Author: lux

56 Miles

That’s the door to door length of my daily commute now. 56 miles each way. I’ve just this week been promoted at work; given a salary bump, a better title, and more responsibility. All of this is good but the catch is … the long commute.

Fortunately, it’s a reverse commute. I live in San Francisco and the job is over the Golden Gate Bridge, up Highway 101, in the fringes of wine country – a town called Santa Rosa. Unless you live in the North Bay you probably never heard of it. If there’s no traffic on the road,and I break the speed limits on the smoother stretches of 101 (Southern Marin is pretty curvy and you can’t really drive it too fast), I can go door to door in an hour, more or less. On a recent Sunday afternoon, though, the trip took 2 hours thanks to a few backup-causing accidents and heavy traffic coming back to the city from wine country.

To help manage the drive time, I’ve signed up for a monthly subscription from Audible.com. Each month, I can download one audio book from their website and burn it to CD. This month I’m listening to Al Franken’s great rebuttal to the Republican media machine, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them”. Even in the unabridged version, it will only last me about 2 weeks, so I’ll have to rely on the radio and my CD collection to fend off boredom the rest of the month.

I’m seriously considering buying an iPod and an FM broadcast kit so that I can listen to the 6 GB or so of MP3s sitting on my hard drive through my car stereo system. Doing so would also allow me to download my Audible.com books to the iPod instead of having to burn them to CD.

So if you have suggestions for things I can safely do in my car to while away the time, let me know!

I’m trendy!

In a way it’s comforting to know that according to this article in USA Today, I’m not alone in what’s happened to my career. To make a long story short, about a year ago I started wortking for Aerosoles, a fairly well-known women’s shoe company, in an entry level management position. Today, as I prepare to begin work as a store manager at one of the company’s 80+ stores, I find that “survival jobs” are, well, the latest trend.

In a lot of ways, I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m on salary, have health benefits for myself and my husband, and have been promoted into management in this job. I have developed strong sales skills – something I never thought I was good at – and I like what I sell. And with this promotion, I have control over my own schedule, which is a good feeling. I still won’t be able to take Saturdays off except on special occasions, but at least I can decide when my days off are.

That said, I’m still a Vassar graduate with a 15 year career in marketing who’s taken almost a $50,000 pay cut to sell shoes for a living. And this is definitely not what I moved to the Bay Area for. The day a former co-worker wandered into my store (I hadn’t seen her since getting laid off from Critical Path a couple years ago) and I found out she’d just gotten back from 18 months in France and was running her own consulting company was not a happy day for me.

Thomas Friedman is a really smart guy sometimes

Taken from his NY Times column today:

It’s time for the Bush team to admit it made a grievous error in disbanding Iraq’s Army – which didn’t even fight us – and declare: “We thank all the nations who offered troops, but we think the Iraqi people can and must secure their own country. So we’re inviting all former Iraqi Army soldiers (not Republican Guards) to report back to duty. For every two Iraqi battalions that return to duty (they can weed out their own bad apples), we will withdraw an American one. So Iraqis can liberate themselves. Our motto is Iraq for the Iraqis.”

I think it’s a very interesting idea. Of course, if we were to do it, depending on the sympathies of the soldiers who re-up, the door is open for a religious takeover of Iraq. That isn’t what our soldiers died for. But better ideas are few and far between right now.

Dana, Dana, Dana!

Thanks to the ever-so-generous people at AlphaSmart, a fabulous new PDA landed on my desk today – the Dana Wireless. Now I can blog from anywhere in the house, untethered to my PC.

The only problem is that the DanaWeb browser, which takes advantage of the Dana’s widescreen capability, is quite buggy. The two problems that I find most annoying are it has issues with scrolling and the forms handler doesn’t like extended text entry (a big minus for bloggers!). Eudora’s PalmOS web browser, although not widescreen enabled, seems to handle forms a bit better and is thus more suited for WiFi blogging, although it doesn’t take advantage of the Dana’s ample screen real estate.

Other PalmOS Internet apps I’ve tested seem to work fine too. Verichat and upIRC, my two favorite messaging apps, both work flawlessly with the Dana, although neither had widescreen capability. And SnapperMail, an awesome email app, IS widescreen enhanced and works quite well.

The Dana keyboard is full sized and handles nicely, although some of the keys tend to be a bit sticky. I’m not sure if that’s an issue with my Dana or if I’m pounding the keys too hard (a bad habit). At any rate, I’ve long wanted a simple laptop or laptop alternative that was wifi enabled so I could do some basic online tasks without having to leave the bedroom or living room.

Now I can.

Go Dana go!

Go Yankees!

Although my heart belongs to the New York Mets, I’m quite happy to also root for the Yankees as long as they’re not playing against the Mets. So last night’s game, which I caught starting in the 7th inning, was quite a thrill.

Derek Jeter has been quoted as saying “I believe we’ve got some ghosts in this Stadium that help us out. There’s some magic in this place.” Maybe he’s right and maybe he’s not. Maybe all it takes is believing that when the s**t hits the fan, you will be able to pull something out of the hat and turn a bad game around. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if it’s the ghost of Babe Ruth or not that helps you win the game. The Red Sox have gone down to defeat again and their World Series drought – whether it’s the “curse of the Bambino” or not – continues another year.

I hope the Yanks have enough time to rest up before game 1 against the Marlins. My call: Yankees in 6.