Category Archives: MUNI

It’s not CalTrain

Posted on July 22, 2011 | Leave a comment

After dropping my kid off at camp for the day, I got on the 22 Fillmore and walked to the back of the bus and sat down.

Back of the 22 Fillmore bus

Back of the 22 Fillmore bus

A few stops later a guy gets on and sits next to me and starts taptapping on an iPhone with a shattered and cracked glass screen. He’s wearing a buttondown shirt and carrying a laptop bag.

Behind me 3 people are talking about where and what Ottawa is. They’re wearing tshirts and baggy shorts. Then they notice the guy next to me taptapping on cracked shattered iPhone screen. They ask him how it happened.

“I put it in my shirt pocket and leaned over. I’ve dropped it a lot before and it’s never cracked. Now I have to call Apple. At least it still works.”

I jump into the conversation with the story about the skydiver who jumped out of a plane with his iPhone in his pocket and it fell out of his pocket (while he was falling from the sky) and landed on the roof of a building and broke, but the GPS still worked and he was able to find his phone.

Now there are a few more people joining in the conversation, contributing stories of cracked iPhone screens and where/how to get them fixed and why not to bother asking Apple to fix it and how the screen gets suction-cupped off and replaced.

“Oh, man, I know where you can get that fixed, don’t call or send it to Apple. Go to Cupertino,” says one of the baggy shorts tshirt guys.

People around me laugh and chuckle. “No, seriously,” says baggy shorts tshirt guy, “Cupertino is a shop downtown on Battery St and they can fix any iPhone fast and cheap. Just Yelp it. They have good reviews on Yelp. Yelp knows everything.”

As people start to get off at various stops, they all wish each other a good day and good luck with the cracked screen, and thanks. Kindness and good wishes are everywhere.

When I got off the bus I wondered why the baggy shorts tshirt guys didn’t just use their smartphones to look up the answer to where/what Ottawa is.

MUNI has the best stories and entertainment along with smells and obscenities.

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Posted in MUNI, storytelling, tech

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Paperless Reading

Posted on January 16, 2011 | 1 Comment

I read on all of my devices (iPhone, iPad, Droid) using iBooks and Kindle apps, but mostly the Kindle app.  I particularly like reading on an iPhone or Droid while standing on MUNI or BART (public transportation in San Francisco) because I can easily hold on to an overhead bar, hold iPhone or Droid, read AND turn pages all with the same hand.  That’s pretty difficult to do with a paper book or newspaper.

The iPad improved my experience of reading in bed.

If I’m on my side, in bed, I can only read the odd (or even-numbered pages) with the book propped on its side:

 

Reading in bed, old school

 

That’s something that always frustrated me as a kid, reading under the covers with a flashlight and having to prop up the book more to read the other side of the page, or holding the book open with one tired hand:

 

Holding book open. Tiring.

I love reading in bed with the iPad because it props up the “whole book” at the same angle.

 

 

iPad improves the experience

 

I also like reading to my 6-year-old kid in the dark, using an iPad, as she goes to sleep. I turn the brightness all the way down, and it’s still too bright in the dark, so I also turn the brightness all the way down in the iBooks or Kindle app.  I sit in a chair by her bed and read a chapter of a book to her (currently I’m reading the Ramona books to her).  It’s so much quieter and easier than a paper book with pages to turn and a booklight to adjust.

 

Reading on iPad vs. reading on paper

A friend recently mentioned how useful the dictionary is in the Kindle and iBooks app.  I’d never used the dictionary until my kid asked what a word meant, I couldn’t think of an immediate easy definition, and I remembered I could highlight a word to get a definition, and it worked!

 

My kid is a good reader, but she doesn’t yet read chapter books on the iPad. She checks out the paper version from the library and she enjoys using and making different bookmarks for the paper books.  I wonder when she’ll start reading more digitally.  Probably just a few years.

I have some books in more than one format (paper and Kindle, or paper and iBooks).   That’s a bit of a racket — paying twice for the same book content just to have it both on paper and digitally.  I hope someday I can pay for the content in one format and choose to have it delivered in multiple formats – particularly if I want to share a book with someone who doesn’t have a device running the proprietary app (iBooks, Kindle).

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Posted in happiness, MUNI, tech

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Defining Adrenaline

Posted on July 16, 2010 | 3 Comments
MUNI from lucy's perspective in 2007

MUNI underground photo taken from Lucy's perspective in 2007

On this morning’s MUNI adventure to take Lucy to her summer day camp, we took the underground and then a bus.  She’s been carrying her very precious prized small tooth fairy pillow with her because she has a loose tooth and wants to have the pillow with her at camp in case the tooth falls out at camp.

While we were stepping off the underground, she accidentally dropped the small pillow and I watched it fall towards the gap between the train and the platform.  I held my breath and wondered how we’d ever replace it. Just as it almost fell into the gap and under the train, a small threshhold popped out, at floor level, between the train and the platform, and caught the pillow.

I picked up the pillow and we walked towards the stairs to leave the station.  While we were walking towards the stairs, Lucy said, “I was so scared my body and head were shaky inside and then I was so glad I didn’t lose my pillow but my insides were still shaky.”  I said, “That’s adrenaline, it’s something your body creates when you’re scared or excited, and then you might be relieved and let out a big breath and said, Whew! and still feel the adrenaline.”  Lucy said, “I felt my body feel the Whew! but I didn’t say it, my body said Whew to itself and it still feels it.”

Can’t make this stuff up.

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Posted in 1st grade, MUNI

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Purging and moving

Posted on December 31, 2008 | 1 Comment

My company spent 3 years (Dec 2005 – Dec 2008) on Folsom Street in San Francisco – a storefront on a noisy street said to have 80,000 cars pass by every day.  When our lease was almost up, we found a new office – happy to leave behind an office where the windows were broken twice, a laptop was stolen, graffiti slashed into our windows, and regular leaks dampened our ceiling (amazing since we were on the ground floor in a 4-story building and the water would leak from the top floor all the way down to our space).

Moving is quite cleansing.  There were things in the Folsom St office that had not been touched since we moved there.  The new office doesn’t have a full kitchen and full bathroom.  The Folsom St office had a fully stocked kitchen (baking! cooking! galore!) and a full bathroom stocked with plush towels.  The towels were carted off to the SPCA for cats and dogs to snuggle in.  The kitchen supplies went to my house or friends’ houses or Community Thrift.  While purging the office and sorting through supplies, we (Thanks, Lori, for the help!) sorted through the earthquake/emergency boxes full of food and supplies and discovered one of the best earthquake/emergency supplies – Asyla Whisky!  Only to be opened in case of emergency.

On December 23 the movers moved everything from Folsom St to my company’s new office on 2nd St.  I moved Ganesha in my pocket that day on an underground MUNI train – I think he’s worth keeping around.  I usually keep him perched on top of my computer monitor.

My new MUNI stop is Montgomery station (used to be Civic Center).  My company is sharing space with a small very friendly architecture firm and I’m excited to be sharing space again.  We shared some office space 4 years ago when we were in Hayes Valley.  When I first started my company I shared office space in South Park (South Park, San Francisco not South Park, Comedy Central) and I enjoy the camaraderie of people working in the same space but not necessarily working together or on the same projects or in the same industry.  I’ve noticed, in the few days I’ve been hanging out in my new space, that the architects seem to have very civilized consistent hours and they all leave for lunch in the middle of the day.  I haven’t worked around people who take regular lunch in over a decade!

My conference room has a view of a new oyster bar and fish restaurant (Anchor & Hope).

And there are some windows that look out to this airshaft.  I love airshafts — old space that got trapped in time.

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Posted in folsom street, MUNI, san francisco, south park

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