9 - Apts - Nob Hill

By now, January 1993, I had been at Fox Plaza for three years. Some units on my floor had fireplaces but mine didn’t. I asked to move into a vacant fireplace unit (because how Blade Runner cool would it be to lounge in front of your 29th floor fireplace on a rainy winter night?) but they had to run the offer by their board, or the Pope, or something, so I started looking at other places as well. One of the places I looked at was a tiny (280 sq ft) apartment in a little, wood building on a short alley on Nob Hill. 

Besides it being quite cheap, what intrigued me about the place was the challenge of fitting into such a small space. I took the place (Fox Plaza agreed to my request to switch units a few days too late) and, because I was in the middle of a project and had no free time, I hired people to move me into the new apartment. This was so much easier than my previous moves with friends that I swore to always hire movers in the future. So now I’ve been in the same place for 20 years.

Obviously I found a way to fit in the space. I had to rent some off-site storage after I inherited stuff from my parents, but I also incorporated some new items into the apartment. It was a work in progress for a long time, and I continue to ponder changes, but it works quite well for me.

After I had been on Nob Hill for four years, the owners of my unit decided they wanted to sell. I am almost never ill, but I was at this time and the thought of having to find a new place and then actually moving was more than I could deal with, so I bought it from them. Now I’m the president of the Homeowners Association and the virtual building manager -- this morning I was up on the roof inspecting some repairs I made last fall. This was not part of any plan of mine, but it all worked out amazingly well.

The cliche about real estate is that what is important is “location.” Usually what people have in mind is slightly different than what is important to me. The reason this location is near perfect for me is that I am on the edge of three interesting neighborhoods: Chinatown, Union Square, and (the nice blocks at the top of) Nob Hill. I’m also an easy walk from North Beach and Polk Gulch so what my apartment lacks in space and amenities, it makes up for in the richness of the urban setting.

The disadvantage of my location is that coming home always involves climbing a hill. The slope is more or less steep, depending on the direction, but it is always a slog. The only easy way to get here is by cable car (or taxi) and, unless you have a monthly pass (which I almost never have) the cable car is prohibitively expensive.

Computers

When I moved to my tiny Nob Hill place I used that as an opportunity to splurge on Apple’s new PowerBook laptop. 

I was back to grayscale, but the PowerBook could hook up to a color display. By this time I was working all over the place and needed something lightweight that I could carry around and hook up to equipment where ever I was working. The next step in this evolution was using just a big hard drive. Macs (at least at that time) had the ability to boot from external drives, so I could take my drive anywhere (I even had a job in '97 where I had to work in Chicago’s Near North Side for several months and I only needed to haul my hard drive with me on the plane). This was the ‘90s equivalent of using a Chrome browser synced to your home machine. Wherever I went I was essentially using the same machine but I now had access to whatever drives were on the borrowed machine (and also the LAN).

I bought one more desktop Mac in those bleak, late ‘90s years before Steve Jobs took back control of Apple. It was ugly but functional. I then needed both a Mac and a PC for testing purposes so I started buying PCs just when my income was tapering off and was never again in a position to afford Macs. I have to say that Windows has served me well. While I still had friends working at Apple (and could use their discounts) I considered buying an iMac, I’ve always loved the styling of these machines and the current batch are almost ideal, but the operating system turns out to be not as good for what I do now. And lately I pretty much live in the Chrome browser so I can hardly justify a Mac just to run Chrome.

If you were in the computer world in these years you will have a strange collection of now pointless cables. Generations of cables to generations of ports that are no longer used. It is remarkably difficult to toss out perfectly good cables you spend good money for even if you know you will never need them again. But if anyone ever needs a SCSI cable, I’m the man to see as I still have all the many permutations of them along with my Sinclair, my last two Macs and hundreds of 3.5” floppy disks. I think one of the things I like best about Cloud computing is the reduction in the amount of computer related artifacts to dispose of as they become obsolete.

Neighborhoods

From time to time I think I would prefer to live in another, more convenient, neighborhood with more amenities within a few blocks and with less elevation. But being in one vibrant neighborhood would greatly reduce the time I spend in other, now more distant, neighborhoods. As with living in Noe Valley, I would become more or less neighborhood-bound. It isn't a bad thing that I walk as much as I do. In just the past year two trendy restaurants have opened on the previously dull block of the major street just below me on my hill. And we also finally got a good local cafe on the hill (also a Trader Joe's!) If I were filthy rich I might want to wander from neighborhood to neighborhood -- getting to know each one better. But as that is unlikely, I'm pretty content to be where I am.
(See also: Orphaned, Still Greening After All These Years.)