A Nondescript Trip to Pier 39

I've been meaning to get to San Francisco and hit some of the touristy stuff since I moved here. I've seen some during my business trips up here, but hadn't been to Pier 39 or Fisherman's Wharf since high school (actually not even sure if I went then). I know it is supposed to be a tourist trap, but felt like if I live here I should see it. Anyway, on Sunday I decided it was time to go. Found an address online, put it in the GPS and headed up. Didn't take long to get close, but once I got on the Embarcadero (road next to the bay) it was like I hit a parking lot. I started paying attention to the radio - the announcers were talking about how bad an idea it would be to drive downtown, especially on the Embarcadero that day. Eventually they get to the reason, which I think they expected the listeners to already know - it was the day of THE PRIDE PARADE!

Well if traffic was going to be that bad I figured I should get off the Embarcadero. On the way to finding parking I saw a naked guy (well he was wearing shoes and a studded belt) riding a bike so I figured I must be close to the parade. I asked the parking attendant about it and he said it was a block away. So I figured I had to see this.

Well I sorta expected guys wearing speedos dancing:


And crazy clothes:


And people of questionable gender:

And references to same-sex marriage (the train car was labeled the love train):

And information about AIDS and meth, actually kind of funny/sad that some schools won't give out condoms, but if you just stand next to the street at the right time in San Francisco someone will hand you a bag of them:

And some other random stuff:




I would not have expected it, but not surprising that there were two Rocky Horror Show floats:


I didn't get a picture, but there was also a float with a working mechanical bull.

Also not a shock that it was not only guys who were wearing minimal clothing (actually I took one picture which I realized later when I saw it full size on the computer which would require a "Are you over 18 button" - in retrospect, it explains why a whole group of photographers were swarming toward that float):


Didn't get a picture, but there was a similar float, but with an important difference, it took me quite a while to realize why the women on that one just didn't seem attractive...

So now for the stuff I really didn't expect. Some were ones that may have out liberaled me, such as anti-mutilation, at first I thought it was female mutilation which I totally understood protesting, but the signs (and costumes) revealed it was male circumcision they were protesting (I don't know what the colorfully dressed girls in front were all about):


And the sex workers float had me totally confused, until someone handed me a flier explaining they wanted to reduce violence towards sex workers:



Before we get to the part that truly messed with my mind I should mention that there were some much more subdued parts of the parade. Such as a marching band and some community groups and even some Israel pride marchers.

The part I'm still amazed by is the companies with floats. Ok so some gym with a big float and blasting the song, we've got big balls as they carried exercise balls wasn't too surprising, although somewhat funny:

But I'm impressed that Levis, Best Buy and Geek Squad all took part in the parade. I would have thought they'd be horrified that the pictures would make their way to less tolerant areas (how do you feel about your pants being pro gay rights?):




And I just think it is awesome to see a science/engineering company that clearly has a fun side:


Yes, the back of that lab coat has a rainbow and the word door with an arrow pointed down.

But the two floats that I found most shocking were the Firemen and Bank of America. The firemen were out in full uniforms and at first I thought they were just taking part like they would in a 4th of July parade, but then I noticed the beads and other signs that they were really taking part in the event. And I don't know much about Bank of America, but my impression was it sold itself as a heartland/southern company so I was very impressed to see:



At first I felt a bit weird taking pictures of the people in the parade, but they were taking part in a parade, and there were a lot of people there taking pictures so I figured it was accepted. I also wasn't sure about posting them, but figure it took place on a major city street so ought to be good enough for the series of pipes and tubes. However, I didn't feel ok with taking pictures of particular crowd members, even though others were, so this part will be less visual. The majority of the crowd was not dressed up. But there was a significant portion in various crazy clothes. I did not see any protesters - seems like it would have been a bad idea considering the size of the crowd. There were some people carrying around signs indicating that had been recently married. There were people walking down the street smoking joints (whole street had a mild pot smell), even though there were cops on every corner. There were people there of all ages - everything from parents with small kids to people in their 60s to 70s. While a lot of the crazy clothing got some attention there was one guy who clearly won the attention competition. All he did was wear a boring pair of shoes and a boring hat. The key being wearing JUST boring shoes and a hat. When I saw him he was walking past three cops. The three cops looked at him and then looked at each other - looked like they were trying decide if they should do something and then all three just shrugged it off and went back to looking elsewhere. And there was the girl (fairly certain real girl) wearing a piece of paper tied around her neck as a shirt - the wind was causing her some trouble...

Going back to the comment about families. I am jealous of those kids. No, not because they get to look at scantily clad people. But, how much easier must it be to be tolerant of others when you grow up seeing people cheering for transvestites and dancing gay guys? Plus this was way more entertaining than my idea of a typical parade - kids riding bikes stuffed with as many American flags as possible.

For all of the pride parade photos go here (most are included in the post, but the key details are more visible with the larger images).

Oh, and after all that I did get to Pier 39, Fisherman's Warf and China Town. All of which would deserve a post, but seems to pale in comparison. I do have a few pictures of the bay here. Unfortunately all my pictures of the golden gate bridge came out unusably fuzzy. Pier 39 may just be a giant collection of shops, but it does have a cool view with the Golden Gate Bridge on the left, Alcatraz in the middle, and the Bay Bridge on the right.

n^n

On the one hand it is cool to have an n^n birthday. But at the same time it is too bad that the first time you are old enough to realize your age is n^n is also the last time (well unless you're a super advanced 1 or 4 year old - 1 is actually the coolest since it is n^n for two values of n). Medical science is going to have to make some serious advancements and really fast if I'm going to make it to my next one. 11011 is a sort of cool age, although I guess I've got a few more years before I'm completely "on" (11111) and only a couple more till I get a prime. Why is it that all jokes involving binary are bad jokes? And why do I publish them on the internet anyway?

On a completely different topic: Having lived in 3 cities in CA over 3 years I'm fairly used to scientology centers and christian science reading rooms. However, protesters in front of a scientology center wearing V for Vendetta masks, holding protest signs and dancing to music is a new one for me.

Firefox 3.0

If you haven't heard, firefox 3.0 was released recently. There are a few cool new features (go here for a full list), but one of the biggest changes is improved performance. To upgrade go here.

Why My Body Hurts

Over the weekend I headed to Portola Redwoods State Park with four others. It was my first time really backpacking and definitely the first time I've refilled water bottles by filtering water from a stream. I realized that UC Santa Cruz's mascot, the banana slug, actually makes some sense since there are banana slugs in the Santa Cruz mountains. I also learned that clothing that wicks away sweat actually works. And my only complaint about Redwoods is if there are too many then it gets hard to see the tops and get a more exact sense of how tall they are than just really really tall!

We did 8 miles the first day and 7 miles the second. Not terribly far, but seemed a lot further with 2 days worth of stuff and 4 litters of water on my back. I was very happy when I realized that proper backpacking food is basically all the sugar, salt and fat I normally use all my willpower to avoid.




Picture didn't really capture it, but the redwood behind my head is really really tall:


More pictures here.

What I learned about pace commericals today

Apparently that pace picante sauce ad where the cowboys can't believe that one of them has salsa from New York City (the highlight of the whole thing being the accent used to say New York City) wasn't show in New York City. I guess I also learned that it was a very memorable commercial for some reason.

Did the Taliban watch too many action movies?

Have you seen this description of the start of an action movie? How cliche. The only question is if the rest of the movie is about one of the innocent people who had been in the prison escaping (kind of con-air style) or if it is about the action hero who was trying to save someone specific or if it is about trying to round up all the worst offenders or if it is BSG style where the prisoners are the side the audience sides with and they will be flying away in spaceships. It is a bit weird that they are combining two movie cliches by also having a flash back to prisoners getting out of the prison by tunneling out. Oh, what's that, this was all for real? Whoa - crazy! Well, still a hunger strike seems a bit cliche even for real life. Oh, you say they stitched their lips together with needle and thread to show they are determined not to eat. Ok, that's a new twist.

Same Sex Anniversaries

As you might imagine there is a lot of discussion of same sex marriage on San Francisco radio stations. One of the interesting things is how many times some couples have gotten some version of married. Which makes me wonder, if you have a non-legally binding marriage and then a civil union and then a marriage in San Francisco that is latter revoked by the state and then get married when it is recognized by the state which anniversary do you celebrate? There's tension for some straight couples when one partner can't remember their anniversary or how long they've been married - can you imagine if you had 4 anniversaries from 4 different years? I guess at least in a same sex marriage there's no out dated social expectations on which partner should take a greater role in planning all of those anniversaries.

Maybe I'm just immature, but I thought it was very funny when they were describing all the same sex marriages they were listing off a whole string of words to describe them such as joyous, cheerful, festive, happy, exciting... I kept waiting to see if someone would point out there's a word that sums up that set of feelings.

Metal Objects in Electrical Sockets

I was going to write a post about how cool it is that as an electrical engineer you get to ignore that universal childhood rule not to stick metal objects in electrical sockets and seem intelligent rather than stupid or suicidal. But then I realized that electrical plugs are metal objects, which makes me also realize that if kids were just a bit smarter they could give parents/teachers a lot of trouble when trying to define what is and is not allowed to be placed in electrical sockets.

And yes I admit that surgeons getting to cut people open and seem super intelligent rather than being arrested as deranged psychos is way cooler.

I feel safe there

I only semi-thought through this post so if you think I'm way off - speak up, because I might be (even more than usual).

I think that people often describe if they feel safe or not somewhere, and I think that people make real decisions based on these statements (I completely include myself in this). I imagine that a person's feeling of safety has some value - having watched most of The Wire in the past few weeks I can clearly distinguish that Mountain View is safer than the projects in Baltimore (not stepping on crack vials is always a good start). But I know my personal "safe feeling" meter has far too strong of a weighting on other people being around which has lead to some silly situations where I started watching over my shoulder while walking through a residential section of Brookline just because there was no one else around. I wonder what really goes into if a person feels safe. Hopefully people feel unsafe long before seeing any obvious signs of violence. I have to imagine that it is largely based on wealth and unfortunately I bet at least a portion is based on race. Whatever the indicators are, they are almost certainly regional or specific to a given country. Graffiti is probably a strong sign to many people from the suburbs. Not sure how it would strike people from major cities in the US, but I know that in some countries where violent crime is minimal compared to the US, graffiti is almost universal. Based on no evidence I would guess that the safety sense probably has some value in areas someone is familiar with, but becomes increasingly less valuable as the person travels further away, especially as that travel becomes international. Which is unfortunate since that's basically the inverse of a person's need for a safety sense.

Even if people have a great internal violent crime detector, that does not help with many other safety factors. In the US far more people die from car crashes than from murder. I guess people do sometimes discuss the roads and types of drivers in different areas, but again it is often what they sense and I feel like it has a less significant impact on travel and moving decisions.

In many foreign countries violent crime is so much lower than in the US that the other factors have to almost entirely be all that matter. In some countries terrorism is the bigger concern (often even if statistics show otherwise). Again, I'm pulling all this out of my ass, but I can't imagine the average person has any in-built sense for if one area is more likely to be hit than other. Clearly you can read the news and be told which areas are good and bad, but just walking around who is going to sense that they are in a spot that is likely to be struck. In fact, I believe that many terror strikes are at targets that would otherwise seem safe which is to some degree the point of the attack.

Not only do car crashes kill more people than violent crime, but heart issues kill even more. So when you are considering moving or traveling maybe the question to ask people isn't how safe they feel there, but instead how are the roads/drivers, how healthy is the food, and how prevalent is smoking. Actually - for anyone with indicators of heart issues the first question should be - what is the average ambulance response time (Update - see happyredpigs' comment for better information).

I do think that the safety sense has some value, and I will almost certainly describe how safe places feel to me at some point not long from now, but I imagine if you really want to know, you're better off looking up statistics than asking how safe someone feels. I guess the big advantage of getting someone else's feeling is it indicates how you will feel while you are there and stress/happiness could also be more important than the exact crime rate. The other nice thing is that you can always just tell your worried parents that you feel safe without needing to bother with any research or facing the fact that you are living/visiting somewhere really dangerous.

cEo

It is always an interesting day at work when you find out the CEO of one of your company's main competitors doses fellow executives with E and smokes so much pot in his private jet that the pilot has to wear an air mask!

It was also interesting to see which papers thought the options backdating was the main story vs the ones that realizes that a CEO with tunnels in his homes where he likes to hire prostitutes is a bit more eye catching.

Virus

Last week I noticed that some of the websites I read regularly were being redirected. For a day or two I figured the issue was on their side so I didn't do anything. Then after a couple days I checked the sites on my laptop (I was suspicious because the URL of the redirect was just an ip address). My laptop went right to the correct site. I ran the command line program host (can do the same with Lookup in the Network Utility program) to look up the ip address and both machines returned different ip addresses. Then I opened up /etc/resolve.conf. On the laptop it pointed to my DSL modem as the DNS host, on my iMac it listed two DNS hosts: 85.255.116.152 and 85.255.112.19. Googling those addresses and checking them with Whois in the Network Utility program both showed that they are servers in Ukraine. I tried just correcting /etc/resolv.conf with a text editor. That fixed what I address I got using host, but not in a web browser. And when I reset the machine, /etc/resolv.conf got rewritten back to using the Ukrainian DNS servers. I found one site that suggested just setting the DNS server in the Network section of system preferences. This worked, but I did not feel good about leaving something running on my computer trying to change my DNS server. So I cleared the manual DNS setting. And decided it was time to buy a virus scanner - for the first time in my life. If I was more patient I would have paid for it and downloaded it on my laptop and then transfered it over. But I wasn't feeling very patient so I just manually set the DNS server and double checked that both computers were resolving the same ip address. Downloaded Norton and ran it and after several hours it found 3 files it identified as viruses. From the names it looked like they were browser plugins. After Norton deleted those files /etc/resolv.conf went back to normal and stayed that way and I stopped having my web browser send me to the wrong place.

That was a pain in the ass! But I guess that's what I get for all those years of claiming that I don't need a virus scanner because I'm careful about what I download and what I run. Other lesson was a reminder of how nice the Mac Network Utility program is.