Here’s what happened: I was on a ride I do often from the Upper West Side downtown, stopped at a light on the far left side of 9th Avenue, in the mid-forties, where the Lincoln Tunnel traffic bunches up. It’s congested along here, but I still prefer it to going anywhere near 7th Avenue in the forties, and if you’re heading south, you’ve got to go somewhere.

I was in the left parking lane, next to a parked car, with a stopped taxi on my right. An apparently-Chinese man on a bike came up on my left, heading into the intersection, apparently thinking he’d clear? Not concerned about why I might be stopped? Oblivious to all the pedestrians? Who knows. In any case, he didn’t clear, and he got wedged in a drainage plate in the corner dip. He fell over to his left onto a bunch of people waiting to cross the street; he reached out to grab onto me (because I was there); I, and my bike, fell over on top of him.

Nobody was hurt, no pedestrians complained, everyone just helped each other up, Chinese guy and I checked to make sure we were both okay, and we all went on our way. But now I can say I’ve been in an accident!

Read their page and at first it just seems like the typical boring web-service copy, until you come to the words “screenshots of work performed.” This is where you swallow hard, and click for more information. You learn that for “only a dollar a day per employee,” you can have comprehensive automated reports on what your employees are doing, including automated screenshots from their computers and reports of their keystroke activity.

If this is what we’ve come to — already, in 2012, not in The Dystopian Future, but now — well, f*ck me, I’m moving to the moon colony. What sort of company would say to itself, “hey, we’ve got to figure out a way to build a loyal and productive workforce,” and would then pick this way?

View Two Bridges Brooklyn Bike Loop in a larger map

This is almost exactly ten miles — long enough to get some real cardio exercise, but short enough to do in about an hour. (Plus there’s excellent coffee at the 3-mile and the 7-mile marks.)

Soft Apocalypse,

There are references to an orderly, well-run consumer society for the very wealthy, who live behind gates more or less the way we live now, but we readers never see those people directly; we spend our time among a dispossessed, squatting uncertain underclass whose members look uncomfortably like us. They’ve been to college, they remember what we remember from the 1990s and 2000s, and yet they live on and near the streets, are menaced day and night, are almost always hungry.

I enjoyed the fact that the book was set in Georgia, in places I recognize, mostly in the pine woods of east Georgia between Macon and Savannah. But I won’t tell you any more; read it for yourself.

For home bandwidth (much of which I federate out to mobile devices via wireless), Time Warner Cable gets a piece of me, for a level of home Internet service I would rate as “meh.” I’m paying AT&T twice, for iPhone 3G and for iPad 3G. And on top of that, I’m paying Clear for a Sierra Wireless 3G/4G hotspot that I can’t depend on (the service itself is generally okay, but the device can’t hold either a charge or a connection, and it takes 3 minutes to reboot). My monthly data total, I’m amazed to report, is upwards of $170, and I’m still pissed off at least a dozen times a month.

When I’m in the UK for extended periods, things feel simpler. I carry a 3 Wireless Internet hotspot (a Huawei device, vastly superior to the Sierra Wireless) in my pocket, and run everything (laptop, iPhone and iPad data) off of that. I have to make sure to keep it charged, which is a minor pain, but the device (unlike my Sierra Wireless) runs fine when plugged in, and charges fast.

In that environment, I know exactly how much data I’m using, and can easily top up if I start to run out. It isn’t necessarily cheaper — even without paying for home broadband, my data cost in a month in the UK would be about the same as in the US if I used as much data as I “wanted” — but that’s with much heavier out-and-about use than I experience when I’m in my own city, and in any case I’d have the ability to decide how much to use.

Someone has to solve this problem, and I’m not sure who will, since the core consequence of things as they are is that people like me spend more than we should, and the providers have no incentive to see that changed. On top of that, everyone in the US hates their broadband and wireless providers, for unfriendly customer service, account restrictions, and what feels like illogical pricing.

To a large extent, these customer dissatisfactions are driven by the sales model in the US (which rolls the cost of the device into your monthly fee, and then sentences you to indentured servitude until you pay it off), and by the bundling of access rights with the device (which keeps you married to your carrier forever). As a result of these things, buying a mobile device in the US is more like buying a mattress than buying, say, a lawnmower. The US model is complex and bureaucratic, and the information market is clouded, effectively resulting in a transfer of rents from you and me to the carriers, on top of the actual market-rate payment for services.

Still, even in the US, I could imagine a company that made mobile simpler. There’s no reason why a US carrier couldn’t say “Buy as many devices from us as you want for a fair price, and then you can use a common data pool for all of them, topping it up when you need to.” If someone did, that would be genuinely transformational, and they’d have a line out the door.

In the meantime, we have to content ourselves with half-measures. I just signed up for the AT&T tethering plan on my iPhone (yeah, I know, I gave up the unlimited data). I now have 5GB per month to use, combined, for data services on my phone itself and on my laptop and whatever devices I tether to it. If I go over (unlikely), the overage charge is more than, but not absurdly more than, what I’d be paying per GB on 3 Wireless. So it’s a start.

My first thought was “that’s a terrible idea, you’ll rust it,” but then again I ride around in rain and salt anyway and it doesn’t rust from ordinary use, so probably washing it down isn’t going to hurt it. And indeed it didn’t. The hot water got almost all the loose salt, sand, and muck off, and made a good dent in the various oily smears in inaccessible places that I usually just assume will stick around indefinitely.

I let it drip dry for a bit, gave it a rough wipedown with an old towel, and then lubed the chain, which I always figured would be a messy process but (thanks to the lesson I got from my local bike shop) basically amounts to letting tiny droplets fall from a nozzle onto the edge of the chain as you slowly rotate the pedals backwards. It took about 90 seconds, and based on how well it rode when I was finished. I apparently did it right.

I gave it a bath (in the bathtub), had a broken spoke replaced, and had the hinge tightened (my local bike shop was kind enough to tighten everything else at the same time, so it rides snappier and firmer). I also bought a cable lock for it (now I’ve got four bike lock keys on my ring) — this kind of cable isn’t suitable for long-period or risky-location locking, but for the kind of “5 minutes popping into Duane Reade on a busy street” that I’m likely to do, it’s fine.

And now that I’m used to it again, I think I may give it an extra week.

View My daily bike route in a larger map

I take other routes from time to time, and branch off for errands and so forth; but after doing this for about a year, all other things being equal, on an ordinary day, I go exactly the same way up, and exactly the same way down — up 6th Avenue, and down 5th.

This route is the most direct, more or less. I used to divert to the bike lane along 8th Avenue (protected above 14th Street) in the morning, and the bike lane along 2nd Avenue and Allen Street (protected or separated almost the whole way) in the afternoon. But I’m a competent street rider, I’m familiar with the route, and I know most of the hazards, so I’m back on the straight route.

The morning ride is harder, both because there are some gentle uphill stretches and because traffic is heavier on 6th Avenue than on 5th. It’s a bit more than 2 1/2 miles each way — 2.6 miles in the morning, and a bit more in the afternoon.

One interesting fact is that on almost all my avenue portions, I’m riding on the left, not on the right. That’s true on 6th and 5th Avenues, and it’s also true on 1st and 2nd and 8th and 9th, because of where the bike lanes are. But even when I’m riding on 7th Avenue, which isn’t a designated bike route, or one of the avenue portions that aren’t marked for bikes, I tend to stay left rather than right — there are fewer buses and generally fewer obstructions.

Almost without exception, if there’s a bike lane provided (protected or not), that’s where I ride. Not only is it possibly required by city law (there’s been some dispute about this); it’s the place where those drivers who are looking out for cyclists are expecting to see us, so it’s where it’s safest for me to be.

And virtually the whole way, in both directions, I’m riding legally, with traffic and on the street. There is one significant exception, and that’s my confession: in the afternoon, when crossing Canal Street near the Holland Tunnel exit, I do something illegal and potentially dangerous. From the foot of Thompson Street (at 6th Avenue), I ride west across 6th Avenue, ride diagonally westward across Canal to the wrong side, do one short block against traffic on Canal, followed by a short southbound block on the sidewalk on Varick (to avoid cobblestones).

Here’s a snapshot of Google Street View facing southwest from Thompson and 6th (the starting point of this maneuver) in the direction I’m about to ride. Imagine me crossing behind the taxi you see there in the traffic, then riding along (toward the right in the frame) on the wrong side of Canal, passing the postal truck on its left.

I didn’t use to do it this way, but because of the way the street grid comes together, the alternative (cutting east to Broadway) is worse, involving more travel on more congested streets. I could, of course, walk my bike two longgggg blocks on the sidewalk, but that’s my fallback, not my starting plan.

Because of the timing of the lights at 6th Avenue and Varick, and the fact that there are usually NYPD traffic officers in both intersections, there’s not actually any traffic coming as I do my riding against traffic. And I’m actually protected by a curb cut ahead of me at Varick, so I’d be hard to hit accidentally. You can see the curb cut here, in the distance at left (live link this time):

View Larger Map

But you can believe I’m exceptionally careful before and during this tricky crossing, watching that all the traffic on Canal, 6th, Varick, and Laight Streets is behaving as expected.

If I could draw like she does, competently and freely and angst-riddenly and good-naturedly, I’d quit my job and just make cartoons about my imperfect but all-I’ll-ever-have life.

User experience consultant Whitney Hess, who brought the story to my attention, called it a case study of what happens when you don’t do your user research, and that’s probably right. We didn’t either — we went into the development of BusyTonight with plenty of technical knowledge, an understanding of the problem we wanted to solve, a solid approach, and talented staff. The thing we didn’t have (aside from “enough money,” of course, and a host of other things that would have benefited us) was any evidence that anyone would want to buy the thing we were selling. Or, to put it another way, nobody cared enough about the problem we were trying to solve to get excited about our solution. And we didn’t give enough credence to inferior but better-funded and better-marketed alternatives, which eventually ate our lunch.

I landed on my feet, as did my two partners. But it would have been nicer if instead we had made our fortunes, no?

It’s hard to empathize nowadays, when anyone with $1000 can book an advance plane ticket and be safely in India next week, more or less guaranteed. Exoticism will never entirely disappear as long as people are tribalist and closed-minded (i.e., forever); but a world in which even modestly paid manual laborers have access to cheap mobile phones is very different from Fay’s world. When she dispatched her letters, she had no guarantee they would even arrive.

In the general case, Yglesias will presumably argue (and I will agree) that restrictive zoning, parking requirements, and so forth, which have the side effects of artificially limiting the supply of housing in attractive precincts of central cities to much less than the market would prefer, lead to an artificial boost in the cost of living that distorts American settlement patterns, making urban living seem less attractive and popular than it actually is and leading (in a vicious circle) to a further concentration of policy and resources behind conventional suburban development patterns.

In this specific case, Yglesias will presumably argue that under the current state of affairs, the cost of living in high-wage metros is artificially elevated, but the extra money spent doesn’t benefit the polity in those communities — it’s skimmed off by rentiers who have an interest in maintaining policies that are at their foundation antisocial.

Obviously, as someone who was pushed out of California almost 20 years ago in part by Proposition 13, I agree, and I can’t wait for the book.

This week Giles and Sue went Victorian, and it does seem that people in Victorian days ate a lot more heavily than we do — their experience reminded me of when I moved to Atlanta in 1999, and had to adjust to a lot more fried food and meat and sweet tea than I was used to. My favorite moment was when they were served (by their cook, as a side dish, at an ordinary dinner on an ordinary evening) a plate of calf’s-ear fritters, which looked as though they’d be delicious if they had zucchini inside, but alas they didn’t. The rest of the boiled calf’s head was sitting nearby on a plate, dressed with about a pound of parsley; you can see it here.

It’s not Downton Abbey, but given the choice between this and watching Bobby Flay yelling, or Nadia G wielding her assets, I’d pick this. More on this episode here.

It’s the full-screen menus from Amazon’s streaming video product. Buttons are big, icons are intuitive, legends are added where needed, functionality is limited to the minimum necessary.

Worth adding that I’m watching this program for free, as a benefit of my Amazon Prime membership. (And by “membership” I mean I pay $79 a year for the privilege of buying five times as much from Amazon as I otherwise would, because shipping costs are eliminated as an impediment to clicking the “buy” button.)

And everything was fine. I went out on the Puma, figuring it would be the most stable on icy ground because it has the widest, nubbiest tires, a heavy frame, and a low center of gravity. But in the end I didn’t encounter any ice. Most of the travel lanes were plowed and sanded and salted, traffic was light, and I had a pretty much normal 5-mile roundtrip, via the Trader Joe’s in Chelsea. There was some slush, but I coasted through it carefully and had no undue problems.

The only problems came when I got home, and realized that both my undercarriage and my … undercarriage were covered in sandy muck, which you’ll see here. And about ten minutes after coming in, about a half-pound lump of semi-frozen sand glumped onto the floor. So my pants are now drying, and I’ll give the bike a washdown later this evening.

In 1993, I probably spent eight or ten Sunday afternoons at Ripples, driving down from LA with my boyfriend and meeting up with my Orange County friends. It was a convenient halfway point between us — in those days, I was living in West Hollywood and working in Costa Mesa, driving 50 miles each way in the carpool lane, passing Long Beach about midway — and it was nice to get out of the gay ghetto I lived in and experience another gay-friendly but not-quite-ghettoized community. And there were new people to look at and talk to, and Long Beach (population “only” 400,000) had a friendlier vibe than LA, and it was sunny and quiet and you could hear the seagulls. For a short time, we even considered buying a house in Belmont Shore, a gay-friendly neighborhood even then and much more affordable than LA, and moving.

Back then, Ripples on a Sunday was packed — it was a local hangout for gay people from Long Beach, a fun day trip from LA, and a magnet for gay people from Orange County. I was never really a bar person, and whenever I went to a gay club I felt like everyone else was prettier and more vivacious than me, not to mention in on something that nobody had bothered to let me in on. But Ripples felt incrementally warmer and more welcoming. People talked to you, and being by the beach made people a little less uptight. From LA it was a schlep, but I enjoyed it anyway.

Now it’s 20 years later, and Ripples has been suffering. It’s obvious from Tabatha’s show that some of its wounds were self-inflicted, and she did what she could to help with that (and through the happily-ever-after lens of a reality show, she appears to have succeeded). But it’s also true that the club scene has changed. One of the Ripples owners said this to Tabatha and she waved it away, but I think it’s true.

Even in 1993, which isn’t that long ago, there were many fewer ways to meet people than there are today. The modern coffeehouse scene was very new (no Starbucks, or almost none). There was no Internet as we know it now; nobody had a cellphone, let alone a smartphone; AOL charged by the minute. If you wanted to have a social experience with other gay people, you pretty much had to go to a bar and stand around until you saw someone you wanted to talk to. And so that’s what we did, even those of us who didn’t really like to drink and didn’t feel comfortable in those surroundings.

“Kids today” still go out and stand around, of course they do. The difference is that they don’t have to in order to be sociable; they have other choices. And so businesses have to be competitive, which is where I think Tabatha is right on. I hope her changes to Ripples stick, because the place meant a lot to me once — and it was open and serving gay people with a smile when I was six years old, which is a long history indeed.

Here in the Financial District, where basic services for residents were scant until recently, we cheered when the CVS at the end of my block went 24 hours. And it is nice to know that basic necessities are available at any time of the night.

But Christ, what a terrible experience! The store’s tattered and disorderly, stock of basic items is unreliable (they run out of milk!), the nicest thing I can say about the staff is that they’re not surly. The packaging design on the house brands is cringeworthy — the healthcare products dressed in an ugly barking upper-case sans-serif, the food tricked out in a cursive font I’d call “Long Island Princess.” And on the whole, shopping there doesn’t feel like a bargain, either.

Speaking of which, I was in downtown DC this week, where I had an entirely typical late-night experience at the CVS at 8th and E (see above). I tossed a bottle of CVS brand lime “sparkling water” and a bag of CVS brand roasted almonds into my basket. Big mistake! The almonds were almost inedibly stale (since resuscitated by 15 minutes in a hot oven once I got them home, but that didn’t help me in my hotel room), and the “sparkling water” LIED — it was some sort of swill concocted of water, citric acid, and aspartame.

Twenty years ago, I had a generally positive impression of the company, but now I have to steel myself before I walk into the store. Contrast this with Duane Reade, whose recent store makeover has made their premises feel inviting and current, whose house brand products (if a bit expensive) seem genuinely of premium quality, and whose staff on the whole seem capable of customer service and interested in maintaining the quality of the interaction.

In New York City, just being here and making the rent and staying open is something of a victory, but in the long run it’s not enough. If the two glorious 24-hour Duane Reades in my neighborhood were two blocks away on a snowy night, rather than four and five, respectively, I’d never set foot in my neighborhood CVS again.

A History Of The World In Six Glasses,

On the “broad historical trends” front, I didn’t learn anything I didn’t know, but Standage was good with details (for instance, I hadn’t realized the guy who yelled “aux armes!” and set off the French Revolution had a name; and I hadn’t known tea came into prominence so late) and it made a compelling read. The narrative construct felt a little forced, but since I have a sort of industrial history fetish it didn’t really bother me.

This is a topic I’ve had an interest in for a long time, and I’ve read in and around it from time to time. I’ve got two of Jeffrey Sachs’ books queued up at the moment (one of which is on the Stanford list), and once I get through them I’ll check out some of those others.

The first generation of democratized publishing came with Gutenberg. The second generation, though, didn’t come until the 20th century, when technologies like the mimeograph (and, later, the photocopier, and even later, the first-generation Macintosh) achieved wide circulation.

Now we’re in a third generation, when the Internet makes it possible for anyone to disseminate information and opinions electronically — and technologies like iBooks Author, which enable anyone to package up information into a physical or quasi-physical product, may usher in a fourth generation.

It’s important not to underestimate the emotional power of that ability to package the information you’re disseminating. Writers want to publish their books not just because they want to make money, but because they want to be associated with (to give birth to) a discrete, finished object. That impulse is so strong that I think being empowered to package up an iBook is a qualitatively different experience than simply putting up a bunch of web pages, and that would be true even if you could only give away your iBooks for free.

The Liberals are the guardians of Canada’s soul. They brought Canadians universal healthcare; they steward Canadian tolerance and respect for diversity; they protect communitarian values. All North American progressives benefit when they are strong, because they pull the midpoint of public discourse to the left. I’m proud to have been present at this symbolic rebirth of Canada’s greatest political movement, and wish the Liberal Party well as it moves into the future.

I will say, though, that the idea of expanding Global Entry is a good one. The worst part of international travel is border control, and being a Global Entry member has already saved me hours even in just a few months.

But everyone has their favorite cheap indulgences. For some people, it’s Starbucks lattes, and for others (hello, Ryan Davis), it’s ordering breakfast delivered, which (believe it or not) is almost considered normal behavior in New York.

And for me, too, there are areas of daily life where, if at all possible, I won’t compromise. I like my artisanal gin and my snooty coffee (although at the moment I’m drinking Trader Joe’s coffee out of an IKEA mug just like the 99 percent). I run the dishwasher whenever I feel like having a clean kitchen, even if it isn’t quite full yet. And I send my shirts out to the laundry.

I started sending my shirts out eons ago, in my mid-20s, during a time when I found myself really busy and was traveling a lot and it was hard to keep up with everything I had to do. It was my mother’s idea, one of her best ones ever — I recall she said at the time “It’s only a dollar, and that’s so little money, compared to the way the convenience makes you feel.” She was so right.

Rates have gone up in the past 20 years — I now pay $2.50 a shirt — but they come back in a box, neatly folded and wrapped in plastic and ready to wear, or drop into a suitcase (or a bike basket). Pull one out of the package, and it’s starched and neat. And all I had to do was walk to the corner and drop them off. The net is that I pay something like $20-$30 a month in exchange for feeling fresh and pretty every day, which I think is a fair trade.

It’s nice to see this common-sense truth reinforced by Freedom to Marry’s new Mayors for the Freedom to Marry initiative, representing dozens of mayors of all political alignments who, on behalf of their diverse cities and communities, are calling on America to stop treating a big wedge of its citizens as second class.

Chaired by the mayors of New York, Los Angeles, Boston, San Diego, and Houston — and including the mayors of Chicago, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Providence, and dozens more places large and small — this campaign makes clear that people from all across America are getting behind this basic issue of civil rights and fundamental fairness.

If your mayor isn’t on the list, please call him or her and ask why. I’m sure Jo Deutsch at Freedom to Marry would be delighted to add your city to the list — there’s a signup form for your mayor’s chief of staff right on the page.

In particular, if you live in the city of Atlanta, please call Mayor Kasim Reed. His absence from the list is troubling, given that gay people are disproportionate contributors to the economic health and vibrancy of Atlanta’s intown neighborhoods, and have helped elect him to every office he’s ever held. If I still lived in Atlanta, I’d be sitting outside his office in City Hall waiting to see him personally right now.

For me, things have been trending that way for a couple of years now, but they’ve accelerated in the past six months. At this point, the only reason I have a voice plan on my phone is that AT&T requires it in order to sell me data. And that change in my behavior is largely due to Skype.

I almost always have my MacBook Air with me, and when I do I’m usually connected to a wireless network. There are exceptions (like when I’m in transit), but usually at times like that, I don’t want to talk to anyone anyway. (Fun fact: talking on the phone when I’m in a taxi makes me nauseous.)

I realized a year or so ago that Skype call quality was better on average than the typical call quality I get on my iPhone. And by “Skype call quality,” I don’t mean “quality when talking into a professional headset,” I mean “quality when I’m sitting at a table talking in the general direction of my open MacBook.”

At that point I started using Skype occasionally, mostly for office-to-office video calls with my far-flung colleagues. But the real revelation came when I realized that call quality when connected by Skype and talking in the general direction of my open MacBook was also better than the call quality obtained by talking into my expensive office speakerphone using our corporate VoIP phone system.

At that point, I signed up for all-you-can-eat US Skype-to-phone service (which is ridiculously cheap — something like 7 bucks a month) and I haven’t looked back. Since then, I haven’t originated a call on my iPhone if I had my computer open and connected to a decent wireless network; I always use Skype. That goes double since I bought a Logitech wireless Bluetooth headset with swing-up microphone. I bought it for Dragon Dictate, but I use it much more often for Skype, and in fact I spend much of the day with it on my head and tend to forget it’s up there.

I don’t know enough about the economics of telephony to know whether Skype is paying its way, or whether it exists to exploit a (historically) temporary niche that became available as a result of a temporary divergence of interests, or lack of coordination, among phone companies, IP infrastructure providers, and regulators. In other words, maybe the regulatory hole that allows Skype to profitably deliver me something for one cent that AT&T values at 10 cents will eventually be closed.

Part of the appeal of Skype is my sense that the costs of using it fall below my threshold of concern. If something is (effectively) 10 cents a minute, I’m not as free with my use of it as I am if it’s one cent or two cents a minute, because one cent feels like “free.” (Not to mention that Skype-to-Skype, and Skype-to-1-800, are actually free; the latter probably does constitute a regulatory loophole that will eventually be closed.) I’m also less frustrated by dropped calls, imperfect sound quality, and the like.

In the meantime, though, I’m waiting for AT&T to stop pretending that everyone wants hundreds of minutes a month of call time, and make a plan available that more accurately reflects the way their network is being used today. Or maybe they won’t. (I’m waiting, but I’m not holding my breath.) And I doubt I’ll ever go back to a count-my-minutes calling model with a “phone company” as the intermediary, now that decentralized IP calling is out of the barn.

I had a conversation last week with someone that went like this — “Do you live in the District?” “Haha, who would live in the District? Services in DC are terrible!” — and all I could think was “dude, are you serious?” Or maybe his definition of “adequate public services” is different from mine. Whatever. In any case, the city looks great to me, clean and well-run, friendly to visitors, with more places to go, things to see, restaurants to try in more parts of the central city than at any time in the last generation or so.

I stayed in a hotel carved out of the 1839 General Post Office building, ate excellent barbecue, had coffee in a neighborhood that 15 years ago I avoided walking through at night, played with a terrier in an adorable pea coat, and of course enjoyed use of the bicycles maintained as a community service.

Besides, DC has the third-awesomest American city emblem, after Chicago and LA.

Thanks to the BSD DC crew for hosting — I’ll be back again soon, I’m sure.

If you live in Southbridge Towers, not only do you have a (rundown, grungy, crowded, but serviceable) supermarket in your complex, you have Jubilee 2 blocks away, Zeytuna 3 blocks away, and a bright new Gristedes 4 blocks away, all of which are well-run and well-stocked, with lots of local and organic items. Zeytuna alone has about 100 varieties of olive oil. There’s a Whole Foods 5 minutes away by cab (and right on the M22), right near those greenmarkets they’re complaining are too far away.

I get it, farm-to-table is nice to have. But, hello, a record number of New Yorkers are on food stamps — I don’t consider “farmer’s market is 8 blocks away” a serious social problem.