Notes

Man Resting

2012-01-12T13:04:00.000-08:00

January 2012
Man Resting
BAMBOO pen tablet

Happy 2011 -> 2012!

2011-12-31T23:01:00.000-08:00

2011 turned out to be a pretty good year — despite all the natural and financial disasters in the world. The revolutions were pretty cool. Also Fidel Castro survived another year.

* A year ago we were five months pregnant and camping in Hawaii with two kids (10 and 2). It was a lot of fun, in retrospect.

* At the SF Erlang Factory I convinced Joe Armstrong to try Rdio (http://www.rdio.com/people/erlang).

* Then we got about a third of the first floor of our house finished, in order to start a co-op preschool there.

* Then I fulfilled a major dream: installed an oval pot rack.

* Then Dmitri Gorchev died. (Correction: he died in 2010)

* Toured the new Bay Bridge with Manish.

* Then we had a baby! Daria:

* We got most of the living room painted.

* Then I turned 30.

* With all the baby-having we forgot to change the oil in our Subaru Outback and the turbo went out of business.

* So we had a month of public transportation. We visited museums and chased the F on Embarcadero. With two strollers!

* I discovered Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.

* Arkadii the Cat (16) went on to the next life.

* Then we got a turbo put in at Brannan Auto Experts.

* Redevelopment finally entered full swing on 7th street near West Oakland BART.

* We went to Yosemite in December. I'll never go to Yosemite during summer again.

* I quit my job of over three years at Rdio.

* Started a new job at Connect.Me.

* Our son Boris turned three.

* Macbook Pro -> Thinkpad X1 with Ubuntu 11.10.

* Started work on the remaining 2/3 of the downstairs.

* Harmony read 26 books this year. This is important, since, apparently, not all children grow up reading.

I don't really read anymore. Somehow I finished these:
- Monday begins on Saturday by Strugatsky brothers (I read this book every year, in January)
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- Жизнь без Карло Дмитрия Горчева ((Correction: I read this last year)
- Matsushita Leadership by John Kotter
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy

* My wife presented me with a Kindle Fire for Christmas, so I'll be reading more. I already read a few of the free Sherlock Holmes stories (better in English, it turns out).

* 2012 will be the year of Connect.Me, which is super exciting.

* Happy 2012!

The Summer 7th Street Won the Lottery

2011-10-04T14:13:00.000-07:00

This summer 7th Street in West Oakland finally won the lottery and hired construction crews to fix its sidewalks. The crews dug them up, put up no parking signs ("no stopping any time until 9-2"), orange cones, wooden stakes and forms, and left. Things have looked like this for the past five weeks:

I'm not worried. It allows me to reminisce of my native USSR, where few construction projects were ever finished and the sidewalks, when they were eventually paved, they were paved with asphalt. USSR nostalgia is far from the only benefit of this crying administrative clusterfuck. Consider this:

Sold Out

2011-05-25T17:16:00.000-07:00

Didn't bike to work on Bike to Work Day

2011-05-12T12:26:00.000-07:00

Kankles 4 Life

2011-04-15T11:47:00.000-07:00

Natural Habitat

2011-03-11T14:11:00.000-08:00

A Ural motorcycle in its natural habitat. Marychevka village, near Samara, Russia, September 2009.

Why do Mormons build temples?

2011-03-08T12:20:00.000-08:00

Sink From the Outhouse Era

2011-01-31T13:00:00.000-08:00

Spotted at the Sink Factory in Berkeley. Pre-1910, would cost about $5000, had it been for sale. It was brought in by a customer for faucetry rehab—$1000.

Ace Cafe

2011-01-28T05:47:00.000-08:00

Omega Salvage

2011-01-15T23:57:00.000-08:00

West Oakland Safety

2011-01-14T19:35:00.000-08:00

Most people who come to this blog via search engines are looking for information about "West Oakland safety".

Oakland has a ridiculously high murder rate — a symptom of the economic predicament of a high concentration of poor people in a rich country that was founded by racist slaveowners with guns — that's true, but victims do not appear to be chosen at random, they appear to be on the losing end of argument resolution between acquainted parties.

Sometimes victims are confused for an acquainted party.

Sometimes people are shot as part of a gang initiation ritual — usually the victims are older (35-45) black men walking to or from a liquor store.

But Oakland isn't Ciudad Juárez. If you live in an affluent neighborhood, home invasion is your primary concern. If you live in the ghetto or Downtown-ish, your concern is being robbed at gunpoint in the street. Home invasions are less common in poor neighborhoods, because there is less to steal in the homes of poor people. Robberies of homes with marijuana plantations constitute a notable exception to this hypothesis.

This, by the way, is one of the reasons why I support total decriminalization of marijuana: to stop marijuana-related home robberies. Other reasons include freeing state funds used to hunt and imprison offenders, stop the need for trafficking weed via Mexico, tax it, and to stop the hypocrisy — those who don't smoke don't do it because it's illegal. They don't do it because they don't want to.

I used to blindly wonder how sixteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds so casually and predictably become murderers and the murdered in one of the most opportunity-rich lands in the Land of Opportunity. How dumb do you have to be to embark on a path that almost guarantees either prison or death at an age reserved for education and discovery? — I used to think. Then, while hanging out at the Alta Bates NICU for three months, I discovered that it was not uncommon for babies to be born into the custody of the State of California. Little babies, they don't know anything yet. Some have mommies and daddies and grandparents with flowers and little puffy bears — pink or maybe blue, but definitely made in China — and some have the State of California. Like, imagine if your parents were the DMV.

Imagine being born in a trench at a World War I battlefield. Your odds of living long enough to learn about the possibility of a meaningful life look very, very grim.

Anyway, let's define "safe". You're safe when you are unlikely to be anyone's target. You're safe when you walk alone in the dark and you are more likely to fall into an open manhole than to get mugged.

The area around West Oakland Bart station is not safe for walking alone in the dark. It is a little bit safe for walking alone in the light.

The West Oakland Bart station is surrounded by public housing projects. Robbing pedestrians is an excellent income model for young men who are born into the world where they will spend a substantial portion of their life in prison, survival permitting. These young men don't have a chance, nor much of a choice, really. They will risk their lives to get your iPhone. A human life does not appear to be worth much to them, but killing you probably represents an inconvenience. Plus, once murdered, you can't be mugged again, so your death also constitutes a loss of future revenue.

Being murdered while being mugged is possible, but — statistically speaking — unlikely.

If you're a woman, you might also get raped.

I've lived in West Oakland for over three years before I should have gotten mugged, had I not run away. The taller and bigger you are, the less likely it will happen. Chances are, though, if your daily commute involves walking alone after dark, sooner or later you will be breaking yourself.

The trick is not to walk. Biking is an excellent alternative. I used to ride the two blocks from BART to home, just to widen the safety corridor. I got sick of dealing with a bike on the train, all for a 50-second ride. So I started carrying a Mace gun and a knife. I also called the city and got them to repair the street light on 7th Street that was broken for at least three years. I slowly began to despise gun-control laws, because gun laws take guns away from law-abiding citizens only. Criminals — by definition! — don't concern themselves with gun control laws. If all Bay Area residents were like this lady, there would not be any muggings.

I began to report every single sufficiently-sized pile of illegally-dumped trash I encounter to Oakland Public Works. That couch remnant miraculously gone from 7th and Henry? I've emailed a picture of it to pwacallcenter@oaklandnet.com. There really should be an iPhone app for that. Anything that makes the streets cleaner and brighter will reduce crime. The problem is most of us think that there's a special being who is supposed to make things cleaner and brighter, we just don't recognize that being as ourselves. Or move to St. Francis Wood and don't worry about it.

Whenever I see someone finishing the chips and tossing the wrapper on the sidewalk, I feel nothing but barbarian violence within, but the solution is to just pick it up and throw it away.

Over the last fifty years, West Oakland and its residents have been terrorized by Public Works projects. These projects, along with other economic currents, have systematically destroyed a cohesive African-American neighborhood. Gentrification is not welcome here, obviously, because it involves a hostile takeover of the neighborhood with intent to displace the indigenous population. If you look Eurasian and you're moving to West Oakland, be sure to realize that you are the enemy, that you're coming to destroy and suppress, and the people who have lived here for generations will not experience an improvement in the quality of life associated with an influx of residents with good jobs and meaningful aspirations — without a miracle that is.

So far I've invented only one potential miracle — raising public teachers' starting salaries by a factor of three.

Today, to be a teacher at a public school is roughly equivalent to being a loser. When we meet a public school teacher, we suddenly feel a little out of place, a little embarrassed, as if hearing someone's story of a messy divorce or how their retirement account just got wiped out or how their landlord is a dick.

Our society has created a pariah profession — public school teacher — and now is wondering what's wrong with its public schools.

To fix this problem one thing has to happen: the tripling of a teacher's starting salary. This will turn it into a viable profession. The starting salary of a public school teacher in Oakland has to be about $100,000 per year. We pay $400 per gallon of gas to fuel American machinery in Afghanistan.

A great starting salary will draw talent and create competition. It will turn a tenure-driven sea of ineptitude into a meritocracy. If we flood our public schools with very smart teachers, the students — over time — will stop failing to achieve. As much.

Also, smart teachers will stop leaving the district once they start having kids who want to eat and a place for a toy kitchen.

This will never happen, because investing in the education of children economically confined to the Oakland Unified School District (controlled by the state between 2003 and 2009 due to being bankrupt and even more awful than usual, by the way) does not guarantee a quick-enough return of investment. But placing these children in prisons — when they grow up — does! And we can always just hire immigrants from the Eurasia and the Midwest to do work to which a good primary education might eventually lead.

I've digressed.

The ongoing foreclosure tsunami is placing many dozens of West Oakland homes into the hands of developers and professional landlords. These homes get a quick do-over before showing up on Craigslist as "charming West Oakland Victorians", for around $1500-$2000 per month.

As a result, people with deterministic gaits and laptop bags are beginning to appear in the streets. I've yet to see a pink-faced woman walking from BART alone while not talking on the phone, but the vector is clear: people are moving in. It feels cozier. (To me.)

When I see little boys on the street trying to break an AT&T box with pieces of a two-by-four, I have a very difficult time imagining that those boys will become enamored with City Slicker Farms. Newcomers, however, may move to West Oakland because of City Slicker Farms. There is a boundless rift between social classes. It's widening. The neighborhood is composed of two parallel universes, where schools of PBR-fueled cyclists swish by the hooded shadows on street corners and young happy couples in blue school buses with Vermont plates sip herbal tea while drunk women in slippers scream at each other in the middle of the street at three in the morning, all to the sounds of gunshots and police sirens and a new BMW motorcycle starting proudly behind a sliding electric gate and wind blowing through the holes in the roofs of foreclosed homes twenty feet away from an array of solar panels — it's not that they aren't aware of one another, these universes, it's that they pretend the other does not exist.

But sometimes there's an error in the matrix, and you get mugged at gunpoint.

Las Vegas

2010-12-10T14:17:00.000-08:00

Meanwhile, in West Oakland

2010-11-02T14:52:00.000-07:00

No Dumping

2010-10-02T16:08:00.000-07:00

On Peralta St. near 36th St. in West Oakland.

Quite possibly the laziest "No Dumping" sign in the world.

Solovki Airport, Arrival

2010-06-30T14:36:00.000-07:00

Embraer EMB 120 Brasilia lands on Solovetsky Island and ZIL-130 is preparing to transport the luggage across the grass to the airport building.

Соловецкий аэропорт, август 2009.

iPhonorama of the The San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge

2010-06-11T14:57:00.000-07:00

Moscow Metro

2010-06-01T18:26:00.000-07:00

West Oakland Gentrification Tutorial

2010-05-15T22:48:00.000-07:00

Step 1: Find a pile of trash

Step 2: Send an email to pwacallcenter@oaklandnet.com
Date: Wed, 12 May 2010 11:27:09 -0700
Subject: Illegal dumping on Peralta St. @ 8th St.
From: Andrei Soroker <soroker@gmail.com>
To: pwacallcenter@oaklandnet.com

Dear Public Works Agency,

I must report a sizable pile of cardboard boxes filled with various miscellanea strewn about the sidewalk next to an AC Transit bus stop bench on Peralta St. near 8th St. (please see attached photograph).

I'd love to spend some of my property tax money to get it cleaned up.

Thank you!

Andrei Soroker

Step 3: Receive a confirmation email
Date: Wed, 12 May 2010 13:56:09 -0700
Subject: PWA SR# 336723 - PERALTA ST & 8TH ST - LIT_ILL_DUMP Received
To: SOROKER@GMAIL.COM
From: cityworks@oaklandnet.com

Please DO NOT REPLY to this email. This email is automatically sent from a mailbox that is not monitored. Reply to pwacallcenter@oaklandnet.com.

Information regarding the Service Request you submitted to the City of Oakland, Public Works Agency, is provided in the table below.

Please note that the Service Request is automatically set to ‘Closed’ if we have sent the request to another agency to perform the work such as the Oakland Police Department, Community and Economic Development Agency, EBMUD, etc.

Thank you for helping to make Oakland a better place to live, work and visit.

City of Oakland, Public Works Agency, Call Center
510.615.5566 - (Monday – Friday, 8:00 am – 4:30 pm) - pwacallcenter@oaklandnet.com

Step 4: Gentrification complete

Tour of West Oakland

2010-05-05T23:50:00.000-07:00

Oakland-bashing is a lot of fun, because it makes you sound really hardcore. Unfortunately, I have to tone down the hardcore a bit, since I have an active interest in enticing people to move here. Interestingly, I don't want the value of my house going up, I just want the neighborhood to become safer. I don't want the value of my house going up because I don't want to pay more property taxes than I already do.

I must say that I know absolutely nothing about digital photography. In fact, I'm pretty certain that photography is best conducted through film. On the other hand, I'm also certain that the medium, apparatus, and software are all secondary to the eye. Recently, I've been eyeing through a Canon 30D, which is way better than the iPhone because it shoots when you tell it to, not at some point in the future. The thought of actually going through the Canon 30D manual frightens me, so I decided to just not worry about it.

The area San Francisco Chronicle calls "West Oakland" when reporting on the murders is way too big to be a neighborhood. When I say West Oakland, I mean the area called Lower Bottoms, The Bottoms, Prescott, or Oakland Point, depending on whom you ask. Intuitively, I should favor "Prescott", since I went to college in Prescott, AZ. Unfortunately, the Arizona Prescott is pronounced "Preskit like biscuit" which causes microseizures in my head, so I've developed a phobia of the name altogether. So let's just say West Oakland for now. Here's a map:

View Larger Map

West Oakland has the highest concentration of really cool old Victorian homes that are in remarkably dire shape per square block in the world. Many of these homes stand next to vacant lots, because the cool old Victorians in dire shape that occupied those lots had burned down.

This possible former church on the right has been undergoing some sort of renovation for years.

This is the Prescott-Joseph Center. This building will put every single Painted Lady to shame.

Prescott-Joseph Center fragment. A statue of Zeus. Or maybe Julius Caesar.

About three years ago we watched this big white building being wheeled into its current location by a huge semi truck. PG&E was on site, removing electrical cables so the building could get by. The building was born in another part of Oakland, where it lived happily until the Condos started moving in. The building decided to relocate, so it sold for $1 and moved. It has since acquired a new — expanded — derriere, another floor, new siding, new roof, and several new windows.

This big building occupies half a block. It appears to be condemned — it's been empty for at least three years, possibly twenty-five. The runes are new. It's astonishing there exist people who think they can paint something on old red brick that will be more interesting than the old red brick.

It's hard to tell at the moment, but in its prime this corner beauty would have turned the head of the Sentinel Building. Until very recently the building housed a corner store which was registered in the Guinness Book of Records as the record-holder of the "Corner Store You Are Least Likely to Enter" title. Then, apparently, Chuey was killed either inside it, or in its direct proximity, and the store has been closed every since. For the time being the building is called "Chuey Team Bitch".

Just down the street we see AMERICAN STEEL. I hope this sign is too big to fail. No, I'm serious, I dread the day this building will be gone — it's absolutely spectacular.

West Oakland is the last bastion of residential life before the Port of Oakland begins. Many streets feature mysterious tracks that suddenly end. We know some people who used to live right next to these particular tracks. They say that sometimes the Port gates open and wagonettes laden with export goods roll out and just sit there, waiting.

If I stood where I'm standing to take this picture on October 17th, 1989 at 5:04 PM, the Cypress Viaduct, a double-decker freeway, part of Interstate 880, would have fallen on me. Luckily, at the time I was sleeping in the USSR.

After the freeway collapsed, the residents of this neighborhood put up a titanic fight to prevent the motherfuckers from rebuilding it here again. Instead, I-880 went around the neighborhood, leaving this space for Mandela Parkway. In five years, when the trees will get taller, this parkway will cause people to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after.

Mandela Parkway is a perfect biking corridor. The problem is the safety hazard created by all amazing distractions on the left, on the right, and in the middle. The parkway begins at West Oakland BART and goes straight to the Home Depot parking lot.

Speaking of Home Depot, the Oakland-Emeryville Home Depot (nobody knows within which city it is actually situated, but sales taxes go to Emeryville, because Emeryville is business-friendly and Oakland hates businesses) has just undergone a metamorphosis from Despicable Garbage to Hardware Store Mona Lisa.

Five years ago, they had these buckets with rotten fish at the entrances. Upon entering, you had to pick up a rotten fish and gnaw on it throughout your shopping experience. This way you would not notice the fact that the three employees there to help you are not only retarded, but also drunk, high, and haven't slept for six days. The merchandise was comprised of the returned items from the other Oakland Home Depot. There were twenty seven checkout registers and 0.4 cashiers at peak hours and 0.2 during other times. But you didn't notice any of it, because you were gnawing on a rotten fish.

Today, they've cancelled the fish.

Self-portrait.

This is Brown Sugar Kitchen. When we moved to the neighborhood almost four years ago, this building housed a permanently-closed Jamaican restaurant.

Brown Sugar Kitchen opened and quickly developed a Bay Area-wide following large enough to guarantee a 40-minute wait for a Sunday brunch. While I was going through some serious soul-searching regarding the sanity of staying in this neighborhood earlier this year, BSK hosted its second birthday party. I talked to some people, and it definitely helped in convincing me to stick it out. Things are getting better.

Oh, and the food here is amazing, I'm telling you.

Every once in a while, the Devil comes up for a field trip. To remain incognito, he settles into somebody's head. His stint in Lovelle Mixon's head was particularly devastating for Oakland — last year on March 21st, before exiting, he killed four police officers. This is a memorial to officers Hege, Dunakin, Romans, and Sakai.

Industrial zone.

This is a fragment of Lone Star Industries, a functioning concrete factory.

Peralta Studios, the proverbial lofts.

On the way to the port we see Downtown Oakland. I'm standing about a mile away from the Bay Bridge toll plaza.

When three generations ago black people from the South boarded trains and headed to California in search of better life, they got off here, at 16th Street Station. The current state of the station is a condensed version of what happened to the people, who didn't have enough time to build up enough Old Money before the economy emigrated.

The rights for new development that we're about to pass on our left were granted with some sort of a clause that requires the developer to restore the train station.

We'll see.

Own a loft from $1900/month. PCLofts.com. After this housing was completed, it was vacant for so long, our initial disdain for it turned to pity. For so long exactly one apartment had any signs of life, and even those were fake — it was staged to lure prospective buyers.

Now the people are moving in, and it's great, absolutely great to see all the new cars, TVs in the windows, and occasional humans sitting on the porches of their new dwellings. Welcome!

The Port of Oakland is the fourth busiest container port in the United States.

Residential West Oakland is on the other side of this underpass. The pavement of the underpass is quite possibly the worst in Alameda County, which would place it high in the running for worst worldwide.

Berths and US Customs.

These are AT-AT walkers' kids' toys.

AT-AT walkers on a break feeding their young. Also a bus stop who thinks it's in Chernobyl.

Our chariot. In West Oakland, we don't use license plates. Just kidding — it was stolen back in January. I've been driving this truck since July 1999.

Since 1999, the Oakland Army Base hasn't welcomed anybody.

Ukraine St.

My wife thinks the gravel is where the taco truck stops on weekdays.

Streets here are vast, kind of like prairies in Kansas.

Oakland is home to the world's largest brachiosaurid zoo in the world.

All the tarmac around the Port of Oakland is excellent for road biking.

This is where BART trains dive out for oxygen.

To the left we have Port View Park. Middle Harbor Shoreline Park is just ahead.

Port View Park.

After a BART train dives under the bay, it takes about six minutes to get to the first San Francisco stop — Embarcadero. Proximity to San Francisco produces major dividends in compound commute time for West Oakland residents who work in SF.

Domesticated AT-AT walkers at work.

The lord works in mysterious ways. If we board this thing and ride it for about a mile, we'll end up in Jack London Square.

In the summer of 1997 I got a job. It was in this building. I worked as a sculptor's assistant — my duties consisted of applying drywall mud to structures cut out of styrofoam. This building is a few blocks from West Oakland BART, but my employer picked me up Downtown Oakland, citing safety. A few weeks into the job, on my 16th birthday, I got a driver's license. From then on I drove our 1985 Caprice Classic to work. The bridge cost $1.

This is a fragment of Svenhard's Swedish Bakery. It always smells like pastries here. Also, check out the benches.

This is a fragment of the MacArthur Maze.

Bus bench ads are the lowest form of advertisement. Any bus bench ad revenue is offset by the loss in property taxes because of decreased property values.

LiAZ-677 in Moscow

2010-04-25T10:09:00.000-07:00

LiAZ-677
Moscow, Russia
September 2009

ЛиАЗ-677 ТЕХ. ПОМОЩЬ
Москва, недалеко от станции метро «Петровско-Разумовская»
Сентябрь 2009

Jerrod Hubbard

2010-04-13T23:02:00.000-07:00

Jerrod Hubbard was twenty-four years old, four years younger than me. Last Wednesday he was walking on a sidewalk across the street from my house with some friends — two guys and a girl. Then he got shot in the back by somebody who was driving by. Then he died, right before my eyes.

A 2003 graduate of Oakland Technical High School, he was involved with a football program at McClymonds and also took classes elsewhere. He had drepanocytosis (Sickle-Cell Anemia), which required him to undergo blood transfusions. He had a sister and a brother — a UC Berkeley graduate student in Journalism.

On his last day of life he was celebrating his cousin's return from prison.

He had numerous friends, he liked to party, and in late March he drove to Las Vegas, without a license. But he didn't get a speeding ticket when he got pulled over. In Vegas he went to Bellagio. He made it home safe.

He smoked weed a lot. I think this makes sense, considering his condition. He also liked video games. He went to family birthday parties, watched The First 48, and learned to cope with people he knew lose their lives. He might have been lonely.

Hundreds of people mourned his death. I join them, and I really wish I'd learned about him via happy events, not this.

His death is unjustifiable — it has no explanation. You say "I'm sorry for your loss" to the relatives of a person who dies of old age. In this case, you say "Hey, check this out, we've built ourselves a pretty fucked up world, and now we live in it". We are like children who shat in a bathtub, swimming around it, preoccupied with the yellow duckies.

P.S. Note to Mark Zuckerberg: Mark, I really hope the devils in hell aren't getting extra-ready for your arrival.

You should move to West Oakland

2010-04-08T02:37:00.000-07:00

Reading about Oakland murders in the San Francisco Chronicle is one thing. Hearing gunshots followed by the sound of a quickly accelerating engine, and then looking through your living room window and seeing a dying man in a pool of blood across the street is something totally different.

When I was in high school, we learned about the first, second, and third worlds. Basically, capitalists live in the first world, communists with nuclear weapons in the second, and everyone else in the third. We didn't study that third world in great detail, but one property of the third world appears to bind all those vastly different peoples and cultures together in our eyes — a very low value of human life.

When we read about men armed with machetes slaughtering old people, women, and children, ferries capsizing and drowning thousands at a time, six-year-olds putting together Nike sneakers eighteen hours per day for three cents per hour, earthquakes destroying entire cities because nothing is built to code because there isn't one — we try to comprehend all this, we read the sentences, the facts, the reasons. But when we talk about it, when we look at each other's well-fed faces, and into each other's smart first-world eyes, in our work kitchens and cars and coffee shops — we come to this silent agreement that we simply don't really care.

Not because we're bad people, no, but because we physically cannot comprehend what we're saying, but because to us it makes absolutely no sense. We continue to buy lattes while all these travesties we discuss take place, and why not, because what are you gonna do? When we say these things, we don't really believe them — it's like adult fairy tales.

But here I am — situated somewhere between Pixar Animation Studios and Wells Fargo & Co. headquarters — watching a 24-year-old man die of gunshot wounds though my living room window. I don't understand — how is it that I'm preoccupied with getting a distributed Erlang application to behave correctly while a man is murdered two hundred feet away? When I tell you about this, we can pretend that we don't really care because it makes absolutely no sense, but there was blood leaking out of his head, onto the curb and down to the street — red, shiny.

Oh, and my wife and children are on their way home, with burritos, in a turbocharged Subaru, while his red shiny blood is leaking out of his head onto the curb and then down to the street. So the burritos have to wait a little, because our entire block has been cobwebbed with yellow tape.

But anyway, you should move to West Oakland! Other than an occasional murder and a mattress/boxspring here and there, it's a great neighborhood — excellent Victorian homes (you can buy one tomorrow for $80K out of foreclosure), close to BART, close to the iPad store, to IKEA, to the Trappist, to Rudy's Can't Fail Cafe, to Brown Sugar Kitchen, to the Crucible, and so on. West Oakland is going to become expensive, like, in a couple of months. All the true hipsters are already here. Hurry!

Morning Nap on 1st Street

2010-04-07T10:59:00.000-07:00

San Francisco, CA
April 7, 2010

Staraya Samara

2010-03-31T15:55:00.000-07:00

Samara, Russia
September 2009

LiAZ-677

2010-03-23T19:46:00.000-07:00

LiAZ-677
Samara, Russia
September 2009

ЛиАЗ-677
Самара
Сентябрь 2009

Boy

2010-03-22T17:57:00.000-07:00

Christmas 2003, fragment

2010-03-18T16:23:00.000-07:00

USA
December 2003

Abacus

2010-03-17T14:28:00.000-07:00

Kem', Russia
August 2009

Кемь
Август 2009

ZIL-131, Solovki

2010-03-16T17:03:00.000-07:00

ZIL-131 with a radar set (?) on Bolshoy Solovetsky Island
August 2009

ЗИЛ-131 с локатором на Соловецком острове
Август 2009

Buildings in Samara

2010-03-15T15:20:00.000-07:00

Samara, Russia.
September 2009.

Links in Comments and Parasitism

2010-03-14T00:55:00.000-08:00

Today, a gentleman named John left a comment on the Solovki post. The comment said:

Absolutely beautiful picture. I'd love to go and see other countries and their cultures.

This seemingly-innocuous sentence is actually a little trap — when you click on the word "picture", it takes you to John's gardening blog. Why does John want you to go to his blog? To create a possibility of you clicking on an ad, so John can make some passive income. He also gets a little boost from the search engines by having a one-way link from a hugely popular resource (proof: google "terry gross x ira glass").

I wouldn't have minded if John simply left a URL. It's the trickery that basically makes me feel like I'm letting a total scumbag crash on my couch, possibly forever.

I don't want to moderate comments, it just seems to kind of defeat the purpose of the internet.

So I decided to disable links in comments. Well, you can't — Blogger doesn't have such an option. It's really not that hard though, it's not like comments are graffiti — it's just HTML. So I added some special magic codes to replace an anchor tag with its text.

I figure if a commenter's intentions are pure, he'll probably leave an actual URL, in which case the reader will have to select the link and paste it into a new tab's navigation bar. Commenters with impure intentions — ones that try to trick my readers into clicking ads on their gardening blogs — will leave us with possible non sequiturs. In John's case, the special magic codes simply turn him into an extra super-nice internet guy.

Solovki

2010-03-13T13:12:00.001-08:00

Solovetsky Monastery, August 2009

Соловецкий монастырь, август 2009

LuAZ in Moscow

2010-03-12T14:37:00.000-08:00

LuAZ in Moscow, September 2009. Near Petrovsko-Razumovskaya Metro station.

ЛуАЗ-969М «Волынь».

Columbidae

2010-03-11T12:42:00.000-08:00

Dalva Bar, San Francisco, CA

2010-03-10T13:23:00.000-08:00

16th Street Mission BART Station

2010-03-09T14:44:00.000-08:00

Man

2010-03-08T15:36:00.001-08:00

Dog

2010-03-06T22:27:00.001-08:00

Erlang Factory

2010-03-04T11:14:00.000-08:00

Picturesqueness

2010-03-02T15:12:00.001-08:00

The big building on the left is 715 Peralta St. in West Oakland.

The little house next to it used to be owned by a family who creatively purchased it for 561 thousand dollars in 2005. Some time in 2007 they moved away and the house — bank-owned at this point — was vacant for a long time, over a year. Zillow says it sold for $358,000 in June of 2008.

To the right of the little house there is a church parking lot, followed by the church.

Every Sunday for three years we heard thunderous sermons and singing, saw people congregate afterward around the table with food, and watched large American cars empty the parking lot and slowly depart in various directions. The church was pink.

In late 2009 the church was sold to people whose ancestors came from somewhere in Asia (real Asia, not this one). They painted the church yellowish green, fixed the windows, kicked out the guy with dreadlocks who lived in a VW Bus in the parking lot, and while it is possible that they started singing, we've never heard a sound coming from the church again. I've seen one American car in the parking lot — a Chevy van which carried the workers who came to install a hood over the back door.

The two people standing against the fence did something that attracted a measurable part of the Oakland police force to come check it out. My wife says they hauled someone away.

The white Buick behind the police car will not be here long. It was used as a getaway vehicle in a shooting that happened a few weeks ago — they left before the cops showed up. Just a few days ago one could witness a very probable drug deal conducted through the driver's side window of the Buick.

I can't tell you how many such Buicks have been parked on our block over the last several years. They come, do their thing, and then they vanish. Usually via a city-sponsored tow truck.

I'm sure that most residents of 715 Peralta aren't criminals. It is safe to say that every single one of them has been somewhat unlucky in life, to end up living at a place like that, but very likely most of them, and probably even the overwhelming majority, aren't surviving by committing crimes.

So, maybe there are three, four active criminals in that building. They have guns, sell drugs, rape women, don't pay child support. They conduct street business, naturally, on the street where they live. With people who live elsewhere, but come here, to 715 Peralta.

I want to know who owns this building. They pay property taxes. They put up ads on Craigslist. They fix up the apartments after the fires. This building is somebody's business, a business that turns an otherwise low key part of the hood into a cradle of crime.

There is a parking lot to the left of the building. Every night a beige GMC truck parks in its entrance and several men sleep in it. You can tell by the fogged up windshield.

TODO: write two blog posts.

2010-02-16T13:42:00.000-08:00

While my blog is still on the front page of http://blogsofnote.blogspot.com, I have to write two more.

I'd be stupid not to advertise my mortgage bailout website while I'm being honored by several hundred unique visitors per day, so that will be the first post (this one).

The second post will be a followup to the mugging post. I'd like to clarify a couple of less-than-eloquent points I made as well as propose a way to fix the problems of violence and poverty in Oakland.

ADVERTISEMENT: Check out out my website, where you can buy a small piece of my house. As a reward, you can listen to me singing on YouTube. You can leave a URL — it will be indexed and will increase your page rank
a little.

The yellow rectangles are areas that have been purchased already. HURRY!!! LOL.

I started building the website a year ago at the Alta Bates NICU, where our son Boris was completing his gestation period, out utero. I guess he really wanted to be around for George W. Bush's last month in office, so he got out three months early. When he was born, he weighed just under two pounds.

This is him yesterday, playing at the Port View Park:

We've downplayed his amazing progress from birth to today, but it really is pretty amazing.

Anyway, I got a little worried about our financial future with our house sinking further and further underwater as our neighborhood was turning into a sea of foreclosures auctioning at a fifth of what we paid (and by paid I mean borrowed). Plus, since the baby was born so early it was clear we'll have to make do with just one income for quite some time.

The idea behind the website was to implement online busking. It had to be online, you see, because it had to occur asynchronously with my day job.

The mandatory overengineered feature here is the contribution selection mechanism. After three complete rewrites I think I finally found something that works.

The only text that gets indexed by search engines is the table of the contributions. There's no good reason for this, it's just the way it is.

I've translated most of the text on the site into Russian. Last weekend, for the first time there was a significant wave of visits from Russia (and other former Soviet republics) due to a link on an apparently popular resource.

As you can see from the "Recordings" section, I basically gave up. First I broke the promise to record daily, then I broke the promise to record weekly, and now I record something once in a blue moon.

A year ago, during the wave of interest and hate generated by the article about the website in San Francisco Chronicle, people scornfully lumped us with that first generation of troubled homeowners who did some really creative financing and were losing their homes as the result.

The point I was trying to get across (it was somewhat unclear in the article) is that we tried — as best as we could — to do everything right. We actually bought a "cheap" house, believe it or not. Seriously. At the time for 500K you couldn't by a portapotty in San Francisco. (Now that the prices have gone down, you could probably buy two portapotties in San Francisco for half a million.) 30-year loans, good credit, etc. One thing we did that was creative was buying without a downpayment. But at the time nobody had a downpayment, unless inheritance was involved. If people had a "normal" sum of 30K in the bank, they often chose to use that money to put a roof on their 500K fixerupper instead of making a miserly downpayment.

We just didn't see that as a sign of a broken system, which side-swiped the bloody hell out of our "equity" during its precipitous collapse.

So here we are, on the verge of the second generation of foreclosures. This one will be more painful, because a shit ton of high earners with perfect credit have started the process of not paying mortgages.

This is a good thing for today's economy, because suddenly many people will have a lot more cash lying around for purchasing consumer goods. It will be disastrous in the long-term because the banks will be forced to swallow unbelievably huge losses. By "swallow" I mean "finding a way to pass it onto your children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren". The only way to mitigate this situation is for banks to cut principal (which of course they won't do, it's unethical).

So, I think my website is still relevant, probably even more so than a year ago. I would still like to alleviate our underwater situation by simply paying back a big sum of money to the banks — someone will have to pay it back at some point, in some way, anyway. It might as well be me, err us.

Assault On The Way Home From BART

2010-01-30T02:36:00.000-08:00

I live three blocks away from the West Oakland BART station.

I work near 1st and Market, which means I have a 10-15 minute commute.

I have two children, a loving family, and lots to lose in general.

I pay mortgage on a house that is at least 50% underwater.

Currently, my neighborhood — historically a god-forsaken mire of poverty — is in a state of gentrificational limbo. After the Cypress freeway collapsed and was rebuilt around the area, the neighborhood is no longer guaranteed to forever remain a ghetto, it has a chance at a do-over.

7th street — formerly a busy stretch of commercial activity — is a desolation zone lined with empty lots and old storefronts. The street is very wide, wide enough for a green median and a 45-degree parking arrangement in both directions in lieu of the second lane.

While I do believe this area will — sooner or later — flourish, I'm under no illusions regarding its safety. Perhaps safety is an understatement: what I mean to say is that people get killed here. SFGate has a map of Oakland homicides from 2006 through 2009 — one can see with an untrained eye the obvious reduction in murders in 2009 in West Oakland (near BART), but the fact remains: people get killed near my house, kind of frequently.

I have a reasonably accurate street safety gauge. I grew up in Russia, where I was a relatively popular target of mugging attempts (my school was far from home). My strategy has always been simple: run. To date, I've never been successfully mugged. Also, to be fair, in the three and a half years of living in West Oakland, the only bad thing that happened to my family was a stolen license plate (a few weeks ago).

Anyway, when I walk home from BART, especially when it's dark, I'm usually on the lookout.

Today, when walking out of the BART station around 8:10 PM I was pondering about Oakland crime and how unbelievably reasonable January has been. It was sprinkling, which made me realize that many days of heavy rain were a very likely reason for the reduction in crime — most people who get killed appear to be "standing on a sidewalk", and who likes to get wet while standing on a sidewalk?

I'm paranoid: this is what my right hand usually looks like on the walk home from BART. I am absolutely prepared to punch anyone who messes with me in the face with this thing.

Today I was not prepared. My keys were in my bag. My bag had two laptops inside, it was heavy. Plus I was pondering about the relatively crimeless January. When I was crossing 7th street — a sometimes dangerous endeavor on account of the absence of a traffic light, stop sign, or a zebra crosswalk coupled with a blind turn that frequently produces mid-nineties Buicks with expired plates going about 60 MPH — I sensed there was someone behind me.

I turned around and saw a young guy in a black beanie walking right at me. Something told me he was not a mere pedestrian, so I turned around all the way just as he sped up and pushed me.

While I was processing the possibility of him getting upset because of me turning around as if I suspected he was not a mere pedestrian, he was telling me "what" and calling me a "bitch-ass nigger". He wasn't very big, but when I realized he was not alone I started running. He pushed me again and I ended up on the ground, my back down on top of the laptops, feet in the air facing him. In general, this is a good position to be in, but not when you've got a heavy bag, when you're not sure whether your adversary has a piece in his pocket, and when there's more guys coming.

I tried doing the scissor thing to drop him on the ground, but he was jumping a couple of feet away from me, repeating the "bitch-ass nigger" exorcism. I got up and started running again.

I was looking around for cars, pedestrians, anyone — the street was completely empty and dark. I was running right in the middle of it to be as visible as possible. The assailant was running behind me, turning around as if to check on his friends.

I remember looking at him and thinking that I could take him down, right now, because I'm pretty sure I'm stronger than him. But I was thinking of knives, guns, my family, the bag, and those guys behind us.

He turned back when we were half a block away from Revolution Cafe — a place I knew had some people inside.

I turned around and saw him reunited with the rest of the group near Upperkutz — an establishment by the looks of which you'd never guess it is just six minutes away from the Ferry Building in San Francisco.

View Larger Map

They crossed the street and walked toward the BART station.

I took out my iPhone 3G and "slid to unlock" to be presented with a frozen passcode screen. I waited for about a minute for it to wake up, after which I dialed 911. "The system is experiencing a heavy load", the recording explained and hung up.

I was standing near this bus stop, weighing options. (Note: I took this picture several weeks ago, but the tires are still there. I've contacted city services with a request to pick them up. (Several weeks ago. (Should I try leaving a tip when I pay property taxes? 15%?)))

Like all Oakland citizens who are not afraid of police, I have their number in favorites. Amazingly, after about 20 rings a dispatcher picked up. I explained the situation and she said an officer will meet me at 7th and Peralta.

Of course the officer never showed up. An hour later a dispatcher called me to tell me an officer will be coming to my house to take a police report "shortly". Five hours later, no officer.

This incident raises several issues.

Police

In Oakland, we can't rely on police to protect us. I'm not just saying this because I'm a crazy libertarian, I'm saying this because when I call the police, they don't pick up the phone. Because when they say they'll be there, they don't show up. Whatever the reasons are — Oakland residents cannot rely on police for protection.

In other words we're living in a version of the American Wild West where all action happens in big cities and the good guys are prohibited by law to defend themselves. If I had a gun, I would have killed the guy who tried to rob me today. The reason I didn't try to kill him with my bare hands is because he had friends, and I've tried fighting in one-to-many cardinality constraint situations before — it just doesn't work.

In other words, while walking home from BART I'm fairly certain the police won't be there to protect me, and the law doesn't allow me to carry a gun, so my best bet is to hope that no one will hurt me.

Maybe if I believed in God and I prayed that no one will hurt me instead of hoping my chances would increase, but it still sounds like an unreasonable proposition.

iPhone

What a piece of shit of a phone. Really awesome for playing The Settlers of Catan though.

House

Tonight's incident got me thinking about our house situation and the sanity of maintaining our commitment to a financially questionable status quo.

We bought our house with the purest of intentions. We've never missed a payment, and we actually like it very much. The thought of abandoning our home and renting is absolutely terrifying.

Our neighborhood is ripe for major improvements. It was on the way up, but it makes perfect sense that in times of trouble the least stable establishments crumble first. So the neighborhood took a major hit in the form of property values. I want gentrification to happen in West Oakland at a much faster rate than is currently the case. By gentrification I mean poor people moving out and yuppies moving in. It's happening, but it needs to be happening much faster.

In an age when walking is so common, what's keeping us pegged? Well, we like the house, we've put a lot of work into it, we believe we can help make the neighborhood better and enjoy the results, and we feel we have to honor the terms of our contracts with the banks.

I'm starting to budge on the last point.

I don't have a problem with mailing in the keys and moving out — that is not a violation of the contract, it's a part of it. I have a problem with trying to modify an existing loan. It seems like, sounds like, and is the exact type of scam that got us into the mess in the first place.

However, if we leave aside the morals, what makes sense is just to stop paying the mortgage. The banks — morals-free institutions by definition — will face two choices: to evict us and sell the house for 100K at an auction. Or cut us a deal. As long as the deal is above 100K, the banks will prefer a deal.

And in the worst case we move out after a few months.

Broadway Kragen in Oakland Updates Checkout Counter

2010-01-18T00:23:00.000-08:00

The new counter boasts two huge computers and an enormous stand with an assortment of cheap automotive goods hanging off of it.

“I guess they put it here so people would buy this stuff,” said an employee, “but they mostly just stare at it.”

The old checkout station featured only one, smaller, computer on the side and most of the counter space was simply wasted by being empty.

Asian Travel at Borders in Emeryville

2010-01-17T20:00:00.000-08:00

Lunchride №2

2010-01-14T18:23:00.000-08:00

1 hour 43 minutes, 23.8 miles.

Lunchride №1

2010-01-12T16:16:00.000-08:00

1 hour 31 minutes, 22 miles.

San Francisco as seen from Sausalito:

New bottom bracket:

Volga GAZ-21 and ZiM-12

2010-01-12T00:13:00.000-08:00

Volga GAZ-21 and ZiM-12 in North Chertanovo, Moscow.

RFID Squaw Lift Ticket Bummer

2010-01-10T22:42:00.000-08:00

My Saturday lift ticket was in my pocket.

My Sunday lift ticket was in my wallet — I just kind of forgot about it.

On Sunday it turned out the Sunday ticket was already used. RFID!

This is a little insane: say you have 12 discounted ($69 each) lift tickets in your ski backpack for some reason — you got them at REI for a bunch of friends who are arriving tomorrow. You forget to leave the tickets at the cabin. On your first run they've all been used up!

You just spent $897 to ski Squaw for one day and left a bunch of people without lift tickets.

The mechanics behind creating such a devastating disaster should be a little more complex than just getting on a lift.

At the very least those tickets should have some large warning in red letters.

But really any place that sells discounted tickets should sell tokens that could be exchanged for actual lift tickets at the resort.

But really the problem here is that an optimization — something that should never modify output or introduce random side effects — modified expected behavior.

Before you could ski with tomorrow's lift ticket in your wallet. Now you can't.

Happy 2010!

2010-01-02T00:35:00.000-08:00

Ira Glass x Terry Gross

2009-11-16T16:13:00.001-08:00

In West Oakland, graffiti looks like this:

Song of the Arctic Pilots

2009-08-08T21:54:00.000-07:00

Слова и музыка Александра Городницкого
Песня полярных летчиков (послушать)

Кожаные куртки, брошенные в угол,
Снегом запорошенное низкое окно.
Бродит за ангарами северная вьюга,
В маленькой гостинице тихо и тепло.

Командир со штурманом мотив припомнят старый,
Голову рукою подопрет второй пилот.
Подтянувши струны старенькой гитары,
Следом бортмеханик им тихо подпоет.

Эту песню грустную позабыть пора нам,
Наглухо моторы и сердца зачехлены.
Снова тянет с берега снегом и туманом,
Снова ночь нелетная, даже для Луны.

Лысые романтики, воздушные бродяги!
Наша жизнь — мальчишеские вечные года.
Прочь тоску гоните вы, выпитые фляги,
Ты, метеослужба, нам счастья нагадай.
Прочь тоску гоните вы, посадочные флаги,
Ты, метеослужба, нам счастья нагадай.

Солнце незакатное и теплый ветер с Веста.
И штурвал послушный в стосковавшихся руках.
Ждите нас невстреченные школьницы-невесты
В маленьких асфальтовых южных городах.

Кожаные куртки, брошенные в угол,
Снегом запорошенное низкое окно.
Бродит за ангарами северная вьюга,
В маленькой гостинице тихо и тепло.

1959

Words and music by Alexander Gorodnitsky
Song of the Arctic Pilots (listen)

Leather jackets, tossed into a corner.
A low window, powdered by snow.
Behind the hangars the Northern blizzard roams,
It is quiet and dry in a small hotel.

The captain and the navigator will recall an old song,
The first officer will listen head in hand.
The flight engineer will quietly join them,
Having tuned the strings of an old guitar.

It's time we forget this sad song,
Our engines and our hearts are thoroughly covered up.
Yet again, fog and snow are pulling inland,
Yet again, the night is non-flying, even for the Moon.

Round-headed romantics, airborn tramps!
Our childhood lasts throughout life.
You, empty flasks — send away the anguish,
You, weather service, fortune-tell some joy.
You, runway flags — send way the anguish,
You, weather service, fortune-tell some joy.

The Sun that never sets and the warm Western wind.
And the agreeable yoke in yearning hands.
Wait for us, the unmet girlfriends-fiancées,
In small Southern towns made of asphalt.

Leather jackets, tossed into a corner.
A low window, powdered by snow.
Behind the hangars the Northern blizzard roams,
It is quiet and dry in a small hotel.

1959

Translation by Andrei Soroker

Marcel Diallo on CNN

2009-08-02T09:33:00.000-07:00

Oakland's "Village Bottoms" Experiences a Rebirth

Agu (with Zhenya Kogan)

2009-07-12T16:17:00.000-07:00

Words: Andrei Soroker
Music: Andrei Soroker and Zhenya Kogan

Агу (послушать)

Когда мы поуменеем,
Мы будем понимать.
Мы будем осторожней,
Мы будем выбирать.
А пока мы молодые,
Пока мы можем все,
Судьба нам несомненно
Удачу принесет.

Мы верим в робинзонов
В героев и в любовь;
Не верим в расстоянья
И в пролитую кровь.
Мы видим неизвестность
И мы в нее идем;
Шагаем мимо слабых
Нехоженным путем.

Морозным ранним утром,
Когда еще темно
Заводим самолеты,
Взлетаем как в кино.
Мы маленькие дети,
Нам хочется играть;
Нам страшно не бывает
Нам трудно выбирать.

3 сентября 2001

Припев

На крыльце мы сидим.
Город спит — мы гудим.

11 июля 2009

Agu (listen)

As soon as we wisen up,
We will understand.
We will be more cautious,
We will learn to make choices.
But while we are young
While can do anything,
The fate will undoubtedly
Bring us luck.

We believe in castaways,
In heroes and in love.
We don't believe in distances,
We don't believe in bloodshed.
We see the unknown,
And travel straight to it,
Passing up the week ones,
Via an unwalked path.

In the cold early morning,
While the air is still dark,
We start our airplanes
And take off, like in the movies.
We are small children,
We want to play.
We fear nothing,
It's hard for us to choose.

3 September 2001

Chorus

We're sitting on the porch.
The town is asleep — we are humming.

11 July 2009

Surprising Proverbial Congruences in English and Russian — № 1

2009-07-07T18:25:00.000-07:00

English: Catch old birds with chaff, you cannot.
Russian: Стреляного воробья на мякине не проведешь. (You can't trick a sparrow that survived a shooting with chaff.)

The Russian version incorporates another saying — стреляный воробей (a sparrow that survived a shooting) — which means old hand in English.

Man from Kemerovo — Translation

2009-07-07T12:12:00.000-07:00

Man from Kemerovo
Words by Boris Grebenshchikov
Music by Aquarium
Translation by Andrei Soroker

I had some problems;
I took things a little too far;
The lowest bottom of the most-remote hell
Appeared not terribly far.
I called my mother,
And my mother was right —
She said: "Immediately, you must call
The man from Kemerovo".

He uses words sparingly, like De Niro;
One must be mentally ill to argue with him.
Catch him with chaff, you cannot,
He knows how to move underground.
The sky will collapse on the ground,
The grass will cease to grow —
He will come and silently fix everything,
The man from Kemerovo.

Adam became a refugee,
Abel got caught in a mobile web,
Noah didn't finish what he was building
Got drunk and fell face-first into mud;
The history of humanity
Would not have been as skewed,
Had they had the wisdom to connect
With the man from Kemerovo.

They called me from Kiev,
They called from Kathmandu;
They called from the start of the plenary session —
I told them I will not attend.
It is imperative to drink two liters of water before bed,
So my head remains whole the next day —
Because tonight I'm planning on drinking
With the man from Kemerovo.

Hear cover by yours truly

Justice Served

2009-06-26T16:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday on my ride from work I see a guy feverishly riding a bike in high gear and a dude with blond dreadlocks running after him screaming "Stop than man! Stop that man!"

I think for about five seconds whether I should follow the bike or pretend it's not happening. I figure I'd catch up with him and ask him why there is a man running behind him suggesting that he be stopped. The biker sees me and turns onto a four-lane one-way street against moving traffic. I follow him, but stay in the empty bus lane, watching him cross in front of several cars. Then I hear a boom sound and see him flying over a blue Toyota Tercel with a busted windshield.

Dreadlocked man catches up with the scene and picks up the bike with a cut cable lock wrapped around the handlebar and a deformed front wheel. The bike thief -- a troll man with bloodless skin and bruises for eyes -- is alive and is trying to walk away, but he is forced to stay still by a very tall pedestrian who happens to be a doctor. "Hold on, let me check you eyes," he says. The driver of the Tercel hands me a pen and an envelope from a bank statement asking to write a note explaining what happened. I try, but my hands are shaking. I leave him a voicemail instead.

Wow, I've just used $400 of self-bailout money to pay down my mortgage!

2009-06-16T23:26:00.000-07:00

For the last 28 days or so I've been playing some homemade music on my website — the website invites the visitors to help buy a little part of my house.

About $620 in contributions from friends and family served as a major source of fuel for my journey to date — thank you very, very much for your support and endorsements.

I have to pay some of that money to taxes (to support socialism), so for now $400 went to the bank. It was by far the hardest-earned $400 in my life.

I would also like to thank everyone who mentioned my website in your blogs, tweets, and facebooks.

I would also like to thank everyone who provided feedback regarding the UI, copy, recordings, and functionality of the website.

I'm switching to a weekly recording schedule for now — I have to concentrate on my work that is actually paying our bills.

If you feel like supporting this project nonfinancially, there are a few options:
— Link to http://pleasehelpmepayoffmyhouse.com from your website or blog.

— Visit my YouTube channel, and give great ratings to songs you like. Also leave comments.

— Digg it

— Let me know of others who are doing something other than waiting to see what happens about their upside down homes — a group of insane lunatics is always more appealing to journalists than just one insane lunatic.

Turtle Tower Vietnamese Restaurant in SF

2009-06-16T14:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.yelp.com/biz/turtle-tower-restaurant-san-francisco

Cheap and spicy (дешево и сердито). Recommend.

The experience is amplified by all the amazing faces of the neighborhood.

VARONA — Egoist is out

2009-06-11T06:43:00.001-07:00

VARONA — Egoist is out

Posted using ShareThis

I owe twice the market value of my home to the banks. How did this happen? What do I do?

2009-06-11T05:47:00.000-07:00

When we bought our house in late 2006 we thought we were getting a pretty good deal. Mainly, because we liked the house and the neighborhood. The house — a Victorian-type structure — had front and back yards, the proverbial character, a new foundation, and 11-foot ceilings. A BART station was two blocks away, San Francisco less than 10 minutes away, the neighborhood was up-and-coming, and was steeped in history. We were very nervous during the appraisal process, fearing it wouldn't qualify as a single-family residence because of the unfinished first floor (it used to be a duplex).

We didn't have a downpayment, so in addition to a 30-year 400K mortgage we signed a 30-year 100K second mortgage. We thought: we'll fix up the first floor, reappraise the house, and get a normal jumbo loan in a couple of years.

So, kudos for the optimism and all, but that plan — how should I put it — didn't work out. One reason it didn't work out is because the housing market committed suicide and it became apparent that we wouldn't be able to refinance anything. I was grateful for being smart enough to steer clear of the short-term, variable-rate stuff (I had the luxury, my credit score was 810-ish). The second reason it didn't work out is because I grossly overestimated my ability to fix up the downstairs. Working crazy unpaid overtime for AKQA didn't help either.

The third reason it didn't work out is because the house decided to create projects for us on its own: in the two and a half years of living there we had replaced three out of four faucets, the washer, the dryer, the refrigerator, the garbage disposal, and the stove. They all broke. Then, the stately Victorian roof started leaking. Then, electrical outlets stopped working on one side of the house. Then, we found a major water leak in the laundry room.

I fixed the laundry room leak myself, because I sort of understand plumbing: water goes through pipes. But electricity is black magic. It'll probably cost around ten thousand dollars to fix the real problems. For now: orange extension cords.

It appears the path to our salvation is a bag with ninety thousand dollars (principal on second mortgage), which we would turn over to Chase Manhattan Bank. Then we'll have only one mortgage and the house will only be about 150 thousand dollars upside-down, not 250 thousand. But then we'll be much closer to being able to refinance. We'd have an extra thousand dollars a month.

We could abandon the house and stop throwing money away, at the cost of my credit history. People are doing that all over the place. For a while, it appeared that half the houses on both sides of our street were at some stage of a foreclosure.

Wait, maybe we can get a bailout? We can just wait for some bailout to arrive in the mail. But they probably won't be sending us any bailout since we have a steady income and we've never missed a mortgage payment. Not to mention the fact that bailouts are wrong.

Before turning to radical solutions, however, I did the obvious: began busking online at http://pleasehelpmepayoffmyhouse.com.

“Grasshopper” by Bulat Okudzhava — translation

2009-06-10T12:29:00.000-07:00

Grasshopper by Bulat Okudzhava
Written for Yuliy Kim
Translation by Andrei Soroker

How can I please you, my grasshopper,
When your anthem fills the void?
One note will cure all sorrows,
The song will resurrect the dead.

Some string you pluck — it is so wonderous,
A chorus joins your serenade at once
Sublime, mysterious, and awful
Of your green brethren and sistren.

Some miracle must be on its way,
Gliding down onto the land from above,
That with such ease, with a choir in the background
You so loudly confess?

You must be a member of the verse-laying cohort,
Of our immortal regiment...
Scream and cry. Chances are, your children
Will look down upon your life's work.

Many thanks to the true poet,
To his pen, to his insanity
And to his voice, which reaches its heaven,
As it rises into a wheeze.

Hear

Paper Cuts by Julene

2009-06-05T17:27:00.000-07:00

http://madebyjulene.com

Man № 0

2009-06-03T14:46:00.001-07:00

Yuri Vizbor, "A Veteran's Tale", translation

2009-05-27T21:57:00.000-07:00

Yuri Vizbor, "A Veteran's Tale"
Approximate translation by Andrei Soroker
http://pleasehelpmepayoffmyhouse.com/#play:10/english

We saw that deal at once
Two companies rising from the earth
They rolled up their sleeves
And began marching toward Vitaly Palych and me.

And the sun is simmering, let it burn to hell
And we've got no other fate.
And I whisper: "Hold on, Vitaly Palych,
Hold on, let them come closer, my dear friend."

The world is rarely at peace --
A piece of grass trembling in the gun-sight.
A small patch of sparse forest behind us --
Then a field, then the rest of the country lies.

The sun is simmering, let it burn to hell
And we've got no other fate
And I whisper "Hold on, Vitaly Palych,
Hold on, let them come closer, my dear friend."

Our trench is our last home,
It seems there won't be any others.
And the damned black uniforms
Are moving closer, like on slow-motion film.

The sun is simmering, let it burn to hell
And we've got no other fate.
And I scream: "Come on, Vitaly Palych!
Give it all you've got, my dear friend!"

My years are passing by like train cars,
But I'm certain to come there once a year --
Where the plough carefully avoids
A wistful plywood star.

Where the sun is simmering, let it burn to hell
Where we've had no other fate.
And I whisper "Forgive me, Vitaly Palych.
Forgive me for surviving, my dear friend."

My housing bailout plan

2009-05-27T12:41:00.001-07:00

pleasehelpmepayoffmyhouse.com

2009-01-30T16:16:00.001-08:00

2009-01-30T16:15:00.000-08:00

Public Urination FTW

2009-01-30T16:14:00.002-08:00

This man pulled up in the car in front, got out, and went to the bathroom on the light pole right in front of my house.

Richard Stallman at SFSU

2009-01-30T16:14:00.001-08:00

2009-01-30T16:09:00.000-08:00

2009-01-30T16:08:00.002-08:00

2009-01-30T16:08:00.001-08:00

2009-01-30T16:07:00.002-08:00

2009-01-30T16:07:00.001-08:00

2009-01-30T16:06:00.000-08:00

2009-01-30T16:05:00.000-08:00

2009-01-30T15:46:00.000-08:00

2009-01-30T15:45:00.001-08:00

2009-01-30T15:43:00.000-08:00

2009-01-30T15:41:00.000-08:00

2009-01-30T15:38:00.000-08:00

2009-01-30T15:35:00.000-08:00

2009-01-30T15:29:00.000-08:00

"man BIO_f_base64" error on Mac OS X

2008-11-25T20:00:00.000-08:00

openssl version: OpenSSL 0.9.7l 28 Sep 2006
os: Darwin Kernel Version 9.5.0

Second example on man page has:


while((inlen = BIO_read(bio, inbuf, 512) > 0)
               BIO_write(bio_out, inbuf, inlen);

should be:


while((inlen = BIO_read(bio, inbuf, 512)) > 0)
               BIO_write(bio_out, inbuf, inlen);