Tsaiberspace

Finally, something new: Ethiopian-style honey wine. It combines the complexity and kick of a “normal” wine with most of the sweetness of a dessert wine.

This wine was very Good.

Wine at an Indian restaurant. This was probably the least-divey Indian restaurant I’ve been to. The food was just as good as all the divey places, but our clothes didn’t smell like Indian food afterwards.

The label came right off after soaking in hot water.

The Zaca Mesa was OK.

Ghost Rider is extremely light on story, which really can’t be helped. There is too much to be covered and still leave room for a real story with a movie’s time constraints. Ghost Rider isn’t as ingrained into the social psyche as Spider-Man, Superman, or Batman, to enable to script writers to skip the backstory in favor of the real story.

What remains is something of a cross between American Chopper, 2 Fast 2 Furious, and Transformers: we get to watch a really cool motorcycle transform into something even cooler, with Eva Mendes in tow as the female lead. Sadly, Eva Mendes is not as hot as the flaming Hellcycle, which wins the on-screen eye-candy battle hands down; she was better in 2 Fast 2 Furious.

Three three major tax software providers (well, the three that I know about) all offer desktop software (download or CD purchase) and online services of their products. For a package including one federal return and e-file, and one state return, all three encourage people to go online (or discourage people from staying at home, depending on how you look at things).

Note: This is not meant to be a price comparison between the three vendors; only a price comparison between each vendors’ individual products. The market being what it is, the bundling of services inevitably vary from vendor to vendor.

Buying a CD incurs material costs over downloading software, but why does downloading software cost more than using an online service? It costs money to maintain an online service, and it costs money to store your information from year to year.

To be sure, it is probably worth some money to know exactly how people are using the products (which forms are most popular, which interview questions seem to take the most time, etc.), for the purposes of improving the product and gaining an edge over the competition.

However, the tin-foil-hatted paranoid in me also knows that it is definitely worth a lot of money to know the tax situations of the people using the products. One needs only to consider the value of a list of e-mail addresses (or even physical addresses and social security numbers!) of people in some ZIP code who are married, self-employed, holding multiple pieces of property, with some specific number of children of a certain age, and earning above some certain amount of money (all inferred from information in the tax return).

Even if 2nd Story Software, Intuit, and H&R Block never sell or give out this information, what happens when the companies hit bad times and go belly up on the auction block? I’m sure this data would be worth a lot on its own, outside of the actual tax software and service products. And then there is always the risk of some kind of security breach like another stolen employee laptop, or hacked server, or whatever the breach du jour happens to be.

There is an older writeup of TaxACT here.

Update: the unstated but obvious fact is that using an “online” service for filing means that there is yet one more party storing your tax records, which is one more party able to lose/release your data.

Happy Year of the Pig (or Boar).

Like any good tourists in our own town, we rushed to Chinatown to add to the general crowdedness. We listened to firecrackers being set off every few minutes. We waited 30 minutes in line to get some moon cakes from some apparently particularly famous Chinese bakery that I heard about on NPR yesterday. Here is a picture of the line outside Golden Gate Bakery:

Some trivia:

• This is not only a year of the pig, but a year of the golden pig. Most people have already heard of the Chinese lunar calendar zodiac signs (one per year). This twelve-year cycle itself cycles through five elements: gold, wood, water, fire, and earth. The golden years are considered lucky, and pig years are also considered lucky.
• Moon cakes are one of a few traditional foods under attack in California, because of the practice of serving them at room temperature (current time and temperature standards would prevent moon cakes from being served at many places). A bill AB 2214 commissions a study to determine how these foods may be considered “safe”.

One thing I did not expect to see on this walk was the preponderance of Taiwanese flags everywhere (clearly outnumbering the Chinese flags).

Home is never having to leave home (except for groceries and work), having a laundry machine downstairs, and a mailbox at the front door. Having finally gotten a small stackable washer/dryer in our garage (my first craigslist purchase ever), I set about improving our mailbox situation.

In San Francisco houses, it is common for the mailbox to be in the garage (the mail carrier drops your mail into a mail slot facing the outside). In a good setup, this mailslot is actually in the wall next to the garage door, and the resident has a box on a table or something right behind the mailslot. In our house, the mailslot is in the garage door itself.

The mailslot-in-the-garage-door setup isn’t a problem for most people, because it is very common in space-cramped San Francisco for people to park on the driveway or on the street, and to use the garage for storage. People who use their garage for storage can just stick a box on a table behind the mailslot.

We use our garage to keep one car, so that isn’t an option. There are a few solutions:

• When driving home, open the garage door (with the automatic garage door opener). Peer over the top of the dashboard and look for mail on the ground. If you see any mail, get out of the car, pick up the dirty mail and put it somewhere, then come back out, get in the car, and drive in to the garage. Or, if you don’t see any mail, drive in to the garage, and accidentally drive over the mail you didn’t see. Pick up the mail, dust off the tire treads from the envelopes, and hope that no CDs or anything were broken.
• Tape/nail an old cardboard box (like from Amazon) behind the mailslot. This mailbox catches the mail and keeps it from getting dirty. When the garage door opens, the mailbox rises to the ceiling and turns 90° sideways; the mail falls out and flutters down to the ground. You will see the mail for sure as it flutters down to the ground, so you won’t drive over it and break anything. If it is a windy and/or rainy day, the mail can flutter outside and get wet. Also, you still have to get out of the car, get the mail and put it somewhere, and come back out and drive in.
• Build a better mailbox. I nailed an old Amazon box behind the mailslot, but I first trimmed one of the top boxflaps and only nailed the boxflap to the garage door; the boxflag acts as a hinge and leaves the mailbox free to swing at an angle (maybe 30° from vertical) when the garage door is up and open. The box is strong enough to hold a reasonable amount of mail without tearing away from the garage door. The angle is sufficient to keep the mail from falling out of the box down to the ground. The box is light enough such that if the nails fail, or if the flap breaks, it won’t kill anyone who might be standing underneath.

My home mailbox technology has steadily progressed up through the third stage described above. I hereby release the design described and pictured above to the world at large, license-, royalty-, and patent-free.

Ocean Beach runs along the west side of Great Highway, starting near the San Francisco Zoo at its southernmost point, up to Golden Gate Park, and a little farther north to Cliff House. We walked one small portion of that, starting about midway up, working our way up to Golden Gate Park. Ocean Beach, being operated by the National Park Service, is interesting for a few reasons:

• You can’t see the beach from the road, because the beach is lower than the road level, and because there are some mini-levees built up. This probably serves the initial purpose of protecting the land from high-tide and flooding, but it also removes the opportunity to passively enjoy the beach. Commuters cannot see it as they drive to work or drive back home; pedestrians and bikers have to descend to the footpaths. On the other hand, people on the beach cannot see or hear the traffic on the Great Highway.
• Unlike beaches in places like Santa Barbara and probably many other coastal cities, Ocean Beach is very definitely public property; there is no “beachfront” property. The beach is separated from the nearest houses by the mini-levees (described above), the Great Highway (4 lanes separated by a divider), another divider, and La Playa St. (2 lanes). The best one can do here is to have a house with a top floor high enough to see over the levees, and over any other intervening houses.

For these reasons, Ocean Beach feels more like a national park to hike, and less like a “beach” for sand and swimming (besides, it’s too cold!).

Receiving broadcast HDTV requires an antenna. The conventional wisdom states that an outdoor antenna is better than an indoor antenna, and that an indoor antenna is better than no antenna at all. In all cases, higher is better.

Being a renter all of my TV-owning life, installing an outdoor rooftop antenna has always been out of the question. So my HDTV journey began with the fancy-looking $40 “Silver Sensor” antenna, but it was not up to the task of receiving signals in downtown Boston, surrounded by high-rise buildings. The $20 Radio Shack 15-1868 was the next antenna I tried, and it served me well in Boston and on the San Francisco Bay Area peninsula.

However, when I moved into San Francisco, the 15-1868 failed to keep up with the more challenging climate and terrain (ocean, fog, hills, lower 2nd-story location, and increased distance to the broadcast towers). Still renting, an outdoor antenna is still out of the question, and despite living in a house, I have no attic. Memories of Pringles cans and aluminum foil came to the rescue, and one tin-foil hat later, we’re back in business. Here is the before picture:

Here is the after picture, with a close-up of the tin-foil-hatted antenna. A bonus decor-friendly side-effect of the improved reception is that the rabbit ears do not need to be as fully extended: