2019.01.26 – Traffic

Post run coffee after a less stressful run

On Thursday – I nearly got hit by a car during my morning run. This was in the residential part of the neighborhood where every intersection is a four way stop, and all of the speed limits are 25mph. Yet, it is such a common sight for people to speed down the roads doing 40mph and blowing through the stop signs. This is what nearly happened to me. Given the vast amount of crazy spandex I have, I rarely wear clothing out that would make me hard to see.

What I was wearing on my run Thursday

As you can see, it is not like I am going to blend into the urban jungle of concrete with this. Lots of contrast and crazy colors. And it is not like I run at an ultra-fast pace where it would be hard to judge how fast I am going. Between 8:30-9:00 min/mile is what is sustainable for me – and honestly given my weight and build it is a pretty respectable time to sustain.

Nearly every week someone doesn’t stop or yield and gives this “I’m sorry” wave thinking that will make everything better. It’s 50:50 if they continue going or stop giving you that look like they are doing you a favor. To me this is the part that just makes my blood boil. SF already has one of the highest pedestrian accident rates in the nation.

The only time you should ever give that “I’m sorry” wave is when you honestly fucked up. Not stopping for a stop sign or not yielding for pedestrian traffic in a marked crosswalk (especially in a residential neighborhood) are times when you can’t claim you are sorry. You actively made a decision that could put others in harm – own up to it.

People also want to treat the neighborhood roads like raceways. I see this nearly every day when I commute to the office. Every day on Fulton I see people speeding down doing 50+ mph on a 30mph road that is next to Golden Gate Park. I see more and more people running _really_ red lights. Or the best are people who race from light to light on the times roads like Great Highway, Sunset, and Oak/Fell. Just go the speed limit and you hit everyone green without stopping. All I can think of is where are you in a rush to get to?

SF wants to reduce deaths and injuries on the streets, but there is never enforcement. When are we going to say enough is enough? But enough of this – here is more of my ass.

2019.01.03 – Yay for slow tablets

Before Coffee

Last night was a disaster. On the way home I decided to stop by Trader Joe’s in Stonestown and grab stuff to make dinner, or so I thought. The students from SFSU were back in town and that store was picked over of nearly everything I needed. Time for plan b – Smart and Final and even that backfired. The only chicken left were breasts, ether with ribs or boneless/skinless and I needed drumsticks and thighs. On top of that, I have never seen the meat section in such disarray that it wasn’t worth it.

I should have taken a picture and sent something to their HQ since this was rather unacceptable. But instead I decided to just put back the one item I already grabbed and head home to drop off my car and grab some Ramen. Only to find out that the place I wanted to go to was closed for the night for some reason – sigh.

After hitting up a taqueria I head back home and realized I didn’t have much to do. Instead of playing a game or watching stuff on TV/Netflix/YouTube I decided to grab the Kindle Fire that is velcroed to the kitchen cabinet and read.

After coffee

This is something I really just haven’t done in a while. I have been trying to read more on my phone, but I quickly realized tonight it is not the same experience. The biggest change is that the Kindle Fire is so slow that I have nearly no apps on it outside of the Amazon ecosystem (Hey – it is used mainly to look up recipes and for timers).

Before I knew it I was halfway through reading a book that has been on my queue to read. There was something mentally uplifting about this. It has felt like my ADD has taken over my life for the last year and has been hard to just focus. I think a lot of the distraction is the constant notifications or the need to check if someone has responded on social media.

Then it hit me – Technology is one part of why my ADD has been worse. The constant notifications. The barrage of emails. The constant @channel abuse on slack. And worse, the addiction of apps that designers knowingly do to make sure you go back to that application to get your dopamine hit.

Time to face the day

Removing Facebook from my Phone is something I had to do out of keeping my mind sane due to the negative feedback cycle. Twitter is easy avoid since I can’t open it in public or work due to the mass amount of adult content I have on my feed there. Even though Instagram is still there – it doesn’t seem to consume my time or cause the rage I get from Facebook. Lastly, MeWe is just too new to have enough of a distraction aspect to it that I feel like I can safely ignore it (I might have to revisit that if it gains more steam).

Maybe 2019 will be the year of Phone App bankruptcy. Removing all of the distraction whore apps from it. The phone and social media are not 100% to blame for my focus issues, but they are as slice of it.

Just knowing that I was able to sit down last night and read made a big difference.

2019.01.02 – Fear of Facebook

You are not going to see this one on Facebook.

Typically I will post up my selfies to Facebook without fear most of the time. But recently more and more people I know are getting wrangled in Facebook jail over images that used to be fine. Having read the current rules, there is part of me that wants to post this and argue with them that my penis is not erect and that I am not soliciting sex. But I know this will be a lost cause since the human reviewers do not share the same social norms as my community. Maybe I should get some wrestling mats and then say I have the toughest sport of them all, wrestling with getting up in the morning.

Yet, this will go on to Instagram and not trigger off any warnings. It is crazy how the two platforms owned by the same company can have different norms and algorithms.

More wrestling with my coffee

Other than worries about getting the ban hammer over spandex selfies – my motivation is nearly zero. Which ironically is the temperature by the office. According to my weather app it is 0 Celsius by the office. My debate right now is do I want to deal with cold on the motorcycle or drive the cage. I’ll probably take Matte in, but I will have to bundle up.

I love how my ass looks in singlets

After watching the news for a bit while writing this, it reminded me that I still have no major New Year resolutions. The question is, should I come up with some? I am thinking no. Outside of attempting a Triathlon this year I don’t think I have anything that warrants a big goal.

Don’t come between and my coffee, it’s the only thing keeping me sane

2018.12.07 – Time to break the silence

I have not been posting much up to my blog lately. This has mostly been to the funk I have been in over the last few months. Also I have gotten feedback from many that they refuse to click out the walled gardens of most social media platforms which lead me to feeling like this was a waste of time.

Over the last few months we have see Facebook change their Community Standards Policy: Link to Queerty article

Tumblr is banning adult content: Link to The Verge article

We have lost Craigslist and the personal section: Link to a Washington Post article

The effects on free speech due to FOSTA/SESTA are real. I guarantee you that your federal representative and senators voted for it – there was very little opposition to it. This added fuel to this fire and now years later we are seeing it ignite. Let’s not delude ourselves as a community – we are caught up in it and many people you know have been fighting the effects of this law.

What we need to do is get ourselves distributed again. Not let our community in the had one of a few mega corporations like Facebook and Verizon have the stranglehold on how we communicate. All they need to do to erase us is change their moderation policy – and with the broad strokes Section 230 gives them, I am afraid we have very little to fight back on.

Paying for hosting isn’t that expensive. It costs me less than a night out drinking to operate my sites for the year. If you have the balls to tell me this is too expensive, and you are holding a top-shelf cocktail in your hand at a SF bar I will be calling out your bullshit.

If you say it is too inconvenient to click a link to a friend’s externally hosted site – I will call your bullshit. This is the complacency that is about to get many communities silenced.

At the same time be weary about where you jump ship to. The world is not safe – know who you are giving this sensitive content to. We are entering a time where the US seems to be getting more socially uptight again and people will use it against you.

Over the next month I am going to spend some time getting both my SFW and NSFW (this) site updated and make this my primary social media outlet.

2018.09.17 – Vacation is over

Realizing that I have 13 business days of e-mails to filter

Over the last 18 days I was on a road trip and now the reality of having to catch up and go back to work is kicking in. Sometime between now and this weekend I will get my Silicon Valley Pride pictures done (since I didn’t have time before the trip to finish them) and start slowly typing my journal from the trip. I am going to get back more to my normal pattern in a bit.

The more Facebook friendly angle.

2018.07.08 – Taking Control over Twitter

Just a casual Sunday

Twitter has been an outlet of Social Media that I have just given up on. The reason why is that so many people that I follow retweet a lot of stuff without any comments added. As a result, my feed is just 95% retweets with very little original content. For the most part, the only time I cared about Twitter is when I got push notifications from a very select few about their tweets or a DM on it. In the end, it became useless for me.

But yesterday noticed that Twitter allows one to block all retweets from a single user. The next thing I thought is someone must have an chrome extension or tool to do this. After a quick ‘let me google this’ I found LifeHacker had a javascript snippet to drop into the debugger to toggle this mode on for everyone you follow. Link to article.

This was a life changer for me. My twitter feed has slimmed down a lot. And while retweets with comments are still there – this was the exact behavior I wanted since I often like to see what people think of something they are sharing. You still get the x people have liked a tweet things – but compared to what my feed looked like before, this is now manageable. I have a feeling I will be using Twitter a lot more now.

And in other news – I never linked the following two galleries on my SFW site here and probably should:

Independence Day Fireworks in SF

 

Weekend Road Trip to Lava Beds

2018.05.21 – Letting my hair down

Letting my hair down after my weekend road trip

1200 miles in 52 hours. Yesterday alone was nearly 600 miles of riding that contained 4 mountain passes and 100 miles of 30-40mph headwinds. On top of that my chain decided to go from being good but nearing the end of the adjustment range to OMG – REPLACE ME NOW in the last 150 miles of the trip.

But what a lovely trip it was. I will be posting up a trip report and pictures tonight or tomorrow. But it’s time to shower and get my ass to the office.

2018.02.25 – DMV hassles.

Come on coffee!

Yesterday I attempted to sell my car. However due to a huge mess with the California DMV, CarMax is unable to buy my car until California has things updated right. So despite having a free and clear title in hand I get to deal with the DMV tomorrow. *tears hair*

The good news is the new espresso machine has seemed to adjusted the grinder dosing (yes, the machine is self-learning). The coffee that is coming out of it is a lot better than my old machine. It appears that this grinder is grinding the coffee finer than the last machine. Also – the coffee is hotter. I was starting to suspect the old machine was reaching its last legs even before it broke. With it so cold, I decided that I needed to pre-warm my gear before hopping on Matte.

Coffee can be dangerous stuff, right?

And I just did things for me today. Hopped on Matte and seeked out breakfast. I went to Apple Fritter and got a bacon hash and (finally) an Apple Fritter. This was the first time ever that they had apple fritters available when I have been there – since they often sell out. Once I finished my Fat Dog Agenda – I then headed up to the Treasure Island Flea – which is now the Treasure Island Fest.

Unfortunately this name change appears to be bad. One of my regular vendors I go to for tea and spices said next month will be their last. It has felt like for a bit that they are going higher end – and this is bad for me since it was one of the reasons I attended. Also I have noticed a drop in the more down to earth type of stands. Not everything needs to be 10 buck bars of organic goat milk soap or artisanal cupcakes. Sometimes we all need the cheap little stuff in our lives.

On the way back I stopped by Wicked Grounds. I noticed that I sometimes feel strange for having a life and interests outside of kink. Recently I have not been as active in the community due to many reasons. But also, I am tired of attending play parties and having nothing happen. My rule of thumb is if you want to have a scene with me, say something to me before and I can make it work. But I have hit the point where I have too much in my life to Stand and Model at an S&M party and have nothing happen.

Now I get to clean up the mess I made digging though lots of old mail for the hassles of yesterday.

2018.02.23 – New Espresso Machine

Yay – new espresso machine!

Yes, I am addicted. For the last two weeks, I went without having a super-automatic espresso machine after my old one decided to stop working. I am not complaining too much for getting 13 years out of it. I realized how much more coffee I was going through making French Press and I also missed the taste of espresso. It was time to order a new one. So I claimed any recognition points at work for amazon gift cards and bought one – no one will ever argue over saving 300 bucks on a device like this.

Now that my coffee is back to being controlled by robots – I will have more time for selfies again.

But thinking about it – I think I have a fetish of being controlled by robots. There will be more info about a personal project I am working on with a friend control me in sexual situations. Stay tuned.

2018.02.19 – Day Off

It was too cold to go running this morning so I just basked in the day light in my nice warm apartment as the sun rose over Lone Mountain.

As I was waking up I was thinking to myself this morning, “Why am I beating myself up?” Little setbacks lately have been ended up as major issues. I really need to stop doing that. But why is this happening?

I think this is one of the downsides of living in San Francisco. You are surrounded by many successful people (or at least they portray that they are successful) in both your personal life and corporate life. When you have friends who do porn, who are perfect looking, who have no issues hooking up – it amplifies all of your imperfections. The people I know who look up to me often are shocked that I have these insecurities – but I do.

And it is the same thing on the business side. I meet up with people who seem to be successful entrepreneurs, or they are successful in a specific niche. There are days I ask myself, what I am missing? What could I be doing different to tap into this market?

This all leads to having any setback feel like a huge blow. Be it my weight or issues with my career. By all means I am doing well on both fronts. When all you have to compare yourself are externally perfect – it is hard to keep a balanced perspective on your life. I need to break this cycle.

This is also a reminder to everyone that what someone externally portrays themselves as is not always the reality