Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

• Swan Laundry will pick up your laundry at your hotel, wash and fold it, and return it the same day for a $50 flat fee.
• Wind Mobile has an unlimited 3G hotspot plan for $35 per month (they will throttle you if you exceed 10GB in a month), a better deal than any US carrier offers. They sold me a refurbished Huawei hotspot for $45 (why should the NSA have all the fun listening in?)
• Urban Fare is an excellent place for breakfast and fancy groceries, specially the Shangri-La location.
• The Blue Water Cafe is my favorite restaurant in town.

San Francisco sweeps streets twice a month in residential neighborhoods, and you will be fined if your car is parked on a street being swept. On my street, the schedule is the first and third Monday of each month, between 9am and 11am. I was trying to create reminders to myself in my calendar. Unfortunately, iCal does not have the ability to specify a recurring event with that definition.

No matter, Python to the rescue, the script below generates a year’s worth of reminders 12 hours before the event, in iCal vCalendar format. It does not correct for holidays, you will have to remove those yourself.

#!/usr/bin/python
"""Idora street sweeping calendar - 1st and 3rd Mondays of the month 9am-11am"""
import datetime
Monday = 0
one_day = datetime.timedelta(1)
today = datetime.date.today()
year = today.year
month = today.month

def output(day):
  print """
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTEND:%(end)s
SUMMARY:Idora street sweeping
DTSTART:%(start)s
BEGIN:VALARM
TRIGGER:-PT12H
ATTACH;VALUE=URI:Basso
ACTION:AUDIO
END:VALARM
END:VEVENT
""" % {
    'end': day.strftime('%Y%m%dT110000'),
    'start': day.strftime('%Y%m%dT090000')
    }

print """BEGIN:VCALENDAR
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
VERSION:2.0"""

for i in range(12):
  day = datetime.date(year, month, 1)
  while day.weekday() != Monday:
    day += one_day
  output(day)
  output(day + 14 * one_day)
  month += 1
  if month > 12:
    month = 1
    year += 1

print "END:VCALENDAR"

The single greatest feature of the iPad is the fact it cannot receive phone calls. Despite being a telecoms engineer by training, I despise phones, and it seems the millennial generation shares my disdain, as it favors less intrusive means of communication like texting.

The iPad is an essential device for me. I am on a 2-year upgrade cycle (at best) for phones, a 5-year cycle for my desktop Mac Pro, and have stopped using laptops altogether, but I will get every single iteration of the iPad. Now, even though my jacket has a pocket sized large enough to hold my full-sized iPad, the weight and bulk means I seldom did so, and kept it in my bag, which I rarely take out with me when going out for lunch. When I saw the iPad Mini and how lightweight it was, I bought one and started carrying it with me all the time.

The Mini is not a replacement for my Retina iPad, as my worsening eyesight makes it a strain for sustained reading, which is why I kept my grandfathered unlimited AT&T data plan on the full-sized iPad and got a limited Verizon plan on the Mini.

No, the device that was displaced is actually my iPhone. The iPad Mini weighs barely twice as much, is thinner, fits in my jacket pocket but has a screen 4 times the size while remaining single-hand-holdable, and is actually usable as a web browsing device or eBook reader, unlike the iPhone’s cramped screen. I don’t believe in the 5-inch phablet form factor, which combines the cramped screen of a phone with the the bulk of a tablet, i.e. the worst of both worlds. I find I never use the iPhone as anything else than a dumb phone any more. I consume less than 60 minutes of voice per month, and if my wife and my startup’s co-founder would let me, I would ditch mobile phones altogether.

Alas I am unable to cut the wireless phone tether, but there is no point in my spending $100 a month on an unlimited data plan for my Verizon iPhone 4, so now that my contract ended, I ported my number over to my old unlocked AT&T iPhone 3GS with a prepaid plan from Airvoice (a MVNO that has the cheapest rates I could find online). At $0.10 a minute without any exorbitant cellco taxes or spurious surcharges, I can expect to spend $6 a month, or 94% savings. That more than covers the $20 a month I pay extra for the iPad Mini’s data plan. The only reason I still use an iPhone instead of switching to a dumbphone is the automatic address book synchronization with my Mac and iOS devices.

Months ago I showed my father how to take screen shots on his iPad and iMac, and he routinely takes them while using FaceTime video conferencing with my 1 year-old daughter. Due to poor bandwidth at home (we live in San Francisco and are subject to the tender mercies of AT&T’s not-even-third-world-grade DSL), the image quality can be described as blurry VGA at best. Yet he is happy with the results, and even made a photo book featuring many of these screenshots, showing the wide range of fleeting expressions she displays. When printed at passport photo size, the fuzziness is surprisingly passable. He has also gotten my technophobe mother in the game.

I spend a lot of time obsessing over the finer points of camera and lens technology, and how to wring the best technical quality out of my photos, but my parents show how content trumps presentation.