I didn't leave the city limits of San Francisco for nearly a whole month, the time period between Labor Day and October 1. I made that observation to a few people, most of whom replied, "you must have been mighty bored." But I certainly wasn't! In that time I worked plenty, walked a lot, tried at least 5 new restaurants, helped paint a homeless shelter, pushed my way through crowds of leather-clad men, had street people mutter strange and unintelligible things to me, and generally lived life.
I recently read a quote by a politician from across the bay in Oakland. He was disgruntled at the slow progress of the new Bay Bridge section, and he blamed it on San Franciscans' lack of motivation to get it done, saying, "They don't need a new Bay Bridge. They think they're in Nirvana over there -- why would they ever want to leave?" Well, I wouldn't necessarily call San Francisco "Nirvana," but I can see his point. It's sort of a hassle to leave the city, especially when you don't have a car (and conversely, it's rather a hassle to enter the city when you do have a car).
Finally, though, on October 1, Karen and I BARTed our way to Berkeley to the La Pena Cultural Center, where one of Karen's friends was playing in the band José Roberto y Sus Amigos (who were mighty good, by the way). That began a flurry of city-leaving. I had to go to Daly City, 15 miles south of here, for work. Then, having prepared myself with these little Bay Area baby steps, I hopped on a plane to New York City for another work-related trip. New York City -- there's another city I could stay in for months and never get bored. And with such good pizza, too! I'd never get hungry, either.
But here I am, back in San Francisco, back within the city limits, and here I'll stay for a while. My birthday is coming up on Friday, and Karen and I have got reservations at Chez Nous, a restaurant we've been meaning to try for years. If I must get older, at least I'll do it in style.]]>Generalhttp://blog.casalaina.net/index.php?itemid=111Tue, 18 Oct 2005 11:24:40 -0700<![CDATA[The Folsom Street Fair]]>
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Upon first arriving, I found myself in front of a stage where an ambiguously-gendered band was capably covering 80's tunes. Thin, leather clad men gyrated on platforms at either end of the stage. The music was actually pretty good, so I stuck around for a bit, but eventually I turned around and headed east on Folsom St. Almost immediately the foot traffic ground to a halt; there was evidently a spectacle ahead. I worked my way towards the front, and lo and behold, it appeared to be a mostly-naked transsexual woman getting whipped (and enjoying it).
At this point, I was filled with a sudden sense of dread: what if I saw someone I knew there? Not in the sense that I would care if someone saw me, but rather more like, "what if I come across someone I know getting spanked?" San Francisco is not a particularly big city, and it's not unusual for me to have a chance meeting with someone I know. If I had happened upon a spanking booth where, say, one of my coworkers was getting the paddle, I'm not sure I'd be able to purge that image from of my head.
Thankfully, of the many red, battered butts I saw that day, none were attached to faces I recognized. And there were spanking booths, quite a number of them. And naked people hanging about, mostly old, bearded men. Leatherwear shops had set up booths, as had Elbow Grease and a number of magazine purveyors (and I don't mean Newsweek). All in all, it was very San Franciscan -- the kind of thing one could only see in this city (and maybe in Berlin).
By far the strangest thing I saw was something going on after I left the fair, as I was walking north on 8th Street. On 8th and Mission there is a massive, windowless PG&E building (PG&E being Pacific Gas and Electric), probably containing a power substation. In front of this concrete monolith was gathered a group of maybe 15 people, dressed perfectly normally (i.e. not in S&M gear) -- but they were doing something incredibly odd. They appeared to be worshipping the building. There were plenty of passersby who just ignored the scene, and really, stuff like this happens every day in this city. Just yesterday, in fact, I was chased around for a bit by two people dressed as a 9-foot-tall sun and moon. You just shrug it off after a while.
But back to the worshippers: I had to stop and watch. A few others stood around me, equally puzzled. As we watched, they started to run around each other in an apparently choreographed manner. Eventually one of the women pulled out a red-stained blanket and played dead for a bit, until three of the men picked her up and lifted her towards the sky. She started chanting, "My wings are gone, there are only stones."
So it wasn't a worship, it was in fact a sort of street theater. These were not street people, by the way; they had obviously planned all this out beforehand, to meet here and perform this weirdness. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a Gertrude Stein play. If you've ever seen one of those (and they're popular in this area), you'd know that she's like the Jackson Pollock of the theater. Her plays consist of utterly random lines, coupled with equally random movements. At least, they're random to me -- I've never been into the abstract art thing. But here it was, right in front of me, the most abstract play I'd ever seen at the strangest venue I could imagine. That's San Francisco for you.]]>Generalhttp://blog.casalaina.net/index.php?itemid=110Fri, 30 Sep 2005 09:13:00 -0700<![CDATA[I've Got To Start Taking Notes]]>
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Pancho Villa Taqueria, the best burrito place around IMHO, which is in the Mission District. It was about a one-mile walk. In that one mile, however, I saw so many strange things, I was very much tempted to stop off in a neighborhood convenience store and buy myself a notebook and a pen to write it down. And I should have written it down, too, because now I can only remember the highlights.
My trek first took me down Castro Street and through the Castro district, long known for being the "gay" part of town. This means that there are men holding hands and generally being affectionate, rainbow flags flying from every storefront, and bars with names like The Men's Room. But these things, at least in San Francisco, are perfectly normal. Sunday, however, there was apparently some sort of gathering for the runup to the upcoming Folsom Street Fair, rightly billed as "the granddaddy of all leather events." And so my path down Castro Street was blocked by hundreds of large, bearded men, many wearing little leather thongs or buttless leather pants. The only means from point A to point B was to push through the crowd, and so I did, slowly weaving my way through the cowhide-clad masses.
Finally reaching Castro and 18th St., I made a left and began traversing the edge of Duboce Park. Upon reaching the opposite end of the park, I couldn't take my eyes off the profoundly weird site of an elderly Asian man dancing in place on the sidewalk in front of the Duboce Park Cafe. And by elderly, I do mean elderly -- the guy was definitely pushing 80 years old. He didn't seem to be homeless or mentally ill (as many people are in this city); rather, he was just selling newspapers from a stack beside him, and the dancing was his way of attracting business. It worked to some degree -- although I didn't buy a newspaper, he did get my attention.
I continued along my merry way, and on the next block I happened upon a bald man smiling sheepishly at me, standing next to a colorfully-striped couch. For whatever reason, he had apparently decided that taking the couch into his apartment the old-fashioned way, using the stairs, was untenable, so he'd rigged a complex system of ropes and pulleys from the roof overhang. My couch-intuition was likely more refined due to my involvement in two recent mega-couch moves, so it was just beginning to dawn on him what I could already see: that the couch wouldn't fit through the window either. He was screwed.
Thankfully, it wasn't my problem. What was my problem was that I was mighty hungry, and I still didn't have a two-handed refried-black-bean-filled burrito in my hands. So I hightailed it to Pancho Villa and got a super burrito. Nothing beats a nice, satisfying burrito after a long, strange walk.
Perhaps this weekend I'll do a similar walk with notebook in hand. Last week was just the warmup for the Folsom Street Fair; this week is the real deal. I've never been to it, in all of my 6 years in the Bay Area, but I've heard it's completely nuts. Sounds like fun.]]>Generalhttp://blog.casalaina.net/index.php?itemid=109Fri, 23 Sep 2005 17:37:11 -0700<![CDATA[A Chill Falls On San Francisco]]>
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This is supposed to be summer in San Francisco -- the brief period between September and October when the sun pokes out of the fog and scantily-clad revelers cover the grass at Golden Gate Park. But not this year. No, this year, we've got bone-chilling cold. From my window here at work, I can see hundreds of sailboats all concentrated into a relatively small area of the bay, sailing around in circles. They're probably huddling together for warmth.
It's been a crazy, busy couple of weeks. This week was Salesforce's user conference, Dreamforce, and I devoted a significant portion of my time to setting things up there and making sure everything ran smoothly. Fortunately, everything did run smoothly, including the CEO's keynote address, in which some of my software played a part. It was time well spent, though; I met lots of people, customers, Salesforce employees, and people from partner companies. I find this all very interesting, especially compared to the mega-company I came from. I feel like I can see how the whole business is run, and what part everyone plays in it. Part of that is just the startup ethos, but Salesforce is fairly well beyond startup status now. But it's still small enough that I can be on a first-name basis with people up and down the hierarchy; back at Oracle, I could never see myself saying, "Yo, Larry!"]]>Generalhttp://blog.casalaina.net/index.php?itemid=108Thu, 15 Sep 2005 13:29:39 -0700<![CDATA[Let's Go Yankees!]]>
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DreamForce, Salesforce's upcoming conference. I'm looking forward to it, it sounds like it'll be fun.
And what better way to celebrate the long weekend than with the good old American pastime? The Yankees are in town! They'll be playing the Oakland A's tonight, tomorrow and Sunday. I've got tickets for myself and Karen for tonight's game, and I'll probably catch one more game this weekend. Oakland A's games are fun in a way that the San Francisco Giants games just can't match. The fans are much more into it, particularly in the bleachers, which sport a full color guard, drummers, and the occasional out-of-tune horn player. Besides, Oakland, being as it is in the American League, tends to have more offensive fireworks at its games. Baseball has two leagues, the American and National leagues, with the primary difference between the two being that the National League requires the pitcher to go to bat, while the American League allows a "designated hitter" to take his place. In general, pitchers can't hit, which tends to dampen the offense of National League teams.
And then, of course, there are the Yankees, traditionally the best-funded of baseball teams, and frequently the front-runners (although at the moment they're a bit behind their nemesis, the Boston Red Sox, in their divison). I've been a Yankees fan since the days of Don Mattingly, partly as a result of growing up near their New York home, but also because they're just fun to watch. Lots of people have choice words for the Yankees and their $200-million-a-year baseball steamroller, but few can deny that Yankees games are always exciting and high-energy.
And those are my only plans for the weekend. The rest of the time, I intend to lounge around and sleep a lot. Hey, I've been employed for three whole weeks now -- I need the rest!]]>Generalhttp://blog.casalaina.net/index.php?itemid=107Fri, 02 Sep 2005 17:40:03 -0700<![CDATA[Busy, Busy, Busy]]>
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Salesforce.com, I attended some training on Monday and Tuesday, culminating in a Salesforce Foundation event where a bunch of us new hires went out to a park in a public housing area of San Francisco and cleaned it up (the Salesforce Foundation is a charitable foundation backed by Salesforce.com). An interesting fact about my class of new hires was that more than a few of them were Salesforce.com users at their previous company, and liked it so much that they got a job here. It's kind of like those old Hair Club For Men commercials where CEO Cy Sperling would announce unenthusiastically, "I'm not only the president -- I'm also a client." Except backwards. And most of the new hires here had hair to begin with.
Meanwhile, Karen has started law school, and she's been hitting the books pretty hard, spending hours upon hours every day briefing cases. Her experience thus far has eerily mirrored Scott Turow's account of his first year at law school, One-L, right down to the strict, no-nonsense Contracts professor. I'd have to say, though, that our new ventures (her school and my new job) are well in sync. She's been spending long hours with her nose in books, and I've been hanging out at work a lot learning the ins and outs of Salesforce's applications; it works out wonderfully in that we're both so busy, neither of us feels neglected. We still manage to see each other fairly often, and we're working out a schedule so that I know to stay out of her way during her worst days (which generally fall just before a class with the aforementioned Contracts professor).
I happened upon one of my roommates the other day, a rare occurrence indeed; although five of us live in the house, we're almost never home at the same time. The most I ever see of them is their occasional load of laundry in the dryer. It works well for me, though; when I am home (also a rare occurrence these days), it's like I have the whole house to myself.
That's that for now. I haven't been very good about keeping up the blog lately; I keep lamenting that fact, but rarely do anything about it. Well, hopefully I'll be a little better about it. If nothing else, I can start writing about what I had for lunch. With all the lunch choices in downtown SF, I'd have blog material for weeks!
I had to keep it quick for lunch today, so I headed down to the Taco Bell and tried one of their new Crunch Wrap Supremes. This is just a new packaging of the 6 standard Taco Bell ingredients (tortillas, cheese stuff, beans, salsa, lettuce, and sour cream), with the twist that it's wrapped up like a big wanton and then put in a toaster. Mmm, so good. But so dangerous. Too much Taco Bell and you'll be in dire straits for hours afterwards. So Rule 1 about ordering from Taco Bell: Never over-order from Taco Bell. When in doubt, leave it out.]]>Generalhttp://blog.casalaina.net/index.php?itemid=106Fri, 26 Aug 2005 17:15:20 -0700<![CDATA[A Room With A View]]>
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eMove to hire a couple of guys who billed themselves as Quality Movers. Fortunately for me, they quite lived up to their name. They showed up at the warehouse just after I did, and promptly loaded the stuff onto the truck. When we got back to San Francisco, the three of us hauled it all up the three flights of stairs to my room, and I became a fully furnished resident of Beaver Street.
After a while spent unpacking, I sat down on my bed to rest for a bit and looked out the window, and I noticed something I hadn't realized before -- I have a killer view of the city from my room! From my window, on the third story of a house perched on top of a steep hill, I can see all of downtown, Civic Center, the Bay Bridge, Treasure Island, and if it's not too foggy, I can even make out Oakland. How about that.
And yesterday I started my job at Salesforce.com. Their offices are at a wonderful location at Embarcadero and Market Streets, and from my large cube window I have a beautiful view of the bay, the Bay Bridge, and the ferries coming in and out of the historic Ferry Building. Not that I had much time for window gazing; I went right to work the very minute I arrived, getting to know the people, learning the products, and that sort of thing. I was happy to do it, too; my three weeks off was mostly nap-filled and pleasant, but I was itching to start doing something useful with myself.
It was just as I suspected: there are smart and motivated people everywhere at Salesforce, and everyone appears genuinely happy to be there. It's got the light, fun atmosphere of one of the old dotcom boom companies (I should know -- I worked at one myself), but with an edge of business acumen and rationality that was distinctly missing during those halcyon days. I think I'm going to like it there.]]>Generalhttp://blog.casalaina.net/index.php?itemid=105Tue, 16 Aug 2005 22:36:06 -0700<![CDATA[New Jersey, New York and Chicago: The Whirlwind Tour]]>
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Karen and I had arranged this trip long before I knew that I'd be temporarily unemployed at this time -- that just turned out to be an unexpected bonus. The plan was that we'd go visit my family in New Jersey, stay in New York City for a while, then head to Chicago to see her family, all before she began law school on August 15. So far it's gone like clockwork (let's hope I don't jinx myself here). We stopped in New Jersey and did such typical New Jersey activities as wandering around Princeton, getting root beer at Stewart's, and playing mini golf. We also went to the balloon festival, where they launch hundreds of hot-air balloons from the huge fields and farms around the old town of Branchburg, NJ. I'll put up some pictures of it in the photo gallery when I get a chance.
Then we headed to New York City, where we had reserved an itty bitty room at the top floor of the Thirty Thirty Hotel -- a room so small, it reminded me of the coat closet we had in Bombay. No matter, though, we didn't need much space (plus, NYC is a heck of a lot cleaner than Bombay). In our 2 1/2 days in New York we really packed it in. We headed to the Empire State Building the night we got there. The next morning, we set out to walk the 60 blocks from our hotel through Central Park to the Guggenheim -- then we walked all the way back south again, across the Brooklyn Bridge, and to Grimaldi's Pizza (which, by the way, is not at all what it's cracked up to be -- "Best Pizza In New York" indeed).
The next day we headed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and went to Ben's Kosher Deli. Then we got tickets to Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway (written by David Mamet and starring Alan Alda and Liev Schrieber, who inadvertently blew smoke in my face as we passed him on our way out). Then we went down to Tribeca and managed to get seats at one of New York's best restaurants, Next Door Nobu. This restaurant doesn't take reservations -- fortunately for us, as the original Nobu is so trendy it's almost impossible to get a table there unless you're Brad Pitt -- but its head chef is the same guy, Nobu Matsuhisa, and the menu is almost identical. Nobu's fare is sushi, and we both agree that we've never seen or tasted any better -- it was truly sublime. We ordered a few items and also got the "Chef's Choice," where for an $80 prix fixe the chef chooses an array of dishes from the menu, and we were not disappointed. They piled on the food, plate after plate of unbelievably high-quality sushi, with deep-red ahi tuna, pink-orange salmon and iridescent blue Japanese sardines. Incredible. When the bill came, we found to our delight that they had even comped us on some items, so it wasn't nearly as steep as we were prepared for. We would gladly have paid the full bill anyway -- it was worth it. If you're going to be in NYC, I highly recommend Nobu -- just save me a seat.
And now we're in Chicago, where we hit the Field Museum (a cultural and natural history museum) and the Museum of Science And Industry, where they had a particularly striking exhibit showing the function of the human body through hundreds of excellently preserved cadavers and organs. It sounds gory, perhaps, but it was actually fascinating. The bones, the muscles, the nerves, the vascular system -- all were shown in great detail. Amazing.
Tomorrow morning I'll head back to nice, cool San Francisco, where I've got to move my stuff from its crates in storage to my place at (snicker snicker) Beaver Street. And next week I'll start my job at Salesforce, which I'm quite looking forward to. The whirlwind tour may be ending, but the whirlwind life continues.]]>Generalhttp://blog.casalaina.net/index.php?itemid=104Fri, 05 Aug 2005 18:07:05 -0700<![CDATA[The (Semi-)Unemployed Life]]>
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For those of you just tuning in, I'm on a three-week hiatus between jobs, having left Oracle last week and not starting at Salesforce.com until August 15. In the meantime, I had intended to continue my search for a place to live, but then I went and found one on Sunday, rendering myself utterly useless for the remainder of the week.
I have been doing a lot of sleeping. Sleeping is something I'm good at, and even at Karen's place, which overlooks a busy street, I can get some solid shuteye. The irony is that the place I'm moving to will be utterly silent, being situated as it is on a steep hill far above Duboce Triangle (which will surely also be responsible for the Thighs Of Steel I will shortly develop). But for now, I've been sleeping until 8:30 (a luxury for me given my previous commute schedule) and taking nice long naps during the day.
Of course, I should be catching up on my sleep now -- in a few days we'll be in The City That Never Sleeps. After a stop in New Jersey to visit my family, we'll head to New York City. Although I don't think either of us has the energy to party all night, we'll surely be on our feet a lot during the day, enough that I'll probably see fit to make withdrawals from the sleep account I'm building up now.
When I get back, it'll be time to move into my new place. Unfortunately, the moving and storage company I used turned out to be somewhat shady, so I'll be making every effort to get a quote from them for the moving job and make them stick to that quote. They screwed me when they moved my stuff into storage, inexplicably charging me $320 more than they quoted, and there wasn't much I could do about it because I was in India. This time, however, I'm going to have as much documentation as I can on hand, so if they try it again, I'll immediately threaten to sue. You've got to keep these shady people in line.]]>Generalhttp://blog.casalaina.net/index.php?itemid=103Thu, 28 Jul 2005 11:14:35 -0700<![CDATA[How To Change Your Life In Three Short Days]]>
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Temporarily unemployed, that is. On Thursday I accepted an offer from Salesforce.com, a company based in a great location in downtown San Francisco. I'd been interviewing for a while since I'd returned from India, and it took a surprisingly long time for it all to produce an offer. Ultimately, albeit after two months or so, I ended up with three offers from three very different companies. The Salesforce one was by far the strongest, but they also seemed the most organized and most aligned with what I wanted to do.
Salesforce.com is in the Customer Relationship Management space, generally abbreviated to CRM. Companies use Salesforce's software to track their customers -- who they are, what they've bought before, what they might buy in the future, and what products they need help with. Salesforce is so devoted to CRM that even their stock ticker symbol is "CRM" -- these guys mean business. I've been working in PeopleSoft (later Oracle) CRM for some time, so I was very familiar with what they did; but Salesforce's twist is that it's all hosted and web-based. That means that Salesforce's customers never install anything at all for themselves, they just log into Salesforce.com and start using it. Sort of like Yahoo Mail or GMail -- you never have to install any applications to read your mail, you just log into the web page and mail away.
Salesforce is a relatively young company, founded in 2000, and it's brimming with energetic, smart people. I already knew many of the people there from previous companies I've worked at, and those people were certainly among the best and the brightest around. Salesforce's offices are laid out in a manner that I think promotes collaboration, where people can discuss amongst themselves over small clusters of half-size cubes. From the moment I walked into those offices by the bay, I got a good vibe. I had a feeling I'd do well there.
But because Salesforce is a direct competitor of the CRM product I was working on at Oracle, the management at Oracle asked me to leave on Friday, just one day into my two weeks' notice. I was prepared for this step, and I fully understand it as well -- if you know your employee is going to a competitor, you probably don't want him to gather any more information about you than he already has. And to their credit, my managers at Oracle were really cool about it. There was no acrimony there, and they knew I wouldn't have done anything unethical anyway, but it's a company policy and they need to abide by it. And so be it then -- I'll just take a few weeks off to relax before I start at Salesforce.
In other news, I have finally found a place to live. This, I think, will be the true San Francisco experience, although that's not what I originally set out to find. Knowing that I'd be taking the job at Salesforce, which is in the Financial District, I decided to focus heavily on Duboce Triangle, which I mentioned in my previous posting. Duboce Triangle is an excellent spot because it's right on top of a central subway station from which I can catch any of three different lines that go directly downtown (and therefore directly to Salesforce).
I found a posting on Craigslist for an open house this afternoon on (chuckle chuckle) Beaver Street, so I went down to check it out. It's a six story house with four bedrooms, and each bedroom is on a different story and has its own bathroom attached. Attached private bathrooms are good. The room was great, nice and big, they have a housekeeper that comes in every two weeks, and they split all the utilities five ways, so that's all pretty cheap. I met two of the four roommates, and they struck me as pretty cool guys. They did make clear to me that it was a gay household (all four of them are gay), and asked me if I was comfortable with that. Honestly, I don't care if my roommates are gay, straight, black, white, or somewhere in between, as long as they're sane and pleasant to be around. It was a deal I couldn't pass up, so I took it. Just call me Marco of Beaver Street.]]>Generalhttp://blog.casalaina.net/index.php?itemid=102Sun, 24 Jul 2005 23:40:03 -0700