Sunday, October 20, 2013
Internet speed test on Villa Palma's wifi: 2.80 Mbps down and 0.47 Mbps up. Awoke to see a hot air balloon floating across the sky—beautiful. Many house flies were inside the house probably attracted by the cooking of bacon and other foods from yesterday, so a number of us went on a fly killing spree with rolled-up newspapers and anything else we had at hand. Ate french toast, eggs, and leftovers throughout the morning. Morning dip in the hot spring pool. I DJed for a bit. Owner Al stopped by to say hello. Yoga instruction by Danny. Showered, dressed, and packed. Phil drove us home. This was my first time crossing the new Bay Bridge (uneventful). We dropped off Paul at his place. Internet speed test at PDDR's: 5.7 Mbps down, 1.23 Mbps up. Dinner at PDDR's with PDDR: cold vietnamese noodles with shrimp, beef, spices, and fish sauce. Rode UberX home. The driver used Waze, said it has been working really well for her. It took us on a strange route, and several times I said something to the effect of "This is kind of a weird way that I've never taken," but she said that Waze sometimes routed you along unusual paths in order to get around traffic you can't see. When we ended up in the Richmond, I told her she was going the wrong direction and eventually convinced her to pull over and recalculate the route. She said then that she would not charge me for the ride, and in total it took about 30 minutes to get home (as compared with 20 minutes with a different UberX driver for the same route in the opposite direction last Friday mid-morning). She apologized again at the end of the ride, and I was nice to her about it. Not a great experience with either UberX or Waze today, but at least I wasn't in a hurry to catch a flight, and so I did not stress over it. Did some work for the Recharge Spa website. I realized later that she must have mistakenly missed a digit in my street address while typing it in to Waze. Fixed some XML files in my journal that had errors due to unescaped html entities for ampersands.