speaking in other tongues

I'm back in Paris, jetlagged. My French is still awful, but I do pretty well with giving cabbies directions to "my" apartment. Luckily for me, French is usually a second language for them, too.

After a lunch of roquette and fromage de buffala with my friend Geneviève, I headed for Monoprix and other shops to stock up on the stuff I need in the apartment and that I miss when I'm not here, because it's either not available in the USA, or not the same, or so outrageously expensive that I can't justify buying it...like the raw sheep's milk cheese and the pimentes stuffed with goat cheese...and the coconut yogurt.

Then had to pop on the metro and off to the BHV to look at the fall clothes, while I was still ambulatory. I didn't last long...I'm too tired.

It's good to be back.

urban mobility, part deux

I've just read a local news article about how there's a ballot initiative in San Francisco for this November's election: one that will make voters choose between funding our public transit systems -- which are in dire need, with 700,000 passengers per day -- and funding more parking for cars, a measure backed by the Chamber of Commerce and initiated by the guy who founded The Gap, which presumably would sell more jeans and t-shirts if people had more places to park their SUVs.

Read about the initiative here .

Apparently, these are dueling ballot measures, and they're either/or bills... we'll either get funding for public transit, or we'll invest in cars and parking lots. This is why I cannot stand the ballot-initiative system in California. Ballot initiatives are like malware. You click on the wrong thing, and you destroy something that's important.

Apparently the president of the SF Board of Supervisors was quoted as saying, "This is about San Francisco's destiny. Voters will have to ask themselves, 'Do you want San Francisco to be more like Paris or Los Angeles?'"

That's a no-brainer for me. You know how I'm going to vote.

urban mobility

I have a car. But I live much of my life without using it. In fact, I only drive it to haul things or to go someplace that's impossible or unwise to reach with public transportation.

I don't think this is so strange -- I live in a city, and I grew up in New York. It seems completely normal to live my life, for the most part, without a car.

However, I live in the USA, and this is considered bizarre. Granted, there are many places where you absolutely MUST have a car and without one, you'd perish. But I don't want to live in those places. I can't stand driving in dense traffic, or looking endlessly for parking spaces that aren't in tow-away zones, or trying to get out of a parking lot without being hit by a bigger car. In general, I often feel like I'm in a horrible video game when I drive. It's not fun.

I won't get into a rant here about using non-renewable resources. I don't have to...you already know.

What I don't understand is the increasing number of people moving into my city with huge cars -- people who live next to a transit hub, but drive everywhere anyway. People who would rather drive four blocks than walk. People who drive to urban events with tens of thousands of other people, with no hope of parking.

I think that maybe it's because cars are basically mobile homes --once inside the car, people feel at "home" -- no matter where the car might take them. So much at home, in fact, that they often have no place to seat their passengers because of the toys, clothes, baby carriers, food, and entertainment items strewn everywhere. They feel "safe" in their car-home in unsafe times.

I'm of the belief system that the more people you have walking on the street, the safer the streets are to walk on. (With the exception of a few horrible mob scenes, that is.) So how do you get people out of their mobile homes and onto the sidewalks again?

long-overdue recognition

Lately I've been on the phone a lot, trying to straighten out the side effects of my social-security problem or dealing with tech-support issues with my gadgets. And in the process, I've discovered something very impressive: the quantum leaps in service from tech-support people who work the phones in India.

Remember when big companies first started outsourcing their service calls to India? A lot of people -- including me -- groaned and complained that the new workers didn't seem to know as much as their counterparts in the West, that they had limited scripts and tasks they could perform, that there were language barriers and difficult accents, and that their function often seemed to be as a "bouncer" who kept us from making contact with the people who actually knew how to solve our problems. Not anymore.

Most of the tech-support people I've talked to lately have been somewhere India, and the service has been great. They've been patient, attentive, friendly, professional, great on follow-through, and always resolved my troubles with little effort on my part. And I realized this has been going on for awhile: phone support has gotten good again -- if you get someone in India, that is.

It's not just because I read the Chetan Bhagat novel, "One Night at the Call Center," though I did feel empathy for the characters and the abusive treatment they sometimes got from their American callers. But I've realized that every time I make a support call and a person in India answers the phone, I get my problem solved pretty quickly....and when I make a phone call to a company in the USA and get a robot that makes a fake typing sound in the background, I DON'T get my problem solved.

So...here's a high-five to the tech-support workers in India... I hope that your employers start letting you use your real names instead of anglicized ones, because it's time for my culture to start recognizing where a lot of our tech talent is actually coming from.

HummerSpotting

Today I actually saw two Hummers in one day.

The first was a big yellow Hummer speeding down the carpool lane during rush hour. The driver had no passengers. Are you surprised?

The second sighting was later that evening. I saw a very short, humorless-looking guy -- he was clearly under 5'4" tall -- driving a big, black Hummer down Castro Street in San Francisco. I know what you're thinking... I thought it, too.

all you've got to do is talk naturally

Recently I've been paying closer attention to how skilled many people are at leaving voicemail messages. We've gotten pretty good at leaving clear, concise messages that actually convey useful information before the time-out beeper cuts us off.

Of course, I'm old enough to remember when some of my friends were intimidated by message machines and got clammy and stammered through a message....or worse, they got stage fright and hung up without leaving a message at all.

But those days are over. The next time you're in a public place, just listen. You'll hear people on cell phones everywhere, and many of these smooth talkers aren't having a two-way conversation -- they're just leaving messages. There's no human at the other end. They might even prefer it that way.

As a culture, we've mastered the art of sounding natural -- even downright warm, sincere, or even enthusiastic -- when we talk to machines. (And increasingly, machines are sounding more natural when they talk to us, too.)

How did we evolve to leaving these spontaneous soundbites for other people? Maybe it's trial by error, from being cut off by the beep too many times... but I also think we've finessed our intonation from listening to radio, cable news, and other media without really thinking about it...a modern instinct versus a primitive one.

Planned Passwordhood

If you're like me, you have a lot of passwords. And if you're cautious, you employ multiple passwords that shouldn't be easy to guess. But if you're also like me, you have some version of culture-induced ADD. And you forget some of your passwords. If you use multiple computers in multiple locations, this can be a pain.

Let's say you've set up a new account on some web site. A week later, you've already forgotten your password. After multiple attempts to recall it, you give in or you're shut out. So you click the "I Forgot My Password" button, which sends a new -- but temporary! -- and overwhelmingly unmemorable password to your email address. You can finally log in again -- but you have to create yet another new password, which you promptly forget the next day. And the cycle repeats again and again.

In the Web 1.0 years, this wasn't such a big deal. Forgetting your password was as simple as remembering the answer to a simple "hint" or verification question (What's your pet's name?). Answer the question, et voila! Here's your password. However, for understandable reasons, password retrieval is a thing of the past. Now, in this age of sophisticated hacks, if you answer the hint questions accurately, you'll only get an opportunity to change to a new password, but never retrieve your old one. And thus your array of new passwords will proliferate like bunnies.

So....what to do? I can't travel from place to place carrying a notebook full of passwords everywhere I go. And because I use multiple machines, saving my passwords to Keychain Access (in Mac OS X) does me no good.

I need a good system for remembering my passwords.....any advice? Maybe a USB memory stick that I carry with me...and which contains all my passwords in a text file. Or can anyone recommend a secure, portable software utility for password recall?