Main

Starting now.

I appeared on the local news last night yet again -- I'm apparently becoming the city's spokesman for enraged Muni passengers, in part because of some tricks I've learned to me more media-friendly. It's almost by accident that this is happening; I don't know that much about transit, and I certainly don't want to care about Muni. I wish it would just work fine so we could use it when we need it, barely aware aware of its presence in our lives, the way we generally can with electrical service or fast food. One reason that they talk to me instead of a more qualified person like Andrew Sullivan at Rescue Muni is because I am in the city, and Andrew is in South San Francisco during the day. So that's kind of a fluke. But also, I'm very good at sound bites. In the piece that aired today, I say (more or less), "There's a barometer of Muni meltdownyness, and it's getting up to the point where people can't count on the trains and will start getting into their cars. And I think that's the worst thing that can happen for San Francisco." It's thanks to a book called "Made to Stick" that I'm getting good at quotable lines like these. In a nutshell, "Made to Stick" emphasizes that you can make your ideas stick in peoples' minds by keeping your meaning simple, including sensory details, and by saying something surprising that you then explain. It's probably my background in storytelling that leads me to add another aspect: an impending action, more commonly called "suspense." It's kind of dumb luck that the news interviews me at all, and also dumb luck that they happen to pick my particularly good lines to air. But it's handy to have sticky quotes at my disposal when I need them.

I'm testing out how the blog handles line breaks, which isn't very interesting to all of you readers (by which I mean just Jackson, since I don't think many other folks have stuck around, lo these 7 months). So in addition to some attractive line breaks, I'll also tell a short, mildly embarrassing story.

A few weeks ago, I took a shopping list to work with me. It was written on a sticky-note, and it said:

- Booze
- Withdrawl
- Itchies
- Cake

Because, you see, I needed to go to Safeway during lunch to buy some liquor for some entertainment I was doing that night; I needed to withdraw $20; I needed to buy some Tinactin, which I try not to think about by euphemistically referring to it as "itchies;" and I needed to buy some cake supplies for that night's entertainment.

Of course, during my day at work, the note fell out of my pocket. So someone in the office found a slip of paper, in my handwriting, that seems to very quickly relate a tale of depravity and redemption. I wonder if they'll think it's autobiographical.

I never quite understood all the nuances of religious Christmas -- but this certainly clears some points up:

Awhile back I gained some notoriety for knowing how to use a cameraphone and YouTube. Here is an email exchange that resulted:

Hello Sir, I was wondering if i could ask you a few questions about the story about the Muni Bus Driver that was getting a back rub while driving? If you could please let me know. Thank You, David H.

As an effective google-stalker, I quickly determined that the David Hayner who was sending the email was a 16-year-old in Stockton. I couldn't find out much more, because his profile is private and I really don't care. I replied:

Sure, David, ask away. Matt.

Three weeks went by. Then:

Ok Now i am a Transit driver in Northern Cali ok and i understand your whole problem with the back rub thing but did you really need to take it as public as you did? You just made that stuff public and was it really worth all the hell that driver is going thru now? I can understand reporting him to the company but it didn't need to go to the news media like that cause now ALL DRIVERS are having to deal with this even were i work we have all new more tough rules now sayin we cant even have our family with us on our coach. And when this did go to the media you had the route number and all that in the media. Why? Why did you make such a big deal over it? And if you have a problem with the back rub you should have talk to the driver personaly it would have been alot easier wouldnt it have been easier?

I responded within minutes:

Hello David, Thanks very much for your email. I'm glad to hear that drivers are being held to standards for safety and performance. Matt.

And he responded within minutes, too:

Yeh they are but it bad enough when drivers work 12 hours on and only 8 hours off we cant see our familys cause of the new rules. And you have to think bout it like your in our shoes when somethin like this happen. When you sit in that driver seat for 5 hours at a time you need a back rub cause those seats hurt like hell. You could have just asked him to have her stop Couldnt you have? And all that should matter is that the Coach is running on time and the driver is driving safely right?

And a minute later, my final reply:

Hello David, Thanks very much for your email. You may have a point. Matt.

The final words in our exchange I graciously permitted to David:

Do me a favor and when u have time ride a bus for 2 or 3 hours without getting up and u will know kinda how it is for us. Ok

I know it's supposed to enrich us, to be able to communicate seamlessly across barriers of age and culture and geography. But I think there's an intellectual bandwidth squeeze happening here that may be to the detriment of all involved.

According to IMDB, my Star Meter rating rose 24% this week, from 762,895 to 492,786. I don't know how to explain this (or the alarming dip to 2,459,379 last month) but it's nice to know that all my dreams are gradually coming true.

Last night, I dreamed that I was shoveling a driveway when I got a fantastic idea for a movie. It was so good, I had to write it down, in cursive, right that second: "Indiana Jones + Star Trek The Next Generation Jr." The idea was to have Indiana Jones on an Enterprise crewed by the children of the cast of TNG.

After writing this down, in my dream, Doctor Crusher suddenly appeared by my side. "That's a terrible idea," she said.

In case you only read my site via RSS, you should probably know that I've TOTALLY UPDATED the layout, which is very exciting. So you should probably come and look at things, and also click on an ad. Who are these people who click on ads? It's mystifying. I made 86 cents yesterday in clicks.

I don't know how new these tricks are -- I don't log in to Facebook very often -- but today I noticed a nifty new feature that makes it even easier to find out information about people that they might not want you to find. I've already used it to track down the identities of some formerly-anonymous SFist tipsters.

Here's how it works: Facebook asks you for your email address and password. It looks like a pretty useful, safe feature -- once you supply your details, Facebook runs through your address book and figures out if anyone you've ever emailed -- even once -- has also used that email address on Facebook. Then it says, "hey, this person you once emailed, they're on this site! You could be Facebook friendsters!" It doesn't save your login info, and it doesn't email anyone without your permission.

This is pretty handy, and I've used it to get in touch with some friends on Facebook whose email addresses I'd forgotten I had. But I was surprised to see some names I didn't recognize: they were people who'd emailed me anonymously with tips for SFist. I hadn't been able to get any info about them any other social networking site; their names weren't attached to the emails, and they hadn't used that email address on any other social networking websites. But for some reason, more than one source had used for Facebook the same email address that they used to write to me.

So, for example, Facebook was showing me the first name and last name that "S," who wrote to me about Google. With that info, I could easily find him on MySpace and Friendster and even verified his employment. I also found out that a local news anchorman, who'd emailed me about a story I did about buses, has a Facebook profile of his own. I bet, when these folks sent me an email, they never stopped to think, "now, I wonder how this will impact my visibility on Facebook."

One reason I left DotEasy for Dreamhost was a series of bad support experiences -- responses sometimes took days, were written in semi-legible grammar, and they suggested, whenever I had a problem, that I abandon my blog and start over from scratch. And finally, once my MySQL tables were suddenly erased, I had to to just that.

Last night, service went out on my blog, and so I wrote to Dreamhost to say, "buh?" And then three hours later, I heard back:

Hello Matthew,

I took a look at your site, and it appears to be back up and running.
Your server may have been having some issues earlier, and it looks like
one of our admins took care of it. I apologize for the downtime, and I
will look into this to try to ensure it doesn't happen again. Please let
me know if you have any more problems!

Thanks!

Jeffrey

Well, isn't that polite. So far, I'm cautiously satisfied with Dreamhost.

Google Calendars is going down for most of the day on Thursday for some kind of upgrade. Ooh! Upgrade! I wonder if that means new features. It would be nice if the calendars were Blackberry-compatible. I don't use a mobile device myself, but my coworkers have been slow to adopt due to GCal's inability to sync. So, mobile support would be nice, because it would permit users to destroy my carefully-crafted schedules with even more ruthless efficiency than they already do.

When I'm feeling stressed and powerless, I like to clean. It's something I can do very well, and it makes me feel better to finish up and look at the house and think," there." During my Big College Breakup, for example, you could've assembled circuity in my kitchen like it was one of those men-in-airtight-suits rooms.

Last night I was at a friend's house, and I realized that I was conducting a mental inventory of his apartment and fantasizing about how I would clean it. The place didn't need a cleaning -- in fact it was quite tidy -- but I nevertheless caught myself idly compiling a mental list of how, were it to become soiled, I would tend to the mess. "First I'd get a Swiffer, a wet one, to scrub the ceiling and corners. Then 409 on the fixtures and art, and a Dyson to really go over the sofa." I went on to imagine how I'd clean the oven, repaint the doors, give the cat a trim ...

And I only caught myself doing this because when someone made a comment about the Roomba, my first reaction was to glance at it with suspicion and jealousy. JEALOUSY. Oh dear God, I thought, I resent the cleaning-robot because it's living the sort of life of which I can only dream.

So obviously, the question is, what source of stress could possibly have driven me into this state? Only my friends and family on Vox know for sure.

I do believe I'll be spending some time in Dolores Park tomorrow afternoon. Will you be spending time in Dolores Park on Sunday? You probably should give me a call if you'll be there. It's nice out, you know.

One of my many Macintosh grumps is that the Finder lacks an update button. Granted, it doesn't need one as often as Windows does; but it still fails to update now and then, especially when chatting with Windows shares. But hoorah, some nifty guy has built a refresh button for Finder! Yay!

Google my email address, and one of the top hits is, oddly, a single minor recurring event from my Google Calendar. At the top of the publicly accessible page is my email address, non-obscured and completely machine-readable. I have no idea how to get rid of it except for making my entire calendar private, which would make me sad because I believe in openness when it comes to trivial data.