Category: Haightlife

General news and thinking about living in the Alderete-McCune household.

How Many Sides Does Your Underwear Have?

Our trip to France included some of the worst travel experiences either Rochelle or I have had. Between losing most of our luggage, some of it for days, some of it permanently, and the almost complete indifference to same, we’re quite unhappy with Virgin Atlantic.

Our trip to France included some of the worst travel experiences either Rochelle or I have had. We didn’t have a non-stop flight, flying from SFO to London Heathrow, and then to Charles De Gaulle in a second plane. On the flight out, the airline lost three of our four checked bags. Yes, 75% of our luggage did not arrive in France when we did. Only Rochelle’s gear got there as expected.

One of the missing bags arrived on the next flight (from Heathrow to CDG), about an hour and a half later. That was the empty hard-sided suitcase we had brought so we could stuff it full of champagne to bring home.

We waited another hour and a half, for the next flight after that, but no more bags appeared. The airline said they couldn’t find them in the system, which meant they’d gotten lost when changing planes (as we very nearly did; our two flights were too close together, and we had to run through Heathrow, something we’ve vowed never to do again).

So we picked up our rental car and drove to Reims, two hours away, and checked into our hotel, sans all of my clothing, and both of our toiletries kits.

Now, the experienced traveler will no doubt tsk tsk, and suggest we were traveling too heavy, and not very smart, by not having at least our essentials as carry-ons. But we were ambitious in what we wanted to be able to bring back (we’ll get to that in another post), and our packing strategy made sense, at least at the start.

Still, after two more days, my bag had not arrived. After turning my shorts inside-out the second day, I was at a loss for what to do on the third. And the shirt I was wearing, for the third day, was starting to get rank. Finally my suitcase arrived, and I was able to change — but not before I broke down and bought new socks, underwear, and shirts.

But that’s not all! My bag took three days to show up, but the fourth never did. Which is astonishing, because it was an empty box. Well, not really empty. It was a very thick cardboard shipping box with styrofoam inserts molded to contain and protect a full case of champagne (I told you we were ambitious). These shipping packs are relatively easy to get in the US, but impossible to find in France — and god knows we tried. This made the lost item almost priceless. We literally were unable to replace it.

And we had to try. Because the airline told us that they had lost it, and since it was an “empty” box, it had no value (to them), so they wouldn’t even look for it. Indeed, even if they accidentally found it, because it was empty, they would just destroy it instead of trying to give it back to us!

You want to hear the most amazing, and appalling, part of the story?

We were flying Virgin Atlantic. Yes, that supposedly Nirvana in the sky, the airline everyone wants to emulate, Virgin Atlantic Airways totally fucked us on our luggage.

I’ll have quite a bit more to write about Virgin Atlantic; this is only the flight to France. But the summary is we’re never flying Virgin again.

Vacation in France

Yes, we just got back from 16 days in France. Yes, we took a lot of photos. Yes, we have a lot to write about. And yes, we’re behind on putting these up.

Yes, we just got back from 16 days in France. Yes, we took a lot of photos. Yes, we have a lot to write about. And yes, we’re behind on putting these up.

Rochelle will write the commentary to the photos, while I’ll post a bunch of stuff here. Look for it over the next couple weeks, starting this weekend.

Of course, there would already be stuff posted if my damn server hadn’t died while we were gone…

France 16, Mexico 3

Our trip in France lasted 16 days, and we obviously ate a lot of French food. Which was wonderful, but it’s time for a rest. So today I ate Mexican food for the third day in a row.

Our trip in France lasted 16 days, and we obviously ate a lot of French food. Which was wonderful, but it’s time for a rest.

So today I ate Mexican food for the third day in a row. Mexican is one of the cuisines you have real difficulty finding at all in France. In fact, the closest we found was a TexMex restaurant. (We were too scared to eat there.)

So, since we got back, I’ve been eating a lot of Mexican food. For three days straight. Well, Sunday it was only margaritas (and margaritas only)…

Murphy Strikes

On Monday, September 3rd, at 4pm, my flight from San Francisco to Paris took off, the beginning of a 16 day vacation in France. 20 hours later, the power supply on my server died, taking this blog, and my mail and DNS, and other services, with it. Two weeks later, when I got home, it took me less than an hour to fix. Grrrr.

On Monday, September 3rd, at 4pm, my flight from San Francisco to Paris took off, the beginning of a 16 day vacation in France. Approximately 20 hours later, the power supply on my server died, taking this blog, and the rest of my web sites, and my mail, and DNS, and other services, with it.

The defunct server is a Pentium 166 with 256 megs of RAM and a 2.1 gig hard disk, and qualifies as useless junk in those excess-and-salvage auctions of defunct companies that are all the rage these days.

I had all my sites and services back up and running within 2 hours of getting home, by moving the hard disk from that system to another useless PC (this one a 150MHz Cyrix system with only 80 megs of RAM), and running on it instead.

The dead server is more than 4 years old. You would think that it could have died a few hours earlier, or a few weeks later, and not caused me to be down for more than two weeks.

Ah, well…

The Cat Who Barfed Copper Pennies

I just ran into Cecil, our oldest cat, in the hallway. He was standing, staring at a penny right in front of him on the floor. There was a second penny just to the side. I asked him, “Are you eating those, or barfing them up?” He just looked at me.

I just ran into Cecil, our oldest cat, in the hallway. He was standing, staring at a penny right in front of him on the floor. There was a second penny just to the side.

I asked him, “Are you eating those, or barfing them up?”

He just looked at me.

He’s lucky they weren’t golden eggs. Or even quarters.

More Food!

I posted more of our food photos, and Rochelle and I both wrote more commentary (Pancita’s #3 still needs more commentary, working on it). In total, five new restaurant experiences in our San Francisco Food photo series.

I posted more of our food photos, and Rochelle and I both wrote more commentary (Pancita’s #3 still needs more commentary, working on it). In total, five new restaurant experiences in our San Francisco Food photo series.

Famous People We Actually Care About

Recently some friends told us about a dinner they ate, with a famous person, that they didn’t realize was famous. Rochelle and I were deeply envious.

The other night we were eating dinner with some friends we hadn’t seen in a while, including one couple where the husband’s family lives in New York. They told a story about how they had gone to Tabla, a well-regarded NYC restaurant, with a couple they described as a documentary producer Damani had worked with in Germany, and “the producer’s wife.”

Apparently the chef kept sending dishes that weren’t on the menu, and without them being ordered. When Rochelle asked why, Sunita said something about how maybe the wife was kind of an editor for some food magazine.

Rochelle knows most of the food editors, and so she asked who it was. “Um, I think her name was Ruth…?”

“Ruth? Ruth Reichl?” Rochelle asked.

“Yes, I think that was her. Yes, that was her name.”

“You had dinner in New York City with Ruth Reichl?!?!?” I asked, astounded. Rochelle and I could not believe what we were hearing, and yes, they did have dinner with Ruth Reichl.

Who is Ruth Reichl? Only the editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, and the former food critic for the New York Times, and the author of two outstanding food biographies.

There are more famous people in food — Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, Alton Brown are personal favs — but not many. And there’s probably no one you’d rather go to dinner with in New York City.

Wow.

Who Reads Warning Labels

When I was a kid we got a VCR with an early model remote control — with a wire! (This obviously dates me.) When watching movies, the kids would want to fast-forward past the FBI warnings, and our father would make us stop.

Like a lot of people over a certain age, I remember my first VCR. My father bought an “advanced” model with a “remote control” for the family, back when a remote was a novel idea. The control had a thick wire that ran between the remote and the VCR itself — none of that infrared stuff back then!

And we’d have family movie nights pretty regularly, where we’d get a couple videos for the weekend, and watch them all together in the family room. It was a fairly big production — there’s eight of us, and some nights would have everyone watching. We’d have popcorn, sodas, or ice cream, and everyone would run around getting their favorite movie-watching items together, grabbing a good seat, etc.

So then we’d finally sit down to actually start the movie, with the house lights turned off, our anticipation would be very high…and the first thing we’d see on-screen would be the FBI warning about making illegal copies.

Now, these were exciting for the first few times, I suppose — remember, once upon a time, you couldn’t watch unedited movies at home, so for a while this was a Big Deal — but it quickly became boring, something in the way of getting on with the movie.

I or one of the other kids would attempt to fast-forward through them, and my father would yell at us for fucking around with the remote. Sometimes he’d even make us rewind the movie! More to make a point about playing around with the machine, rather than to actually see the warning, one presumes.

Anyway, I guess that kind of behavior pisses off the folks in Hollywood, too, because with DVDs, the Fast Forward button is disabled during the display of the FBI warning.

More Anti-Spam Tools

At the recommendation of a new co-worker, I recently installed Cloudmark’s SpamNet add-in for Microsoft Outlook, the e-mail client I’m using at Persistence. If you’re using Microsoft Outlook on Windows (as I have to at work), this tool should be a no-brainer.

Note: I no longer recommend SpamNet, having found more effective tools. See my Personal Survey of Anti-Spam Tools for more details and recommendations.

At the recommendation of a new co-worker, I recently installed Cloudmark’s SpamNet add-in for Microsoft Outlook, the e-mail client I’m using at Persistence.

The plug-in adds new capabilities to Outlook, enabling it to scan each message as it’s downloaded, and determine if it’s spam or not. If it’s spam, it’s sent to your Spam mailbox, rather than your Inbox. This lets you review the caught spams at another time, to verify that only spam has been filed there.

The most interesting part of SpamNet is the way it detects spam. It plugs into a P2P (peer-to-peer) network of spam reporters. Everyone who’s part of the network reports spam when it gets through their filters. After a couple people have reported any given spam, the network “learns” what that spam looks like, and will filter it for everyone else. So SpamNet “learns” about spam from the collective experience of everyone using SpamNet (currently about 40,000 people). This makes SpamNet probably the most effective anti-spam tool out there. There’s more to it than that, but not much, and you can read all about it on the Cloudmark web site.

Oh, yeah, the price tag. SpamNet is free for individual use. If you’re using Microsoft Outlook on Windows (as I have to at work), this tool should be a no-brainer.

But, there’s the catch. Today SpamNet supports only Outlook on Windows. If you use Outlook Express, you’ll be supported soon. If you’re using Netscape, or Eudora, or a Macintosh, you’re SOL at the moment.