Need I Say More?

I am different. You are different. This started differently and progressed without intention. Long evenings without harmless untruths. It was quixotic and confidential.  Trials were made and times got hard.  Everything always got better, but time ways always too short.  

We're silly and horrible people, but you are awesome and  I am awesome. We're not alone but certainly in our own world. We don't always agree, but we can compromise and most importantly you put up with my quirks. 

Thank you for being different.  Need I say more?

Appeals Court Strikes Down Prop. 8

The woes of cabbing in SF

Cabbing in San Francisco, sucks. I don’t think I could emphasize this anymore.  Of course, if you’re from SF and reading this you’re probably thinking, “You’re singing to the choir,” and it’s true.  You won’t find many people in SF who will sing praises of San Francisco Cabs.  

I cab frequently,  mostly because I’m super anal retentive about being on time to anything I’ve scheduled myself to go to and everyone knows how reliable Muni is. There are places in SF where it’s not that hard to hail a cab from the street (at least in my experience), but my office is no where near the SF cab trail.  This leaves me with the only option of attempting to use some service to order a cab or calling the companies directly.  I’ve tried: Cabulous, Taxi Magic and Uber, with Uber being my most recent test of transportation.

I liked the UI and spirit of Cabulous, but in reality there were so few cabs that were using it (when I was testing it out) and most of the time I’d hail a cab and they’d drop me and I’d have to try again.  I loved Taxi Magic when it worked, except Luxor completely ruined Taxi Magic for me. I had many good experiences with Luxor, but the bad experiences were overwhelmingly bad.  I’ve been stranded at 3am alone waiting for a cab that promised to be there but never showed up only to call the cab company and get treated like an idiot, on many occasions I’ve gotten cab drivers who didn’t know their way around and asked me for directions (despite having a GPS mounted to their dash), I’ve been assigned a cab and waited for 40+ minutes for it and I’ve had Luxor assign me cabs only to reassign a cab and eventually cancel my order underneath me after waiting for almost an hour.  Many times, I would order cabs from multiple services as a safety net and just take the one that showed up first.

As I said, I loved Taxi Magic, but Luxor treats their customers horribly and they are the only cab service that Taxi Magic offers in app orders.  Then I finally broke down and tried uber, those are for the cars aren’t cabs but more of private drivers. The few times I’ve used them, the price was about $6 – $7 more expensive than a cab (including generous tip).  I will say, that despite the cost I feel respected as a customer by the private drivers. Thus far I haven’t been stranded or left to wait forever.  

With the horrible mess that San Francisco Cabs are, they are planning on raising cab fares in SF. While I understand that the actual cabbies probably aren’t making much money after their companies take their cut, I’m pretty offended as a customer that extremely subpar service will cost even more money. Below is an article from The Bay Citizen that talks a bit more about the cab fare rise and has links to back stories involving it.  

Drastically Derailed

I'm very easy to distract and I don't even realize it when I am, then all of a sudden I don't remember what it is I was originally doing before I went down the rabbit hole. Here's an actual chain of events (and I'm thankful I've remembered them) they aren't necessarily a complete listing, I know that I did some work in the middle of all of them in various places. I multitask like a fiend and keep two browsers open with multiple tabs and windows for various work and non work stuff. The big monitor right in front of my face gets all the worky stuff, the laptop monitor way off to my side out of my direct view (usually) gets the non-worky stuff.

1. See self in mirror, realize new hair stuff makes hair keep shape.
2. "Crunched" up my hair and put on a tophat, creating a crazy bedhead and tophat look
3. Decided to immortalize silly hat/hair look on Dailybooth
4. Tweeted the picture
5. Working on large tedious project (referred to as LTP below) that is taking all day.
6. The @replies made me think of my hair colour
7. Perused old Dailybooth photos looking at dye jobs
8. Came up with idea to crowd source hair colour
9. More LTP
10. Perused punk hair dye sites to get colour listing
11. Made google form/poll and got embed code
12. Even more LTP
13. Went to my tia-marie.com with the intention of just making a post to add the embed code to the post and ended up at Nerdsinbabeland.com (It just popped into my head, don't ask)
14. Noticed that she linked to my blog, decided to go to template to make a blogroll section and reciprocate
15. You guessed it, more LTP
16. Changed tagline on blog instead and tweaked some other minor aesthetics
17. TypePad code snippet for beta comment system, broke blog trying to put it in.
18. Learned lesson hard way (for the millionth time) to never make changes to a live site without a backup and switched between the LTP and fixing my giant mistake.
19. Started looking for graphical inspiration for better background.
20. Closed all chrome windows by accident, continued on LTP and dropped everything else (because I forgot)
21. Boss asked question about work, tech issue. Went to investigate
22. OMGWTFBBQ, one of our sites is broken with an SSL error. FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT.
23. Consult programmer friend before making stupid bug report to coworker programmer.
24. Troubleshoot problem to an old entry in /etc/hosts, crisis averted I'm just stupid and forgetful.
25. Stared at bosses twitter page trying to remember what it was I was doing and continued to work on the large tedious project I'd been working on all day.
26. Noticed form edit page on laptop monitor and remembered originally what I was doing.
27. IM comment from programmer friend made me look at programs on mac app store.
28. During my amusement and bewilderment of how far off I'd derailed myself, decided to create this list.

There you have it. As I said, there are lots of other bits in there. Do you ever get this wildly derailed?

Help me rescue @JapanaRadio & @WNOHGB!

Clipped from: www.japanaradio.com (share this clip)

A dear friend of mine has a project dear to him that is in risk of going under. If any of you are Anime or Jpop music fans, I'd love for you to take a listen to Japan-a-Radio. It is an online radio station for Jpop and Anime music. Right now, Japan-a-Radio runs out of my friend's house on a T1 connection that he pays for himself with the assistance of donations and paid subscriptions to Japan-a-Radio (you can still listen to Japan-a-Radio for free still, it just has some adverts in it).

Not only am I good friends with the person who runs Japan-a-Radio but I also am a heavy user of another project of his that is run off of the same T1 line (that is also in risk). It's a Star Trek themed MOO that I've been playing for about two years now, I wrote about it here to get more players in the game.

Anyhow, this T1 line needs help and not only is it's livelihood important to my friend but it is important to me as well. If there is anything you guys can do to help out, that would be awesome. I've donated myself, but I can't give much more than I already have. However, as proof that I have put my own money up on this project I have a picture of the receipt for my donation.

How can you help? Obviously the most awesome way is by directly donating or buying a subscription to Japan-a-Radio here is the Donation page. I personally don't like asking strangers for money, so I would be just as thrilled if you could just go listen to Japan-a-Radio and spread the word. With luck, some one will appreciate the station and buy a subscription or drop a tip to Japan-a-Radio.

Please don't hesitate to contact me for any questions or you can reach out to my friend @Otaking on twitter if you have any questions about this :)

The Social Commentary behind Die Antwoord’s “Evil Boy”

It’s no secret that I’m particular fond of foreign music. I find myself drawn to genres of music in other regions of the world that I would not enjoy produced in the states.

One song in particular that drew my attention is the song “Evil Boy” by the South African Zef group Die Antwoord (Afrikaans: “The Answer“). The song is written in English, Afrikaans and Xhosa and has a sound similar to American hip hop.

Admittedly, what drew me to the song originally was the total WTF/NSFW nature of the video associated with the song. Dark, grungy and incredibly phallic symbolism is used throughout the entire video. Watching the video for the first time, with no lyrics or context is very confusing. Which is what led me to dig around deeper.

The lyrics have pieces of social commentary about adolescent circumcision within Xhosa tribes as well as a shout out to AIDS awareness campaign from 2002, to encourage condom use across Africa and even a word play joke on the armed wing of the African National Congress.

Before saying much more, I’ll let you watch the video for yourself, pay special attention to the period of 1m24s to 2m10s. This section is sung in Xhosa by Wanga:

On first pass, you’re probably very confused and upset that I didn’t mention NSFW about a dozen times. If you read the english lyrics in the section of the video I mentioned, it may on first glance sound as anti-homosexual commentary. However, as the band has explained, these lyrics are in regards to Wanga’s personal experience with his tribe’s ritual circumcision:

So, the story behind this video and song (or part of the story — there’s so much going on!) is that Wanga felt that he was being coerced into a form of ritual circumcision by his community. It’s sort of taken for granted within his ethnic group that you must do this, so much so that if you are a young man and you do not participate, you are ostracized, as the band explained to me.

The thinking, and this is communicated very directly to the young men, is that if you don’t participate, you’re gay. You’re effeminate. You’re not a real man. You never mature from being a boy to being a man.

He struggled with all of this in real life: with what it meant for his personal and cultural identity. And he came to a point where he was like, you know what? Fuck you all. The fact that I won’t consent to having my penis sliced with an unsterilized knife, out in the bush, and risk infection or worse– that doesn’t mean “I’m gay,” as you say. I reject this tradition. If that’s what being a man is, fuck it, I don’t want to be a man. I’ll be an “evil boy for life,” even if it means I am ostracized from my community.

You might have chosen different lyrics, but dude, it’s not our story or our culture or our world experience at all.

It’s his.

From www.boingboing.net (share this quote)

It’s gone into more explanation about the environment of ritual circumcision:

We’re not talking about the same thing as what happens in Western countries, with babies in a sterile hospital environment… we’re talking about boys in their late teens going off into the bush with an unsterilized knife and a blanket, no anesthesia, etc. The ritual apparently results in some number of casualties, infections, and permanent (unintended) injury to the teen males who go through the tradition, and some of the kids who are now more urbanized, with access to other ways of thinking, want to opt out. That’s what Wanga’s lyrics are about.

From www.boingboing.net (share this quote)

This ritual circumcision is performed in unsanitary conditions, often with the same knives that has caused the spread of STDs and HIV.  Post initiative deaths are extremely high and there is great social stigma associated with the ritual.  There is much attention (but still not enough) towards the practice of female genital mutilation, yet very little attention has been turned to the practice of adolescent ritual circumcision.