All posts tagged geo:San Francisco
Ben Ward's Scattered Mind
Song of the Day
‘Electric Dirt’, a Foals vs. The Chain Gang remix of Foal’s Electric Bloom. Hot.
Last night was a lot of fun.
Technically it probably is buildering. But I was also gloriously drunk, so I wouldn’t read too much into it.
Song of the Day (3/3)
Franz Ferdinand - ‘Do You Want To (Metronomy Remix)’
File under ‘songs I got bored of but am now totally aroused by thanks to total remix transformations’.
More synths. They’re ‘in’, apparently.
Trying to get a handle on one of the reasons for my mood having dipped this week.
I’m feeling isolated, which is nuts because I’m surrounded by people. Except, I feel diluted. It’s not that anyone around me is a bad person - I’m yet to meet a bad person in San Francisco at all - it’s just that I have no close friend here. I very much dislike spending evenings on my own in my apartment, and when choosing to live alone vowed that I’d be social. But while staring at the walls makes for a dismal evening, it’s less uncomfortable than forcing myself around people that I don’t know so well. It’s moments like this that the absence of a great flatmate is emphasised.
I left behind a set of friends who even though I only knew most of them for a year, I could be completely comfortable with. It’s intimidating to think how long it will be until I have that same depth here.
In the mean time I’m up late, Skyping to Dot and my family, clinging on to the closest people I have, some 6000 miles away.
This is the part of moving where it all slows down. The part where you actually have to settle.
I really wish I had some furniture to sit on.
http://cats.iamnear.net/
IAmNear is awesome already (at least, in the UK); the ‘nearest ATM’ app is really very useful in central London.
By moving into kittens, I can see they’re making a bold move to become our default demo service. Competition is clearly heating up now that we’re live…
!Pownce Feature Request: Hype Machine music player integration for URLs please.
Thanks to !FatBusinessman, you can in fact still disable the ‘Browse By Genre’ list and ‘Link to iTunes Store’ arrows in iTunes 8, there’s just no UI for it in the Preferences any more.
Open up Terminal and run the following:
$ defaults write com.apple.itunes show-genre-when-browsing -bool FALSE
$ defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE
Restart iTunes and everything is back to relative tidiness.
One especially aggrevating passage in Sarah Palin’s RNC speech last week was this:
‘Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America… he’s [Obama] worried that someone won’t read them their rights?’
So. Various constituional ammendments in the Bill of Rights support the presumption of innocence. It’s a vital cornerstone of a just and free society.
It’s terrifying that Sarah Palin supports pushing aside such an important principal; one of many laws that makes America a respectable nation. It’s more terrifying that she regards her opponent’s defence of this constitutional principal something to be attacked on an election stage. It’s perhaps most terrifying that her remark quoted above was greeted by raptuous applause.
Awesome piece of music of the day: The Hill, The View & The Lights by Cajun Dance Party.
The guitar shift halfway through makes me smile greatly.
‘Its an odd thing being in two different parts of Middle America for a fortnight. Most of those who choose to come to America come to the wonder of New York, of Boston, San Fransico or LA, or to the Grand Canyon, the Cape, Florida or California. To be in Denver and, more particularly, St Paul and Minneapolis, is a salutary experience.
You feel it hard. America is living in the past, a past of consumption, fatty foods, garish television, weight reduction ads, depression relief pills, gas guzzling freeways and a dependence on splurging out 25 per cent of the entire world carbon emission totals.
Travelling bumper to bumper, rat race to the workplace for 50 minutes each way, six lanes of traffic clogging the freeway, with many more trails of such traffic glimpsed from the side windows.
Parking in vast multi-storey carparks that dominate the city centres, a short walk through massive yet inefficient security into great icy barns in which these conventions take place and are reported.
This sort of living, which huge numbers of Americans experience every day of their lives, is NOT the future. There is no soul, no touch with nature, no brush with fresh food or fresh air.
The sheer cost of maintaining a building at 15 degrees C when its 23 outside must be monumentally wasteful, and everyone of the skyscrapers, office blocks, malls and convention centres you see are up to the same stuff, freezing inside against a perfectly manageable temperature outside. Theres not a single opening window in Minneapolis.
Yet for the first time I have heard politicians on both sides at last calling for an end to Americas dependence on foreign oil. But there is still no clarion call for a Manhattan-style project to find alternative energy sources.
So yes, being here at this crunch moment in the life of America is, er, a kind of a treat. But you know something, you feel neither of these competing teams is offering a big enough vision for whats needed to change America.’
Jon Snow, September 4th 2008
Jon Snow — British newscaster and all-round eccentric national treasure — writes daily news summary emails for Channel 4. He’s currently in St Paul covering the RNC and in his coverage of Sarah Palin’s speech from yesterday included this rather striking summary of middle America.
I’ve lived in my new apartment for 7 days so far. I just put in an order for a dining table and six chairs to go with it. Not sure they’re going to match quite right, but the table shape is worth it and could always be stained later.
More importantly, this means that all the major pieces of furniture required for this place are covered. A sofa will arrive in about a month, a bed frame some time before that, dining table and chairs should come this week and television stand is already in place.
I’ve got a bean bag on order, which should tide me over until the real sofa comes.
With the basics covered, I’m feeling good that the essentials are done, and I can start focusing on less vital accessories.
Interesting points about OAuth being too integrated into third party applications. Some people are missing the point of it, I think.
