66. Freakish weather

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Weather

For two days I've been scheduling to avoid forecast bad weather, and for two days the bad weather has been dodging us. Yesterday it simply passed south of us and then went up into the Sierra where it can actually do the most good. But today it parted over the city with streams of stormy weather passing both north and south at the same time. I kept playing with the radar images to see if I was missing something, but no. 

We got enough rain to clean the streets -- which is really important given the state of our streets -- but not the kind of deluge we were promised. Now it's late afternoon and I'm finally out at Peet's. The silver lining here is that I got a lot of work done at home, mostly updating HOA documents and doing prep for our pro forma budget, but also doing laundry and dishes and the like. I'm in good shape for the weekend. Yea?

The Mac & me

I keep forgetting to add something to what I wrote before about getting into programming back in the 1980s, but I need to start with statistics from today. Besides all the iPhones and iPads Apple sells today, to my amazement, they also sell around 5 million Macintosh computers each quarter. Since 2006 they have not sold less than a million a quarter and have exceeded the 5 million mark five times. When I bought my first Mac, Apple had produced about 500,000 of the machines. They passed the 1 million mark in September of 1987, about three years after the launch. So in the first three years they sold as many machines as they do today every month. It was such a small community back then.

I bought my Mac in 1985. I started writing about HyperTalk in 1987. I started working for Apple at the Multimedia Lab in 1988 and by 1990 I was working for Apple in Cupertino (testing a new color version of HyperCard for the Apple IIgs). In 1987 I took a little personal pilgrimage to Cupertino just to gaze at the Mariani 1 building, that the documentation for my Macintosh informed me was the company headquarters. In 1990 I was eating lunch every day at the Mariani 1 cafeteria, and some years later I was working all-nighters in that building for a system software update. 

On Market Street

Now I need to say more about the location of my new Peet's. I already said that it faces a busy stretch of Market Street, SF's main drag. The cafe is on the ground floor of the Marriott Marquis Hotel. It borders the mid-block pedestrian way that leads to the Jewish Museum and then the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts and Moscone Convention Center. On the other side of the pedestrian way is the Four Seasons Hotel & Residences. All this is setup for my next charming story.

As I was leaving Peet's after writing the text above, I was walking down the sidewalk in front of the Four Seasons when I saw a guy standing in the middle of the sidewalk with his pants down taking a dump. This time I didn't get the full defecation visual -- for which I'm grateful because I happen to know that visual sticks with you longer than you might imagine (and I've walked a lot of dogs in my life.) 

Now I don't care how crazy you are, if you shit on the sidewalk in front of the Four Seasons it's less answering the call of nature and more some kind of statement. Alas, I'm sure Michel Foucault would have something interesting to say on this subject but all I can do is report the incident.

Next - 67. Music & TV