Living in the Periphery

As I’ve alluded to before, I’m currently in California for the summer, living in Sunnyale, doing an internship with the Solaris Kernel Group at Sun (work blog) in Menlo Park. Last summer I lived up in a nice part of San Francisco (West Portal) and commuted down to Sunnyvale, where I interned at Network Appliance (in a nutshell, they make easy to configure, high-end file servers). Right now I’m living in an apartment with three friends. One grew up in the Bay Area (Berkeley), and the other two are from Virginia, and had never been out here before. One of the latter’s friends from school is visiting, and I overheard part of my apartmentmate’s description of San Francisco in preparation for their trip tomorrow. And her description made me realize what an incredible difference in perception there is between those who have lived somewhere, and those who have visited.

Of course I’ve always been aware that such a discrepancy must exist, but it never truly hit home until just now. My apartment mate has visited San Francisco two or three times while we’ve been out here. Once she and our other apartmentmate who had never been to the area before just visited a few tourist-oriented spots in the city. Another time another friend was visiting, and they went to the Dike March (for those of you unfamiliar with the area, that’s actually the name - the parade the day before the huge pride parade in downtown San Francisco), walked through part of Haight-Ashbury, and then saw some teenagers smoke pot on board a BART train to Berkely on the way to dinner. These are her limited experiences with the city. Her explanation to her currently-visiting friend makes it seem like the city is incredibly, incredibly left-wing. While San Francisco is clearly quite liberal, some of her descriptions suggest a giant hippie commune. I only lived there for three months, and really only got to explore the city at large and interact with a variety of people on the weekends, but I’ve still walked through the financial district, Chinatown, Little Japan, the Sunset, and so on… And the reached the conclusion that despite being fairly liberal on a number of issues, the city is really not that drastically unlike any other (with the possible exception of the beautiful scenery of the Bay Area).

I feel like my apartmentmate only gathered experiences which reenforced her preconcieved ideas of what San Francisco would be like. Granted, the particular experiences she’s had truly do support those notions, and I don’t think she believes she has a true understanding of the city (for that matter, I’m not convinced I do either). But it’s still an interesting difference in perceptions. It makes me question my distaste for New York City - I’ve been there more times than I can count, growing up about as far from there as Sunnyvale is from San Francisco, but still dislike it. Even after a close friend going to school there showed me a great time there. Perhaps its time to give it another chance when I go back east near the end of August.

This post of course leads opens up something I was originally hoping to avoid with this blog - the potential drama from writing opinions on someone who reads your blog! As my apartmentmates all know of and perhaps read this blog, despite the fact that it has existed for less than a week. We’ll see.

Electronics and Airport Security

Another blog has an interesting post detailing an encouter with airport security while carrying some home-made electronics, with some interesting observations at the end:

…
But these are the times we live in. A handful of people with no knowledge of physics, engineering, or pyrotechnics are responsible for determining what is and what is not safe to bring on a plane. They’re paid minimum wage and told to panic if they see something they don’t recognize. Does this make me feel safer? It doesn’t really matter. Implementing real security would bring the cost of flying up, which would likely cause a collapse of the airborne transportation network this country has worked so hard to build up.
…

This is the sort of thing I’m always mildly concerned I’ll have to deal with when I fly with my big bag of electronics and AC adapters - which is why I always arrive a couple hours before departure time.