Category: Wild Weekend

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No Mo’ Mary Jane!

Seeing as the two times I’ve written about marijuana my hits have spiked and the two most searched terms are redneck girls and marijuana I guess I have to cater to my audience of guys who like to look at nekkid red neck girls smoking pot every once in awhile. So today I’ll be talking about the current attack by the federal government on California on profitable medical marijuana dispensaries.

When I first read it I like many others I’m sure thought that it was a Federal attack on the state’s legalization of marijuana for medical purposes. Then  I re-read the article and realized they were only attacking the mmd’s that were making money. Hmmm…I guess you can’t blame this on the GOP, because they would never attack a company that actually made money because they are the job creators.

I think the biggest problem is that a lot of politicos can’t wrap their head around the term medical marijuana. I have trouble some times especially after I attended a job rally for a company called Mary Jane Magazine. A magazine focused on cannabis culture aimed at women. The biggest question people kept asking was, will you have a space available for us to medicate? I thought to myself, if you’re that sick you shouldn’t come to work. I’ve never asked a boss if there was a room for me to go and get drunk during work because of the stress. My mind stores a lot of useless information that it gets to pull up from time to time and today it pulled out Granny from the Beverly Hillbillies who made moonshine to help with her rheumatis’. I think we need to stop thinking about marijuana as a medical drug and think of it like we think of booze.

Most of the people I know who consume marijuana do so for many of the same reason people who drink a martini or shot of scotch do. It helps them relax after a stressful day at work. It helps them relax, etc. Medical marijuana users just use terms that make it sound like a pseudo-science drug. Let’s face it, if I do a couple of shots, pop a valium or smoke a joint [not at the same time, of course] it has the same effect. It’s time to call a spade a spade. The difference is that nobody has beaten their wife after smoking a joint or destroyed their liver from consuming marijuana. It is far less deadly than alcohol or barbiturates. You don’t have to smoke it anymore you can consume a tincture or brownie so the smoking hazard is removed. If we treated marijuana like we treated booze it would be a good thing. We would be taxing it and bigger more efficient companies would be coming in to make it cheaper. Some dispensaries sell their pot at the low price of $45/gram. Now I don’t know the weight of a pack of cigarettes, but let’s say it’s an ounce. You can get an ounce of tobacco for under $6 in San Francisco [$10 in NYC]. What if you could get an ounce of marijuana for $6 including all the added taxes like cigarettes have? California would recover more than the rest of the nation and probably become THE largest economy in the world instead of the eighth largest.

We are living in an age where there is hardly anyone who can say they haven’t tried marijuana at least once. Hell, I’m sure Mitt Romney tried it at some point. I think Rick Perry is using it right now after seeing some of his clouded speaking during the debates. Let’s just legalize it and tax it and make it into a commodity that we can control instead of calling it a controlled substance that the government isn’t really controlling. Which brings to mind a possible urban myth of the government developing it’s own WMD which was a strain of pot called G13 which was supposed to be extremely potent enough to cloud the minds of our enemies and dissidents.

The government knows about marijuana, now they just need to show the small percentage of people that it’s like booze so they can understand that. Then they’ll all be saying to the politicians, hey how can we start making some money off of it? The biggest people against the legalization were the pot growers themselves because they knew that some corporation would come in and find a way to do it better for less. Why else are there so many Escalades and BMW in Humboldt county next to the trucks?

So to sum it all up, the federal government isn’t really against marijuana, just people who make money off of marijuana. I suppose if they’d tax it and make some money off of it they’d think different. Steve Jobs smoked pot. How else do you think we’d have computers in our back pocket today.

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Goodbye Morgana

Yesterday was probably one  of hardest days for me. While I grew up having dogs and being around pets I never had to put one to sleep. My mom had asked me once with one of our dogs if I would go and be with him when he was put to sleep, but I couldn’t do it. I always felt like I was being the executioner. Well, yesterday the time had come for the woman I had spent the last 19 years with to go to sleep for good. It was time to take the long walk with Morgana.

I could tell the last couple of days were hard for her as her meow changed to a yowl that sounded like she was in pain and we noticed that she couldn’t walk very well. This was hard to take because she had always been a feisty cat in her youth that would jump off our deck in the mission [that was 10′ high] and hit the ground rolling with a bird in her mouth. She survived a couple of raccoon attacks with almost no scratches and she even was shot with a BB gun that didn’t seem to phase her until I happened to notice it when she was on my lap one day. My friend Mike gave her to me to replace Max who had adopted me just by walking in my house one day and curling up in my lap. Max left me when I was away on a trip to London in the days before laptops and email or text messaging so I was a little shocked when I came home, but it was much easier to deal with. Morgana’s mom was an Abyssinian who happened to get loss the first time she went into heat and met up with a rakish tabby and got their freak on. She started life with big Abyssinian ears like her mom and she was the last one of the litter to go. I think I did pretty good with her. She only started to slow down in the last six months.

The two worst parts where having to make the phone call and having to take the long walk to the vet. I really hurt inside feeling like I was escorting a friend to the gas chamber. I managed to hold it together long enough and I have to give big kudos’ to my friend Dr. Scott Anderson of Avenues Pet Hospital. I’ve known him since I was a little kid and he and his staff have always taken excellent care of our pets.

Seeing as this was the first time I had to do this I wasn’t aware of the options. I didn’t realize it only took 12 seconds, but I did know that you could be there if you wanted to. I couldn’t do that. That would have been too hard for me. I was offered the choice to see her after, but I didn’t want that either. I was even offered the choice to bring her home after and bury her in my back yard which I couldn’t do because that just seemed gross to me. In the end she will be cremated and I’ll get the ashes to put somewhere appropriate.

She was a great cat that got a good long life. I’ll miss her, but I know she won’t be in pain anymore.

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The Rat Pack: Three Guys Who Influenced How I Think.

I was a kind of strange kid growing up. I had older tastes for a young kid. While I always liked rock music there was something about a bunch of guys on TV that made me want to be like them and that was the Rat Pack. Started as a group of guys who hung out with Humphrey Bogart, they came down to three guys that were the main attraction, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr. Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop were kind of honorary members who were included at times, but it was the big three that I wanted to be like.

Being a member of the rat pack wasn’t very healthy by today’s standards. In almost every picture of them they all had cigarettes and a glass of scotch. I’m convinced that’s where I got my love of scotch. I would sneak a beer or two as a teenager, but when I turned 21 there was nothing like the look of sitting and talking with other people with a glass of that dark brown wonder swinging from your hand. I started smoking as well, both of which aren’t good for you as my liver told me one day and when I started to have trouble breathing. So I had to cut back. Besides, having your friends refer to you as someone who drinks old people drinks didn’t help my character as much during everyone else’s beer days. I was always of the mind that real men drank scotch or bourbon, not cosmopolitans.

This isn’t what this article is really about though, this is about the old times and some things that we used to do that we don’t anymore and we might be able to save ourselves some money in this economy if we thought about some of them.

One of them to me was shaving. When I started shaving they had two bladed razors that were pretty good. I never had to used the old safety razors, they were starting to be on the outs then so you went with what was available. Then came the three blade, four blade and now five blade razors. I moved up with each one and realized the other day that even when I’m buying my razor blades online I’m still paying close to $5 for a blade that doesn’t last me a month. With the three blade razors I used to get around 2-3 months out of them before I had to replace them. I learned at an early age how to take care of a blade.

The five blade razors don’t seem to last as long though and I notice that not only is it harder to get the hair off my face, but after a week I start to get more nicks from them. I’ve always taken good care of my skin and I rarely have gotten cuts from shaving, but now I’m noticing them appearing more often.

I want to go back to the old safety razor days. I’m not willing to go for a straight razor as I’d probably slit my throat since you have to manually sharpen them, but the single bladed Gillette and Wilkenson blades of yesterday seemed to be just fine for my Dad and they were cheap as well. You could get like 25 blades for a buck and you’d just replace them once a week. To me that’s a deal.

When King Gillette started the disposable blade business in 1904 he started a revolution. He sold the holders at a loss knowing that men would pay more over time for the blades. It was a success and I heard the other night that because of Gillette and the disposable double edged blade that that is part of the reason all Presidents to this day no longer have beards. It used to be a cumbersome act to go to the barber where a person who was professionally trained with a straight razor would carve the hair off your face. Now everyone could do so in the convenience of their own home.

Another thing that I miss that I did use at one time was shaving soap. Sure it’s convenient to pull out a can of shaving creme and spray some into your hand, but during a period living on my own when money was in short supply I switched to shaving soap with the old fashion boar bristle brush for applying the soap to your face. You know what I found out? It wasn’t much different than the spray foam and a bar of the stuff would last me over a year and cost me a couple of bucks. There was just something more manly about using the soap on your face before shaving. It was old school before people used the word old school. It was a relaxing methodical process that had the benefit that if you wetted your soap with hot water you got a hot lather on your face to make the shaving easier.

So now I’m on a quest. The going back to old schools single blade shaving with shaving soap is making a bit of an odd comeback, but at a higher price. I think I can find something out there that is affordable and will do the job right. If you’ve got an old safety razor you don’t know what to do with let me know. I’ll take it off your hands. I’m going to find the blades and soap out there somewhere, then I’ll have to go purchase some new cufflinks to go with my French cuffed shirts.

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Sorry to my loyal readers…

I found a couple of sites that I won’t mention who pay you to put ads on your Facebook and tweet feeds. I thought I might be able to make a few extra bucks on this, but it turns out that in the past month I haven’t earned even a dollar from both combined.

So just to let you all know that I’ve stopped the ads on my Facebook and Twitter feeds so when you read something it will be from me and me only and not from someone who’s giving me a couple of cents per post.

My apologies. I will only be accepting sponsorships/advertising from San Francisco local businesses that I wish to promote and not from people  who will be trying to sell you crap. I will continue with the AdBrite adds at the end of each post until someone can suggest a better way to make money since as we all should know by now that Google is evil and their AdSense is a scam.

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Musical Technology Evolves

After an experience I had yesterday morning I decided that a look at musical technology was in order. Being a guitarist and keyboardist I’ve got an arsenal of gear in my house. It used to take up a whole lot of space and it cost me an arm and a leg to get it. I’ve pared down over the years because the technology has increased. I used to have a Marshall Stack that cost me $800 for the head and $400 for each of the two cabinets. I sold them both to get a PODxt Pro which gave me a choice of 32 different amp models plus 22 different cabinets plus a huge selection of effects and modeled mics for the cabinets to get the same studio sound for $799. They now have a newer version that does even more for $300 less. They say modeled because they can’t say duplicated, but when a friend of mine came by and told me the amps he wanted to play through and what setting to give it he was surprised at how close it came.

Now it’s time to up the ante. Yesterday I just happened to run across a few iOS apps for the iPad that bring the price barrier down even further. In the early 80’s there were two synthesizers that were vying for the top of the heap as being the best and most expensive synthesizers in existence. These were the Synclavier and the Fairlight CMI. You have to remember back in these days most computers had about as much power as your bottom of the line cell phone and they were big, fat and ugly. While the Synclavier has sort of fallen away into the history books, Fairlight CMI decided to take a step forward. The original Fairlight CMI cost around $40,000. Well outside the range of the average musician. Now Fairlight has release the Fairlight CMI II as an iPad app for $9.95. You can get the pro app for $49.99 or if you bought the cheaper version through an in app upgrade of $39.99 and this included the entire CMI III sound banks.

Granted you have to deal with 80’s styled synth sounds, but retro has always been cool. The other downside is that you have to deal with the same interface as you did in 1980, but at least it’s on an iPad which makes it a bit cooler. The original used to take up the equivalent of a six foot table with a large box underneath that you had to insert 8″ floppy disks into that were a bit on the fragile side. Now you can hold the entire thing in your hand and walk around using it. Very cool in my book and I’ll be getting a copy of it soon.

The next piece of software is the Mellotronics M3000 that recreates the original Mellotron built by a British company in the 60’s that you’ll all know as the flute sounds in the Beatles, Strawberry Fields. It was the first sampler that used blocks of audio tape that had the recorded samples of the instrument and it was rather fussy at times and the tapes wore down. Now it’s on the iPad and you don’t have to worry about the tapes wearing down because it’s all digital. This is a really good version of the original seeing as the builders of this app have joined forces with the original Mellotron makers to perfect it.

There are lots of other synth programs for the iPad like NLog and Rebirth [being a fraction of what the desktop version is] that offer MIDI interfacing so you don’t have to use the iPad screen to make the music and there are lots of apps out there for the iPad that works as recording studios letting you record anywhere from 4-16 stereo tracks.  This is something twenty years ago that no one would have believe to be possible. If you’re not a synth wizard, but a guitarist or bassist you can always download Amplitube and turn your iPad into any one of a number of amps for literally pennies. Granted for most of these things you’ll need a few extra bits of hardware, but I can definitely see now that we’re entering into the post-PC world as Steve Jobs said that in the next few years recording studios are going to shrink down to a table with an iPad or two plugged into a speaker system and be very streamlined.

Somewhere in the mid 90’s I wrote an article on my music website, saundhaus.com that talked about Audio for the Masses and how at the time for under $5000 you could put together a recording studio that would surpass the level of studios from the 70’s and even 80’s. Now today you can get an iPad for $499 and for another $100 add in what you need to make it pretty awesome. If you search youtube.com you might find a few people like this who are already using iPads to play concerts [now if they could just get the singers on key]. Life can be weird, yet amazing at times.

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Digital Babylon

The ways of yesterday are the ways of today. I’m enrolled in the Jobs Now 3 program which isn’t like the original Jobs Now program where you could get a job and your employer would be repaid your salary. Now it’s only a $5000 endowment to the person who hires you, but it’s still not bad. There is a catch now though. You have to go through the Career Development Center where they try and find you a job.

This works fine if you’ve just turned 18 and don’t have a college degree, but for someone like me who has a Bachelor’s degree and has worked in the graphic design area for over 20 years and done web development for a good 10+ years you aren’t going to find anything. They do offer training, but nothing for me because I already have a college degree. Then I remembered something that few people know about or pay attention to…iTunes U.

iTunes U is a part of iTunes where colleges offer courses online. The colleges could be Stanford, Harvard, MIT, etc. They’re good courses and the best part is they are free. You won’t get a diploma from them, but if you’re someone like me who wants to learn Objective-C or Drupal, you don’t really need a diploma. You just need to learn it, then put it to use. For those of you out there like me who are skilled workers looking for a job [techie day labors] This is were you need to look. The classes cover the full range and aren’t just for techie types, but might give you an upper hand if you’ve been unemployed for awhile and want to brush up on your skills.

At the very least it’s free and gives you a chance to learn something new. At the worst, read the last sentence again. The ways of yesterday are not the ways of today and you have to use the new tools that are out there to get a leg up on the competition.

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Yoga for the Ears…

I’ve been one to play around with binaural beats in the past. These are tones that you listen to through headphones that are supposed to retune your brain for a number of things. They are supposed to make you more focused, wake up and be alert or even help you fall asleep. Some people list this as pseudo-science and while being skeptical I like to keep an open mind.

Well, while my own results have been mixed on doing it myself, I found an app a friend recommended to me that made a world of difference. It’s called Brain Wave by Banzai Labs and is available for the iPhone and iPad. They aren’t making these for the Android, but I can tell you that this is a fun app. Many of their apps seem to be in the brain tweaking realm.

I had to hop on the bus the other morning for an interview and because it was early in the morning I had to leave the house I decided to use it to run the focused and alert program. It has ambient sounds to go along with it so you aren’t just hearing the binaural beats in and of themselves. This is pretty good because when you listen to binaural beats through headphones you sort of hear a tone that sounds like it’s panning back and forth between your ears rather quickly. Let me say that about 10 minutes into the trip I felt myself perk up quite quickly and I definitely was very focused and alert.

The way you create a binaural beat is to combine two mono tracks to form a stereo track. Here’s an example, if you want to stimulate the 4hz frequency of your brain [that’s the area that gives you spiritual bliss-like feelings] you create a tone of say 400hz on one side and on the other you use a tone of 404hz. The 4hz difference when you listen through headphones are supposed to tune your brain to accentuate those frequencies and bring you into that state of mind.

This program gives you a choice of 25 different settings from Morning Coffee, Esperesso Shot, Morning Meditation, Focused and Alert, Critical Thinking, Concentration, Memory Boost, Problem Solving, Confidence Boost, Pre-Excercise Energy, Creativity Boost, Positive Mood Boost, Euphoria, Stress Reduction, Anger Relief, Calm Reflection, Reduce Anxiety, Deep Relaxation, Mediation, Lucid Dreaming, Sleep, Vivid Dreams, Power Nap and Deep Sleep.

While I haven’t tried all of these yet, I’ve tried several and I’m pretty pleased with the results. As I am typing this article up I’m running the Euphoria program and I have to say I’m getting the giggles something fierce. Each of the programs has a minimum setting length so that you can get the full effect in the least amount of time. Most of the programs run for 30 minutes minimum, but some will do the job in 20 minutes. For $1.99 it’s definitely a program that can help you get your head in the right space with very little effort. The ambient sounds are ocean, thunder and rain [my favorite for use during the power nap setting], light and medium rain, flowing creek and pink noise [not recommended unless you’re a total geek.]

One thing to keep in mind is that if you are an epileptic or prone to seizures you might want to consult your doctor first. 10hz tends to trigger seizures in people. I say give it a shot and tell me what you think. If nothing else you’ll get to listen to some interesting experimental music that might have you thinking in a different way. It’s kind of like yoga for the ears.

 

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Ejumication doesn’t happen in skools anymore

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this one for some time now and I think I finally have got it. Granted it’s been a few years since I’ve been in school learning things that were supposed to help me fit into society [e.g. social brainwashing] and teaching me skills to land me a job [vocational training].

Well, I do fit into society as I don’t walk out of the house in the morning naked mumbling nonsense and expect people to accept me as being normal, but as far as what I learned through college let me break it down for you.

Amount I paid for college at San Francisco State University to graduate in 1987: ±$3000

Amount earned from said skills earned: ±$1000

Amount paid to learn new skills outside of college: $0 [self taught]

Amount earned from skills learned outside of college: $73,000/year

Basically, everything I learned is college has become useless to me now. When I was in college only very well off people had cell phones, not everyone had a home computer, there was no texting, you had to go to a video store and seek out their back room behind curtains to find porn and the cloud was something you walked outside and saw overhead. The world has changed significantly because of technology. My first computer cost me $800 and had 16k of RAM and no storage. If you wanted to store material you had to buy a cassette drive which would cost you another $200 [ok, I got started with computers early] For that same amount of money today I can get a computer with 4Gb’s of ram, a terabyte of storage and a processor that is over 1000 times as fast. Five years ago no one used the term smartphone or iPad [yeah, there are other tablets, but let’s face it in the past year there have been millions of iPads sold and you’d be lucky to find a million of the other tablets sold combined].

The computers that launched and landed the first astronauts on the moon were not as sophisticated as your cell phone that we all have today. So what am I trying to say? Well a good friend of mine Fitz who I so via an iPhone video conference this weekend turned me on to a lecture given at TED where the speaker stated that the top ten in demand jobs of 2010 didn’t exist in 2004 and then he dropped the shocker line that brought it all together:

We’re preparing kids for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies we haven’t yet invented.

Looking back I realized this is very much a true thing. We used to block out change by decades. Now if you look back ten years it’s hard to remember what it was like in 2001. We didn’t have any where near the abilities that we have today. There was no social networking which is a requirement for most of the jobs I apply for. There were no mobile apps. WiFi was new and 3g didn’t exist. Sure we had doctors back then, but DNA identification was in its infancy back then. OK, people still bake bread the same way and pump gas and bag groceries, but none of us have a child and hope that one day they will be a successful grocery clerk.

My mother wanted me to grow up, get a college degree and become a world class [what Mom would want world class in there] scientist or musician. Most of my college years in science were spent dissecting animals or mixing chemicals together to create nice smelling compounds [that was learning about esters] and blowing shit up [nothing more impressive than dropping pure sodium into a glass of water]. Today we have tons of videos on youtube that teach you all that and now we have mentos being dropped in coke as a form of art, not science. Musically, I had 10 years of private piano lessons by a former concert pianist for the San Francisco Symphony. I was trained in the recording arts and sciences and when I graduated there was no studio that would hire me and I couldn’t open my own studio because it would have cost me over half a million dollars. Today, you can spend $499 for an iPad and then $4.99 for Garage Band and even if you don’t have any musical talent you’ve got an eight track recording studio with virtual instruments that will do the playing for you at the cost of a few taps. The music isn’t very original, but if you turn on the radio today you aren’t going to find very much that is and you’ll probably be hearing some of the riffs from garage band in the songs.

So what good is a college degree today? Well apparently not much according to people of the Thiel Foundation, not much. They have given away 24 grants to the tune of $100,000 to high school grads with good ideas so that they can skip college altogether and have a funded start up company. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook when he was 20 and today is a billionaire. It took him seven years to do that and he’s had a movie made about it, guest hosted Saturday Night Live and has been on the cover of Time magazine while being loved and hated by people around the world. What degree did Zuckerberg earn at Harvard? He didn’t. I can’t find it anywhere. He started Facebook at Harvard, but was forced to stop because it overloaded their servers so he left and moved to Palo Alto with his friends and set in step actions that caused him to become a billionaire today.

So how do these things affect schooling today? Well, schools need to get on top of things faster. When Adobe Creative Suite was released there weren’t any college courses available to learn the programs. Today there are, over ten years after it was release. Photoshop which is a part of Creative Suite was release long before the rest and now you’ll find more videos on youtube that you’ll see in a classroom teaching Photoshop. I know this because I was tutoring an autistic college student in Photoshop because he wasn’t learning fast enough in his class. The biggest problem is that after he’s learned what I and his teacher have taught him he’ll still have to compete with people like me who’ve been using the programs from day one and have more experience than what you’ll ever get in a classroom.

This is something I’ll have to keep in mind as I raise my daughter. Yes, at the elementary level everything she learns she’ll be able to use later in life. Reading, writing and arithmetic won’t go away, but when it comes to college and choosing a major, that might not happen. Very few of the skills taught today are useful five years after you learned them. Technology causes change and the change is being adopted more quickly and those are the people who are getting ahead. The iPhone is less than five years old and the iPad will turn one next month, yet there are people who have built careers on these platforms and there’s nothing you can learn in a college to help you get into this field. There are kids who have pulled down six figure salaries while in high school writing and selling iPhone and iPad apps. How will a college convince a child that he needs a college degree to be a productive member o society when they’re already earning more money that person telling them that who works for the college?

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Apps I’ve come to appreciate

Seeing it’s a wild weekend I’ll go off base again. I’ve come across a couple of iOS apps that I’ve found to be very useful to me and a bit of a game changer in many ways. These are two apps one for commerce and one for pleasure that have changed the way I think in many ways.

The first is Square. It is a free app which is always a bonus. When you download the app it pushes you to register to receive a card reader, also for free. The card reader plugs into the headphone jack of your iPhone or iPad and then lets you scan a credit card for payment that is directly deposited to your bank.

Now I remember back to the days when I had a credit card account for a business I was running. I had to pay $35/month plus 35¢ per transaction plus 3.25% for every charge plus there was the charge for the software which was somewhere in the $500 range. This was rather expensive and I didn’t like it. It made me understand why some places were cash only. If you’re a small business or a seasonal business you’re kind of screwed having to shell out money each month for a service you aren’t using that much. Square is different. They don’t charge you anything up front, they give it to you for free. They don’t charge you a monthly fee. They only charge you 2.75% per charge. This comes in handy to me. It’s less of a charge than PayPal which you already know I don’t like. It is a spontaneous way to obtain money. I frequently tutor people and I was at a computer lab one day and when I was finished with the person I was working with I was approached by another person who asked me about my services. When I was finished I pulled out my phone and swiped their credit card to bill them and they were sent an email with my contact info for future business.

Sure, it costs you a little bit, but to me it’s worth it. Overall it costs you less than regular credit card services and that was the point when Square started up. They wanted to reach out to small businesses and entrepreneurs who wanted the ability to charge credit cards on a mobile basis or at the very least wirelessly at a low cost. Now they have taken it a step further. Now small businesses when they charge your card if you have a smartphone it will send you a message asking you to download the app. Once you do it will let you open a tab with the business you’ve visited so that the next time you visit the business you can tap on the tab and it will connect with their device in an encrypted format so that you don’t even need to pull out your credit card. This is the type of NFD [Near Field Device] technology that people are trying to work into the hardware of their phones that now can be worked in with the software.  The iPad version is a bit richer in that you can program in a list of services or offerings so that it acts more like a cash register itemizing a persons order and emailing them the details. I really think that Square will be a game changer in the near future. You’ll see it popping up in numerous places in San Francisco now along with other major metropolitan cities.

The second app is called Flipboard. This is an app aimed at the iPad and it is a really nice app for repurposing content from social networks and news sites into a consistently similar format. You can browse through your facebook, twitter and news sites of your choice in a format that looks like a condensed magazine format. The nice part for twitter and facebook accounts is that if you post links it follows the links and brings in a synopsis of the article and adds it to the link. Tapping on the link takes you to the full article formatted for the app so it always gives you the same familiar look and feel.

I find the biggest thing I like about Flipboard is the facebook and twitter integration. It makes it much easier to follow what people are talking about instead of seeing just text and links. Now you get to see the pictures and videos people post instead of just seeing the text. It is a more visual form of social networking than textual version. Yes, it’s a bit of a pretty toy, but it works. I can fully understand why Apple has it listed as an essential iPad starter app. It also is free.

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Baghdad by the Bay: The Book

Well, I’m still a bit in shock over this, but yesterday I received a call from Runa Raven Press and they have asked me to write a book about Baghdad by the Bay: San Francisco. Now Herb Caen did a fine job with his original Baghdad by the Bay, so I’ll have to call it Baghdad by the Bay: Revisited. The city has changed a lot since that book was written and at first it was just going to be a repurposing of my blog posts, but now I think I’ll need to step things up a notch or two.

I’m going to talk about each and every district in San Francisco with its history and how it changed into what it is today. I’ll also talk about the politics of the city and foibles of our politicians, new and old. Granted, it will all be from my perspective, so it may not always be entirely correct, but it will be how I interpreted the information that I’ve found.

I won’t be quitting my day job which I don’t have yet, but I think it will be something that a lot of people will like. I’ll keep you updated on the progress of the book as it comes along. I’ve done a lot of things in life, but I have never thought of myself as a writer. Now I’ll have a chance to see how good at it I really am.

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