Crepes and cars

Drove up to the City for dinner tonight. I was meeting up with Roland from Bryght, who was down from Vancouver for a conference.

Every time I drive up to the City, I feel guilty. Guilty that I'm not using the mass transportation system that (nominally) works. Guilty that I'm spending over $5 in gas to get there, only to spend another $3 driving around looking for a parking space, and another $5 to drive back.

And yet...

I met Will Pate of Flock, Sarah, Steve, Paul, Roland, Ivan, and Dimitri at the dinner. Tantek, Messina and Tara were all there, too (YAY!). Tara's leaving Riya this Friday, nominally because the new Marketing VP is going to be a suit guy, and because the engineers developing the social software don't actually use the social aspects of the software, and hence have no clue how to build it. Neil showed up later, as did James Walker (having spent over an hour cumulative waiting for connections from BART to MUNI).

I had offered to drive Roland back to Sunnyvale, where he was staying with a friend for the conference. After James showed up, said hello, and socialized for a bit, we started gathering to leave. "Hey, you have a car? Can you drive me to ...?" By the time we actually left the restaurant, I had 5 people in my car, ranging from a quick Haight dropoff, to Palo Alto, Mountain View and Sunnyvale (all of a mile from my house for the last two).

Sure, the car is expensive, non-environment friendly, big and sometimes annoying.

But it sure is convenient at 11:30 at night when you need to be 40 miles away from your current location.