Alsop's Small Thoughts

No Internet at BestBuy

So I returned the TiVo I just bought this morning. No phone line, so I thought the easiest way to solve this problem is to take it back to BestBuy and swap it for one that doesn't need a phone line to get started. BestBuy doesn't have any of those, so I just returned it for a refund. But here's a little tidbit; I asked the returns/exchange guy if I could use a computer to look up TiVo's tip for how to tell if a particular box has the right software (ie version 7.2) to set itself up without a phone line. He told me that it's company policy not to let any computers surf outside the intranet in the store. In other words, BestBuy is a computer store with hundreds of computers hooked up to a network and you can't surf the internet! Intentionally.

The Downside of the Presidio

Regular readers know that I'm renting a duplex in The Presidio, the old Army base located in (sort of) San Francisco. It is a beautiful place to live, a national park in the middle of the most beautiful city in the country (IMHO). This is what I look at when I walk out my back door every day to get the newspaper. That's right: my house, built in 1917, backs onto a beautiful grove of cypress trees (as best as I can tell, given that I don't know much about trees). My house is the closest residential building to Crissey Field, which is a habitat for birds that's right on San Francisco Bay and where you can walk or ride your bike to Fort Point, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. I could go on and on, but it is a remarkable place to live.

Except for one big problem. The Presidio Trust is both the best and the worst landlord you could imagine. Technically, The Presidio is now owned by the National Park Service (after being transferred from the Department of Defense in the mid-90s). But, except for the coastal parts of The Presidio, the entire property is managed by a not-for-profit organization called The Presidio Trust, which was chartered to figure out a way to manage the property without costing the US Government anything. In other words, the trust had to make the property self-sustaining without developing it or selling any of it off. Remarkably, it has already done that, primarly by renovating and renting the former officers quarters, like the one I live in. (I figure it was a captain's residence, so just call me Captain Alsop.)

The Presidio Trust can be a great landlord. It has an extensive staff that manages the operations of the property, one of which is called The Work Order office (for reasons I can't fathom); I can call this office and report any issue with my house, including that a light bulb has gone out, and someone will show up to fix the problem, usually the same day I call. Other staffs manage the public areas, which are beautiful and manage the roads and telecom infrastructure and even excavate old sites.

The problem is that The Presidio Trust appears to view the actual residents of The Presidio (people like me) as a liability that needs to be minimized, instead of as customers who pay the freight for the rest of the park. I moved into my house in November, 2004 under a sublet and then signed a new one-year lease last April. In that time, The Trust has decided to rewrite my lease twice (making one wonder what the point of having a lease is in the first place), removed most of the extra parking on the street I live on (making it much more difficult to invite people to visit me), engaged in constant construction on the street in front of my house (with the equipment getting going at 7:30am as though no one actually lives here), and then decided to renovate my basement regardless of whether I wanted it renovated. While renovating it last week, the contractor caused a power surge that blew out all of my consumer electronics gear (see last post).

The reason the Trust wanted to rewrite my lease is that they had experts review the state of the renovated residences and decided that some of them could create potential liability for the trust in the case of fire or gas leaks. The experts said the basements didn't have the right venting and egress for anyone sleeping in the basement (which my son was doing at the time). Then they wanted to rewrite it a second time because they decided that, if they renovated the basements, that would relieve the liability. In both cases, these decisions were made and then communicated as done deeds, with no recourse or negotiation. That, of course, is a landlord's right, I guess. (It's been a long time since I rented my residence.)

I could go on in a litany of the small and sometimes larges injustices visited by The Presidio Trust on its residents. But the most interesting part of all this is the realization that The Presidio Trust is a government that does not need to answer to its residents. The Presidio is federal land, owned by the government of the United States. The City of San Francisco has no jurisdiction over the land; indeed, if you get a ticket from the Presidio Police, you have to go to the Federal Courthouse in downtown San Francisco to pay the ticket and deal with the federal district court if you want to contest it! So this isn't your typical landlord that's subject to regulation by the city; this is a non-profit organization chartered by the federal government to manage the property to make money. There are no elected officials, no representative form of government. It's effectively a totalitarian system allowed to exist inside a democratic political system.

I keep wondering if, by writing this post, I have put at risk my opportunity to sign a new lease on this house come April. Perhaps I'm getting paranoid in my old age....

Ain't Got No TiVo Blues

I am depressed. Despite my best efforts, which I'll describe, I have been completely failed by consumer electronics. I was on a 10-day trip raising money (which is why I've been too busy to post since February 5) for my new venture capital fund. My landlord started renovating my basement while I was gone (another post to come). When I got back, my television, my wifi access point, my cable set top box and my TiVo were all blown out, presumably by a power surge caused by the contractor turning the power off to move the electrical and then turning it back on.

Great excuse to buy a new television. But I've also had to replace everything else (my landlord will get a bill). At first, I didn't think I needed to replace the TiVo because it seemed to work, but it turned out to have its brains scrambled so I bought a new one today. Guess what: The TiVo I bought is an old one and REQUIRES a landline phone line to do guided setup and download the newer software that does NOT require a landline phone line. I don’t have a landline phone line in my house. So the only way to get this TiVo installed is to literally (and the TiVo web site says this) take it to a location that does have a landline phone line and do the guided setup there, download the new software over the phone line and then bring it back here, where it will be able to use the network to get its programming.

I've now spent days and hundreds of dollars replacing my equipment and I am completely foiled. And I don't even know who to get mad at.

Not So Hard Disks

The thought has just struck me: The hard disks in three of the four computers I have the pleasure of dealing with failed in the last year. My Macintosh Powerbook G4, just a year old now, lost its hard disk last summer. My son's Dell Inspiron 6000 lost its hard disk last fall. And my brand-new Lenovo Thinkpad Z60t apparently came with a faulty hard disk. However, in every case, the disks failed slowly, allowing me or someone else to back up the disks before they were replaced.

The tiny little Dell Latitude that my old firm provided me has been chugging away for more than two years with no problems (yet). My TiVos generally have gone along pretty well, although I think I got the green screen of death on the Samsung because the hard disk decrepidated. My iPods have generally been reliable, although the New York Times' Joe Nocera had something to say about that (registration required) yesterday.

This experience has lead me to believe that hard disks are a problem and computers are not to be trusted. I wonder if that means something about the hard disk industry.