updated phraser again

I have once again updated the phraser word and phrase lists. They use fresher data from Wikipedia, fan wikis, crossword constructors, and the chat transcript from Houthi Small Group; so if some future puzzles solve to the phrase "we are currently clean on opsec," you'll be ready. screen shot of a small excerpt from a big text file. On each line, there's a 208, a tab, then a phrase or phrase-fragment.

208 wbgg
208 wddm
208 we all were
208 we are currently clean on opsec
208 we are happy
208 we are with
208 we attribute
208 we dont need no stinking badges
208 we found him
208 we knew we
208 we long

screen shot of a small excerpt from a big text file. On each line, there's a 208, a tab, then a phrase or phrase-fragment.

208 wbgg
208 wddm
208 we all were
208 we are currently clean on opsec
208 we are happy
208 we are with
208 we attribute
208 we dont need no stinking badges
208 we found him
208 we knew we
208 we long

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2025-07-09T17:16:35.264808

Today, I walked to El Polin Spring in San Francisco's Presidio and looked in a hidden Field Note. Thus I completed ⅒ of one of 22 Fun Things to do in your National Park. While in the area, I glimpsed a hummingbird, and completed an entire Fun Thing to do in your National Park. marked-up photo of a boardwalk in a somewhat scrubby valley. the marks call attention to a small wooden box at the edge of the boardwalk, somewhat concealed by plants

marked-up photo of a boardwalk in a somewhat scrubby valley. the marks call attention to a small wooden box at the edge of the boardwalk, somewhat concealed by plants

looking down at edge of boardwalk at a little box. there is a foot in the picture, perhaps for scale

the box, open, reveals some interpretive text about berries: Summertime is well known for berries and the berries we eat all come from wild ancestors. Around El Polin Spring there are many native berries: elderberries (tiny red clusters), thimbleberries (large soft leaves), snowberries (white), twinberries, wild strawberries, California blackberries and more. Even poison oak has berries! See how many different kinds you can notice. [Note: Not all berries are safe for humans to eat!]

I was following a map, but really following my memory. The Presidio Trust publishes an activity map for kids, Adventures in the Presidio. Page 2 of that linked pdf is a map encouraging you to find Hidden Field Notes (inside wooden blocks perched on fence posts and stumps). There was a little picture of what to look for: a little box held together by a hinge. When I saw that, I realized I'd already spotted one of those Hidden Field Notes, near El Polin Spring. The activity map had a box with a note: "glimpse a hummingbird at El Polin Spring". I leaped to the conclusion: This map was showing me where to find Hidden Field Notes. Or maybe geocaches; somewhere else on the map, it mentioned geocaches. This seemed kinda sketchy; if I hadn't already known about this little box in El Polin Spring, that would have been a darned large area to search; the map location wasn't even that close to real thing, seeming to indicate a place west of Inspiration Point. Some friends of my mom tried to use this map to find a box north of Mountain Lake Park; it didn't go well; the map seems to suggest you should hop over a padlocked gate and walk along an unused, overgrown dirt road that's more of a gully than a road in some places.

Now that I'm home, I looked over the map more closely and I think I figured it out.

Hey mom, tell your friends: the "map" doesn't show wooden boxes. It's basically an activity list sketched onto a map. You aren't expected to go to the places marked on the map; that's good since some are in the Pacific, on a golf course, on private property… There is a separate map of the wooden boxes, a.k.a. Field Notes: Behold the map. The ~~map~~ activity list also mentions GeoCaches; the Presidio does have some GeoCaches, but they're not shown on this ~~map~~ activity list. There's a geocache on the north side of Mountain Lake Park, but not near the mark on the ~~map~~ activity list. (That geocaching.com site I linked to has maps; you need to have an account and be logged in to see them.)

A clearer, albeit much-less-pretty guide to kids' activities in the Presidio: Self-Guided Adventures.

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2025-07-05T21:17:13.401139

I continue to check my little dashboard of #SanFrancisco COVID numbers each morning to figure out whether visiting the comic book shop in person is a nice excuse for an errand or the moment my doctor will pinpoint, asking "You gave yourself long-term heart problems by picking up a funnybook about a barbarian with a talking axe?" Lately, one of the numbers I track has whooshed up from pretty-safe to not-so-safe, so that now ⅔ of the numbers I track are not-so-safe:

line graph with text underneath. the text underneath: Tracking some measurements relevant to San Francisco for the past 60 days:
New Cases in SF 😊
Test Positivity% in SF ☹️
Wastewater in SF 😐
If on the righthand edge of the chart all those lines are below the thick black line, SF is probably doing OK.

Overall, I guess Π(😊☹️😐)=😊?

San Francisco's COVID test positivity recently went up steeply…and then slowed down. Maybe it's peaking and will fall again? (That would be nice.) Maybe it's just pausing a bit before zooming up again? (I hope not.)

I'm still doing indoor errands. But I remember at least one person mostly made their go/no-go decisions based on % test positivity; I bet they're staying home these days. And people who make go/no-go decisions based on wastewater data have maybe been staying home for a while.

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2025-07-03T15:55:30.010323

Arty things I saw on my #SanFrancisco walk this morning:

Cement infrastructure for the "Naga" sea serpent statue going in at Rainbow Falls. The statue is sinuous but it's easier to make rectangular cement forms. So…depending on whether you're near or far, you might think this thing was gonna be all right angles or serpentine. (I walked up the path to the creepy Celtic cross so I could take the far picture, please clap)

Well Done Signs sign painter's van with woodpecker logo promising "Always Hand Painted." (Looking at the web site, I guess this van is visiting from Portland, OR.)

Sidewalk chalk art at 20th and Irving (alas, pretty scuffed by the time I got there) asks a very American question: Pay your bills or buy your pills?

cement supports in a drained pond. Individual parts of the supports are rectilinear solids; but they're arranged at angles to each other

cement supports in a drained pond, seen from above with an annoying tree in the way. Individual parts of the supports are rectilinear solids; but they're arranged at angles to each other

Faded chalk art on sidewalk. Art depicting a dog and cat surrounded by text in many languages I can't read and further surrounded by English text: 'Pay your bills?' / 'Buy your pills'

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2025-06-29T16:29:30.959040

Book Report: The Swimmers

A swimming pool develops a crack. A mother develops dementia. Everything you ever cared about, everyone you ever cared about will wither, decay, and fade away. You will wither, decay, and fade away. One character in the book, a swimmer, says "Everything is loss." She wasn't wrong; piece by piece, it all vanishes. I loved this book and recommend it and say: Brace yourself. I also noted the passage "And the time that your other brother, the lawyer, went after her boss, Dr. Nomura, when he tried to cheat her out of her 401(k)…." If that's based on a true story, then I'm glad that brother knew what to do.

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2025-06-22T00:00:16.753381

As I walk around the city for exercise and errands, I like to play walking-around games on my phone: games that that use GPS* to move my little guy around in the game. I just wrote a new such game. It runs in a web page: Walkzee. (Because Apple hates the web, if you visit Walkzee on your iPhone and you, like 99.9% of iPhone users have the default web browser and haven't turned on the enable geolocation setting, the game will do nothing.) I'm still tweaking the game. I play it as I walk around; then sit down and fix bugs when I get home. As of today, it might be of more interest to Mystery Hunt players than walkers: there are no instructions, so half the challenge is figuring out how to play.

Screen shot of a web app. There's a big green square that has dice scattered across it. Down below are some buttons,some of which have die-face titles; others just have black dots. It's very mysterious

Why am I writing yet-another walking-around phone game? The previous such game I wrote ran on top of Google Cloud Services. You might remember a few months back, I switched my backups to not use Google servers, run by a will-abet-genocide-for-$$$ division within Google. Some days ago, I wondered: "Why is Google still billing me?" My little walking-around game didn't make Google's servers think very hard—it almost squeaked under the threshhold to run for free. But it was a little over, and thus Google was billing me.

I wrote this new game so that it does all of its thinking and data storage on the phone, not on some server elsewhere on the net. Then I shut down my old game that was running on Google's computers. Now I won't send money directly to Google's pro-genocide division. This means giving up some server-y features. In the old game, when my phone broke, my score was still saved on some Google machine; so when I got a new phone and resumed play, my big ol' score showed up. In this new game, if I get a new phone, I'll have to start all over building up my score. <sarcasm>oh no…</sarcasm>

(If you do care about scores and furthermore you read this blog mostly because you're into puzzles, have you tried https://huzzlepub.com/? At Huzzlepub, you can paste in your daily Wordle, Toddle, Raddle,… uh, all those daily puzzles, you can paste in that "share your score with your friends" thingy, and it will let you compare your scores with your peers, thus reminding you that Tyler Hinman is still better at crosswords than you are.)

No, I don't think this will change Google's behavior. I'm imagining some Google exec: "We were willing to toss out 'Don't be evil' to get that $$$ military contract, but Larry shut down his app and that little app pays for a cup of coffee every four months, so—uh, make that five months, I want to leave a decent tip or else the barista will spit in my drink." Yeah, no, this isn't changing anything important, aside from me being able to look myself in the mirror; well, OK, that's kinda important.

*Yes, I mean geolocation using GPS and other means.

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2025-06-16T13:41:07.929880

Book Report: Show me a Hero

It's a history of the struggle to build and inhabit public housing on the white side of Yonkers, NY, USA in the 1990s. (If that sounds familiar but you're sure you didn't read the book, maybe you saw the HBO miniseries?) It was a pretty interesting, albeit aggravating read. Why aggravating?

Yonkers' NIMBYs were national-news-level notable. In Yonkers, they were very stubborn. Ordered by a judge to build public housing on the east side of town, city politicians got elected by promising to just not build that housing. Faced with fines, they stuck to their guns. When the fines threatened to bankrupt the city, when the city had to fire workers, when… Their appeal went up to the US Supreme Court.

The book isn't written from the NIMBY point of view. I suppose the NIMBYs didn't want to sit down with the author and recount their tales of hurling racist epithets back in the good ol' days. But you feel their presence in every chapter: Voting out the sane politicians; making death threats; hurling those epithets.

Instead we hear about the ousted Yonkers politicians and the outside-Yonkers politicians who were trying to figure out how to make the city comply. Do you fine the city? Seems bad to make city workers lose their jobs just because the city council got taken over by racists. Do you fine the city council members? They can declare bankruptcy, and then get re-elected by pointing out their sacrifices.

And we hear about the people who moved into the new public housing when it was finally built. None of these people thought of Ruby Bridges like Yep, that's the lifestyle I'm looking for. But they had to learn how to get along with their new neighbors, how to stand up for themselves. There are some real moments of inspiration in there.

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2025-06-11T14:06:03.061026

Some photos walking around #SanFrancisco 's Marina District (and the bus ride back home):

Someone tried to tear down a flier, but instead just spotlighted the important part of the message
Some tentacles atop an entrance of the Palace of Fine Arts turned out to be part of a travelling exhibit of balloon art. As every 12-year-old San Franciscan knows, you can call it the Palace of F. Arts for short, which raises the question: How did they fill all those balloons?
A new-to-me graffito on the wall above the old Lucky Penny at Geary+Masonic. Sorry for the awkward angle; I snapped this out the bus window as we rolled past

a mostly-torn-down flyer on a utility pole. The scrap of paper reads: (Pe)ter Thiel is Evil

northern entrance of SF's Palace of Fine Arts building with some big tentacle balloons on top

graffito on big wall over the old Lucky Penny. It depicts a BART train busting through the wall

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2025-06-09T00:53:32.936325

Still wrapping my head around the new reality: My cousin quit his job with the federal government and went to work at a startup, thus increasing his job security.

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2025-06-07T17:00:00.099403

This SMRT COW "smart cow" smart car impressed me. Yep, that's a nose ring.

[Update: When I saw this car again in late June, it no longer had the Texas SMRT COW license plate, but a message-less Calfornia plate.]

front view of a smart car painted with a jersey cow pattern. it has horns on top and a shiny nose ring in front. its license plate is Texas SMRT COW

rear view of a smart car painted with a jersey cow pattern. it has horns on top. its license plate is Texas SMRT COW

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2025-06-27T19:52:32.539409