Author Archives: kfarr
The sky is not falling
I am writing to share some reactions to Claire Cain Miller’s piece in the New York Times, “Silicon Valley Booms but Worries About a New Bust.” I met Claire at the Founder Showcase event she mentions in her article and … Continue reading
One thing that you will learn quickly is that a computer is very dumb. It does exactly what you tell it to do, which is not necessarily what you wanted. —Introduction to Computer Programming from Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in … Continue reading
Emergency!
Working taxi dispatch phones, I received a call around 1am from a group of loud women. “We have an emergency, we need a taxi immediately.” (Loud yelling in the background.) “What’s going on? Is anybody injured?” “No, nobody is injured. … Continue reading
Woman in Tears
I worked taxi dispatch phones Friday night, answering hundreds of calls from people looking for a cab all across the City during the busiest time of the week. A woman had called around 10pm for a cab from the Richmond … Continue reading
Python Multithreaded S3 Bucket-to-Bucket Copy (on Amazon Web Services)
For both backup and staging purposes, we regularly need to backup an entire S3 bucket to another bucket. AWS has no built-in function to do this, nor does the boto Python library. We started off with a simple for key … Continue reading
Take Me to Chinatown
I drove Thursday this week, a day after the SF Giant’s World Series Parade attracted record crowds. The morning was spent driving to and from the airport — I had 4 trips to SFO before noon. In the afternoon I … Continue reading
Avenue Street
I answered a lot of phone calls last night at the taxi company. Around 3am a girl called demanding a cab at “320 Avenue.” That didn’t make any sense. “320 Avenue? That doesn’t make any sense. What’s the street name?” … Continue reading
Fetch OAuth Authenticated YouTube API Version 2.0 Requests with GData-Python-Client, Including Insight
We’ve been using Google’s GData-Python-Client library to connect our VidCaster client accounts to YouTube, which allows for neat operations like importing* and exporting of video. A key component of VidCaster is to provide simple aggregated video analytics to our users, … Continue reading
SFMTA Taxi Medallion Sales Pilot Program
(PDF Link) I’m returning from my blogging hiatus at an amazingly unique time in the history of San Francisco taxi regulation. In the past I’ve written extensively about the San Francisco medallion system and other regulations, including: What would be … Continue reading
Driving April 22
It’s time to try this blogging thing again. Yesterday I drove a normal “extra” day shift from 7a-5p. Some notes: I drove my favorite taxicab: the Toyota Camry Hybrid. Ample space, great handling, adequate (but not stellar) gas mileage, smooth … Continue reading
