Month: October 2006

A couple of apologies:

1) Well (if anyone still cares) I will get around to documenting the rest of our trip to America eventually, but, you know, it’s just finding the time and all that…

2) Then again, most of the times recently that I’ve thought I might pop over and write a blog, the bloody site has been down. I think Freedom2Surf fixed the database problems I was moaning about the other week, but now their server seems to have packed up altogether.

If anyone is ever actually able to read this, then I’m sorry. If it’s not sorted out very quickly, then I’m going to have to seriously look for a new host…

And if anyone is in any doubt that the problem is pretty bad, then this makes pretty conclusive reading.

(The irony of trying to use this blog as a medium for informing people about the website being down is not lost on me, of course…)

UPDATE: Of course, now I’ve posted this things seem to be back up and running ok. How long that will last is anyone’s guess though. As a possible interim solution, I’m now mirroring the site at the old address: www.pastemagazine.f2s.com. I think it’s hosted on a different server, so if you can’t get on to www.pastemagazine.org then there is just a chance that that version of the site will still be up.

UPDATE (2): And then this weekend I received an email reply from F2S to my support ticket about the downtime. Although they can’t say when they will be able to fix it, they do at least acknowledge that there is a problem and that they are working on it. Perhaps most surprising is that fact that they emailed me on a Saturday (especially given that they’d previously let a database outage go unfixed for an entire weekend). Things seem to be back up and running properly again for the time being, and I don’t really have the time right now to be looking for a decent replacement, so I guess I’ll leave things as they are for now and see what happens… (I choose the devil I know. For now…)

In the evening, after we’d biked the bridge and had some fun, we went down to the Mission, an area named for the Catholic missions built a couple of hundred years ago in an attempt to convert the natives, but now famed for its Mexican food. In particular, burritos.

We caught the bus down. As it pulled up on the corner of 16th Street, we realised that this, too, was an, ahem, “interesting” part of town: the square above the metro station where the bus had stopped was just like you’d see on some American movie when they want to show a rundown downtown. It was just what I’d imagined LA would be like, actually–lots of people pushing around shopping carts containing their worldy goods, and others just sitting around drinking, taking drugs, and panhandling for change. They weren’t quite crowding round those drum fire things that you see on the TV, but it was definitely in that ballpark. It’s not as if London and the UK don’t have their fair share of homelessness and poverty, of course, but there’s something about poverty in America (when you encounter it) that’s just on a different scale altogether. Then again, maybe you just don’t expect to go to the world’s richest country, and see such a gap between rich and poor.

(The burritos were great, by the way…)

The following morning we went back to The Mission. As we waited to catch the bus near our hotel, a guy approached us and struck up a conversation. He looked like a rocker from way back in his black skinny jeans and leather jacket. Might have been in his 40s, I suppose, and he had the kind of worn, leathery face that suggested he been around the block a few times. Maybe he’d roadied for Ossie Osbourne, or the like. When he found out we were from London he started telling us all his stories. How he’d been there in the 80s and stayed in some hotel in Kensington for about £3.50 a night in a massive room where, he had been told, “Lord something or other used to bring his tarts”. “I didn’t know what a tart was,” he told us, “but I found out soon enough”.

He probably had many more stories to tell, but then our bus arrived to whisk us away–back to The Mission, where we headed straight for Mission Dolores, one of the oldest missions in the area, and which gave it’s official name (San Francisco de Asis) to the city. Luckily when we arrived we just managed to beat a double-decker coach tour, and so we were able to wander around alone; only as we were leaving did the coach open its doors and flood the tiny, previously tranquil, church with its cargo of bumbag-wearing turistics.

We kept moving, to Castro–home of the city’s gay community. On the advice of our Time Out guidebook, we stopped in at a deli on the high street, got lunch “to go” and made our way up a steep, steep road to the park, Corona Heights, for a stunning view of Castro, the Mission, and the city beyond:

On our way up to find a lunch spot, after climbing up a road with one of the steepest inclines we’d seen so far in the city, we stopped to take a breather. Suddenly, from nowhere came a piercing siren, like an air-raid warning.

We both looked at each other. We were both thinking the same thing: Oh my god, there must be an earthquake coming… what do we do? Should we stay put, out in the open, or was it better to go somewhere and shelter? I looked up–we were standing directly underneath some power cables and a telegraph pole, but we were both rooted to the spot, unsure what to do…

Then, from out of nowhere, two old ladies were suddenly walking towards us.

“Excuse me,” said Sal. “Do you know what that noise meant?”
“Oh yes dear,” came the reply. “It’s 12 o’clock.”

Oh yeah, we’d just arrived in San Fran…

Now, everyone told us we’d love the city, but we weren’t quite sure. Maybe it was something to do with first impressions, or maybe we were expecting too much, but we never quite got on with San Fran like we thought we might. That’s not to say that the city doesn’t have its charms, and I really enjoyed some of the tourist stuff: Alcatraz is well worth visiting, of course. There’s an excellent atmospheric audio tour that guides you around the old prison buildings, and if you close your eyes you can almost begin to imagine what it might have been like inside there. Unfortunately, to get yourself there you have to catch a ferry from the world of tourist tat that is Fisherman’s Wharf: a world of tacky souvenirs, shabby amusements, and fast-food restaurants (or “San Francisco’s most popular destination” if you like…)

We got out of there as soon as we could.

San Fran did provide one of the highlights of our whole trip, however, when we did this:

“Are you ready to bike the bridge and have some fun?” asked a ridiculously cheery bloke as we approached the bike rental office.
“Um, yeah, I guess so,” I replied, as he handed me a disclaimer form to fill in, on which we waived the right to sue them in the event of our collective untimely demise under the wheels of a gas-guzzling SUV. Now, it’s at least six years since I’ve been let loose on two wheels, but he assured me that it comes back to you. It’s “like riding a bike,” he tells me (a joke I’m sure he’s never made before), as he goes off to the back of the shop to locate the biggest framed bike they have, muttering “we got all the tall people today!”

As we wobbled off to locate some flat ground on a quiet street to get used to our new mode of transport, the English couple who had been in front of us in the queue shot past on a tandem, which we thought was rather optimistic. Sufficiently proficient ourselves, we rounded the corner to face the first challenge of the journey up to the bridge: a steep gradient of about 45 degrees. We decided it might be an idea to find a bit of flat ground to get used to our gears, and by the time we’d got back there was the other couple again. On separate bikes.

The bridge is simply stunning. Up at the top, as is often the case, the fog had descended to street level, and you could feel the dampness in the air in spite of the lovely hot late summer day that we’d left down in the town.

Over the other side of the bridge the city gives way to the national parks of Marin County, and when we decided to hire the bikes, we’d entertained thoughts of riding off to the redwood forests and greenery beyond. After 2 1/2 hours on the bikes, however, we decided that we might just stop for lunch in the pretty town of Sausalito, which is just a couple of miles over the other side.

In a very clever move, the bike rental company gives everyone tickets for the ferry back to San Fran from Sausalito (“if you don’t use them, you don’t pay for them…”) Of course it was just too tempting, so we stopped for lunch at a restaurant called Horizons, which offers decidedly average food, but wonderful views, and caught the ferry back.

We sat one table away from the bay area’s grumpiest woman, who had complained about so many aspects of her dining experience that the waitress had begun to show her frustration (and it’s not enough that you see that kind of attitude in service-culture-focussed America). The grumpy customer was not only complaining about her food, but she had also taken exception to the music. She asked if the inoffensive pop could be changed to some “light jazz”, to which the waitress responded (eventually, after initially fobbing her off by telling her she’d have to ask the manager) through gritted, slightly sarcastic teeth: “well, this is a seventies-themed restaurant; it’s been here for quite a while, actually…”

It worked, though. Before the grumpy woman left, the manager popped up and tore up her bill. Hmm, we thought: maybe we should try that one in future…

In case you’ve been wondering why the blogs have been appearing and disappearing quite erratically over the last few weeks, then I’d just like to point out that it is all the fault of my shoddy hosting provider.

The Paste website has been hosted through them F2S for years, and they always used to be extremely reliable, but since they were bought out by Pipex last year, things have rapidly gone down the pan. The most recent problems have been with their database server, which was down for a full 59 hours last weekend, and most recently for the whole of last night. If the database server goes down, then so do the blogs, so that’s why you might have seen this page looking a bit empty recently.

According to some disgruntled fellow customers on the user support forum, the problem can be resolved by typing one command on the server, but as there’s no one in the F2S office outside of normal working hours, if it happens during the weekend or overnight it won’t get fixed until shortly after 9AM on the next working day. Which is pretty poor.

I’d think about changing hosts, but I’m not sure if I can take the hassle. If this goes on for much longer I might have no choice, though. Grr.

Of course if you can read this, then everything is working fine. For now…

UPDATE Monday 9th October: Just for my own future reference, here is a list of some of the database outages so far:
– the evening of Tuesday September 26th, to the morning of Wednesday September 27th
– the evening of Friday September 29th, to the morning of Monday October 2nd (i.e. the entire weekend)
– the evening of Monday October 4th, to the morning of Tuesday October 5th
– the morning of Monday October 9th, until about lunchtime.

Hmm, now that’s some quality service there. If anyone can recommend a reliable alternative host, then I’ll be over there in a shot, but I’m worried that anything else I pick would be just as unreliable (and even if you can find a reliable host, then there’s nothing to stop Pipex popping up and screwing things up again…)

Well, I guess I should start at the beginning, then. We arrived in San Fran after a fairly uneventful flight, that was notable only for the ridiculous security hoops we had to jump through to get on it–the woman in front of us in the security line at Heathrow, for example, was carrying two bags: “Oh you can’t go through with two bags, madam,” said the security lady, before instructing her that she could only take them on if she put the smaller of the two bags inside the other one. That was fine, apparently. Then when we got to our gate Sal and I opted to hang back while everyone else queued up to get on, so by the time we got to go through they seemed to have pretty much given up actually searching people, and they were just asking everyone if they had any “matches, lighters, or liquids”. “Oh. I’ve got some matches,” said the man in front of us. “Oh no, those are safety matches”, said Mr Security. “You’re fine”. It’s nice to know the whole thing isn’t just a pointless charade, then.

The last couple of times we’ve arrived in the States it’s been through a New York airport, and it’s taken us no less than a hour to get through immigration. But San Fran was a breeze. Hardly any waiting at all, and before we knew it there were our bags rolling off the belt and we were off to the train station… where a train pulled in in front of us just as we arrived on the platform. Everything was working out perfectly, and clearly nothing could possibly go wrong.

Now, San Fran’s a big place, but I’d printed out some maps, and I figured that if we jumped off the train at Civic Center we could walk up to our hotel. It didn’t look that far, after all… Perhaps the alarm bells should have started ringing as we headed up the escalator to the sound of “would an officer of the SFPD please come to the main ticket hall… SFPD to the main ticket hall…”, but we set off anyway in the direction of our hotel through what turned out to be one of the more colourful parts of the city, with the kind of streets you might bring a film crew to to illustrate your documentary about the rich/poor divide in America. With each block our hotel seemed further away then ever, as we passed pan-handlers, druggies, and, towards the end, a strange old woman who tried to sell us some trinkets.

As if to reinforce the point, when we finally arrived at the hotel, one of the first things that the awfully cheery man at reception did was produce a map:

“Now here’s the area we don’t we you going in,” he said, drawing hatch marks over the Tenderloin, which we’d just crossed.
“Er, yeah, we just walked through that,” I said. “Interesting part of town.”
“Well,” his equally smiley co-worker pitched in “it doesn’t get much worse than that…”

Perhaps not the best first impression, but we’d arrived. It might have been a typically San Franciscan dismal, grey, foggy day outside, but we were here, at last.

Oh dear. So we’ve been back from our (2 week) holiday for over a week now, and I still haven’t got round to even thinking about blogging about it.

This may take some time.

In the meantime, a quick digression: could someone explain clothes sizes to me? Ok, so I understand the thing with women’s clothes sizings–they are based on some made up numbers like “10” or “14” that don’t actually relate to any underlying measurements of any sort, thus enabling manufacturers to change the size to whatever they like, making women feel better about themselves if they can fit into what purports to be a smaller size, and encouraging them to buy more. Over time, then, the actual dimensions of these hypothetical sizes gradually increase in some kind of clothes-based inflation scenario.

This much I get.

Men’s clothes, on the other hand, tend to be sold in non flexible units, like inches. I’ve always wondered why it’s so difficult to find a pair of jeans that fits me properly: perhaps the fashion industry is suffering from a severe shortage of tape measures, because it’s the only explanation I can think of why two pairs of jeans from different brands both purporting to have a 34 inch waist can in fact be such different sizes. I tried on a pair recently in the States in a shop called Old Navy (which is like a cheaper version of The Gap targeted at obese mid-westerners) that claimed to be a 34 inch waist, and Sal described the effect as looking like I’d just had weight loss surgery but hadn’t replaced my clothes yet.

Yesterday, out shopping in London, I found confirmation of what I’d long suspected: that men’s sizes are just as flexible as women’s, whatever the spurious use of “inches” or “centimetres” might lead you to believe. There’s a shop on Oxford Street where the men’s jeans have both EU/UK sizes and US sizes. Apparently a UK 34 inch waist is equivalent to a US 33 inch waist. Erm…?