Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Castles in the sky

Hey fellow San Franciscans: are you seeing the light beam in the sky at night? Apparently that's an art installation for the APEC summit happening this week. Originating from the Ferry Building are 12 laser beams shooting down southbound Market Street. The fact this beam can be seen by me all the way on the literal opposite end of the city is kind cool. Though it's supposed to the colors of the rainbow? I can only see a beam of blue on this side.

The folks living along Market Street must hate the thing, right? A week-long light beam shining up your pricey luxury condo at night. I wonder if it's worse than the time Elon Musk put a giant illuminated 'X' logo on top of what was the twitter building.

But hey, anything for APEC, am I right? Who cares if restaurants and smalls businesses in the vicinity of the summit are struggling this week (tongue fully in cheek). I mean, did organizers think the opposite would happen? No one is voluntarily going downtown this week! The street closures, no-go zones, and transit detours signal one thing: stay away. I feel most terrible for Chinatown merchants. My own mother - who goes to Chinatown weekly - is avoiding the historic district for the duration of APEC.

Foreign travelers picking this week of all weeks to visit San Francisco also drew the short stick. At least the streets are clean and free of homeless encampments! SFPD is fully working overtime as well, so maybe your rental car won't get broken into? Condolences to the Czech TV crew who got robbed in front of City Lights Bookstore.

It'll be back to normal next week. Enjoy the light beam in the sky while it lasts.

Matthew Perry

I am remised in writing about the untimely passing of Matthew Perry. My friends and I grew up watching him on the show Friends. It’s tremendously sad: a person who gave so much laughter and joy to the world cannot keep any for himself. Perry’s addiction to alcohol and drugs is widely known, so when I saw the news of his death, my first inclination was: “He could never outrun his demons.”

(To be sure: as of this writing, the cause of death is still under investigation. Perry was found unconscious in a hot tub.)

I haven’t the slightest idea what it’s like to be in that deep a mental funk, be it substance addiction, or severe depression. I have friends who are on anti-depressive drugs, and it’s always been a challenge for me to empathize with their plight. It’s like a fully healthy person having to level with a terminally-ill patient. The wavelength of understanding is completely different. All I can offer to my friends are platitudes. Sometimes I would feel guilty to be “normal” and “happy”, when they are in such a rut.

Perry surely had close friends that know of his situation and want him to get well. But they couldn’t do anything for him, just as I cannot do anything for my friends facing mental challenges. The battle cannot only be fought by the person dealing with the issues. Those of us on the sidelines can only wish them the best, and be there when asked.

And if it comes to an end, it was beautiful while it happened. Matthew Perry leaves an enormous legacy of comedic and acting talent for generations to enjoy. Rest well.

No one there to watch

Word on the street is the Formula One race in Las Vegas - happening this weekend - is struggling to attract a full paying crowd. Tickets to the race weekend are discounted on the secondary market, while hotels rooms are cheap and widely available. We have exactly one person to blame for this: three times Formula One World Champion, Maxwell Verstappen.

Is there even interest in the 2023 F1 season at the point? Verstappen - and his Red Bull team - wrapped up the championship many races ago. I’ve certainly stopped following the series closely since then. When there’s literally no stakes in a race, of course people are wont to tune out. And because Red Bull is the most dominant car, the suspense of who can win a Grand Prix is gone as well. Max is a generational talent in a generationally great car, that is for certain. However, that combination does not make for interesting races to spectate.

It seems the promotor of the Las Vegas race (Formula One Management itself, oddly enough. Race promotors are typically third-party) underestimated the overall interest level. The scheduling gods did the race no favors: by scheduling it at the tail-end of the calendar, it risks having a race with nothing to fight for. Fans all want championships to go right until the final race of the season, but that’s not all that common. In the recent decade, I can only remember it happening twice: Rosberg vs. Hamilton 2013, and the controversial Hamilton vs. Verstappen in 2021.

A brand new race - third race in the United States this year - with nothing on the line is not a good recipe for commercial success. Never mind the superbly high prices FOM is charging. Sure, the ultra rich can buy premium packages with white-glove service. Plebs like me on the other hand aren’t willing to suffer through horrendous travel logistics and the high costs (tickets and hotel) just to watch a procession. I bet the current situation would be completely different if the Las Vegas Grand Prix this weekend is a potential championship decider.

Four more days until yet another Verstappen victory.

We can have nice things

The APEC summit is happening this week in San Francisco. Honestly, I’ve never heard of APEC until I started to see news of street closures and movement restrictions a few weeks back. Of course, when world leaders representing nearly half of the world’s economic output come together, security is of utmost importance. Especially in a country - the United States of America - where the second amendment exists. If the locals who live and work here are inconvenienced, so be it. Literally the price of doing business.

I sure hope the supposed increase in local spending from all the foreign visitors is worth it!

Because I am sure San Francisco is spending a significant sum in hosting, and its various logistics (Federal government is chipping in, surely). I was surprised to read the organizers literally built a 14-foot high security fence surrounding the Moscone Center area. Access is highly controlled and monitored, no doubt. (Who says we can’t built walls here in America?) Entire subway tunnels are shut down for the duration of the event. Freeway exits near the conference area are blocked, and entire lane of the Bay Bridge is closed to normal traffic.

There’s apparently a 30-mile no-fly radius - commercial aircraft excepted. Leisure guy flying his recreational Cessna better stay away, lest he wants fighter jets for company.

Another surprising thing is seeing the city actually enforcing laws! Sidewalk homeless encampments getting cleared out, and illegal street vending stopped. I bet the tacitly-allowed drug trade in the Tenderloin is also put to a pause. The Department of Public Works must’ve worked overtime to clean the downtown area. I love how shambolic it is that San Francisco only (literally) clean its act up when cameras and eyes from the outside world are upon it. Count me as one of the locals asking: why can’t we have this year round, all the time?

I wish APEC a successful summit in this city of ours. It’s wild to think I will be in the same 7-by-7 mile piece of land as Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Day of updates

First world problem: it’s always a tiresome day when Apple rolls out software updates to all its products. Each one has to download its respective update, prepare it, install, then restart. The whole process takes about 45 minutes, during which I am deprived of functional usage. Thumb twiddling is a great exercise!

Of course, the real problem is I own too many things from Apple - that’s why updating takes so long. Not one, but two laptops (granted, one is from work). There’s my beloved iPhone, and an iPad. Two sets of AirPods (though these update whenever, automatically). An Apple TV 4K and a HomePod mini. Finally, there’s the newly-purchased Apple Watch, which oddly needs to be actively charging in order to run updates. These things all delightfully enrich my life, to which I am sure Tim Cook is very happy about.

But just a humble request to Apple: stagger the software updates to different days, for different device type. It’s such a chore to update all my Apple products at once.

What isn’t a chore is deciding to not upgrade to the refreshed MacBook Pros. The M3/Pro/Max chips in the new refresh may be two generations newer than the M1 Max in my current MacBook Pro, but functionally the delta is mere icing on the cake. The M1 Max chip still chews through everything I can throw at it, a testament to how great the first-generation Apple Silicon chips was and still are. There’s zero enticement to upgrade, not even the new black color. Truly gone are the days when I bought a new MacBook Pro for three straight years…

Not of this reality

It seems what’s popular these days amongst millennials and Gen Z is buying old iPhones to take pictures. I guess these folks don’t want the latest and greatest in imaging technology that Apple has to offer? An iPhone 7 offers a comparatively nostalgic look in its photo processing, yet still has enough megapixels to do prints. (I remember it was around the iPhone 7 era that I was able to use photos taken with the phone in making calendar-sized prints.) I often see on social media people carrying two phones: an older iPhone strictly for photography, and a modern one for everything else.

I can understand why. Honestly, I am not a fan of how the modern iPhone processes its photos. It’s too sharp, too crunchy, too much HDR. Computational photography deserves kudos for what it can do with such a small camera sensor in smartphones, but at some point it gets to be a bit too processed, a bit too perfect. A photograph’s job is to be evocative, to elicit an emotional reaction. A direct technical copy of how a scene is in real life is not a requirement. A black-and-white picture taken from the real world of color is a great example of this notion.

It seems nostalgia and retro-ness always have a place. What was once old becomes new again. Just look at the return of bell-bottoms and baggy pants (that was the fashion of my high school days). We all think a decade ago were better times: we were objectively younger, with less ingrained responsibilities. The photographs from that time have a certain look, which explains why people are buying older phones (and cameras) to replicate that feel.

The instant film - be it Polaroid or FujiFilm Instax - will never go out of style, even though smartphones have surpassed it in technical image quality a long time ago. It’s the look that people want: a feel that isn’t of this reality, because our reality it too burdensome to bear. That’s how instagram came to its immense popularity, isn’t it? Nostalgic filters to make a photo look not of this present. I too have rose-tinted fondness for the early days of instagram.

Respect the Thanksgiving

It’s November, and you know that means: it’s officially Christmas season. Well, not in my house! In this rented studio of mine, we have respect for the major holiday before Christmas. That’s right, I am talking about Thanksgiving. The Christmas tree (and decorations) goes up after the fourth Thursday of November, not before. There won’t be any Mariah Carey on the music rotation. And if I see Santa at the mall available for pictures - before Thanksgiving, I am punching him in the throat (tongue fully in cheek).

I get it: the Christmas atmosphere is pretty awesome. To get two months of it - from the beginning of November to end of the year - stretches out that specialness. I certainly like Christmas more than Thanksgiving. The latter doesn’t have songs to compete with the many famous tunes related to Christmas (shoutout the woman being horny for Santa). Aren’t Thanksgiving decorations simply autumnal-themed? Pumpkin spice latte can never compete with the evocative Starbucks holiday cups. (Or for the folks on the American political right: Christmas cups.)

You know what does respect Thanksgiving? Capitalism. The local Walmart may already have Christmas decorations up, but it hasn’t forgotten that it’s (day after) Thanksgiving that brings in the biggest revenue of the year. It seems like Black Friday has morphed from Friday after Thanksgiving to an entire month of sales and consumerism. These big box stores all have Black Friday sales way before the actual day. Take the Walmart example: if you join their membership program, you get first access to “Black Friday” sales on the second Wednesday of November (that’s tomorrow).

Black Friday is the best time to do your Christmas shopping. If you’re the frugal, non-procrastinating type.