
- The URL is http://chipotle.tumblr.com/, and it should have an RSS feed and other such niceties out of the box. LJ users may add it to their friends page as “chipotle_tumble”; Dreamwidth users may add “coyotetracks_feed”. (Please note that while DW and LJ will allow you to comment on feeds, there’s no guarantee that I will see such a comment.)
Feb 26, 2010
5:31 pm »
A brief update
…but not as brief as a tweet.
Work has been busy the last few weeks, culminating in really busy this last week. Today was a coworker’s last day and he was trying to do a knowledge dump while we’re trying to roll out the code that he’d been working on and merge in various fixes that were being stashed away rather than checked into the source code trunk line, because the now ex-coworker was maintaining his Huge Project in trunk. (Why was he not maintaining it in his own branch? I don’t know.)
To add spice to it all, my “other job,” the contract that I started last March or so, is finally wrapping up. Sort of. This means a big push to get it running in production mode rather than development mode. So this has been eating up most of my spare cycles this week. Truthfully there are other projects I’d rather be devoting spare cycles to, but a contract is a contract and all that.
Speaking of C&Q, there will be more to report on that soon. While I can’t say that interest in it has spiked—we’re still flying very much under the radar in most places, I think—I’m getting asked about it more frequently. And there’s work, er, being worked on. (In part that’s why having the other contract pop its up head and demand work on me now now NOW! is so frustrating; there’s only a couple more hills to climb before I can start getting things into a private alpha stage.)
Anyway, on the train now heading home to do Jäger shots and collapse.
I’m kidding about the Jäger.
Probably.
Feb 5, 2010
9:24 pm »
The Next Thing That Comes First
Against my better judgement, I’m going to write about the iPad. It’s been long enough that everyone’s already formed an opinion, I suspect; I’m going to start off by throwing a bit of cold water on some of the opinions I’ve been seeing.
( Then, I'm going to get distressingly non-skeptical at you. )Jan 28, 2010
12:55 pm »
On comments about the iPad
What was the famous Slashdot quote about the first iPod? “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”While I’m not going to predict the iPad will match the success of the previous iP* product lines, there’s a definite party line among the geek crowd that only fashion-conscious fanboys would ever actually buy Apple products and that whenever they introduce a new gadget it’s the Stupidest Thing Ever. If the majority of commenters on Slashdot and TechCrunch did not piss all over a new Apple product, that’s the product I’d expect was in trouble. Given how much pissing is going on around such sites over the iPad, I'm betting the thing is going to sell like crack-infused hotcakes.
Never make the mistake of assuming either of the following:
- That you really know what a product you've only seen demo videos of is going to be good at. Some things look much better in demos than they really are, and some things have to actually be used to be properly evaluated.
- That because ultimately a product is not good for you means that it's not good for anyone else. You are not necessarily in the median of the product's target market segment.
Jan 8, 2010
8:17 pm »
A disquieting thought
So with several people making various offers to help with Claw & Quill’s programming, I’m realizing that there’s no way to avoid it—I have to play project manager. And as much as I may wish to find excuses why it isn’t necessary, I really, truly have to finish a (cue ominous organ chord) requirements document.
But it’s on the way. Really.
Dec 15, 2009
10:43 pm »
Still here!
Geeze, nothing for nearly a month and a half, and that shortly after a post talking about how I should write here weekly.
As a quick update—which I seriously need to get back into the habit of doing here, don’t I?—I’m heading to Florida starting this coming Friday the 18th, and will be there for a week. My new job is somewhat less crazy now than it was over much of November, but during November it was… we’ll just say really hectic.
It often seems to be the case that people get more done on personal projects when they’re getting busy with other projects, and to some degree that’s even true with me. I’ve made progress on Claw & Quill in the last two weeks or so that I’m proud of, although a lot of it’s awfully nerdy stuff at this point. I’m going to put out another quasi-call for people who are interested in helping with coding. The site’s being written in Python using the Django framework; experience with either one isn’t strictly necessary (although it’s obviously helpful). There’s also going to be call for work with Javascript and jQuery (and jQuery UI), HTML 5, and other such markup-savvy stuff. A couple people have expressed interest in the past in a general way; if you’re still interested—or have become interested since—give me an idea of what you’re actually interested in and I’ll try to bring things to a point where I can start getting people on board shortly after the holidays.
Oct 29, 2009
1:04 pm »
Trainspotting--and Birthdays
As I start this, I’m riding the BART train into work. This is a way of commuting I’m still not used to. It’s not cheap—$4.75 each way on BART plus $1 a day for parking (unless I buy a monthly parking permit, which is actually more expensive per day at $30 a month). It’s also not fast—the drive from the apartment in Foster City to the Millbrae Transit Station, the southern end of the BART line on the Peninsula, is 15 to 20 minutes and the ride on BART is 35. On the flip side, though, it’s relatively easy: obviously, on BART there’s no driving involved. And parking fees alone at my building would cost more than I’m paying for this trip.
I’ll admit that of the several commuter rail services I’ve tried in the Bay Area, BART is the best only in terms of reach. Caltrain is considerably quieter, considerably more comfortable, and considerably faster—a limited or bullet train would make the trip into San Francisco from Millbrae in under 20 minutes. And it’s no more expensive. Unfortunately, the SF Caltrain station is a mile and a half from the office, more than I’m inclined to walk. Taking MUNI from the station to the office would add another $4 per day in the commute. In theory, I could actually catch Caltrain closer to the apartment at the cost of an extra buck a day in parking, but at that point it’s become a third again as expensive, and Caltrain—as ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
jakebe frequently has reason to complain—has the Achilles’ heel of railroad crossings, providing high potential for traffic accidents and the occasional suicide. BART is at various points a subway or an elevated track, but roads never cross it.
On the other hand: more comfortable, quieter, and—yes, when not delayed—faster. Hmm.
Anyway, this gives me something to think about: I can make a go of this kind of commuting and be moderately comfortable with it. This opens up the potential for living longer distances away from my work if I choose to, provided that both my home and my workplace are sufficiently close to rail lines. I could move back down the peninsula and take Caltrain in, or go anywhere in the East Bay that’s still on BART—although that would open up the problem I’ve written about before of being farther away than I’d want from friends. Granted, driving an hour or so each way to get somewhere on a weekend is hardly new for me, but I’ve noticed that in practice getting together with friends much past a ten-mile radius of one’s house rarely happens. Maybe one can develop a mindset of frequently pinging friends to see if they’re busy, to even (gasp) plan ahead, but by now it’s a little unlikely I’m going to change my ways, I’m afraid.
But: speaking of that, and of lack of planning ahead, I’d like to see if I can get people together for my birthday—to go out to a group-friendly restaurant, perhaps Buca di Beppo in Palo Alto. (I’m open to other suggestions; my thought is that Palo Alto isn’t too far for people from the South Bay, but isn’t as far as, well, the South Bay for anyone coming from the north or east.) Technically, my birthday is tomorrow, and while I’d normally just suggest bumping things to the next weekend, the next weekend is, well, Halloween. So. I may see if I can get people together for the next next weekend, say, Saturday November 7.
Oct 24, 2009
12:06 pm »
State of the Coyote
About halfway through October I went up to Seattle to visit shaterri and quarrel for a long weekend, which involved visiting a few Seattle neighborhoods, walking around downtown, and visiting Vancouver and Granville Island. And—unsurprisingly, given that Shaterri is at least as much of a foodie as I am—various restaurants, from Poppy to Spur. I spent some time at Zig Zag Cafe, home of the quasi-famous (and terrific) bartender Murray, and tried Carpica Antica vermouth for the first time, and Victoria Gin, made—I think—up in Vancouver.
Shaterri talks up Seattle so regularly that one wonders if the Visitors’ Bureau is paying him (and if not, why not). But it’s an area that seems eminently worthy of accolades: many walkable neighborhoods, a great culture (by which I personally mean “coffee shops, brewpubs and restaurants”), and very, very green. Yes, it’s rainier and a little cooler than I’d personally prefer, but I suspect if I were offered a job in any major American city of my choice, that’d be the one I’d choose.
Of course, I’ve just started a job in the closest American city to me, San Francisco. This is the first time since I’ve been out here (seven years, as of next month) that I’ve worked in the city, and at least so far I’m really liking it. My commute is the longest that I’ve had time-wise, but ironically one of the easiest: I drive to the Millbrae Transit Station, which is usually about 20 minutes with traffic, then take BART into the city, about a 35-minute ride. Since Millbrae is the start of the BART line, I always have a seat in the morning; I usually start standing on the way home but get a seat before we’ve left downtown.
The office building I’m in is One Market Plaza; this puts me within a few blocks not only of the bay itself, but an amazing array of lunch choices. There’s a food court in the building itself and another one in Rincon Center, the next block over. And a row of restaurants and cafes along Steuart Street. And the Ferry Building sits right across the Embarcadero, with its array of permanent food stands and cafes, and a farmers’ market on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’m used to taking long lunch breaks to go find interesting places to eat—but now I’m surrounded by them. (I see coworkers bringing their microwave lunches to work and I want to shake them and scream, “You are in one of the best food cities in the world and you are having goddamn Stouffer’s?”)
I’ve written before about my feelings of being tugged toward both urban life and—well, less rural than a particular kind of suburban life, the kind of place where you can see a lot of stars at night but you’re not isolated, where there are homes around but it’s not modern tract housing, and where urban life isn’t more than an hour or so away when you want to spend time experiencing it. (Shaterri’s place is actually pretty close to this ideal.) This job is the most exposure to true urban living that I’ve had—even though I go home to a very suburban community every night.
Yet I think I don’t really want to live in a big city. There are urban places that might tempt me: the Fremont area in Seattle, and I’ve mentioned the Rockridge neighborhood in Oakland before. But San Francisco? Probably not. There’s not much greenspace in SF except in small pockets (and one huge one), it’s very expensive, and even in “nice” areas there’s litter in the streets. That last one is very striking comparing it to Seattle or Vancouver, but it’s not too hard to see even comparing it to other Bay Area cities.
But for now that’s not much of a concern; I don’t expect to move any time soon (I’m about to sign a lease here for another year). I don’t know if this contract will last the full six months—I’ve grown to assume that plans collapse on short notice—nor if I’ll be able to go permanent, but just going the full six months will help my finances considerably.
I’ve been considering trying to make a more concerted effort to write something in this journal at least weekly because, frankly, I need the mental exercise. This is a recurring promise I recurrently break, so no promises, but I’ll try.
Oct 4, 2009
7:38 pm »
So what's been going on?
Time for another update, and also time for my quasi-regular reminder that if you’re interested in more minutae from me, follow my Twitter feed; my journaling is as light as it is in part because I just throw the little things I’m doing up on Twitter rather than collect them and write about them here. One may argue that Twitter can’t adequately replace a journal, and of course that’s true; I may try to get back to more “long form” journaling, if for no other reason than to keep in practice.
However, the big news for me is as follows:
The contract that I am on is still not concluded. While I give some knocks to myself for not having done a good job of measuring the scope of this project initially, the truth is that the scope simply wasn’t understood by the client at the start, either. And it… kind of still isn’t. “I think we’re close, just a couple more little things” has been the watch phrase for the past three months at this point. The little things in question sometimes involve database changes and adding new functionality. I have a much deeper understanding now, at least, of the importance of not just sitting down with a client and having them describe the functionality they want, but stopping at every bit of customer input and exchanged data and saying Is this capturing everything that we need? and Is this sending everything to the other system that it needs? and Is this screen displaying all the data you need here and in the right fashion?
I am starting a new contract position sometime this month. This will be full time, on site in San Francisco.
This new position doesn’t replace the old one directly. For a time I will be working on both of them at once, and I’ll continue as the current contractor’s “web maintenance guy” indefinitely. I hope this will not drive me nuts. We shall see.
I’m excited about the new job. The intent is that if it works out, it will transition into a full-time job with the employer. It is through a recruiting company, so I am technically working for the recruiting agency, and they will be handling taxes and potentially providing health insurance. (I’ve just switched my personal health insurance over to Kaiser Permanente from Anthem Blue Cross, and I have to decide whether it’s worth it to immediately switch over to the recruiting company’s insurer.)
I’m also frankly kind of intimidated by the new job. It’s paying a lot of money, and that’s good. But, you know, it’s paying a lot of money. More than I’ve ever been paid. By a significant amount. I think I’m a pretty good programmer, but there is part of me going Holy hand grenades, I don’t know if I’m that good a programmer.
Even so—well, getting a lot of money quickly would be good. I have debts from the last year of underemployment to pay down and a savings account to build back up. And the job’s location in San Francisco—in the Embarcadero area, for those of you who know the area—guarantees I’m going to see a lot more of the city than I’ve been seeing since I’ve been living out here.
The two concurrent contracts are probably going to put a dent in Claw & Quill, I know, but hopefully not too much of one. I’m looking at it as yet another opportunity to get better at personal time management—other people seem to be able to manage not only a full-time job and a couple hobby projects, but frequently a family as well, whereas I’m still inexplicably living like a college student in middle age. So I have no excuse, really, do I? Perhaps I’ll figure it out before I retire.