TenEleven things to do in San Francisco

San Francisco* has all kinds of interesting events going on. Here are some of my favourite off-the-beaten-path activities:

Storytelling

Porchlight

Science

Ask a Scientist
Down to a Science [on hiatus]

Music

Paul’s San Francisco House Concerts
Drew Pearce’s House Concerts
Songwriters in the round, hosted by Heather Combs

Literature

Writers With Drinks

Talk Show

The Heather Gold Show

Tech

SuperHappyDevHouse
BayCHI

* Okay, so a few of them are just out of town.

I somehow forgot the Long Now‘s Seminars on Long Term Thinking. These are excellent, and I’m even a Long Now charter member.

Homeland insecurity: Customs delays ambulance

Two weeks ago, US customs held up a fire truck, and a hotel burned to the ground. How do you top that? Delay an ambulance with a heart-attack victim.

The incident happened last Monday, when 46-year-old Rick Laport needed emergency angioplasty — a procedure that couldn’t be performed at his Windsor, Ont., hospital.

Medical officials rushed Laport to the border, expecting to be waved through so they could take him to Detroit’s Henry Ford medical facility

Instead, U.S. customs asked the male driver to exit the vehicle and show his identification card. Another border official opened the back of the ambulance to confirm a patient was inside, and asked Laporte to verify his name.
…
The ambulance workers were only delayed by five minutes, but Laport’s heart had already been re-started twice by paramedics.

Math is hard

The Manchester Evening News, a British rag is reporting a lottery scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale “because players couldn’t understand it.”Apparently your average Brit is well-qualified for a job at Verizon:

Tina Farrell, from Levenshulme, called Camelot after failing to win with several cards.The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.”I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it.”I think Camelot are giving people the wrong impression – the card doesn’t say to look for a colder or warmer temperature, it says to look for a higher or lower number. Six is a lower number than 8. Imagine how many people have been misled.”

Homeland insecurity: Customs delays firefighters while hotel burns

Some Québec firefighters tried to help save a burning building. They didn’t get there in time. Why? US customs.

Six volunteer firefighters rushing to assist a small-town fire department in upper New York State, part of a long-standing mutual-aid agreement, were held up while being grilled about their identification by a U.S. Customs official this week….Meanwhile, the landmark Anchorage Inn in Rouses Point, N.Y., burned to the ground.“I’ve been crossing this border for 30 years, and the only question we were ever asked was: ‘Where’s the fire?’” Lacolle fire chief Jean-Pierre Hébert told The Globe and Mail Wednesday.

Welcome, Wachovia. Seriously.

A while back, Wachovia bought World Savings, a bank I use for CDs. I received a few letters in the mail describing the process and telling me what I had to do.

The first thing I had to do was register for an account with Wachovia’s online banking. I do.

Mistake #1: Only three of my six CDs appear in the account list.

I call Wachovia. They correct the error. Misplacing half my accounts is not a good way to make a first impression.

While I’m on the phone, I verify that I have opted out of all solicitations: phone calls, emails, postal mail and affiliate sharing.

Mistake #2: I had to opt out of solicitations.

Now I’m pretty sure I had already opted out with World Savings. I can’t guarantee this 100%, but I’m careful about these things. First, Wachovia failed to preserve my privacy preference. Second, they enabled junk mail by default. This should be opt-in, not opt-out.

A few days pass. Today, I received not one, but two letters in the mail. Yes, file this one under “I” for irony:

Mistake #3: They send me two letters to tell me they won’t send me any more letters.

Sigh.