Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Breakfast at home: a pear. Rode Uber Pool to UCSF Laurel Heights. Along the way I continued studying Spanish on Duolingo. Sprint standup. Spent all day working with Eric and by myself on the handoff of our Servint VPS to CP. Lunch at Vixi: hot water; caesar salad; warm bread with dipping sauce; spaghetti and beef and pork meatballs: about $13 before a $2 tip. Rode Uber Pool to the Mission. Drinks at Laszlo with Patrick: laszlo margaritas. Dinner and a movie—Wonder Woman 3D—at Alamo Drafthouse New Mission with Patrick: fried flounder sandwich with fries, the burger with fries, cold brew coffee for Patrick, grasshopper for me: $55 before a $10 tip for the food and drink. We received a lot more food than we could eat because the menu did not indicate that both sandwiches came with french fries. Lately I have been growing disenchanted with Uber. Long ago I often had to wait less than five minutes for a pickup. Now it's often double that or more, and the estimated pickup time is now always incorrectly too small. More and more I see Uber drivers' cars not moving for several minutes before a pickup. Today a driver stopped about 100 yards and down a small hill from my destination because it was easier for him to continue on his next trip. I alighted and rated him three stars. And then later in the day another driver stopped 200 yards away and around a corner expecting me to be in that wrong place. Three stars again. So after the film I switched to Lyft and timed the pickup, which resulted in a 4-minute wait for an estimated 3-minute pickup—a significant improvement over Uber, and likely the same price: $16 to home from the Mission.