Concepts in the Paradox

“Is this yours?” a homeless man asked me while I was doing my laundry.

I looked at what he wants holding in his hand, it was 12 pennies.

“Uh, no.” I responded in a very confused tone.

“Are you sure this isn’t yours?” he persisted.

“Uhm, no.” I repeated.

“Cuz if it is yours, you should take it. I’m not gonna take it!” he demanded, obviously not wanting the guilt of taking 12 cents from someone.

“How about this. It is mine, but you can give it to someone on the street?”

And so with that, he gave the twelve cents to the first person who came by, and that person was literally overjoyed with his new gift.

On the way to work this morning, I walked by a young woman who was doing trash duty on Ellis street. This is part of the never ending battle against the trash people throw on the ground around Hallidie Plaza. Usually, trash duty is one of the many selections that a citizen can choose from to work off a citation or jail time. Think, “community service”. This young woman added value to her community, by giving me a warm smile and turning to me to ask a question as I went forward in my day to earn a day’s wages.

“You gotta dollah? I wanna buy a juice.”

And with that, I ignored the young woman and silently thought to myself how much this program offers the community.

Since going part-time vegetarian, I’ve had some awkward food moments. Beyond being called a hippie, as one might expect, I’ve had some food servers give me some interesting interactions:

Yesterday at a Valencia coffee shop:
Me: “I would like the veggie sandwich with hummus instead of mayo.”
Cashier: “Would you like bread with that?”

I thought this was otherwise known as a “salad,” no?

Today in my favorite TL burrito shop (the one that doesn’t make me ill):
Me: “I would like a veggie taco with black beans.”
Cook: …
Me: …
Cook: “For real?!”

January has been an active month, with dead time between events starting to go back to back with things to do.

At work, I’ve ended up diving head first into SAN virtualization. I didn’t want to go this route for a another few months, but we’re evaluating SAN technology, and the research needs to be done quickly. This stuff isn’t as hard as I thought it would be, and in fact it is pretty straight forward. LUNs here, WWNS there, sparse volumes and mirrors over there.

I finally heard back from David Snyder at SPUR, and he’s going to put me in touch with the transportation communications intern there. The idea is for me to do “online advocacy” for transit, something that I’m already knee deep in by nature. We’ll see where things go. SPUR’s membership fee was a whopping $65, but it is for a good cause. These folks seem to know what they are doing.

The car has been up for sale for almost 2 weeks now. I put it up on cars.com for $21750, but the only contacts I’ve gotten are other sales agencies wanting to list my auto for another $50. I hate to lower the price, it is already low compared to other cars for sale in the area, but every month it sits is another possible parking ticket or accident, plus deprecation and the insurance payments I have to make.

Speaking of parking tickets, the two citations I got from DPT came back after I wrote a very polite letter to the them. Their reply? Pay the $100 or find a cop to verify that the tags are current, have him sign off on the tickets, then submit $10 per ticket ($20) for “administrative fees” to have the citations written off. I about flipped my lid when I read that. The DPT brings in $40m a year, so I have little concept of why I must pay fees to have my fine waved. Such is the law, and such is yet another complaint letter for me to write. I’m getting good at writing them these days.

Finally, I went to the MacWorld expo this week. I ended up buying a keyboard cover, 2GB of RAM for my Mac Mini, and laid out the cash for an academic version of Adobe CS2 + Acrobat 8. It’s about time really, I’ve been suffering with The GIMP and I’d like to greatly improve the designs of my various blog sites. Now I have something more to learn, but it’s graphics, so it should be fun!

I was going through my unsorted stack of receipts today, looking for the my warranty documents for my Marin urban bike. It’s time to take it in for adjustments, and while I’m at it I want to take the Timberline mountain bike in for a tune-up. In the process I came across the registration tags for my Subaru.

It looks like I failed to apply the tags. I must have forgotten in the chaos of moving, and as a result I got two “expired tabs” $50 tickets on my car the last 2 weeks.  I decided to take a bike ride up to my magical street parking permit zone in Western Addition to apply the tags. Luckily, no new citations this time around, but not so luckily me the battery was dead. I had left the map lights on the last time I used the car. Good going me!

$45 later, my automo-car was jump started by a friendly SoMA tow truck driver. Yay insurance reimbursements!

I put the car up on cars.com this time around. CL didn’t yield a single hit. I’m priced lower than all the other Subaru’s in a 250 mile area, so I should get *something* soon.

I only play one online.

The new established diet is what I call the “2/3’s Vegetarian diet”. It serves a dual purpose, first to reduce the amount of bad fat in my diet by avoiding meat, and second to “help the planet”. Yes, this is another step in the greening process.

Allowed items that don’t count as meat are eggs and dairy, though I should take substitutes if they are available. I can have meat with any single meal, not including snacks. I could have beef jerky, for example, and that wouldn’t count. Eating a hot dog might be pushing it though.

It’s now day 4, and I’m actually enjoying this diet. I went to Speedster’s in Oakland and they had a selection of veggie dishes that were spectacular. Eating at Naan’n Curry yielded similar results, I possibly had the best egg plant ever. For breakfast it is yogurt and bagels anyhow, so I almost never have to worry about taking that as my meat meal. I dislike pork in general anyway, a typical breakfast meat.