This SMRT COW "smart cow" smart car impressed me. Yep, that's a nose ring.
2025-05-27T15:27:26.352015
A few things I noticed on my #SanFrancisco exercise walk this morning.
The Whale's Tail, a.k.a. the summer weekend beer garden in Golden Gate Park is set up again, sorta. Looking for info, I found a bunch of obsolete pages saying it's closed; and one page that says this is indeed opening weekend, and you can check the schedule to see when it'll be open (many weekends between now and October-ish).
Irving Street sidewalk things: The drain near Nomad Cyclery; a pretty geometric construction for the math lovers out there.
2025-05-25T16:41:20.205441
As I walked around the corner of the California Academy of Sciences on my morning exercise walk, I was surprised by a roar. There was an animatronic dinosaur (T-Rex?) swaying in the side yard. This was part of Dino Days https://www.calacademy.org/exhibits/dino-days . I dunno if they leave the animatronics running 24/7, but it was going as of 8 this morning.
The animatronics were moving kinda slow+stately; not exactly what I'd expect of bird relatives. I dunno if this motion reflects how we think dinosaurs move vs. slow so that the animatronics don't fall apart from flopping around too much for a few weeks.
2025-05-17T16:31:29.210847
I snapped a couple of pics on my morning exercise walk today:
Wondering why a normally-open section of pavement in the Golden Gate Park panhandle was fenced off with some strange angular shapes inside, I used my phone camera as a periscope. It looks like the Bay to Breakers organizers are preparing to deploy a fleet of Cybertrucks.
I saw a construction crane pointing at the moon and took a pic. I tried to get my phone to auto-focus on the (faint, faint) moon, but it could only do it on the crane.
2025-05-16T14:21:24.418030
47 Million Hits, COVID fluctuations
Wow, it's the site's 47 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits some page, the count goes up. If a human views a page that contains a dozen graphics, those graphics cause another dozen hits. So "a million hits" isn't as impressive as it sounds. But hits are easy to measure so that's what I measure. We can take a look at the log:
73.83.151.13 - - [12/May/2025:18:11:05 +0000] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 1441 "https://iask.ai/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/135.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/135.0.0.0"
Ah, this was a bot from the iAsk "ask AI" company, checking on my site's "favicon," a little icon to display as a little picture in web browser tabs. Of yesterday's ~8500 hits, ~2800 of them (about ⅓) were this stupid bot checking for the favicon. "Has Larry updated this one thingy in the past 30 seconds? Better check! Nope, no change! Well, better get ready to check again in another 30 seconds!" I meant to blog about this site's 46 millionth hit, but I wasn't paying attention when it snuck by. I didn't think I needed to pay attention so soon, but my site's been getting so many more hits lately from poorly-programmed bots for AI companies that the numbers whooshed past.
Speaking of things I would have blogged about but they whooshed past when I wasn't looking, behold this graph of the past couple of months of San Francisco COVID data:
As you remember, I have a little dashboard of San Francisco COVID data that tracks three numbers. I blog about when all three numbers cross below the "pretty-safe" line (yay!) and blog again when a number crosses above the "pretty-safe" line (boo!). Looking at that chart, you'll see there was a span of time when all three numbers were "pretty-safe" (yay!) but I didn't blog about it. Why not? Alas, the California Department of Public Health didn't update their wastewater data for about a month. As far as I knew, that number was just a little above the "pretty-safe" line… By the time the Health people were publishing numbers again, the numbers were high again. I only learned about it well after the fact.
I bet the Department of Health relies on some professor-type to put the wastewater data together. I bet that professor-type has a Spring Break. That would also explain why they stopped updating their numbers around Winter Break time (including, annoyingly, around MIT Mystery Hunt time so I chickened out on gathering with puzzle nerds because I thought the numbers might be high… but I'd later learn they'd been low).
Anyhow, the numbers continue to whoosh around, sometimes invisibly. Enjoy the ride.
2025-05-13T16:14:58.390869
New/old signage up at the Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart, a.k.a. Twitter HQ for many years
Ready to try again & make new mistakes
2025-05-05T18:11:08.571358
Some pics from this morning's walk in #SanFrancisco
The newly-open Bay Area Young Survivors Breast Cancer Memorial Garden
An outdoor foosball table. I didn't know that outdoor foosball was a thing. It pairs nicely with the nearby outdoor ping-pong tables.
A confusingly-labeled faucet: "Potable water / Used for irrigation / Do not drink" If you don't want me to drink it, why go to the trouble to tell me it's potable (safe to drink)?
A stretch of road at the kinda-newly-open Sunset Dunes Park. I admit I have mixed feelings about how this park turned out. On the one hand, art on the old road is pretty. On the other hand, I was hoping that we'd stop keeping the road dug out from under the sand that keeps blowing over it. But if there's pretty art there, I bet we keep trying to dig out the art so park visitors can appreciate it. Ah well.
Polly Ann ice cream shop: On this May the Fourth, here's a Star Wars memory: Back in the 1970s, when the first Star Wars movie came out, it was quite a fad with the youth, of which I was then a member. Polly Ann ice cream was pretty creative with making up new flavors and theoretically came up with a Star wars flavor. I say "theoretically" because my main experience with it was: Ask parents to take me to Polly Ann; At Polly Ann, ask for "Star Wars" ice cream; they were always sold out of that flavor; "As long as we're here, we might as well get some other flavor." I eventually heard that the Star Wars ice cream didn't taste great: it was black (licorice?) ice cream with pale marshmallow "stars." It looked interesting but tasted "interesting." Thus did a generation of young consumers learn a valuable lesson about movie tie-ins.
Golden Island: As long as I'm snapping pictures of one Noriega Street landmark dessert place, why not snap a picture of the other?
2025-05-04T18:25:41.627832
Several months back, some loon started posting hate-flyers on the stretch of Irving Street from 9th Ave to 19th Ave. At the time, I blogged about it, saying it was the work of a "hate group," but in hindsight I guess it was just one loon.
I mostly-tore down hate-flyers when I saw them; but I failed to tear them all the way down. The loon used strong tape. It was easy to tear down most of each, but tough to tear down the part right under the tape.
Other neighborly folks mostly-tore down hate-flyers too. Often I was too late to tear them down: some neighbor had already gotten to them. But the Irving Street light poles were now "decorated" with ratty tape and paper. Walking past these remnants reminded me that a hateful loon was my neighbor.
This went on for months.
Occasionally, some neighborly person did a thorough job tearing down hate-flyers and tape-remnants. That was nice.
But mostly I walked past remnants. I'd think I should bring scissors with me on this walk, then I could cut down the tape. But this was my route to the supermarket. Heading out of my apartment, I wasn't thinking about flyers and scissors; I was thinking about whether I should buy a potato. When I got to the supermarket, I forgot about flyers and scissors, but remembered what groceries I needed. When I got home, I again forgot about flyers and scissors, but remembered to put away my groceries.
New Year's Day came along, as it does. I thought about resolutions. I remembered that I always forgot to bring scissors with me when grocery shopping. I fashioned a little hook and attached it to a shelf by my apartment door; and I hung a pair of scissors from the hook. On my way out the door, I'd see the scissors and remember to slip them into a pocket.
On my grocery supermarket trips, if I saw a hate-flyer, I cut it all the way down. More likely: if I saw tape-remnants clinging to a pole, I cut those all the way down.
Sometimes, I'd go for groceries and never need the scissors: all the poles were free of hate-flyers. Maybe because of that thorough-tearer-downer neighbor who'd inspired me? Maybe because of me? Maybe because of other thorough-tearer-downer neighbors? Together, we kept up with the loon.
I guess we wore the loon down.
I haven't seen a hate-flyer nor tape-remnant along that street since mid-March. I think the loon gave up on posting them.
If I stopped writing there, it would be a tidy, satisfying story: how a neighborhood came together to overcome etc etc. Alas, the loon has shifted to putting up stickers on the poles at Irving at 19th Avenue. (Yes, I could detour from my grocery route to 19th Avenue to pull down stickers… But if I get there and someone else has already pulled down the stickers, I feel silly for shlepping all that way.) So it's a not-so-tidy, somewhat-satisfying story.
2025-04-30T15:11:07.866229
Some pretty impressive sidewalk chalk art on Irving St at 20th Ave in San Francisco this morning:
2025-04-26T15:50:36.290313
Seen on my morning exercise walk in San Francisco…
A new-to-me little-house-model-in-front-of-house, Waller St at Del Mar (a few houses down from the four seasons Victorians on Masonic)
A mystery on Grove St. near Clayton: Why doesn't this apartment building have a front door? When I got home and could look at maps I found out: That's not the front of 1984-ish Grove St. At some point, it got connected to 58 Clayton St, around the corner.
2025-04-23T16:53:37.769520
