Potential Energy

Any time I'm in San Francisco without an agenda, I find myself drawn to Ocean Beach.

It's not the most beautiful beach in the world-- the weather is often foggy, the water is cold, and there's seldom any babes in bikinis. But it has a surly, moody, post-apocalyptic feel to it that really draws me.

The beach is about 100 yards deep, and completely flat, so it's popular with walkers, joggers, and dogs. You can walk right along the edge of the water, and if you watch the waves, you can avoid getting wet:

Or, if you prefer, there's another 50 yards of so of wet, glassy sand for chasing waves, each other, or a good ball:




At its moodiest, Ocean Beach makes all the walkers look kind of like lost souls:

But really, what I love about Ocean Beach is just the vastness. (The little dots on the beach are people)

This trip, I ventured to the paths north of Ocean Beach to the former site of the Sutro Baths.

The baths were popular around the turn of the last century (boy, that sounds weird to say), and were demolished in the 1960s.

A bit of trivia I also just learned: The Sutro baths were featured in Harold and Maude, with Harold chasing Maude around the ruins and calling her "commie!"


You can walk right down among the ruins, if you aren't scared off by the signs that don't forbid trespassing, but note that "people have been swept off the rocks and drowned".


I also found a nice path over to some great views of the Golden Gate Bridge

I ended the day just sitting on the edge of the baths, watching the angry, angry waves...



...the moody, moody sky...

...and finally, a good old fashioned nuclear explosion over the Bikini Atoll

All pictures taken with my little Blackberry cameraphone, which explains the poor quality, but really a lot of the blurry fogginess is just the landscape, not the camera.

July 31, 2007

EchoStar Satellite LLC
Dispute Resolution
PO Box 9040
Littleton, CO 80120

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am writing this letter first and foremost to demand that my phone number, XXX-XXX-XXXX, be placed on the do-not-call list of Dish Network and all other EchoStar Satellite business units and affiliates. I have made this request three times over the past three months to agents calling from Dish Network (telephone 866-668-8047) but continue to receive as many as 8 calls a day from this Dish number.

DO NOT CALL XXX-XXX-XXXX AGAIN. FOR ANY REASON. EVER.

Pursuant to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (47 CFR 64.1200), any further calls to this number can and will result in legal action. The penalty for willful or knowing violations of this act is $1500 per incident.

Now with that bit of business out of the way, let me address the question that your persistent telephone agents ask me every time I answer your harassing phone calls. They want to know, they say, why I left Dish Network. Mind you, I patiently answer this question for the hapless agents week after week, month after month, whenever the ceaseless ringing from your auto dialer finally breaks my will and causes me to answer in the hopes that this time-- against all accumulated experience dealing with your bungling, incompetent network—maybe this time, someone will actually write down the answer and also maybe heed my pleas to be left alone.

Why did I leave Dish Network? Because I was told to. By Dish Network. When I moved into my new house last October, I called to order Dish service, primarily because that was the provider that the previous owners had used. The installer came out and did a fine job of installing. And we were watching TV. Well, some of the time. Right from the start we had brief interruptions in service. Then frequent interruptions. Eventually we came to find the constant “No signal” message to be soothing. The black background behind the message blended in well with the black TV case, and the lack of any noise really improved our quality of life. It was almost like having the TV off completely, but without the anxiety of not having the TV on. When occasionally the “No signal” message was interrupted by actual content, we were slightly nervous and grew restless and irritable wondering when the strange moving lights would go away.

From time to time, I’d call Dish Network to ask about the moving-pictures vs. soothing-black-screen conundrum. There a computerized “helper” would make suggestions (“Make sure your cable connections are tight!”) until a real live person finally came on the line. If we’d had any “weather” recently, this person would tell me, it likely moved the dish. Moving the dish, even the tiniest fraction of an inch, was a sure recipe for disaster. Had we had any weather? No, I’d say, we’d had no snow, nor sleet, nor dark of night-- not since we made that sacrifice to the Egyptian scarab god Khepri. Weather was not the issue. “Oh. Well then, maybe you should try moving the dish.” I was still new to the Dish Network at the time, and assumed the whole “friendly but useless” shtick was a local phenomenon. I’m sure even NASA hires the occasional dull knife.

Eventually Dish Network sent out The Guy In The Truck. The local Dish franchise always sends guys who don’t wear a Dish uniform or drive a Dish truck or in any way appear to be professional installers. I like this, because it throws the neighbors off. We’re a down-to-earth community (notwithstanding the occasional sacrifices to Egyptian dung-beetle deities), and having some fancy-schmancy uniformed repair guy showing up would come off as pretentious. Anyway, The Guy wasn’t even in the front door when he said, “Oh man, I’ve been to this house before!” The previous owners threw a lot of parties. “No,” he said, “I’ve been to this house a LOT. Almost every week.” They didn’t throw that many parties. Turns out, The Guy In The Truck had been tweaking and re-aiming and re-mounting and generally trying to coax a signal out of our very dish for years, and for some reason the previous owners didn’t listen to his simple advice: “You need to get rid of this thing and get cable.” (Maybe if he’d been wearing a uniform…) He called his manager and the manager came out and they both told me to get cable. They pointed up into the south-west skies and explained that you couldn’t see the satellite from here, even if you squinted really hard. There was always a tree or a house or a bunch of hydrogen molecules blocking the view. I’m not sure why the installer guy didn’t notice this when he installed the dish. Maybe he had super X-ray-vision or something.

So we ditched the Dish and got cable. Your company even let me climb up a big ladder and take the dish down myself! Most other companies would have taken it down themselves, what with the risk of falling and the fact that they never should have installed the thing in the first place since everyone knew you couldn’t see the satellite from our backyard, even if you squinted. I pretended to be The Guy In The Truck and took the dish down with my own ladder and an old work shirt I got at the thrift store with the name “Ernie” stitched right on the breast pocket. Pretty cool!

Ever since then, your auto-dialer calls my cell phone constantly, and your dim-witted (but friendly!) agents listen to my story about how I left Dish Network because Dish Network told me to leave Dish Network, and occasionally say things like “Well, if you ever, uh, don’t have giant trees, give us a call!” Then they tell me that there’s no record of my ever requesting to not be called, and promise to add me to the do-not-call list, post-haste. Well, give or take 31 days. Lather, rinse, repeat.

To summarize, here’s my experience with Dish Network:

1) You installed a dish at a location that your own installers knew was a very bad place to install a dish.

2) Your workmen show up in outfits that I use as an example to my grandmother about who not to let in the house and when to call the police.

3) You make your customers do the work of uninstalling the equipment that you should never have installed in the first place

4) You harass ex-customers by constantly calling their phones despite being asked not to.

Short of physically abusing your customers, I’m not sure I can think of any way that you can make the “customer experience” any more annoying, infuriating, and downright unpleasant. Maybe you could make that “No signal” screen flash red and make loud screeching noises. That would really suck.

Sincerely,

SmoothP

Ps: DO NOT CALL XXX-XXX-XXXX AGAIN. FOR ANY REASON. EVER.

Edit: If you like this, please visit my current blog: All Of This Is Wrong

Originally this post was going to be about airport security(the game) and the strangle little company that made it, Persuasive Games. See, Airport Security is a little political commentary on the arbitrary nature of security regulations. As you try to get your travelers through the checkpoint, random updates come from the government: shirts are now prohibited, but water bottles are okay. Now shirts are allowed, but pants and hats are taboo. It's a great little statement in the guise of a game. Turns out that's Persuasive's gig: "We design, build, and distribute electronic games for persuasion, instruction, and activism." Other political statement games like Bacteria Salad and Oil God seem to support this. But then, a quick look at Persuasive's other games makes them seem less political activists, and more just game-mercenaries for hire. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it seems odd that the same folks making activists games would also have produced both Take Back Illinois and the Howard Dean for Iowa game.

As I said, this post was going to be about Airport Security (the game). But instead, it ends up being about Airport Security (the disturbing institution). When I went to the TSA site to grab a good picture , I was greeted with the headline: Man Charged with Murder SPOTted at Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport. Murderers trying to board planes? Can metal detectors detect that sort of thing?

Turns out, racial profiling is out, and SPOT is in: Screening Passengers by Observation. Why, TSA agent can now spot guilty people (snap!) just by looking at them. It's all in the distance between their eyes.

Turns out, this particular dirty Mexican dangerous criminal was deported to Mexico seven years ago on murder charges that were later dropped. Thank goodness we didn't let him anywhere near a plane! Thank you, SPOT, for keeping our airlines safe for white people the rest of us.

I might never post to my blog if I didn't keep getting tagged. This particular incarnation is strange and arbitrary, but I'll give it a try.

There's a handful of books on my nightstand at the moment, all of which I'm currently reading. Most of them have page 123, but none of them have 5 paragraphs on that page. So sometimes the 5th paragraph on page 123 is actually the 2nd paragraph on page 124, if you catch my drift. In at least one case, the concept of "paragraph" doesn't quite apply. So, I'm going to give you a sampling:

"Maureen."

Nick Hornby, "A Long Way Down"

Dennis and I are eating an early lunch at an Italian restaurant near the beach. We are the only customers, and it's way too quiet for the conversation going on at our table. Whenever the waiter appear to refill our water glasses, I pause, as though we were discussing something top secret or desperately personal. Shanahan seems not to care. The waiter will be grinding pepper on my salad for what seems like a week, and Dennis is going, "...used a scallop trawler to recover some of the smaller remains..."

Mary Roach, "Stiff"

Answer 5.8-- (August 1968): Any angle can be bisected with a compass and straightedge. By repeated bisections we can divide any angle into 2, 4, 8, 16,... equal parts. If any number in this series is a multiple of 3, then repeated bisection obviously would allow trisection of the angle with compass and straightedge. Since this has been proved impossible, no number in the doubling series is evenly divisible by 3.

Martin Gardner, "The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems"

Look at all those ants.

(Calvin, to Hobbes) Bill Watterson, "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes" Book 2

It's amazing if you just look at ads, and then you see how people talk about them in the meetings. Amazing. There are actually guys in the meetings sitting around, going, "Well, Jim, I think the reason she should hold the scrubbing brush at this angle is-- yada, yada, yada." They're so careful about everything, like is this woman couple of years too old? Or is she too fat? Or too thin? They worry and they worry and they worry, and they get it fucking wrong every time. Every time.

(Josh Williams, Advertising Executive) from "Gig" edited by John Bowe et al

Though an early employee of Netscape ended up with a financial jackpot, those rewards weren't enough to hold its team together. Toy left as the company's suffocation by Microsoft (and its own mistakes) began to look inevitable, and took a break from the software business. In early 2003, he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to return, but the opportunity at OSAF fit every item on his dream job checklist: "I like the idea of working on software that millions of people will use, that will be on everyone's desktop. I think that the browser failed in its promise in a certain way, because a browser says that the only thing interesting to do with information is to look at it... But it turns out that as soon as you have the browser, your next step is to organize and communicate information, and browsers never picked up that interesting problem even when it became obvious right away that that was going to be the deal. And so it's the problem that, since 1995 and a half, has been interesting to me to go solve. But I don't know about the pressure to do a crappy job in a hurry. It'd be nice if we had some luxury to do a better job, right? And it'd be great to do it in open source."

Scott Rosenberg, "Dreaming in Code"

I've been tagged!

Without further ado, here's five things you didn't know about me:

1. I learned how to solve the Rubik's Cube when I was 9 years old, and I can still do it, largely without even looking. Note that I didn't say I solved the Rubik's Cube; I just learned how to solve it. I think I spent two bucks on a solution book, which I quickly recouped by charging a quarter a cube to solve them. One time my friend Jimmy messed up his dad's cube, and didn't have time for me to ride my bike over, so I solved it over the phone-- that one cost 50 cents.

You too can learn to solve the Cube, and you don't have to be a genius (or even have two bucks). The complexity is about the same as learning to play one song on the piano. It just involves a lot of finger repetition, a little dexterity, and memorizing a few dozen "moves".

2. I'm a terrible reader. Horrible. I read slowly, I don't retain much of what I read, and I have the attention span of a four-year-old. But, I love books, and I can hardly set foot in the bookstore without buying something. Consequently, I have a house full of books that I've read the first chapter of.

3. Speaking of books, I suffer from this condition, although I doubt it really qualifies as suffering (or a condition). Aren't you glad you asked.

4. Any time I buy something, I immediately tear open the box and start playing with it. Even if it's a gift for someone else. I particularly love putting things together, and within that genre, I really love assembling furniture. I've actually bought furniture I had no need for, just for the pure joy of putting it together. My normal friends, who hate assembling furniture, have learned that not only will I do it for them, but I'll actually be grateful for the opportunity.

5. I do math in my head to calm or distract myself. Usually it's recursive problems or some really long division. For example, while riding my bike up a long grade, I'll distract myself by calculating the slope in centimeters per foot, or how much faster I could go if my wheels were 1/8" larger in diameter. Or, if I can't get to sleep, I'll work on a problem like this: arrange the numbers 1 through 9 in a 3x3 grid such that every row, column, and diagonal add up to the same number. How many solutions are there? How many ways can the 9 digits be arranged? Repeat for a 4x4 grid.

Well, I hope you've enjoyed the frightening peak into my life. There's lots more things you don't know about me, but they're best left for another conversation.