Or a cascading series of errors

Last night I had a platform release to help with, which begins at 7pm and takes about an hour. I don’t have much to do, but it helps for me to be on hand to deal with any problems that might crop up. It takes me about half an hour to walk home, and I got delayed leaving the office, so I wasn’t out the door until 6:20, which is cutting it pretty close. I figured I’d catch a cab (would be the 2nd time this week!) but every one was dark. Eventually I reached that point of no return (where taking a cab would just be silly), so I just hoofed it the whole way.

The side of the street where I usually park my scooter gets “street-cleaned” on Friday morning between 6 and 8, which means I have to remember to move the scooter to the other side when I get home from work on Thursday night. Then on Friday morning before I walk to work I have to move it back because our side of the street is a commute lane between 3 and 6 every weekday afternoon. This is a well-choreographed urban reparking ballet that I do EVERY WEEK.

Since I was racing home for the release, I didn’t have time to move my scooter across the street, so I made a mental note to ask my dear Stephanie to move it for me (or to do it myself later). Of course I promptly forgot all that after getting into things. Somehow I beat Stephanie home (she had an errand to run)—and even she noticed my scooter on the wrong side of the street, but by the time she made it in the apartment building and up the stairs, she completely forgot to mention it to me.

The release went well, but then we discovered an error in a config file that got pushed out to umpteen servers, so I was chasing down some lingering issues until after 10. Release nights don’t really feel like work, it’s mostly just hanging out online and watching the last 3 weeks of work go live. But it’s still work, so I stayed up a little bit later to compensate, to have some “me” time—which included listening to the Fresh Air program on Shepard Fairey and Mannie Garcia.

So this morning, I was in the shower, and my brain was totally chewing on something that annoyed me about what I’d heard on that program, and I was worried that if I didn’t write it down, I’d forget it all, so I started telling Stephanie the story to aid my own memory. Except this only got me more worked up. She left for work while I was still getting ready, and I figured I had a whole blog post worth of stuff to write. So I decided to take a little bit of time to get it out (I was up late working after all—I can show up a little later).

I pounded out this blog post on fair use, left a comment on another blog, and saw that it was around 10:15. As it takes me half an hour to walk in, 10:45 felt a little too late to show up, so I decided to scoot. Whereupon I discovered my first ticket of the day: $50 for parking in a street cleaning zone. Grrr.

I got down to Folsom where I usually park, and everything had changed. There was a new block of motorcycle parking without meters that was completely full. The several blocks of motorcycle parking along Main were totally gone (while they build the new Temporary Transbay Terminal). And even the little secret free spot where I sometimes park was now painted red. There was no place to park, partly because I was showing up late, so I circled once or twice, and eventually found a promising free spot at the end of some parking meters where another motorcycle was parked. Safety in numbers, right?

Fast forward to tonight, I walked out to my scooter, at the corner of Harrison and Embarcadero, and IT WAS NOT THERE!!! FUCK. I parked in the least obvious commute lane there ever was. Oh, except for that sign right above my head that said no parking from 4-7pm ANY DAY! I walked 3 blocks to where Stephanie was waiting for me on her scooter and told her that my scooter had been towed. How could this happen on the same day I got a street cleaning ticket?! My helmet was in my scooter, so she couldn’t take me anywhere. Eventually I caught a cab ($10) to the impound lot on 7th and Harrison, while she went home to dig up my license plate number.

Cost to free my scooter: $244.25

Ticket for parking in commute lane: $70

Total scooter-related fines: $374.25

Living in San Francisco: Pricey

Naturally, you can see it hanging in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (which I visited a few years ago).

I point all this out because my Grandfather worked as a draftsman at Bell Aerospace Company and was involved in the design of some of the empennage components for the Bell X-1. It’s famous for being the first aircraft to break the speed of sound (roughly 761mph) as flown by Chuck Yeager.

This blew my mind yesterday. For about 4 miles north of Castaic, California, the lanes of Interstate 5 invert, with northbound traffic on the left-hand side and southbound traffic on the right-hand side, “in order to make the grade manageable for trucks.”

Caught sight of the new Airship Ventures’ Zeppelin NT from Crissy Field this weekend. I only know that’s what it is because I happened to read about it on Telstar Logistics.

It must be pretty bad when your dad asks if everything is ok, because you haven’t been posting as frequently to your blog. No big secret, just been busy. Mostly I’ve been trying to focus on a project at night which sort of eats up the time I would otherwise be blogging—and it puts my head in a decidedly non-bloggy space. I made some good progress tonight, so I thought I’d take a break.

Nothing top secret there either. Just a lil’ photo gallery web app to replace the venerable Gallery. Something I’ve been meaning to work on forEVER. Just finally had a flash of inspiration on the particular quirky angle I wanted to take, and the feeling of technical prowess that I could actually approach a project like that from scratch. God, is it ever hard starting from scratch. I have a newfound appreciation for web frameworks (like Rails and Django) even though I’m not using one (or trying to write my own).

It’s probably also true that I sort of burned myself out trying to move all my data to my newer but heavier laptop. Oh well, now I’m just eagerly awaiting my new X200 to arrive, to replace both of my laptops.

Surprisingly big life change coming up on Monday: I’ll be working in San Francisco! Monday is Federated Media’s first official day in our new location, which kind of feels like a combination between moving to a new city and starting a new job. It’s definitely a significant upgrade in both respects. And I’ll also be leaving Sausalito behind, the place I’ve worked for the last two years and two months. In particular, my commute will change from a 8 mile, somewhat harrowing journey over the Golden Gate Bridge on my Vespa every day to a less than 2 mile walk/bike/scoot through the city. I’m totally stoked.