This is not a typical ‘Show HN’, but I checked with the mods & Daniel encouraged it.
Three months ago, in the comments to HN submission 'RIP Kuro5hin', I posted [1] about my story having been the last to post, and that I was thinking about getting a domain of my own. One of you responded, "Please do that. I enjoyed your stories, particularly 'Who Are Your Lifelines?'"
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609802
All of the current blog posts at my new site - http://www.TaxiWars.org/ - were originally posted as diaries at kuro5hin.org (K5). I'd started blogging about my taxi passengers at K5 in March, 2012, after my eighth lease. My original intention was to help me better remember all the interesting people I was meeting. I posted at K5 because I wanted to be anonymous, and was not looking for attention (the site had already shrunk to a skeleton core of users at that time).
K5 users voted three of my story submissions to the site’s front page, and one to section.
“Electronic Taxi Dispatch, v1.0” is about how the taxi company’s pre-smartphone/pre-tablet GPS-enabled computerized dispatch system matches passengers with cabs: http://www.taxiwars.org/electronic-taxi-dispatch-v1.0/
“Who Are Your Lifelines?” is about the time that I bailed my passenger out of jail. He was a down-on-his-luck tech worker. He’d called me because he remembered my phone number. http://www.taxiwars.org/who-are-your-lifelines/
“Humanity’s Second-Best Hope” is about the dreadful seasonal job that I had just before I started taxi driving, mixed with some 2012-era political commentary: http://www.taxiwars.org/humanitys-second-best-hope/
The section story was an anecdote of no importance. It needs some editing.
The pages and posts are basically as I submitted them to K5, except I’ve moved the pictures and youtube videos into the stories (K5 did not allow inline images).
Speaking of youtube… The passenger whom I rescued from his new ‘friends’ built websites for people, iirc: http://www.taxiwars.org/2012/07/passenger-rescue.html http://www.taxiwars.org/2012/08/passenger-rescue-pt-2.html
This post is about why I decided to call my K5 account ‘TaxiCabJesus’: http://www.taxiwars.org/2013/04/origin-of-tcj-moniker.html
That post mentions Michael Crawford (whom I believe was K5 user ‘Zombie Jesus Christ’), who witnessed a murder while a student at CalTech. He eventually graduated with a physics degree from a California State university, but has struggled with mental health issues ever since. He was a prolific diarist at K5. Some of my K5 diaries were about visiting him in the San Luis Obispo county jail, that time he was arrested for stealing ketchup packets from McDonald’s (they dropped the charges and released him the day after I visited).
I kept notes about almost all my passengers. Some of the stories that I haven’t posted are of some importance. I plan to narrate “Ordinary Rendition” and get my EMACS friend from college (I suffered through a $100,000 computer science program) to help me find someone to help with animation…
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Thanks for reading this far. If you have any comments or suggestions about my little website (layout, etc), I’ll very much appreciate them!
If you have any comments or suggestions...
You can add " / cover" to the background: CSS definition on the body or add the separate property "background-size: cover;" to make the image not tile on larger screens.
Great writing, I really enjoy your vérité style.
It's a stock blogger theme. I've looked into adding this css definition/property, but it's a bit past my competency as a webmaster. I imagine myself breaking something else, and not knowing how to fix that either.
> Great writing, I really enjoy your vérité style.
thanks... I do some writing on other topics too, and try to keep 'fluff' to a minimum.
Are you still working as a cab driver? I read one story so far and I liked it a lot, I will keep reading, thanks!
> Are you still working as a cab driver?
I talked to another of the company's drivers early one morning, and tried to recruit him to drive for the owner-operator that I was driving for. She's a careerist, and has driven for the cab company for 30+ years.
This fellow sighed, and said, "You meet some drivers, and you know that they know that this is the best way for them to support themselves. The rest of us are just doing this for the time being, until we're able to do what we really want to do."
He was a carpenter, and much preferred working with his hands to driving for the taxi company. But the Phoenix housing market didn't need his services as a carpenter at the time.
I had to give up the taxi driving gig last fall, when something more important came up... This is one of the things that I'm going to write about in the future.
And while the Arizona legislature half-neutered the so-called "ride-sharing" companies, it wasn't enough to keep their brand of economic cancer from metastasizing to affect us too.
thanks for commenting!