East Palo Alto

For nearly 5 years until I finished school at the end of 2009, I lived in a Menlo Park apartment just 2 blocks southwest of East Palo Alto, 1992 recordholder for highest homicide rate in the country. While the homicide rate has fallen a bit since then (or maybe it just got surpassed by the likes of Detroit and New Orleans), I always thought East Palo Alto was a bit incongruously located, being less than half a mile from the second most expensive zip code in America (that would be Atherton). Its other flanks adjoin Palo Alto and Mountain View, home of Stanford and Google. The 101 freeway serves as an 8-lane barrier to discourage fraternization.

So, now that I’m at the age where people are buying homes and settling down, I had a brilliant idea — Why don’t I get a bunch of my friends to do a group buy of homes in East Palo Alto?? Houses there are super affordable! Maybe we can instigate a mass influx of well-educated young urban professionals and expedite the gentrification of this slummy Peninsula corner!!

Then I had another thought. I’m not that smart, so if this idea were truly so brilliant, surely someone else would have already done this — certainly during the height of the real estate bubble in 2006*?

Well, Warren explained to me that slums need to exist near expensive neighborhoods. If the rich pushed into East Palo Alto, the poor people would just squeeze into Redwood City or something. Slums are necessary so that there can be a local supply of workers who provide services to the wealthy. What services? Cocaine, of course! Maybe Provigil if you’re lower class. Come on now, it’s not the custodial staff at Facebook who come back to East Palo Alto and shoot their neighbors. If they were the only workers wealthy people depended on, East Palo Alto would merely be a low-income neighborhood, not a friggin murder capital.

So I guess Palo Alto needs East Palo Alto the same way that the US needs Mexico. It’s an interesting synergy.

*Turns out someone did. — wsj.com.

It’s actually a bit sad. Page Mill Properties bought up 1,800 rental units with grandiose dreams of building a wide swathe of high-end McCondos. Then they defaulted on a $240M loan, abandoned the buildings, and now East Palo Alto’s crime rate is even higher than before.

I’m always late to the party

“Let him eat cake!”

Until 5 minutes ago, I had never heard of Yammer and had no idea that Microsoft is closing a deal to pay $1B for yet another regurgitation of Twitter and Facebook. I suppose the founder is earnestly naive to the fact that his Marie-Antoinette-themed birthday party (complete with celebrities and whores) embodies the precipitation of the French Revolution.

Lavish parties coupled with the offload of stupid business assets for premium prices — shortly after Facebook insiders exercised their exit strategy via an IPO — It’s like that time Goldman Sachs sold their synthetic CDOs to Deutsche Bank. Other people seem to be able to identify the height of the bubble, clear as day — Did Microsoft misplace its bifocals again?

I’m just sad that I didn’t get to ride this wave either.

This One Crazy Photo Tells You Everything You Need To Know About The Tech World Right Now — Business Insider

The Pissing Contest of Work

The laptop I was given to use at work has a 15.6-inch screen, Intel Core i5 processor, spillproof keyboard, and a host of other fancy specs that render it far better for watching TV than the blank wall I have at home. As such, I quite happily drag my 8-pound work computer back to my apartment every evening. This comes with an added bonus – it allows me to log on to Lync Messenger, the unified communications system that we use at work. It displays coworkers’ online statuses, thus I can appear to be hard at work even when I am actually in bed watching Top Gear on BBC!

Jenny, my wonderful friend and colleague, has given me plenty of crap for my disingenuous use of my work computer. She works in the fab, and legitimately puts in long hours. For me to screw around at home with the guise of being industrious is fair justification for her resentment.

See, at our soulless company, the appearance of doing work earns far more merit than the actual accomplishment of any work. At 7:00 pm today, I sat fidgeting in my cubicle as I waited for my boss to log off from Lync, indicating that he had gone home. Nope, his status stayed green. By 7:20, I had refreshed facebook and cnn about 50 times apiece trying to wait out this pissing match. By 7:30, I had read everything worth reading on the internet and was too tired and bored to care anymore, so I threw in the towel. Screw it, I thought. I got better things to do. I closed my laptop and went home, reflecting deeply on the events of the day during the 4-minute drive. Oh, yeah, I only live a mile-and-a-half from work — I really should bike, or even walk, but I have to carry that 8-pound behemoth of a laptop with me every day, remember?

When I got home, I took off my shoes, got an apple from the fridge, went upstairs, opened my laptop, and saw THIS:

I may have lost the battle, but I guess I also lost the war, which is evidenced by the fact that I am at home writing a blog post about this.

Carpe Diem

When I was a lowly grad student, my advisor set me up with a summer internship and said to me, “You may not get to work on anything interesting at [unnamed employer], but take as much as you can from your experience.” I assumed he meant pencils, staplers, notebooks, coffee, whiteboard markers, USB drives… oh, I got the idea alright. Any pencil I don’t take is a pencil I have to BUY in the future! And they probably weren’t paying me enough anyway.

Microsoft’s Carpal Tunnels-inducing Arc Mouse

Last week I got my company to order this for me. It’s a crazy bendy mouse. Cool, huh? I complained that the old Dell mouse that came with my computer was aggravating my Carpal Tunnels’, which I suddenly decided I have. I also requested a new chair for my newly-discovered lower back pain. If this job isn’t going to provide me with any personal fulfillment, it sure as hell better give me some good office supplies.

The sad part is, this mouse sucks. Freaking Microsoft, what were they thinking with this Arc Mouse? Who the hell uses a mouse with their wrist contorted in a bend like that?? If I didn’t have Carpal Tunnels’ before, I’ll probably get it now.

Penguins are Awesome

Penguins have been my favorite animal since forever, primarily for their ability to do cute little human things that no other bird can. These things include necrophilia and pedophilia.

“Adélies gather at their colonies in October to start to breed. They have only a few weeks to do that and young adults simply have no experience of how to behave. Many respond to inappropriate cues. Hence the seeming depravity of their behaviour. For example, a dead penguin, lying with its eyes half-open, is very similar in appearance to a compliant female.”

‘Sexual depravity’ of penguins that Antarctic scientist dared not reveal — the guardian

This reminded me of something I had read about cane toads on cracked.com way back when. I have a particular sympathy for cane toads, because the Australian Department of Agriculture encourages residents to actively kill cane toads. They are an invasive pest, brought to the continent to try to control another invasive pest. Unfortunately, they sucked at eating locusts but did a great job of poisoning native fauna. Through no fault of their own – they didn’t ask to be introduced – they became a persecuted martyr. Traveling through Queensland’s suburban areas, it is quite common to see a squashed cane toad on the road with a boot print over its back.

And then there’s the cane toad: Not only will they regularly have sex with dead bodies, but they’ll even make sweet love to corpses outside of their species. Not just different types of frog, mind you, but animals that in no way could ever be mistaken as a former cane toad: Snakes, lizards, small mammals — the cane toad is a firm believer in the “hole is a hole” attitude, and an even firmer believer in the “if there’s no hole, just make one with your boner” attitude. There has been at least one recorded attempt of a cane toad to mate with a long-deceased female that had been completely flattened by a car … for eight straight hours!

cane toad

In conclusion, here’s a cane toad raping a dead salamander.

6 Animals That Just Don’t Give A F#@k — cracked.com