later nerdz; it’s about techgnarlogy

On the 47 headed to work. An R’nB song is playing on someones headphones. The only part coming thru is the whiney muffled voice of a male singer and the familiar slow boom/clap rhythm. Boom- , boom-clap, boom boom.

This boom/clap rhythm takes me back to middle school, a time when I listened to boyz 2 men.

This wasn’t the same though. After a while the pattern changed to include more claps. Boom-, boom-clapclap, boom boom. Then more until it was more clap than boom. It slowly turned into nothing but rapid fire claps. More of a Clappity-clappity clap-boom-clap. This was a musical transition that left me thinking “where is this going?”

I watched two documentaries today. One was called War Made Easy and was all about the reoccuring narrative of American wars. Pretty interesting but also very anti-war biased; Not much coverage of why war may be nessesary. The other one was Where in the World is Osama bin Laden. It was very interesting and brought up the point that for the most part everyone in the middle of the war on terror doesn’t want to be in war. It also covered many opinions that terrorism is largely created with poor foreign policy. I definitely agree with that.

It brought to mind a couple concepts. First of all is choose your battles and what that means. Choosing your battles is essentially deciding when to make a stand and when to take things in stride. I believe that America could choose its battles better and this would allow us to keep our friends close and our enemies closer.

That’s another saying that I think’s pretty smart. It doesn’t literally mean be closer to your enemies than your friends. Keeping your friends close and your enemies closer means keeping them within friendly smalltalk range. For instance, sometimes there are people that you have to work with who you just have to tolerate and it’s easier to tolerate them than to battle them at every pass. Doing this manages perceived threats.

Once a relationship has a lense of a perceived threat, it changes everything. Being a perceived threat redefines your position in a relationship. For instance, have you ever seen a close friend do something that completely changed your perception of them, and changed how your friendship worked? If you can’t put that past you, the relationship is pretty much kaput. If that perceived threat keeps coming up then the relationship is set back.

So I think limiting perceived threats by choosing your battles and keeping your friends close and enemies closer makes a better strategy than going out bullying the world. You can’t change minds that way and it’s no way to lead in the workplace or in the world. It makes taking a stand, and the relationship in general, much more meaningful.

Yep

“The process of bringing our wants and our needs into realignment,” says Merrill Lynch economist David Rosenberg, “is going to involve years of savings and frugality.” Or, to put more it more simply, “there is an anti-bling thing going on,” says Marian Salzman, chief marketing officer of Porter Novelli.

Party’s Over is the general theme of this article about how Americans are realizing that a reductionist lifestyle is easier and more fulfilling. Finally, I can confirm that I made the right decision staying a renter. Yes!

http://www.usnews.com/articles/business/economy/2008/08/08/the-end-of-credit-card-consumerism.html

Yelp is really cool. I found my first SF sushi restaurant, Sushi Zone, on Yelp.

Last night I went to another restaurant which I had been to before. The place had essentially found it’s mojo for me. It went from average to my new favorite.

The food was great, the environment and clientel were fitting, and the service was friendly like they were strangers having a party and wanted me to join them.

This is where Yelp comes in. I don’t want to yelp this place. I don’t want it to become popular. I don’t want people to come there for the first time. I realized, for the first time, why many of my elder foodie friends don’t use Yelp.

There is a very important layer to information disemination that Yelp doesn’t acknowledge. That layer is what I experienced last night. I would have shared this place with my close friends, in fact I will share it, I can’t wait to. But it won’t be by posting a review, or putting it into a bucket on my internet-public profile. No offense public, I think you’re great, but there are a lot of things that you have to find for yourself.

Please watch this video of copyright lawyer Lawrence Lessig presenting his new project: Change Congress.

His premise is that until we remove the money from the job of Congress-person we’ll never be able to trust Congress to work for us. It’s worth a listen and it really resonates at a time like this, when only 9% of Americans believe that Congress is doing a satisfactory job.

Found this on Alaska Airlines. You probably can’t make it out but the people tucking in this illustration have small Nike swooshes on their shoes.

I thought I was on to something. Sitting in a stall in the bathroom was a great idea for passing the time at the airport. It seems I was not alone.

Well this was after I put rice on it. Basil in SOMA, service sucks but the ribs were good.

My landlord is unlocking the cage on my kitchen window. My apartment is on the second floor of our building and outside of my kitchen window is a small piece of roof. My other two beautiful bay windows face across an alley at the adjancent building about seven feet away.

Our apartment doesn’t get tons of natural light but it gets some. More than some basement apartments. At least we have tall ceilings.

I hate to say I told you so.

The economy is still in a tailspin and I read that India has got a similar problem with predatory lending.

Two documentaries that I saw a couple years ago turned out to be on the money. One was Maxed Out. It told about the gross amount of debt that Americans are in and how our economy depends on it and the growth it creates. The second movie was a peak oil presentation that made my girlfriend cry it was so fatalist. But the things predicted in that presentation are coming true. I don’t think it’s going to happen as stock-up-on-guns-and-gold quickly though.

I proposed writing a piece for frog Design’s designmind publication. The piece would be about how many current events are driving Americans toward design and it’s related priciples. I really hope it gets in because I could write ad naseum on the topic by now.

A few weeks ago, I went to a Toyota dealership to look at their Priuses. Really, I’d rather not have to have a car at all, but I just moved to Ohio and cars are pretty much a necessity of life here. This is the land of multi-car families, where car-pooling is practically nonexistent, and most vehicles stuck in traffic during rush hour have one driver and no passengers. Hell, there was a time when my parents owned seven cars (one for each driver in the family and one extra, just for good measure).

Ohio loves its cars, and doesn’t seem to think too much about what those cars mean to the environment, the economy, and U.S. foreign policy. So, it wasn’t too surprising when the saleswoman at Toyota tried to sway me away from the Prius towards a Camry or Corolla. I tried to explain to her that I was only interested in the hybrid, when my dad interrupted in a “don’t mind her” fashion, to tell the woman I’d just moved from San Francisco. The saleswoman sighed, “Oh… you’re one of those ‘green’ people.”

From there, the conversation strayed away from interest rates and incentives. The saleswoman was astounded when it dawned on her that I didn’t have a car in San Francisco and that this would be the first car I’d ever owned. She wanted to know how I got around without a car, did I just take taxis everywhere? Imagine her surprise when I told her I walked as much as possible and took public transportation. She laughed and said, “Yeah, we sure are spoiled around here. I tell you, I just hate to walk. When I first started working here, you should have heard me when they showed me how far away the employee parking lot is from the office. I was like, ‘You expect me to walk all that way?!’” At that point, I realized she and I were never going to understand each other and she was not going to help me get a Prius. My dad, a man who sees cars as necessary tools and doesn’t see owning a car as a complex issue, was not at all pleased at my disinterest in any other car and grudgingly took me home. Thus ended my first and only car-shopping experience.

One thing I didn’t know before visiting the dealership was that every Prius in America is made in Japan. I’d never even thought about that, but it totally pissed me off. The best bet we have for an environmentally responsible car is shipped here from across the Pacific, loaded on trains or car-carriers at Los Angeles or Oakland, and then trucked all the way across the country? How is that possible? I’d be interested to see how close the emissions from the ship’s oil and the truck’s diesel come to negating the benefits of the bio-plastic and hybrid engine of the Prius.

Most Americans don’t have much of a choice when it comes to modes of transportation. Sprawl has eliminated the option of walking to work, school, and shopping. Public transportation is spotty and unreliable in all but major cities. Moving to a metropolis is out of the equation for most people, and they are left no choice but to drive. So why aren’t there better choices for what we can drive? It’s sad that the best we can do are hybrid vehicles that still rely at least partially on fossil fuels. As a consumer, it’s extremely frustrating to be at the mercy of the auto manufacturers and feel forced to give up on values I feel very strongly about, just so I can get around.

But really, the auto industry isn’t solely to blame. The situation this country is in right now is a result of a corrupt political machine which values the interests of lobbyists over all other concerns, a national epidemic of abysmal city planning, and, most importantly, a populace disconnected from their community and the world at large. Incubated in a world of plastic and glass, Americans today live in literal and metaphorical bubbles, traveling between the manufactured realities of their cookie-cutter suburb to their cube-and-fluorescent-light cage to their local big box superstore where they can buy prepackaged meat and shrink-wrapped vegetables and anonymous clothing. We know more about the contestants on American Idol than we do our own Supreme Court. We breathe filtered air for the majority of our day and only see the real world through the glass of our windshields.

Remind me again why I was going to buy a car?

A number of small, no-name banks went under last week causing small runs on banks all over the nation. I saw pictures of angry penny-savers mobbing police-guarded doorways. The only difference between depression bank runs and these are the number of bowler hats.

This appears to not be limited to small banks, however. Wachovia is apparently collapsing and a particularly distraught branch is being accused of passing counterfiet bills. Bank of America is also said to be hurting.

Lucky gen-Y’ers, new to money and with relatively small amounts to lose, are frothing at the bit for inexpensive real-estate and milking their earning potential. In my circle of friends we are still throwing large amounts into our 401k with the assumption that the economy will rebound and we will never recieve a pension.

I think that despite all the bad news, we are still generally upbeat. It is as if Americans, and particularly gen-X/Y, were expecting this like a hangover. The party was called “Fuck It: We’re Gonna Drive This Thing into the Ground”. Only the party goers who didn’t know what they were doing are surprised (and foreclosed on).

We continue going through the motions our parents and financially-savvy family members have recommended. No investing in gold. No diverting our retirement into CDs or cash in the floorboards. No panic.

On the 47 later than normal, I saw a guy outside the bus. He was wearing really nice slacks and shoes with a moderately ratty undershirt and headphone wires flew around him up to his ears. He was walking with great haste, really speedwalking with that terrible hip swing. Despite looking like he was late for his master opus he was totally rocking out on the air drums.

There is a 50s-era McDonalds next to the San francisco hall of justice. I wonder how many cops eat there. That whole area is full of law people.

Lawyers cops bailbonds