A Win Is A Win

Amazingly, improbably, incredibly, the Seahawks are 9-2.

It was ugly. The Giants really outplayed the Seahawks, who never really got much going.

Credit not one, not two, but three missed field goals by the Giants.

One was as regular time expired, and the other two were in OT, and any of them would have ended the game.

The Seahawks have won their last two games by a total of 5 points. This is mostly due to luck, but it's luck that has evaded the team for the past several years.

Finally things are going their way, but the Seahawks have to start playing good football again if they expect to survive in the post-season.

One thing: what the hell is up with Bay Area TV stations? Fox was advertising this game here two or three days ago. It was supposed to be a national broadcast. And what does Fox Sports show here? A Stanford basketball game. A women's basketball game.

I had to watch the play-by-play on NFL.com, and listened to OT on AM radio in the car.

W. T. F?

@$$hole

This guy gets my vote as the Asshole of the Month.

He waited in line for hours to score his Xbox 360, then immediately took it outside and smashed it with a sledgehammer, in front of everyone who had either managed to score a 'box or were still trying to get one.

Yup.

Ass. Hole.

Alternative Fuel

Real men burn peat.

Prison Fun

Man, I wouldn't want to be stuck in the prison shower with nothing but a bar of soap between me and this guy.

360

Last night after unloading all our crap from Seattle, my Dad and I went to the local Best Buy to camp out and wait for the launch of the Xbox 360. I thought we were going to be bored, but we whipped out our Nintendo DS's and played Nintendogs and Electroplankton for a few hours. When the doors opened at midnight, I threw a few low blocks while my Dad made a beeline for the counter. Our teamwork was effective, and pops emerged from the scrum a while later with a premium 360, an extra controller, and a stack of games. Since the Oriental Wife and Number One Son were still in Seattle, we fired it up and played "Perfect Dark Zero", "Call of Duty 2" and "Project Gotham Racing 3" until dawn. Our marathon gaming session was fueled by adrenaline, Guacamole Doritos and Code Red. I thought my Dad's arthritis would make him easy prey in the shooters, but the canny old bastard had a few tricks up his sleeve. I put down the controller seven hours later to stagger into work, my eyes bloodshot and bleary, a green rime of Dorito dust gathered at the corner of my mouth, rivulets of cherry-flavored softdrink running down my neck. I think Dad had a stroke.

Okay, that's all a lie.

Even I can't justify dropping $700 on a 360 and a stack of games a week after shelling out for the sweet PC rig, which won't even ship for another week.

Anyone out there score a 360 yet?

Aw, Crap

So my dad and I just drove a 14' U-Haul van from Seattle to San Francisco.

I hated driving that thing. A Ford F350 with 160,000 miles on it and a busted A/C. It was very disconcerting to have to use side mirrors while changing lanes, backing up etc.

Little did I know those mirrors would be more trouble than I suspected.

We got to the Bay Area just fine, unloaded the truck, and were heading to return it to a U-Haul center about two miles away, in Berkeley.

We were heading down a boulevard with narrow lanes, and I was having to watch traffic on my left, and parked cars, buses and trucks on my right.

Suddenly, BLAM! Something hits on right side of the truck. I see something go flying out of the corner of my vision.

I immediately pull over around the corner and get out to see what happened.

It turns out an 18-wheeler had been parked on the side of the road and our mirrors collided. My mirror was fine. The other guy's mirror... not so fine.

I can't believe I drive more than 800 miles and then, five blocks from returning the damn truck, have something happen.

Oh well. I had to mail two letters, and I made it to the post office one minute before they closed, and even scored a parking spot right out front.

Guess it was my lucky day.

A Close One

Whew. The Seahawks win a close one.

The good news: A win's a win, and they are now 8-2, the best season since 1999.

The bad news: The 49ers are possibly the worst team in football. Going into this game, they had the worst-rated offense and the worst-rated defense.

The good news: This is exactly the kind of game the Seahawks would have lost a year ago. For a while, it looked like the old Seahawks were back on the field, ready to give up another solid lead. So the fact that they actually held on is a great credit to the team.

The bad news: There are still six games to go. I cannot forget the 1999 season in which they started 8-2. But in the final six games they went 1-5.

And next week they play the 7-3 Giants.

Yikes.

Bow Down

Amid all the busyness, I do have one nice thing to look forward to: the arrival of my new HP Pavillion computer.

Oh yeah, I pulled out all the stops for this one, too. Check it:

--AMD Athlon 64-bit dual core +4200 CPU. The Athlon 64 2X family is the cream of the crop when it comes to gaming and graphics. It rolls up P4s and smokes 'em like cloves. Apart from speciality gaming rigs from overpriced vendors like Alienware, HP was the only major PC maker I found who offer the Athlon.

--1 gigabyte DDR RAM. Because anything less these days just isn't serious.

--256 megabyte Nvidia GeForce 6800 XT graphics card. This isn't the top of the line, but it was the best card offered with this model. I put more dollars towards a better CPU since you can always easily upgrade a graphics card.

--5.1 Soundblaster Audigy card. With the 5.1 speaker setup. I had never actually seriously considered doing surround sound for a PC, but the HP pricing was so attractive I just threw it in there.

--160 gig hard-drive. I would have gone for the 250 gig model but when we left China I pulled an 80 gig drive out of our old machine, so the addition of that will get me close enough.

--DVD/CD burner. With "LightScribe". That's the technology that lets you burn a title or simple graphic right on the top surface of a CD or DVD. Again, it's something I never seriously considered but it was only a few bucks more, so...

--19" flat panel LCD monitor.

So there you have it. All you chumps can just bow down to my technological, intellectual and moral superiority. Especially Robert, from whom I reclaim the Ass-Kicking PC crown.

Well, you can all bow down when the thing is actually delivered, in early December.

A Tad Busy

Over the next four days I will sell a condo, rent an apartment, fly my family to Seattle, rent a U-Haul truck, drive said U-Haul truck back down to San Francisco, drop my father off at the Oakland airport, pick my family up at the Oakland airport, and get the rest of our household belongings in from China.

Blogging may be rather light.

Real Estate

Well, today was the day for real estate deals. We pretty much signed off on a deal to sell our Seattle condo, and we were approved for an apartment in Albany, across the bay from San Francisco just next to Berkeley but with a lower level of moonbattery.

Our plan is to hunt for someplace to buy in the area. I am pretty determined about sinking the equity from our Seattle abode into something down here. It boils down to two questions: how small are we willing to go, and how far out from the city can we tolerate?

Over the weekend we went shopping in Emeryville, an up-and-coming neighborhood on the other side of Berkeley. They recently put in a really nice outdoor pedestrian mall of the Banana Republic/Williams & Sonoma variety. Above the retail strip are new 1- and 2-bedroom condos. I popped into the sales office to check out the brochure, and overheard a staffer telling another visitor that the 1-bedrooms started at $650,000 while the 2-beds were priced between $750-$850,000.

Ho. Ly. Crap.

You know you're in a crazy housing market when you see a 900 sq ft 2-bedroom condo for $410,000 and your first reaction is "Wow! That's cheap!"

Big. Ass. Burritos.

Our house-hunting expedition had an additional, unexpected payoff, which was the discovery of Chipotle, a local purveyor of fine burritos.

This isn't your typical flourescent lights, neon and sterile Taco Bell-style Tex-Mex takeout. It's all earth tones, rusted iron and light maple fixtures.

The menu is not complicated. You can have a burrito, a fajita burrito, soft or hard tacos, or a "burrito bol" -- burritos fixin's in a bowl.

Then you pick a meat. Pork, spicy beef, steak, chicken, or veggies.

Finally, top it off with a salsa, of which there are four.

And you can get margueritas, which I haven't noticed on the Taco Bell menu recently.

They've got a pretty funny ad campaign going, which actually deserves the label "edgy". You can see it at their Web site, though it takes a bit of navigation to get to the ad page (I think it's under the "fun" section).

For example, there's this slogan: "Donde est la casa de big-ass burritos?"

Or: "20 ounces isn't the drink, it's the burrito."

And "The first half is fun. The second half is masochism."

I can't stop: "A complete, four-course meal in a handy tortilla carrying pouch."

Okay, last one: "Usually, when you roll something this good, it's illegal."

Cars

Oh, one thing about this city is the amazing amount of money floating around. We're talking crazy money here, folks.

I tend to notice this manifested in cars. Porsches are like Volkswagens here. In fact, there are so many Porsches here that if I had a million dollars, the last car I would buy is a Porsche because everyone has one. Seriously, this morning I saw a homeless dude pushing a Porsche with a trunk full of empty cans.

In the first week we were here I came home one day and there was a Bentley GT parked at the meter in front of our complex. A Bentley parked at a meter.

Other hot cars that seem extremely popular, apart from BMWs and other normal fixtures of a highly monied ecosystem, are the Nissan 350 Z and Murano SUV, the Mercedes CLS 500 "four-door coupe" and the Subaru WRX/STi. Normal cars that are highly represented for whatever reason are the Prius, Saturn Vue SUV and, yes, the Jeep Liberty.

I've seen a handful of new Mustangs, one Pontiac Solstice and zero GTOs.

Digs

I think we've found a place to live. Our temporary apartment has been quite nice, actually. It's a bit small but everything is spanking new and the location is hard to beat -- one block from the waterfront, a 10-minute walk from SBC Stadium, etc.

But life smack dab in the middle of the big city isn't really our thing. About a week ago we started focusing on Albany, a small city of 17,000 people right next to Berkeley.

It has an interesting dynamic. The east-west strip of Solano Ave. is home to funky coffee shops, art galleries and small restaurants. Running north-south is the larger, more commercialized drag of San Pablo Ave., which has everything from Mickey Dee's to REI.

Albany is known as one of the most kid-friendly towns in the Bay Area. It has the best-rated schools. Oddly, this hasn't yet translated into stratospheric property prices. Oh, they're high by national standards but very reasonably by local ones.

While there aren't any bad neighborhoods in Albany, the streets can be a mix of older, grotty homes and ones that have obviously been recently remodeled with modern paint schemes and landscaping.

We had a fairly depressing week looking at lots of 2-bedroom apartments, which were either too small, too old, smelled too much like rancid cat piss, or some combination of those three. One place had a nice, split-level layout but the appliances hadn't been updated in 20 years. The owner told us the microwave didn't work so we should bring our own. WTF? For $1,500 a month you can't spend a grand to put new appliances in? Then screw you.

So today a listing pops up on craigslist for a 3-bedroom Albany unit. The price was lower than anything we'd seen so far, too. It turned out to be a really nice unit, with relatively recent carpet, a clean kitchen and bath, decent appliances, covered parking and on-premises laundry. It's three blocks from a kid's park, three blocks from a major shopping center with a Barnes and Noble, Trader Joe's and Starbucks, and four blocks from the rapid transit into the city.

But like I said, it's not perfect. The complex is next to the rapid transit line, and a train rumbles by about every 10 minutes. Thankfully, the unit we looked at is on the other side of the complex, so the noise is minimal. And although the interior is nice, the building itself is old and frankly pretty ugly. Oh well, you can't have everything and this has probably 80 percent of what we want. Plus, we intend on eventually buying so it should at least hold us for the next six months.

And Another Thing

Oh yeah, and San Francisco voters also passed a symbolic resolution stating that military recruiters are not welcome at public schools.

That means the enlightened and benevolent populace here thinks its just fine for people elsewhere to die to protect their freedoms, even the ones they give up, like the right to bear arms.

This city thinks it's immoral to defend the country and they think it's immoral to defend yourself.

Bizarre.

'Tis The Season

I got just three words for you guys: Eggnog lattes, bitches!

They don't serve this in Beijing Starbucks, that's for damn sure!

Oh Great

Well, my new city has just voted to forcibly disarming its citizens.

If you sell guns in San Francisco, you are now out of business. If you own a gun in San Francisco, you now have to hand it over to authorities, presumably with no compensation. I'm sure I don't need to point out that the gun owners most likely to commit crimes with their guns did not come to possess them lawfully and are not very likely to give them up voluntarily.

I can't even begin to imagine how this is remotely constitutional. I guess there's precedent, though. Chicago and D.C. have passed similar bans. And of course they now have zero violent crime, right?

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Four out five Constitutional scholars agree that Trident fights cavities. But they also say that the Founding Fathers' intent was clear -- that they thought the right of average citizens to possess firearms was important enough to list right after the amendment guaranteeing free speech. For those who argue about the Second Amendment's wording about militias, that reasoning ignores the fact that the amendments enumerate rights of individuals, not governments or their various organs.

Weak

One reason I moved back to the States was easier access to fine beverages such as Diet Lemon Coke and Diet Vanilla Coke.

Now, less than two weeks after I move back, Coke announces it will eliminate those drinks from its line-up.

Oddly, they are launching Diet Black Cherry Vanilla Coke. If people don't like vanilla in their Coke, are they more likely to like it if you add black cherry to it?

Office behavior

Here is a real conversation between colleagues that transpired on my first day in the office:

"Could you turn your speakerphone down?"

"Could you suck my ass?"

Today, there was a brief struggle as three of us advocated closing the blinds to prevent morning glare in our eyes and across our computer screens, while one guy wanted them open to let in more light. Since there were three of us, we won, much to the displeasure of our colleague, who had this comment:

"You guys are just three little bitches."

To which, the "suck my ass" guy from above yelled out:

"Yeah? Well, you're the BIG bitch!"

Things were made worse by the fact that the last woman in the office was transferred to Los Angeles and had her last day at work yesterday.

Everyone is now referring to us as the San Francisco Men's Penal Colony, which provided endless grist for the gross-out mill today.

I think I'm going to like working here.

San Francisco

Well, we arrived in San Francisco five days ago. Things have been pretty crazy. I walked into my new office on Monday. On Wednesday and Thursday I had two days of back-to-back meetings for 12 hours. hen had two days of 12-hour meetings. And despite this being like the most wired city in the galaxy, our wireless Internet connection is crap, especially at night. I haven't had any time to even start looking for an apartment, much less blog. I do have lots of stuff that I will get out eventually, though. Thanks to all those who kept the faith and hit the site despite the dearth of postings.