“I’m Alicia Silverstone and I’m a vegetarian. There’s nothing in the world that’s changed me as much as this. I feel so much better, and have so much more energy. It’s so amazing.”
The walk from the Andrew Molera state park parking lot to the beach is about a mile. It starts out with a wade over a stream, then a long walk through small wooded areas and wide open grassy areas (like the one in the photo).
Unfortunately, when we finally made it to the beach the wind had picked up so much that it was more like being in a sand blaster so we basically turned right around and walked back!
On the way home from San Francisco on Sunday I took a detour through the old naval air station in Alameda, and snapped some photos using the Nokia N95. All in the Flickr stream…
One of the historic trolleys that Muni operates in San Francisco, running along the Embarcadero and up Market street. This one is an Italian car, from Milan.
It was parked along the Embarcadero tonight as I crossed over to get to the ferry. In the background you can see the Bay Bridge.
Seems that AT&T decided to send me a new SIM for my phone, and deactivate the old one. Not that serious normally, except that I’m not at home at the moment, so I didn’t get the new SIM.
Worse, when I spoke to them, they confirmed that once the SIM is disabled it cannot be re-enabled, and even if a new one was shipped out to me here, it still wouldn’t help as they need to be activated the first time on the AT&T network. So, no cell phone for me.
Even more annoyingly, the N95 insists on telling me about this every time I return to the standby screen, even in offline mode! I would switch it off entirely, except that I use it as my camera, email and web browsing (over Wi-Fi) and as a VoIP telephone as well.
So, my recent trip to Toronto was booked on the United Airlines website, and I ended up with three flights (I went via Las Vegas on the way out) all with UA flight codes, although two of them were operated by Air Canada. As is pretty much the norm for United, the flight they operated was late leaving San Francisco (they had to perform last minute repairs at the gate while we sat on the aircraft). That, combined with the 30 minute interval between inter-terminal shuttles at Las Vegas, meant I missed the original flight I had been booked on up to Toronto.
The Air Canada check-in desk staff kindly moved me on to the next flight, and all went well from there. Now I get back and discover that United had credited me with the mileage for SF to Las Vegas, and Toronto to SF, but had missed the flight that was changed. On the rare occasions that their website manages to show past itineraries, I can see the change recorded there, so they know what happened. But apparently they aren’t smart enough to handle the mileage credit too.
So I call customer service to be told that I need to send the boarding pass and a copy of the E-Ticket receipt (which is almost impossible to get to on their website because of repeated errors) to them. Since it is hard to get at online, I ask if they can send me a copy of the receipt since I can’t seem to get to it. “No, sorry, you need to call a different number for that.” OK, can I file a complaint about the ridiculousness of a system where I need to print something generated by a United database and send it back to United? “Yes sir. Let me give you the number for that…”
And why am I sending any of this information to them on paper? This was an online booking, made on their website. They already know that I was moved onto the next flight (because they were late getting to Las Vegas – and from what Air Canada told me, that’s not unusual). They already credited me the miles for 2 out of 3 segments. How hard can this be to fix online?
Is there anything I can do without calling another number? No, apparently not. The customer service desk is apparently just a telephone directory for United’s many other numbers. All he could do was give me other numbers to call. And the first person I spoke to managed to cut me off when I asked to be transferred to her supervisor. The only thing other than a number that I managed to get is an email address for the complaints – customervoice@united.com if anybody is interested.
Well, no reply to the email I sent through their website (perhaps I should send them a thousand or so copies of it so I make sure they see it). I get home tonight though and sure enough there’s another message on my home answering machine from the idiot’s campaign. This time he’s just bad mouthing his opponent, McCain. Another sure sign of desperation if you ask me; when you are unable to win on actual issues, the only thing left is to spread rumours and lies about your opponents. And that seems to be what he’s doing today.
And they say this is a model democracy? I’d say it is the most dysfunctional democracy I’ve ever seen. Sure, it is one, which puts it ahead of places that aren’t, but only just. And if this year has as many issues of possible fraud, and all the dirty tricks to prevent people’s votes from counting, perhaps even that status might start to be questionable.
Update: Make that two calls today as the jerk just made another call, again recorded. Only this time he suggested that I call his California campaign office (which is apparently in Massachusetts, which might come as a surprise to anybody making the call who actually pays for long distance calling themselves). The number is (857) 288 6400.
Normally, I don’t write about politicians, especially not US ones, but I have been so annoyed by Mitt Romney’s campaign that I am forced to write something. Over the last week I have been bombarded by phone calls paid for by his campaign, all of which are recorded messages with no option to get off the calling list, or to say that I have no interest (other than hanging up of course). I haven’t received a single phone call from any of the others in this year’s circus. So, this tells me two things:
If you can’t even be bothered to ask the people you’re interrupting whether they’re interested before you play them the message, and you don’t provide them any means to be removed from the list of numbers they call, then you don’t deserve to even run for public office, letalone actually win.
And here’s a really simple bit of campaign reform that they could implement: no recorded calls, ever. And all callers must first ask whether the callee is interested in hearing the message, and whether they’d like to be removed from the calling list.
I’ve sent his campaign a question, through their web form, asking how to get off the list. We’ll see if I get any response; I’d be surprised, though the website did say “we will make every effort to respond to your message as thoroughly and quickly as possible” on the page after the submission.
It’s not every year that you get to extend your birthday into a 27 hour day. Sounds good? Well, I’m not so sure. The day started at an airport hotel in Canada, where it is definitely winter! And since I’d only just arrived, I wasn’t ready to sleep.
All too soon it was 6am, and time to get up and head off for a meeting (the whole reason I was in Canada). By 4pm I was back at the airport, but unable to move my flight to the earlier departure. Four and a half hours, and two gate changes later I’m still waiting for a plane to show up. We should be leaving here in about 15 minutes, but that would require a miracle at this point.
Theoretically at least, I should get back into San Francisco just before midnight. And that means my birthday this year will have been a 27 hour day. Much of it spent either at an airport, or on a plane 🙁
If it was anybody else they’d be madly scribbling tickets and demanding that you move. Not only is the first one parked in a red zone, there is a second one double parked alongside it!
They should be issuing each other with tickets at this point, not standing there chatting (presumably about their day of harassing people who were confused by the ridiculous number of different types of parking zones and different rules and exceptions for each in San Francisco.
In some places the meters have different coloured caps to confuse you some more; there are yellow capped and green capped meters for different restrictions on parking. The odd one though is the red capped meter. Red normally means no parking, ever, no exceptions (unless you’re a DPT employee apparently). So what does a red capped meter mean? No parking ever, but when you do (illegally) make sure you drop some quarters in there as well or they’ll get you for parking on an expired meter as well as in a red zone?