There is a personality profile application on Facebook that I just added to my profile. After taking a 100-question personality quiz, the website told me this:

I suppose that’s not too surprising if you know me.

I know we do some pretty good avertising at Apple, but I think we could do better (and rotate it more frequently). Sprint did better. Tip of the hat to them for it.

The only gripe, I suppose, is that they are not advertising anything new, per se. They are saying “we have a fast network, and so we can do more.” (Than, say, AT&T: Their website for the campaign features a comparison of network speeds with AT&T.) There is an obvious elephant in the room that is causing all the other cell companies to aggressively advertise, particularly against AT&T, and I hope to see some good competition. Everybody wins in the end that way. And hey, I like a good ad now and then.

It has an interesting behind the scenes video too.

Mushroom! Mushroom!

As I implied that I was going to do in my previous post, I decided to give mushrooms another shot, after generally not eating them for over twenty years. It didn’t hurt that I’m in LA for the weekend visiting Melissa, long-time friend and long-time vegetarian.

Just as is necessary when getting into a cold swimming pool, I decided to jump right in. Friday night we went to a Thai restaurant, and the soup had thin slices of mushrooms in it. These I tentatively swallowed almost whole at first, and later tried to take some time to investigate the texture of the mushroom. They are firmer than I thought they would be, which is reassuring, and makes sense in context of the veggie burgers that I do eat now and then. I took things to the next level Saturday morning with a “Buddha Bowl” at a local cafe, which had what I suspect were button mushrooms cut into bigger pieces. These went into corn tortillas and down my gob. A third type of mushroom made it into dinner: straw mushrooms at a Chinese(ish) restaurant in a spicy fish dish.

While it’s going to be a while before they find themselves into my “favorite foods” list, I can appreciate that they are one of the most versatile and healthy foods known to man, and given my increasing trend of living well, I figured I may as well give them a chance. Having broken the proverbial seal, I suppose I will be more convenient to have around the dinner table. Yet, it’s going to take some sort of sausage-stuffedness to get me eating them whole any time in the near future, but I suspect my mom has just the recipe for that

One of my two favorite sisters, Andrea, tagged me on some blog meme of sharing eight random things about myself. Such that nothing horrible befalls my loved ones, I suppose I’ll need to play along. To make things easy, I’m going to borrow her format in places.

1. I am exceedingly difficult to make angry.

2. Here are the places I have lived:
* Willingboro, NJ until I was through second grade
* Medford Lakes, NJ until I finished high school
* Allentown, PA for most of my undergraduate time in college
* Minneapolis, MN for the summer of my sophomore year, doing a research program at U of MN
* Coventry, UK for my junior year abroad that the University of Warwick
* State College, PA for grad school at Penn State
* Cupertino, CA for the summers of grad school spent at Apple
* San Francisco, CA, where I live now while I continue my career at Apple

3. If I hear something a few times, and my vocal range allows for it, I can reproduce it. As a result of this, I can do a number of cartoon voices, impressions, and sounds.

4. I have poor depth perception due to an eye condition called strabismic amblyopia wherein I am essentially ignoring the input from one eye. I will never be able to see the image embedded in a “Magic Eye” poster. Yet, I have very good eyesight, 20/15. I can close my right eye and see fine out of the left, but if I reopen my right eye I’ll switch back over to it quickly, or else I’ll get a headache.

5. I apparently stopped eating mushrooms one day when I was young. If I can’t recognize them (e.g., veggie burgers), I eat them with no problem. I’m gradually warming up to the idea of eating them whole again, because I don’t have a good reason other than visual aversion and smurf nightmares.

6. My biggest pet peeve is when people complain. Life is much too short to be doing something you don’t want to do. (Not that I am complaining about their complaining, mind you…)

7. Several people have questioned me as to whether or not I actually sleep, because even when they’ve seen me apparently sleeping, I am so easily awoken (by sound or light) and so alert when I am awoken that they swear I was never asleep to begin with.

8. I collect etiquette books as a hobby.

Back on the previous incarnation of my blog, I had elaborated on my moving plans, and noted that relocation of my vehicle was covered in my startup package at Apple. I presently drive a 1993 Ford Explorer, a SUV which, while handy in the snowy winters of central Pennsylvania, gets only 20 miles per gallon of fuel.

Ultimately, I’ve decided not to take the car with me. It’s worth less than it would cost to move it, it probably won’t pass CA emissions inspection without costly repairs (though it did pass in NJ and PA, so maybe it’s ok), and it lacks an airbag. However, I’ve also decided not to replace the car.

First, there’s the matter of cost. I’d nominally be looking at around $800 in monthly expenses between the car payment, the insurance, the parking fees in San Francisco, and fuel costs. That’s half my rent!

Second, I don’t think I could bear the “soul-crushing slog” back and forth between San Francisco and Cupertino, even I carpool with friends. The daily commute was the straw that broke the camel’s back for ex-co-worker and decent human Buzz Andersen. Quoth Buzz:

…As the stress and hours increased at work, my 45 minute commute down 280, which I had initially thought of as a reasonable (even pleasant and scenic) drive, became a soul crushing daily slog. With most of my social life in San Francisco, but my demanding job an exhausting drive away in Cupertino, I started finding it harder and harder to keep up relationships. As a recent article about commuting in The New Yorker put it:

“I was shocked to find how robust a predictor of social isolation commuting is,” Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, told me. (Putnam wrote the best-seller “Bowling Alone,” about the disintegration of American civic life.) “There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.”

My plan around such isolation is to ride the train into work, which will be a fairly social experience, given that my roommate and a variety of my other work friends will all be taking the same train in. The train back at night can even be happy hour. During my morning commute, I plan to put some of the time into work on my dissertation, and with the upcoming introduction of free wifi to the Caltrain, I can even trim some time off from my Cupertino workday by doing email and updating some bugs from the train.

My third reason for ditching the car has to do with restoring some simplicity to my life, which I alluded to as a goal in my previous post. As a mass transit commuter, I’ll be kinder to the environment. As a person who will have to get up and walk to the train station or to the grocery store, I’ll be kinder to my body.

My plan for getting around will ultimately involve renting cars for the weekends that I really want to get away to distant destinations and cabs for those nights out in the city. Even if I were to do that every weekend, it would still be cheaper (~40/day plus gas) than owning a car!

I suspect that eventually I’ll leave the city for cheaper real estate. In the mean time, I’m going to enjoy the perks that the city offers with respect to commuting alternatives and corner stores. If you think you too can live without a car - without its impact on your budget, body, psyche, not to mention its impact on the environment - I highly recommend giving it a shot.

Have you ever run out of space on your hard drive? I mean really run out of space, when the operating system is throwing warnings up on the screen. “What can I possibly delete?” you think to yourself. There are a few first places to start that are relatively stress-free. You take a cursory look in your Trash, making sure that there’s not something in there that you would in retrospect like to keep. Then, you hesitantly tell your computer to empty the trash. You get a little space back. Maybe you delete some funny videos people forwarded you in emails. Crisis averted… For now.

Eventually, you get the warning again. But it gets to a point that there’s nothing in your trash and you’re still out of space. This is where I am at with my computer, and it is a perfect metaphor for where I am at in my life. Overfull. My computer is sluggish from being full of data, my drawers are bulging with clothes I’m never going to wear again, and I think I have my pre-algebra book from 7th grade on a bookshelf somewhere. I’ve simply taken on too many things in my life, and they’ve made me physically, mentally, and emotionally sluggish.

I’m lucky to be young. I’ve got the better part of my life ahead of me. So far I’ve lived in eight cities in three states and one “metropolitain county” in two countries (and visited more), and there’s little doubt that more adventure is in store for me. The adventure that is currently on the horizon for me is moving my life to the opposite side of the country, continuing my career at Apple in the San Francisco Bay Area. Everything from my past will be far east from me, or farther west when you take a spherical world into account.

The move that is part of my next adventure affords me the opportunity to declutter my life. At the hard drive level, I’ve been able to delete gigabytes of files and emails corresponding to organizations, activities, and people who will be part of my collective past; my memories, but not my future. In the real world, I’ve disinvolved my time and attention from the physical analogues of these things. Over the next few days, I’ll continue to separate my wheat from my chaff: what clothing won’t I wear again, what books I’ll give away, what furniture, knick-knacks, and people from my childhood, adolescence, and early twenties it is time to leave behind as I begin to furnish my independent adult life and mind.

This is going to be an interesting and challanging change for me. Rarely in life do we get a chance for a clean break; to put our life through the wringer. I’m going to try to do better with creating and cataloguing my future memories in ways that still let me have a balanced and invigorating clutter-free life. It’s time to buy a digital camera, to get some healthier food for the pantries, to put my computer to sleep, and to go for a walk in the warm May air.

I like to write, but I don’t like to feel like I have to write at a certain time or in a certain way. I’ve abandoned my previous weblog into the ether of cyberspace (Google ranking be damned!), and I am thinking that my writing in this space will be a bit different from now on. Most of you who come here wanting to know what’s new with me should, like me, instead strive to use the most rewarding possible medium of communication. If we can get together for a hot (or frosty cold) beverage, let’s do that instead. If you have my phone number, call me. Don’t worry, I’ll still post some things here, for those who don’t know me yet or who don’t have a better way to contact me yet (start with my first name at billstevenson.org), as well as to share some things I think you’ll enjoy.