Coyote Cartography

Posts on Coyote Tracks are supposed to be cross-posted here, but it's clear the cross-poster isn't, er, posting. I apologize. I'll look into it, but the best way to really "follow" me is in one of these places:

• Coyote Tracks, my WordPress blog
• Micro.blog (chipotle.micro.blog)
• Twitter (@chipotlecoyote)

I've subscribed to the RSS feeds of the still-active Dreamwidth blogs that I follow, although if you haven't posted in the last three months I probably can't tell that you're still active -- so leave a comment here either way if you'd like me to add your feed.

I'm finding myself spending more time searching rental and home listings in other parts of the country. Finding myself is such a passive phrase, as if it's not me doing it, but it truly feels like it's just...what I do when I'm bored or restless. I daydream about being somewhere else.

I haven't been journaling the way I used to years ago in, well, years. So in a quick "catching up with things" rundown, I've been out here in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2002, and living in Santa Clara since 2010. I moved to Santa Clara for a job with Nokia in Sunnyvale when they moved their offices there. On the first day their offices were open, I was laid off, with about half my team.

I bounced around between other technical jobs, and grew to loathe working with code. Especially bad code, but to some degree, code, period. I hate to trivialize real PTSD, but I think it truly broke me in some small but noticeable way. To this day I fall into frothy screamy lunatic moments when my computers do something I don't expect or want in a way that just didn't happen five years ago. I know I've always had a short temper, but this is much more oh my god, listen to yourself, what the fuck is wrong with you kind of irrational rage.

In 2014, I lucked into a terrific startup, RethinkDB, not as a coder but as a technical writer. I loved the people, genuinely liked the product (as you can guess, a database), liked the commute (25 minutes to or from the office on a bad day, usually under 20), was paid really well. It was as close to a dream job as I suspect I'll ever have unless I go into business for myself.

So naturally, that couldn't last. They spent all of 2016 trying to get more VC funding and finally threw in the towel in September.

I'm employed again, at a company in San Francisco that's...nice enough, I guess, but I have issues with them that I might get into in another post.

The truth is that 2016 was already a bad year for me, emotionally. I can't say why with absolute certainty, but my mom had a serious health scare in late 2015--I spent months kicking myself for not dropping everything and flying out to be with her while she recovered from surgery--and a series of house troubles in early 2016 which ended up seriously throwing me into flux, because it seemed that the theoretical Some day you will move back to Florida to take care of your aging mom was nigh.

Now, there are things I still like about Florida, and I think some of the urban areas I used to visit have gotten, well, more urban in the last decade. Hipsters are starting to spring up and, setting aside concerns about gentrification for the moment, that means non-retiree culture is starting to spring up. (Also setting aside how uncomfortably close to retirement age I'm getting.)

But all other things being equal, Florida just--isn't high on my list of places to live anymore. I don't like the climate, I don't like the bugs (seriously), I don't like the politics. It's cheap compared to where I am now, but that's not a useful metric.

So I spend my free time looking at other cities.

Portland or Seattle--that's where techies flee the Bay Area to, right? Staying in state, Sacramento is beautiful and has a thriving craft food scene. And there's Eugene, Oregon, kind of a lower-cost, small town version of Portland. An artist friend who used to work at RethinkDB--she did my Twitter icon--suggested Santa Fe. Honestly, Albequerque has pretty areas, despite what "Breaking Bad" may make you think. For that matter, if we're thinking desert oasis, there's Las Vegas.

I know this is silly. I still expect to move in with my mom, wherever she is, and that's almost guaranteed to be somewhere around Tampa. (She's looked at moving away from the rural area she's been in for the last thirty years, but I have my doubts she'll commit.) Putting it that way makes it sound like something I'm dreading, but--it's complicated. I love my mom and want to be with her in her twilight; I just wish there was a way for us to move into The Perfect Town For Both Of Us, whatever the hell that would be, into separate side-by-side houses, or two sides of a duplex or something. So I'm right there, but still have my own space.

But I can't make that happen.

I hate moving. All things being equal, bluntly, I'd rather stay here. So, for the foreseeable future, I am. But my salary is about 15% lower than it was at RethinkDB. Commuting to San Francisco is about a two-hour process each way, when all is said and done. I only have to do that two days a week now, thank God, but between the costs for commuting that incurs anyway and the cost for buying my own lunches when I'm working at home, I'm spending a couple thousand dollars more a year to go to the job that isn't paying me as much. And the rents here are getting so, so high; I'm pretty sure we're paying about 50% more on this lease than we were on the one we signed in 2010, and I would be (perversely) pleasantly surprised if there's merely a 5% increase when we're asked to renew in a couple months.

So I wait. I wait to see what happens with this job, what happens with my mother, what happens with the Bay Area, what happens with my friends. And I daydream about towns I'm not going to move to.

I'm joining the migration to Dreamwidth, finally. Well: that's kind of a mischaracterization on two counts. First, I don't use LiveJournal much anymore; second, I've had an account on Dreamwidth for years, but I just kept using LJ anyway.

I know that a fair number of people, including some who were on my LJ friends list, abandoned LJ back in the Six Apart days when they had their brief flurry of panicked journal deletion-and-reinstatement because Save The Children Something Something. And, on the one hand I get that, but on the other hand, Six Apart listened to their users, reinstated most of the journals, promised to do better, and for the most part did. Was this perfect? No, but it seems at times like they never got even partial credit for trying harder. Water under the Bridge of Khazad-dûm and all now, I suppose.

The sale to SUP, the Russian media company, was interesting, in what a friend described a while ago as the American sense. ("When Europeans say something is interesting, they mean it's interesting. When Americans say something is interesting, they mean it's worrisome.") In retrospect, though, I think SUP did a lot of things right that they don't get credit for, either: for years, LiveJournal was the Number-One-With-A-Bullet blogging system in the Russian Federation, and SUP did their damndest to keep it a free and open platform--no mean trick given the political reality. That's why "LiveJournal, Inc.," remained an American subsidiary, with their servers on American soil, for so long.

I suspect, though, in the end that became their undoing. In September 2015, Russian Federal Law 242-FZ, the "Russian Data Localization Law," went into effect. It mandates that any business that collects or stores personal information--which includes names, email addresses, and even IP addresses--of Russian citizens to use data centers in Russia.

While I couldn't find any smoking gun that suggests this law is why SUP moved their servers to Russia, it's hard not to suspect that's the case. In mid-2016, Russia blocked LinkedIn for non-compliance with the law, and at that point the writing was likely on the wall. In theory, SUP could "simply" run servers in both the US and Russia, and segregate data based on a geolocation algorithm. In practice, though, even assuming they had the resources for that, they'd be under harsh government scrutiny. Dissidents start figuring out how to get his data on the US servers, and that gives the government enough pretext to take the whole company down. From SUP's perspective, it's a choice between submitting to Putin or going out of business. It's easy for us to say they should have chosen the latter, but it's not our livelihoods in question, is it?

Also, let's be blunt: given the Trump administration, SUP probably didn't think having servers in the US was much of a safe harbor anymore.

Will Dreamwidth rekindle my longform blogging? Honestly, I doubt it. It's not that I don't still have that desire, sometimes, it's that Dreamwidth just isn't a platform I like much. "But it's the same as LiveJournal!" Well, no, it isn't. There are a few clever things with filters and access that DW does better than LJ (whenever I'm critical of DW they always get brought up, and yes, I get it, honest), but in terms of the overall design and UX, DW feels pretty much like the LJ of a decade ago, and the LJ of a decade ago didn't feel that much different from the LJ of a decade before that. The reason I kept sticking with LJ is--well, partially inertia, okay--but also because over the last few years or so, SUP put real effort into modernizing things. (Unfortunately, they also closed off the code base.)

And, frankly, all of them feel way less modern than Tumblr--the site I suspect is one of the three crucial legs in the LJ diaspora (the other two being Twitter and, as a distant third, Facebook)--or, for that matter, WordPress 4. And then there's sites like Medium, which are joys to write and read on. (And, for that matter, publish on. I don't think there are any modern LiveJournal clients anymore. If I were writing this for Medium, I'd be writing it in my beloved quirky Markdown editing app Ulysses, and publishing it directly from there. As it is, I'm still writing it in Markdown, but it's going to require some effort to get it from Markdown to DW, because Markdown was invented in 2004 and that's just too dar recent for the LiveJournal codebase.)

Having said that, though, DW/LJ offer unparalleled access control, something that you'd think would be more popular these days given all the concern about online harrassment. There are other valuable things, large and small--from threaded conversations in replies to multiple user icons that we can set for a given post based on topic, mood or whim--that seem to have fallen by the wayside in recent years. The goal of clean, simple UIs is worthwhile, but maybe there's some functionality we should be re-imagining for a new decade rather than merely stripping away.

I've thought a lot about this; people who follow me on Twitter know I've half-joked about making a "modern" LiveJournal equivalent. The thought's still there, although I'm not honestly sure the time and energy is. On the other hand, I'm at the age for a good and proper midlife crisis, so we'll see.

Way back in May 2006, I wrote a little piece called “The State of the Furry Zine.” I’m informally revisiting it now. (And remembering to post it on DreamWidth, too, not just LiveJournal!)

Since I’ve lived out here, people have said that the San Francisco Bay area has little seasonal variation. To someone who’s come from the northeast United States, perhaps this is true; to someone from Florida, it certainly isn’t. The seasons here seem to come late—fall never gets underway until November. This year it came abruptly. The summer had been unseasonably cool, leading to an unusually warm October followed by a cold snap. In a single day, trees around where I live jumped from green and a little yellow to red, orange and shedding, thick drifts of brown leaves blowing across roads and gathering soggily in gutters after the rain.

At least, this happened where I live now, in Santa Clara, back in the heart of Silicon Valley. In Foster City, just 30 miles north up the peninsula, I don’t remember this happening. This may be the fault of my memory more than of Foster City—as I write this passage, I’m on a train bound for San Francisco, the same train I used to take into work at times. Right now it’s in Menlo Park and there are—well, some fall colors, although certainly not as pronounced as I saw in Santa Clara.

When I got to the peninsula it seemed much nicer than the South Bay: more urbane, with walkable downtowns and fewer chain restaurants and more history. It would be closer to hills and closer to parks. There was one right down the street!

All true. But Foster City itself had no downtown at all, and only a few restaurants (chain or otherwise). It wasn’t easy to get into the hills except for residential neighborhoods. The nicer downtowns were some distance away. Nearly all of my friends live in the South Bay, and I found myself making new ones there that I could rarely visit.

And there are no first class coffee shops anywhere between Mountain View and San Francisco. Trust me.

Don’t get me wrong; Foster City is a pleasant place. Sure, it’s aggressively nondescript in a way that only the exurbs that sprung up in the last fifteen years top (and which were the clearest sign of the recession-to-be: when people are spending $300K to live in house farms 60 miles from the metro area they work in, something’s going to give). But it had a great location and made taking a job in San Francisco a lot more bearable than it would have been if I’d stayed in San Jose.

When I first moved to California a friend complained I kept saying everything was better in Florida. I don’t think that was a fair complaint, though. I was guilty of comparing things here to what I knew in Tampa, yes—but looking back is hardly the same as wanting to go back. There are things I miss (as anyone who’s moved from a place they grew up would have) and I love my friends in Florida, but it’s never been a place I’ve pined for.

I didn’t realize until this very move, looking back on my other moves, that this is hardly new for me. I rarely think the grass is greener on the other side—the grass is greener wherever I happen to be. The SF Peninsula was clearly better than the South Bay until a month ago. Now the South Bay is clearly better than the Peninsula and I was an idiot to think otherwise. So it goes.

Today, though, is the last day that my office is in San Francisco, and while I won’t miss the commute I’ve had for the last several weeks—I’m very much looking forward to the shortest commute I’ve had in five years!—I’ll miss being in The City. After spending a year riding in four or five days a week, it’s a different place for me: less intimidatingly labyrinthine, but no less magical. There are dozens of spots from little cafes to funky neighborhoods to world-class bars that you’re unlikely to visit, or even find, unless you live or work there.

There’s a curious mental barrier between SF and the South Bay. It’s only 45 miles away from where I’m living now, which is—yes, this is a comparison to Florida—is a shorter distance than that between my college in Sarasota and the neighborhoods in Tampa I visited frequently. But SF is much harder to get into and get around in until you’re familiar with public transit. I doubt I’d been into San Francisco more than a dozen times in the seven years before I started work up by Market and Embarcadero.

So this colors this move in a strangely unexpected way. I am going to miss working downtown despite the costs involved. (Between no longer paying for monthly transit and parking passes and not having the “Financial District tax” on lunches, I’ll probably be saving upwards of $200 a month.) Yet I have a curious feeling that the South Bay is more my home than the Peninsula ever was. This has made me think—not for the first time—on just what “home” means to me. Maybe I’ll have an answer before I retire.

(Presented for your perusal in no particular order.)

• I transitioned from being a contract employee to a direct employee of the company I’ve been working for since October. In practice this doesn’t make a huge difference in terms of my role and responsibilities (or salary), but it’s nice that they’re hoping to keep me around for a while.
• I’m experimentally moving my journal back end from LiveJournal to Dreamwidth. So:
  • If you’re reading my journal on LJ or at ranea.org, you shouldn’t have to do anything; if you also have a DW account and want to read me there, my username is (surprise) chipotle.
  • If you want to comment on my journal, you still shouldn’t have to do anything, at least for the indefinite future. I expect to check both sites.
  • Eventually, if DW works out, I may first request and then eventually require comments to be only on DW. But I’m not sure. I’d rather things be a little more of a pain in the butt for me than for you.
  • Why bother doing this at all? In very short form, I don’t really trust LiveJournal’s commitment to their “old” userbase (i.e., people like me).
• While this journal is probably going to remain moderately quiet, just for the occasional life update, I have a tech blog now, although it’s also something of an experiment: Coyote Tracks.
  • My goal is to update it with something at least once a day and with something substantial at least once a week. It may be a little something like Daring Fireball in content mix, focusing on web stuff, Apple stuff, and publishing stuff, musings about the future of computing which will undoubtedly look ridiculous in as little as a year’s time, occasional commentary on commentary, and—the secret ingredient—cocktail recipes.
  • For a “brand new blog” it got a fair amount of attention from being linked to by Marco Arment (the creator of Tumblr and the amazing Instapaper). We’ll see if that lasts.
  • The URL is http://chipotle.tumblr.com/, and it should have an RSS feed and other such niceties out of the box. LJ users may add it to their friends page as “chipotle_tumble”; Dreamwidth users may add “coyotetracks_feed”. (Please note that while DW and LJ will allow you to comment on feeds, there’s no guarantee that I will see such a comment.)

Against my better judgement, I’m going to write about the iPad. It’s been long enough that everyone’s already formed an opinion, I suspect; I’m going to start off by throwing a bit of cold water on some of the opinions I’ve been seeing.