Tag: bad

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BART Protest: When good ideas go bad

I have to count my blessings that I don’t work downtown at the moment because yesterday’s protest would have done the exact opposite to me of what the protesters wanted. Yesterday was a day when a good idea when wrong and I’m not even sure it was that good of an idea.

There is still a little dispute about whether it was because of the shooting of a homeless man who while being drunk threw a bottle at BART police and then drew a knife and started to come at them or whether or not it was BART cutting off cell phone service last week. There’s a couple of problems with each of these.

First, Charles Hill, attacked police officers. Sure, they probably could have done some TV style police moves and disarmed him and got him to the ground, but TV isn’t real life. He had a knife pulled out and after throwing a bottle at police started to come towards them. I don’t know if he ran, lunged or just stood there stabbing the air in the direction of the cops, but he was a threat. Oscar Grant on the other hand, wasn’t a threat. I can see people protesting that incident, but not this one.

The second is the Guy Fawkes masks protesting censorship by turning off cell phone service underground to protestors. Here’s a couple of things. I actually liked going into the station after work at one of my last jobs because the cell reception was crap. I could barely get 3G service on my cell even in BART so to me if BART and Muni kept their mouths shut no one would have noticed. The second is that most of the protesters probably don’t know that Guy Fawkes came to fame by being a religious fanatic in England who was caught sitting on a number of powder kegs to be used to assassinate King James I and hopefully restore a Catholic Monarchy in England. Fawkes ended up committing suicide at his execution by jumping from the scaffold he was to be hung from before he was to be drawn and quartered. Choosing one pain over a more grisly pain. The Brits back then only hung you until you were almost dead, then dropped you, tied you down, sliced off your genitals, then ripped your guts out and if you were lucky as the last act of mercy beheaded you. Actually, now that I think about it, the people who make V is for Vengence should have done some homework as well.

Many people are calling this a denial of freedom of speech. No one was denying their the right to speak, just not on cell phones which work poorly underground anyway. I’m not even sure why you would need a cellphone at a protest anyway since you’re supposed to make your voice heard to those you are protesting against.

Much of this fell on deaf ears. Yes, there were BART Police there and many of the protesters were arrested, but did they get their point across? In my opinion, NO. When you stage a protest your goal is to bring the people around you into your outrage and join you. What this protest did was anger those people who were trying to get home from work to be with their families. No to have their trip home interrupted by a mass of people angry over the death of a man who attacked police or because they couldn’t use their cellphones in a place where cellphones don’t work very well in the first place.

I think the protesters today need to do a little homework to learn how to be more effective. Perhaps it would have been better to protest at BART headquarters, but that would require more work to get there. People will not join your cause if your only purpose is to disrupt the people. BART and MUNI don’t really care too much about that, but the people do.

 

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Sunset Boulevard’s Bureaucratic Medians

I just finished reading an article today in the West Portal Monthly about the medians on Sunset Boulevard. I knew something was up because I’ve noticed they’ve been tearing them up recently. Not all of them, but only a six block area of them. This got me wondering when I saw the new turf laid down and wondered how much that cost the taxpayers.

Now I have to admit that the median has been nothing but weeds for years with a few bits of grass thrown in so in some ways I’m happy to see it replanted but at what cost? $1.2 million dollars is the cost and why are we spending this much? Well apparently our supervisor Carmen Chu got the idea that it would be good to replace the 25 year system and install a new more water efficient for of grass called bentgrass. It says it uses about half the water of the previous weeds grass so I had to look into this new fangled grass.

Apparently, bentgrass is mostly used on golf course putting greens, lawn bowling and lawn tennis courts so that already sounds like it’s a kind of luxury grass. Here’s the kicker on what the demands are for growing this grass according to University of California’s Integrated Pest Management Program: High maintenance. Creeping bentgrass requires frequent watering, mowing, aerating, and dethatching, and high levels of fertilizer.

Oops! Little mistake there. The article goes on to state that this new grass and the low flow watering system will save seven million gallons a year which could serve 120 single family homes in the Sunset. There’s a little hitch to this problem. That’s all reclaimed water. The only thing it’s good for is watering your lawn and maybe washing your car. Reclaimed water is filtered sewer water with some of the impurities removed. It is not fit for human consumption in any way shape or form, so it’s not saving water for human consumption one bit.

I’ve driven by the medians that have been finished and I’ve seen the sprinklers popping up. Because it’s new turf you have to water it more at first. These look just like the sprinklers we installed in our lawn. There’s nothing really specials about this that makes them anymore water efficient than mine, but they’ve got a lot more of them. They’re about one foot apart and these are still not too cheap.

The next phases of this is to reinstall new turf on either side of Sunset Boulevard. First the east side, then the west side. I’m not sure what that’s going to do to all the new trees they planted around the area recently, but I expect that some of them might be injured if they don’t carefully remove them or use smaller tillers to dig up the soil. What’s even more baffling is that some of those big trees there are very old and have some big root structures that have been tearing up the boulevard causing bumps  in the far right lanes in places.

Now it’s time for what would Eric do? [WWED?], well they should have pulled out the grass altogether and planted some of those nice aeoniums and other succulent like plants that we found grow if we water them and grow if we don’t. It would give us a very distinctive median that they’re doing in other parts of the city and it would take about five minutes of water every couple of weeks and a drive by once every month or so just to check if there was any overgrowth happening that needed to be trimmed back. Out across from Java Beach is a small little park that was built by the residents and it has lots of succulents planted that are just doing fine and it’s only watered by the rain. There are plenty of drought resistant plants that would have been a much better and cost effective choice, plus they clone very easily.

The other thing I question is why the other nine blocks of the boulevard are being left as is? Were there fewer donators to Carmen Chu’s campaign living north of Sunset and Rivera? If they had done it my way they could have saved money and done the entire boulevard and the extra water could be used in Golden Gater Park to make that as spectacular as it used to be.

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Skool Daze

A few days ago I was talking about my daughter and pre-school and how she had a great teacher. Well, that’s all still true, but I’ve had an experience with higher education that’s really appalled me. I was asked by someone to tutor their son in Adobe Creative Suite. He attends City College and was having a little trouble with a couple of programs so I offered to go into the lab with him and help him out.

Part of this is because I’m an expert with these programs and another was in part because I went to City College close to thirty years ago. I was cheap (cheap meaning free) back then and the teachers were decent but a bit quirky. In the end it turned out to work out for me because I got to get all my core courses under my belt and then I transferred to SF State where I could focus on my core courses in Broadcasting. I think my entire college experience which lasted 6 years cost me less than five grand back in those days. Honestly, while it gave me a few skills to use in the outside world, most of those skills are useless today except for the writing and communication skills.

I was referred to a speaker at TED who said something that was very important to me. I can’t remember his name, but I’m sure my friend Fitz will remind me after reading this. The speaker said: We’re preparing kids for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies we haven’t yet invented. Well then, what’s the point of college? There was no photoshop classes when I was in college. The computer courses were all about programming in languages that only came into use again during the Y2K scare and we were using punch cards to store our data not floppy disks, CD or the now ubiquitous thumb drives. Nothing was on the cutting edge back then and none of us had cell phones.

Now going back to my student. We were working last night in photoshop and the course was basically a book of exercises that said, do this, then this, then this. The problem was that this was a class teaching you how to use photoshop in which you needed to know photoshop to pass the course and if you knew photoshop you could see that they were teaching it wrong. I’ve worked previously in the print industry for over twenty years and I know what formats you use to output files. I was going over the test with my student and started making notes to take back to his teacher. One of the questions was: What is the proper format for outputting graphic files to print from photoshop. He answered TIFF and JPEG. Which is correct. For offset print work you always want to use the TIFF format because it gives you the highest resolution with no loss in compression. JPEG’s used to be problematic with some digital print servers, but the new servers handle them better, but TIFF is always the best choice.

The teacher told him he was wrong and deducted two points from his score. Two points doesn’t seem like much, but you need twenty-five points to pass the class. The correct answer according to the teacher was PNG or GIF. I wrote down that this was the wrong answer. While PNG is technically correct some print servers that the print houses use still can’t handle them, though most can. It does have some loss during compression, but the majority is unnoticeable. Many on demand print houses actually like PNG because the smaller size aids in faster rasterization getting the final product out faster. GIF is as outdated as my college education because it only allows for up to 256 colors which is far from the color range you normal see with the naked eye. OK, sorry if I’m getting a bit techie for some of my readers so I’ll try to make it easier to understand.

Essentially, this course doesn’t need a teacher. All it needs is a student that can read and follow instructions which they hopefully learned in High School. The writing wasn’t very good in the manual either because there were some steps that it just told the student to perform a task without telling them how to do it. The course book was a cheaply printed low quality book that looks like it was printed on a laser printer and tape bound and then sold to the students for about $50 if not more.

You could do better by purchasing one of the O’Reilly books from Amazon that has links to downloadable files to work with that would give you far better instruction than this course would. The unfortunate part is that an O’Reilly book doesn’t give you Adobe Authorized Certification™ when you finish it and this class did even though you’re probably not taught well enough to satisfy the needs of a company who’s looking for someone with that kind of certification.

I had to learn all of what I do from magazine articles, a few books and now YouTube videos that kids in elementary school are sometimes putting together. Some of my schooling came from the school of hard knocks which I’m sure I’ve earned a Ph.D. by now. When you have kids who are going to college trying to learn a programs that were written by high school kids who didn’t go to college so they could spend more time with their multi-billion dollar start up company it makes you wonder sometimes if there still is much value in college today because as I mentioned earlier, We’re preparing kids for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies we haven’t yet invented.

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