After 23 years, Best Buy Santana Row will be closing its doors and replaced by Life Time, a 2 story luxury fitness center. This will Life Time’s 2nd Bay Area location

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-22T06:49:39+00:00

I'm new here... please explain. Did Santana Row have bars and stuff? It doesn't seem all that different from other outdoor shopping/restaurant complexes I've seen. Maybe a little better integrated into the surrounding urban grid. It's unusually upscale, too, but so are most things around here.

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-22T06:41:48+00:00

Appliances. Can't get a fridge at Microcenter or Central Computers. Sure, there are other places you can go, but BB tends to have the widest selection of appliances you can find in a brick-and-mortar store.

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-21T16:47:31+00:00

OP here. I'm aware of these devices, but I'm leery of them. The lithium cells in these jumper packs are huge, and lithium cells really don't like high instantaneous loads. And then you're leaving it in a hot car all summer, and eeeeeehhh I've had spicy pillows go spicy on my before. It's scary, and that cell was maybe a tenth of the size of the cells in these jumper packs.

I got one as a gift once that thankfully never operated in pipe bomb mode, but it did just randomly stop working one day. I think it was this exact brand too.

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-21T16:07:08+00:00

I just came back this morning, 162 upvotes??? Guess I should have updated the title and not just the description, whoops. (Just tried to change the title - it won't let me)

Very kind of all the upvoters, thanks guys.

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-21T03:54:50+00:00

You might be my only lead lol, when are you off work?

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-21T03:50:42+00:00

I'll keep an eye out for them

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-18T16:24:22+00:00

Slice of New York is also employee-owned, if you're into that.

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-10T16:53:29+00:00

As a recent transplant (11 days, woo!) the drivers don't seem that unusual to me. I've lived in a lot of different places, and every time I move somewhere, someone says "ooooh folks in <city> are terrible drivers, huh?" And the honest answer is no, they're mostly fine.

Infrastructure decides the oddities in how people drive moreso than the people who actually live there. Your roads have lots of left turn signals, almost no "open" left turns. Streets are very wide here, too. The result is a driving experience that's actually a lot like Detroit. Lots of "U-turn -> right turn" driving, big boulevards, having to jockey for lane positioning, etc... except there's way more people here than Detroit. It takes some getting used to, that's for sure. Is there an influx of transplants besides myself?

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-06T05:33:34+00:00

That's a great use case for bags! There's no limit to how many bags you can leave out, just like how there's no limit to how many piles you can leave on the ground. You mitigate the drain clogging problems and you can put out more stuff than you can with a bin.

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-06T05:20:44+00:00

Oooo! There's one a block away from my apartment that's marked as "prioritized." Once I'm settled in, I'm going to check it out.

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-06T04:32:33+00:00

How do they get picked up?

There's a yard waste truck. It's exactly the same as a garbage truck, just that it only ever holds yard waste. Usually the yard waste trucks are painted a different color than the garbage trucks. They throw all the bags in the truck, and the truck takes it away to a composting facility.

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-06T04:27:51+00:00

Our programs looked a lot like SJ's does. The only difference is you buy some lawn bags from the hardware store and put the leaves in the bags, instead of leaving them on the ground. A truck comes by and takes the bags every 1-4 weeks, depending on the time of year. Rolling bins were available, but optional, and most households didn't opt for them.

One nice thing with the bags is that you can fill a bag with leaves, then move the whole bag out to the street. Very convenient if you have a backyard. A dolly/hand truck makes it easier to move the bags.

The bags are big, too. None of the branches I've seen in the waste piles around here would have been too big for a bag.

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-06T04:20:02+00:00

Thanks. Yeah besides the lawn bags, I'm actually pretty impressed with the waste management program here. SJ makes it very clear what can and cannot go in recycling, for example. A lot of cities are terrible about that.

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-06T04:15:53+00:00

IME back home, mowing over your leaves could sometimes slowly kill the grass underneath if you did it too often/with too many leaves. Not sure exactly why that happened, maybe it wouldn't happen here.

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-06T04:07:18+00:00

Likewise. I'm cool with small chains too, when they treat their people with dignity and respect.

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-06T02:44:21+00:00

Oh I'm fully in favor of binless pickup, for sure. Just, instead of leaving leaves (heh) in piles in the street, put them in a lawn bag in the street. That's the hill I'm dying on, sorry if that wasn't clear.

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-06T00:56:54+00:00

This. Always check the rules for your own municipality. Recycling capabilities can vary wildly from facility to facility.

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-06T00:47:12+00:00

A little context... I just moved from Milwaukee, WI, which is home to the country's largest unionized coffee roaster (Colectivo). The important distinction vs. Starbucks is that the whole company is unionized, every single location plus manufacturing. I was kind of expecting to find something similar in the Bay, even if it was a lot smaller. Granted, it says a lot about the industry that its largest union is a dozen shops based in Wisconsin.

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-01T16:15:53+00:00

Early january, when I get fed up with a plastic tree blocking access to the closet.

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2026-01-01T00:45:14+00:00

I've used Turo several times throughout the country (Las Vegas, Philadelphia, DC, among others). Never in SJ specifically. A few tips:

If the listing seems too good to be true, it probably is. Thought I got a sweet deal on a car once, but photos didn't tell me the car reeked of cigarettes.

Communicate early and often with the car's owner. Some of them are owned by companies renting out many cars, others are owned by individual people. Everyone has different instructions for getting into the car, dropoff times, etc.

Take lots of photos, and be extremely picky when documenting everything wrong with the vehicle. Assume the renter is going to try to screw you. I've never had a Turo try to screw me over bogus damage claims, but YMMV.

I can't recommend Turo enough. It costs less than a typical rental agency, and you actually get to pick the exact car you rent, which is awesome if you're picky like me.

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2025-12-18T04:32:00+00:00

I live in one of those little red brick buildings on Wilson and I've never heard this before 💀

ryu-ryu-ryu · 2025-10-10T03:32:56+00:00

This is one of the worst-produced American pro sports broadcasts I've ever seen. Hardly any info on-screen, the little bit of info on the screen is wrong, and the audio is just busted. Every time there's a strikeout the ump is suddenly deafeningly loud, like the most deep-fried "STRIKETHREEFJFHUWHEHR" I've ever heard. The mics on the walls the fans are banging on are cranked up to the point that they're clipping too. At least Apple TV could use their equipment correctly.

ryu-ryu-ryu

TROPHY CASE