Lee.org

My company of is looking for a full time office manager. Look here for the job listing

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/ofc/1907786796.html

Find out about the company: earthmine

If you’re a friend of mine, tell me you’re applying and I’ll make sure your resume gets seen. This kind of job usually pays 35-45k, more if you’ve got solid executive management skills.

The Crucible is having a sale on fall classes, including all my beloved Kinetics classes like Flame Effects, Mechanical Sculpture, and Arduino.

Here’s the deets:

Crucible Friends and Family Promotion

SAVE 30% on all Fall class tuition, exclusively available to Friends and Family of Crucible Board, staff and faculty!

Available by telephone orders only — call 510/444-0919 and use the code FRND10 to get this unprecedented discount.
Registration must be completed by 6PM on August 31 to qualify; discount is only for tuition, class materials fees are additional to discounted tuition

For a complete listing of classes, visit thecrucible.org

Woke up yesterday grumpy. It hasn’t been sunny in SF in a while. Finally got moving and grudgingly rode my bike to a Public Bike party at South Park. (an emotional grudge, not logistical. Thank you so much Cindy for the invitation!!).

I got to talk to a product designer at Public about this weird little loose-ish screw on the bike. (I won’t go into it here) and he responded “That’s quite astute of you to notice”. Ha! We had a great little product design and user experience conversation.

I got to meet the owner of The American, a new Grilled Cheese restaurant in San Francisco! I’ve spoken with Charlotte many times somewhat flippantly about wanting to open a grilled cheese restaurant. You can make them sweet or savory, it’s almost the perfect food! (ok, I don’t want to hear any non-perfect comments… to me, it’s almost the perfect food!). I explained how I didn’t know anything about being a restaurateur. His response, “Me neither. I just quit my job at Oracle and put my life savings into the business! We’ve been open 3 months and, so far, it’s going really well.” Anything is possible, eh?

At the end of the party, Cindy’s friend Dan had to get his Fun Cycle conference bikes back home. He was asking “Hey who wants to ride these bikes back to Pier 39 and Golden Gate Park?” I was thinking, “Umm, my legs burned on the way here via bike, I don’t need to push it. But I’ve got nothing else going on today… Feh, why not” And we were off!

Ok, conference bikes are fun! We must have had our picture taken 50 times on our route down Embarcadero to the parking lot near Pier 39. People are all waving and smiling. We stopped and got beers for the ride, and did donuts out on one of the piers! It was such a blast!

We parked the bike and Patrick and I went into the Spy Shop across the street from the parking lot. Boys Toys!

Then it was back to South Park to pick up our bikes… but first a stop at 21st Amendment for drinks! Wee!

On to a birthday party for Cindy Woo in the Mission!

Laurie suggests we go to a party at Adobe Books and then the Lexington, and we’re off! Adobe has it’s requisite compliment of fun and weird! Then we’re off to the Lex where I met Carla :-). We meet up with these Brits who say this is their last night in San Francisco after a whirlwind tour and keep demanding we show them the “real gay San Francisco”. Carla and I walk them from the Lexington to The Cafe in the Castro, meeting a few characters along the way. These 2 boys saying joyously despondently “Oh, it’s 1 am, all the good looking guys are already gone!” I say hopefully to our British contingent, “Now there’s just desperate guys left. Maybe even some good looking desperate guys. You’ll find yours, don’t worry!” We drop off the Brits at The Cafe, get some pizza slices and walk back to fetch her car from a garage in the Mission. :-)

What a night!

I got to see Jonathan Richman (of Modern Lovers et all musical immortality fame!) at (of all places!) Lost Weekend Video. Went with Charlotte. About 300 people packed into the video store! First thing was they they started playing the movie There’s Something About Mary. Charlotte and I wondered, a little disappointedly, if we’d have to wait until the end of the movie to hear Jonathan Richman play. But just 30 seconds in, a bold voice shouted “Ok, stop it right there!” Jonathan gave commentary throughout several parts of the movie, it was awesome! If you don’t recall, he did the music in the movie and had a few greek chorus singing cameos.

Initially we walked up to the video store and the line to get in went up Valencia and around the corner! We thought we’d never get in so we meandered around for a while. We finally committed, saying that we’d likely not get in. It turns out that we were the LAST people allowed in… which put us right at the front door… FRONT ROW SEATS :-).

I got this email today. NBC doesn’t want people downloading SNL.

From: complaintresponse@abuse-att.net

Dear LEE SONKO:

We recently received the attached notice from NBC Universal claiming that your Internet account may have been used for copyright infringement. Specifically, NBC Universal claims that your account was used to reproduce and/or distribute copyrighted content without authorization to other users of an Internet-based file-sharing network. We are forwarding this notice at the request of NBC Universal — please see the enclosed document.
Continue reading ‘Saturday Night Live is Protected by Internet Gremlins’ »

Had a crepe formage 2 blocks from Notre Dame :-)

Notre Dame is pretty awesome. The structure totally rivals the Taj Mahal! And in my opinion surpasses it… But that’s just me.

Went in to the cathedral at about 11:30pm following a procession in the doors. The Virgin Mary and son had left at about 10:30 with a grande accompaniment celebrating the Feast of the Assumption. I looked at the holiday’s calendar and darn if I didn’t miss Gregoran chanting at the cathedral by just a few hours! I saw that the confessionals have glass “cones of silence” around the traditional tiny wooden rooms; pretty funny

Had an anduillette AAAAA for lunch. When I picked it with my patented menu order randomizing system our local coworker cautioned me “be careful with that”. Sounds like a dare, right? What other food based on a dare do you know about? That’s right, Scottish Haggis! The anduillette was umm.. err.. Ok, it was pretty gross but I’m glad I tried it. It’s a sausage made with intestines, not just the casing but the whole thing. When I cut open this unassuming sausage, it looked like it had lots of rolls of.. I don’t know.. maybe little rolls of soggy paper. Not so bad. But it smelled like… when I held it to my nose, Arnaud immediately said “It tastes better than it smells, like cheese.” he was somewhat correct: as long as I didn’t use my nose, I couldn’t smell the stench of death and entrails bundled on my plate. It smelled awful. It had the texture of soggy rolled up postit notes and had almost no flavor (barring the stench). I felt it appropriate to try and get used to it. Well, it’s been 10 hours since that meal and my stomach and mind still haven’t gotten used to it. :-(

During lunch it rained really hard. I watched and smelled it… Being in San Francisco so long, I miss the occasional “real” rains you get in Boston, New Jersey and Florida.

Saw a guy jump a 5′ tall turnstile on the Metro. The thing was designed to be very hard to jump. He did it with ease, it was pretty amazing. I might have told the station attendant who was 5′ away but there’s that language barrier…

French TV is much like US… channel surfing I found:
a modern drama with a good guy vampire
a cartoon that looks Ren and Stimy-ish but the story was stupid and the French speaking actors all had horribly American accents
several mediocre pop music bands (I’m guessing it’s easier to hear sloppy music when you don’t speak the language)
Some pretty darn good rap, though culturally different from American rap (possibly a plus)
French World Series of Poker,
A sitcom that was waaay more sit than com
A nice cultural food program with goat cheese making, salt harvesting, honey gathering, dessert making and all things French.

Croque Madame in a Parisian restaurant on Place d’Italia. One of our party had a whole burger’s worth of steak tartar! He says it’s fresh enough in Paris.

Eiffel tower! (I’ve got a better photo on my real camera) Did you know that it twinkles on the hour for 5 minutes. Aparently I was there for 2 hours… 3 twinklings.

For the new job.

I’ll be back Monday.

Phew!

Ok, this is an unusually frank post. The title pretty much speaks for itself. Put the word out. Ask that dear friend of yours if you think we might get along nicely. Don’t be shy, life is short!

If you’re looking at signing up for Mozy, you might as well pay a little less for it. I’ll split the referral fee I get from the Mozy people if you use my referral code. AND you’ll get a 10% discount if you use the promotion code “AUGUST” when you sign up.

Here’s all you have to do:

1. First, sign up for Mozy with my referral link (I’ll split the fee I get and send you $10-20)
2. Then, when signing up, there will be a box where you can type in a promotion code. Type “AUGUST” and get 10% off an annual or biannual subscription to Mozy!

The above code is only good during August 2010. If you found this link and it’s not August 2010 any more, look on my blog for a current Mozy discount code.

Without any help from Steve Jobs I downgraded my phone from the stupidly slow IOS 4.0.1. It is SOOOOOOOO much faster.

Thank you Lifehacker! Downgrade your phone here.

Previously, and.

This is exactly what IOS4 did to my 3G iPhone.

I called Apple again today to try and resolve this problem. I was on hold for 13 minutes. “Ryan” came on and the call quality immediately went to crap. The call failed after a few seconds. I’ll call back later after my phone rage has subsided.

It is rage because I got this phone because it “just works”. But last week Steve Jobs broke my phone and the best answer I’ve gotten so far is “Well, it was an optional update so we won’t support it.” (yes, exact words). Me along with a million other people got your fucking^W update. I paid to live in a walled garden and now the gardeners are telling me in no unambiguous terms that it is their right to burn down the garden and make me buy another one. The evil Droid phone is starting to look pretty good.

I’m on my way back from Oregon. It was so beautiful that I couldn’t stop taking pictures. I must have taken 160,000 pictures or so with my new 12 megapixel camera rig! Yes, really!

Or… Hey, check out my new portable panopticon! Every 10 meters it automatically snaps a 360 degree panorama image that gets stitched into a 36 megapixel 3d image!

I’m on my first business trip. Brent and I are driving to Oregon right now to take 20,000 160,000 pictures of some roads. Back in SF on Friday.

Then off to Paris Aug 9-13!

Then off to Malaysia Aug 16-20!!

I got an email Saturday 9am on Dorkbot saying that SRL is going to have a few machines at some River Town Revival thing in Petaluma. I grabbed my things and went right up there.

Coolness abounded.
* I missed the art-boat race but saw some nice vehicles: a sea monster thing, a hand-made row boat, a giant floating wicker basket.
* Saw an artist’s terrific rusted mini submarine
* “Experience the Black Hole” had this spiraling water flowing into a hole. I threw in a donation for it
Here is the view from the top of the Experience the Black Hole. :-)

Yes, that’s the Big Arm and Running Machine by SRL attacking a big glass sign with face shots of elderly people doing errr…. umm… things; suffice to say that the photos appear benign. Later the machines attacked a giant chicken; when the running machine choked the chicken mercilessly, everyone laughed and didn’t tell their children why.

I met up with Noah, a great student of mine from Crucible Youth Kinetics. And Jessie, Erik, and Trebor (who got me the happiest beer of the day!) We all went off to a great dinner in Petaluma.

A great day :-)

I just left voicemail on the BART comment and complaint line 510 464-7134:

Just north of the west Oakland Bart station there is some sidewalk construction going on. Pedestrians are blocked by a fence from crossing Center street. To avoid the fence pedestrians must walk east or west a very long block. Understandably, pedestrians instead choose to break down the fence and walk across the construction zone. It would be easy for Bart to make a safe crossing zone in a nearby area instead of allowing this unsafe crossing.

Please create a safe way to cross this construction zone.

We’ll see if the problem is fixed anytime soon.

This looks like it’ll be pretty nice. I’ve been watching them practice. Singers and dancers and flame throwers and contortionists and smithing oh my!

It’s going to be this Friday and Saturday at the Crucible in Oakland.

Bring a date!
http://www.thecrucible.org/events/heat-a-fire-cabaret

Short form: If you have an iphone 3g, do NOT get the new ios4 upgrade for your iphone. It’s MUCH slower and doesn’t add any features.

I’m building a list of iPhone ios4 stupidity. I wrote this all in a deadpan tone though I could have used a lot more exclamation marks and words like “stoopidly!” Here’s a start:

Most every app is much slower. For example, it now take 8 seconds to start the calendar, it used to take 4. Starting editing a note takes much longer. Etc…

It sometimes doesn’t detect my button pushes and sometimes mistakenly believes I have pushed a button. (yes, it’s insane)

I initially did an “upgrade” install. After it the Notes app would sometimes (twice out of 5 or so attempts) lose the changes I made to a note. I then did a “new” install and haven’t has that problem again.

Scrolling email is now much more jerky.

It appears that now voicemails aren’t downloaded to the phone until I try to listen to them. Which causes delays in listening to voicemails

In the first 5 seconds or so of running Notes, Calendar and many other apps, a snapshot of what was on the screen last time it was run is displayed. Of course, it looks editable, but it’s not. You can click all you want but you’re just looking at a picture of the Calendar app, Notes, etc. Key presses are not recorded or registered because… well, you’re looking at a picture of an app, not an app!

Update: 7-15-10: At the suggestion of the Apple rep, I installed iTunes on a new computer. I then Restored my phone to it, making sure to rename the phone when asked. This has fixed the problem. My phone is now as fast as it ever was. :-)

Update 7-25-10: My phone has gotten slow again after the full restore. I just installed 4.0.1. Starting Calendar still takes 8 seconds, up from 3. Eff you Steve Jobs :-)

Centered just a mile or so west of Ocean Beach at 7:47am.

I was in bed and barely awake. The building shook a bit more than a building should generally shake when maybe a strong wind blows on it. I was groggy but it felt like just about 3 seconds of shaking.

Wee! I haven’t felt an earthquake in a few years. It’s good to know the earth is still alive… I hope it doesn’t rain down an 8.5 tomorrow.