Yerba Buena

I scooted back up to the Bay Area, not quite a trip to the corner market, but a pretty smooth journey today. Left about 9:00 this morning and blew into Burlingame around 4:30.


The trip included a detour for some unknown reason around the 57 freeway, and a stop at Whole Foods in Pasadena for victuals, breakfast at Noah's as well as a couple pit stops en route.

I had a three hour long conversation with friend Gary along the way, Bakersfield to Fresno and beyond, comparing notes on mothers, family, art and insanity. After we hung up, my phone decided to call him once again. "Oh" he said, "It must have been a pocket call." A pocket call must be a new addition to the english lexicon for the times when your cell phone accidently starts dialing numbers on its own, something that happens to me rather frequently.

New technology has a way of changing the language in a moment, we have quickly gone from tivoing to googling to friending. Today I started the process of unfriending a few folks on Facebook, another neologism, I imagine. A tough matter of etiquette and diplomacy that is sometimes necessary. You are a christian republican who likes scrap booking, I'm a pagan trotskyite who likes to cross stitch, it will probably never work out.

Today I ran my hands under a faucet wringing them in the air, only to look down and see that there was actually a manual valve on top. So twentieth century.

My gmail was on the fritz for the most part of yesterday. Since google has no customer service, being a free service that depends on ad revenue, I was forced to navigate through various forums and FAQ's to try to resolve the issue. I tried the suggested fixes, going to their encrypted site, switching to an HTML version, switch off google labs, all to no avail. The forum was funny because there is a person there we will call Keith, who doesn't say he works for the company that promises to do no evil, but obviously does. He was berating people who expected things to work rationally, indignantly informing them that the internet was a complex environment that demanded flexible solutions and besides couldn't they follow simple directions? I felt like I was listening to a communist party apparatchik berating his comrades.

I evidently could not fix the problem myself because Gmail still failed to fire, on my phone and on the desktop. There was talk was that the problem laid with Yahoo, the mail originator. I finally found a site that said that they were experiencing problems with some gmail service but that the problem had been dealt with. Except for me of course.

One of the difficulties with behemoths like Google that eschew customer service is that laymen like me never know who is responsible when there is a problem, if it was something I did or didn't do. I guess it was them because around three this afternoon, the system started flowing again.

My wife has a cousin who lives up here. She went to sleep with indigestion the other day and never woke up. Just a few years older than me. Leslie is flying up for the funeral friday and we will drive back down together after my show.

I saw an interesting piece today about a couple of guys who have figured out a way to deduce social security numbers for about 8% of the population from readily available public data. The perils of being publicly visible in this transparent age of social networking. Beware!