Aside

Yesterday, before going to a show at Café du Nord, Becky, Leila and I had pizza from Zante’s, which is basically Indian food but on a naan-style dough, in pizza form. Amazing. As Becky said: “I like pizza and I like Indian food. But together . . . oh, man!” While at Ton Kiang down on Geary in San Francisco today with Garett, Rachel, Eric and Ari, while we were having dim sum we saw Robin Williams for a second…

Now that I can afford proper hosting, and am sort sick of the fact that I can’t have comments turned on in my blog unless I want to be subjected to comment spam in Moveable Type, I’m migrating to WordPress. Subsequently, I have a new, cleaner layout. All the old posts since Jan. 2004 are in the archives here. If I did this correctly, the Feedburner feed should stay live, (I just edited what it points to), and the cfarivar.org…

My co-worker, Jen Berger, popped by to tell me that she saw Adam “The Podfather” Curry at Caffè Centro, just over in South Park, near the Macworld offices. I wonder if he’ll make an appearance at the OPML Roadshow in Berkeley.

For those of you who have been following this blog for awhile now, may remember that I was going to be a book editor back in December 2004 for a new book about Persian blogs. My editorship ended up not working out, as the publishing house had their own. However, the book is going to be coming out in a few months under the name We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs. Pre-order the book here. Congratulations to Nasrin!

I was looking at the Wikipedia entry for the old Key System, the old light-rail system that existed in the East Bay from 1900 until the 1950s. There, I found an old movie from 1945 called The March of Progress that has a great 20 minute film on the history of the Bay Area as seen through transportation. Well worth it. It looks like there was an old line that used to go right near my house.

The Good: I took the casual carpool to work this morning. This brings my BART fare down to $60, and with a $45 commuter check from work, down to $15/month! The Bad: While trying to cut through some tape on a package, the tip of my car key snapped off.

So while doing a search in the Slate archives, I came across a series of fascinating articles (March 2004) about the demise of feminism ˆ la Girls Gone Wild. The piece mentions that the author, Ariel Levy, was working on a book about this topic. The book Female Chauvinist Pigs : Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture is due to be out next month. I’m interested.

Ed: Big ups to G. Pascal Zachary, whom I knew from my Business 2.0 days, who just published this piece called The African Hacker in the IEEE magazine, Spectrum. “Saviors” are common in Africa, and they usually come in the form of demagogues or rebel leaders, missionaries or medical doctors, peacekeepers or refugee-camp managers. Rarely are they Birkenstock-wearing engineers or software programmers. That’s why Chinery-Hesse is worth getting to know. Because if Africa has a sunny future, Chinery-Hesse will be…

It’s the last few weeks of minor league baseball season. Both the Stockton Ports and the Sacramento River Cats are in first place in their divisions! There are only a few more home games left in the season. I’d love to go to one or a couple of these games (I’ve never been to see either of these teams) — these are the only ones that I can attend. I’d be happy to drive if someone wanted to come along…

After spending some time online and talking with a few people, I’ve settled on this new car stereo. I just ordered it, along with a harness and crimping tool, for just under $100. I plan on installing it myself as soon as it comes. The Crutchfield website has a video and Circuit City has written instructions on how to install it myself. It seems easy enough, and if successful, I’ll have a new stereo with an aux input (for the…