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The fourth is still an open-air parking lot and doesn’t show any signs of joining its counterparts any time soon.
The northeast corner has a pleasant collection of umbrella’d tables and some trees just tall enough to give an effective shade. We hung out there for a while and watched the light change as the sun bounced off buildings and the trees broke it up. Most relaxing.
The northwest corner is more severe, as befits the anteroom of the building that houses the Black Rock investment firm, which basically runs the world right now. There are tank barriers around the
perimeter artfully designed to look like tank barriers, and a forbidding Moebius-like sculpture doubtless intended to evoke the incomprehensibility of modern finance, or something.
The southwest corner shares the elegant black rock motif but gives more space to its trees than to walking or sitting space. It is dominated by a Specialties restaurant that contains an Intelligentsia
coffee kiosk, a nice surprise for coffee snobs weary of the long lines at Blue Bottle. Intelligentsia appears to be following a Starbucks-like model, with settings controlled by someone other than
the barista and not a lot of information available behind the bar. But the coffee is passable, certainly far superior to any Starbucks I’ve been at lately.
Our fortunes improved with site 53, which is a pleasant enough little courtyard outside the building at 235 2d St. that houses CBS Interactive. There are spiffy brushed-aluminum tables and chairs. At this time of year there is shade along the east side after about noon, thanks to a tall hedge that our hosts thoughtfully provided.
We skipped site 54 (we’re doing this backwards) pending further research. The list has it as “Marriott courtyard,” but I’ve been all around there and haven’t seen anything resembling the description. The map doesn’t help. I suspect they list is referring to a different location, perhaps near the Courtyard Marriott? Stay tuned.
Site 51, just down the street at the corner of 2nd and Mission, is even more impressive. It was clearly designed by someone familiar with San Francisco weather. It is completely enclosed in glass, so you can hang out there in faux-outdoors ease throughout the year. There is a reasonably interesting 20-foot tall sculpture on the ground floor, and some large ficus trees to complete the al fresco effect. You can go upstairs and hang out on a mezzanine level with a nice view of the skyline from an unaccustomed angle. The tables and chairs are the same brushed aluminum that graces site 52.
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The second site on our tour of publicly-owned, privately-operated spaces in San Francisco was another disappointment. The whole open area attached to 303 2d St. is fenced off for construction. We had to peer over the fence and try to figure out what the features might look like when finished. It looked like there would be some smallish circles of vegetation and probably a fountain or two.
(This is the list of sites we plan to visit. We’re taking them in reverse order; this was site No. 55.)
To assuage our despair, we went over to the nearby South Park area and did some yuppie-watching from a table outside a sandwich shop. We felt much better after having a bite to eat. Then: excitement! While we walked back to John’s subway stop we were stopped — right at the site of last week’s disappointment, No. 56, as it happened — by police clearing the way for some dignitary or other.
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Since I started working in downtown San Francisco, I’ve talked John into helping me with a project I’ve been idly imagining for years: visit every one of the sites on this list of “publicly owned, privately operated” spaces. I thought we’d start from the end of the list and work down, just because.
Today I took an exploratory look at 611 Folsom. It’s as bad as the pamphlet says. Windswept, scraggly trees spaced far apart; big pointless flat areas paved with pale reddish brick. Plenty of seating on the brick benches, at full-on lunchtime, because only a few people were depression-proof enough to hang around. I’ve seen smoking rooms at airports that looked friendlier.
Here’s John modeling the way the surrounding buildings loom over the site, making you think of Mordor, or Wall St. He’s struggling to keep up his cheer in the face of these enormous masses of gloom bearing down on him from behind.
One thing that could save it: with all that heavy built-in furniture, it might have made a convenient skateboarding location. Skaters bring a certain something to a neighborhood, and they’re fun to watch on your lunch break, like the break dancers and drummers who entertain in the subway. But the authorities have killed off that possibility by installing those nasty little steel blades all over every surface. They don’t just repel skaters, of course: they repel anybody who doesn’t like nasty little steel blades.
Upside: Mehfil Indian restaurant, just across Folsom street, has a quick, cheap and tasty to-go menu. I had the meatballs in yogurt gravy and a mango lassi. Most satisfying.
Next time: Marathon Plaza, aka (I think) 303 2nd St. Plaza.
On a project I was writing for in the late 90s, there were several teams, each of them developing code that would do some work on the data and pass it off to the code created by some other team. The team leads quickly got into the habit of saying things like “I parse it and pass it to Gerry, and then she crunches it and gives it to Terry.” Gerry wasn’t crunching anything herself, but she had identified so thoroughly with the code her team was writing that it felt like she was.
It’s not just software, of course. When I moved to California I met a lot of people who spent a lot of time in cars. Where I would have said “I parked the car down the block,” a Californian would say “I’m down the block.” The person was not down the block, the car was, but everybody seemed to understand. I’ve been in California so long, I talk the same way now.
Until recently I was writing a lot about a complex and rather precarious installer. In frustration, I caught myself putting questions to the developers like this: “Are we seriously telling the user to run that script manually, twice?” As soon as I noticed that I tried to get back to phrasing it like, “Are you seriously telling me I have to…?” Putting myself rhetorically in the position of the user helped me stay focused on the point of the writing, but even more than that, it helped keep these developers focused on making sense, rather than just getting through the processing. ]]>
The trick, for me, has been to develop a feel for how much rework is optimal. When you are a part of a scrum team and you understand what the people in control of the organization want to do with it, you can learn to sense how likely it is that code will be backed out, or that a feature won’t be recognizable in its ultimate form, and you can use that sense to gauge how much thought and drafting time you should put into a given user story at a given time. You have to accept that some text will have to be discarded, because you thought it would be needed and it wasn’t, and that some text will have to be created right up against deadline because you didn’t see the need for it until the last minute.
In the early stages there is inevitably some wasted work. But if you can stick with this approach over the life of a project, you can end up working far more efficiently, on the average, than you ever did the old way. (That’s not a trivial “if.” Even the most committedly agile manager will at some point give in to the temptation to ask for a “doc outline,” or a “doc freeze,” or some other artifact from the old days.)
The ironic thing is how much this resembles the way we’ve always worked, minus the pretense. When I told myself I was working from a functional spec, I was always really working with one eye on the spec and one eye on the real development that was happening, which sometimes followed the spec and sometimes led it. I saw some good specs, but I never did encounter one that I could put through the classic semantic-reversal exercise that in theory could have auto-generated the help content and put us all out of jobs.
]]>Your mother asked us to tell you about what Eric meant to us personally.
To me, Eric was infinite creativity combined with unbending principle. He was the embodiment of the happy warrior, slogging it out in endless meetings and marches and picket lines and having a blast the whole time. His enthusiasm was contagious.
In difficult moments, when we weren’t winning, he gave me the sense that we really were, even if we couldn’t see it right now.
I especially remember his delight at having a little child. He knew your presence would change everything, and he was very happy about that.
With my best wishes,
Ted Kuster
]]>Burning Man, and the parking is easy
Not an artist to be seen around here
Coffee’s scarce, and Valencia’s a ghost town
And all the bikes on the street have gears
One of these mornings you’re gonna rise up singing
You’ll spread your wings, and you’ll pack your van
But until that morning, it’s gonna be a bit crowded
And we’ll all just park wherever we can