I donated to the A.P. News Service today. Now I'm a paid subscriber, sort of.
I was dismayed when
the Washington Post's owner
killed some stories about why Trump should not be president of the USA. I subscribed to the Post for its national news; but
apparently, I couldn't trust it. So I unsubscribed.
Where should I get national news then? Not the Washington Post, apparently. Not the New York Times; I remember groaning
about their confident-but-wrong tech reporting many years back. If I
couldn't trust their reporting in a topic I knew, how could
I trust it in a topic I didn't know? Maybe I could give them another chance; a lot can change in a few years.
But, thanks to trust issues, the New York Times wasn't my first choice.
I noticed I read a lot A.P. News stories, mostly because of links shared to social media.
So… I already get a lot of my USA national news from the A.P.
Could I subscribe to A.P. News? They don't have paid subscriptions.
I'd like to pay for my news.
You can get daily emails from the A.P., but you can't pay for them.
You can follow them on various social thingies, but you can't pay for those.
Their web site does have a Donate button, however.
So I donated; so now I'm a paid subscriber, sort of.
Permalink
2024-10-27T13:44:10.995028
*unpins the browser tab devoted to the Washington Post daily crossword puzzle web page*
So long, old friend. I hope you understand why I had to unsubscribe.
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2024-10-25T18:32:54.433527
It's the second volume in a set of books about the history
of keyboards, text entry, the user experience of working with
text on various devices. This volume got into more modern history.
Sometimes I was learning stuff, but other times I was just
wallowing in nostalgia.
Or maybe "nostalgia" isn't the right word. What's the word
for when you find out that you misunderstood what was going
on at the time?
Decades ago, I thought I cured my repetitive strain injury by
making sure I used different types of keyboard at home and at
work. Now, reading this book, I figured out that what really
cured my RSI is that the new "different" keyboard I bought for home
was thinner than older keyboards, and thus didn't encourage my
wrists to bend so much.
(OK, there was regular ol' nostalgia, too.
Talking about Japanese text entry, I remembered
how the then-newfangled Canon WordTank was so
much easier to use than my Nelson's
paper kanji dictionary. At the time, such
a game-changer. Nowadays, the idea of a separate
dictionary device seems absurd, tho.)
Anyhow, there's modern keyboard history, how keyboards
migrated onto our phones, then (alas) to our phone screens.
There are a couple of
chapters about modern keyboard enthusiasts who soup up
their keyboards with custom designed keys, custom-built
boards… Uhm, I didn't really try to follow those
chapters too closely because I already have enough hobbies.
(Also, I would feel bad if I spilled snacks on a
nice keyboard, so that's a deal-breaker.)
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2024-10-24T00:29:03.642600
Crossing Golden Gate Park on my way to get a COVID vax,
I saw some new-to-me art on the Golden Mile. I ?think?
it's Fnnch's Solar Bridge (which doesn't look so
exciting in daylight, but glows at night).
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2024-10-17T18:34:31.480718
I'm slogging through my ballot, looking at California proposition 33.
This proposition says that cities could impose rent control on more types of housing.
Opponents say:
Beware! NIMBY jerks will use this to prevent new construction
by imposing unreasonable rent control so that new projects don't "pencil out." That sounds bad to me, but I'm not a real estate
development expert. I dunno whether this is a real problem with the proposition or if it's just a YIMBY echo chamber convincing
themselves it might be a problem. So I went looking for some real estate development experts.
My hypothesis: Suppose this proposition threatens new construction. Then among its opponents, along with landlords, I expect to
see several building unions, contracting companies, construction companies. But when I
look at the opponents, I see landlords.
OK, there's also the California Council of Carpenters, one company with "construction" in its name, and another company with "builders."
That's not zero but it sure ain't much. I expected
to see a lot more than that. (For comparison, there are about a hundred companies with "apartments" in the name.) I tracked down the recommendations of the San Francisco Plumbers, Steamfitters, and HVAC; they had opinions about every California proposition except 33.The prop opponents are well-organized, must have tried to get endorsements from many organizations;
but those organizations mostly replied "nah."
This looks…like the fraction of Californians who believe the world is flat.
So I'll vote Yes. If this proposition wins and all California housing construction indeed grinds to a halt in a year: Sorry, I tried my best.
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2024-10-13T21:49:18.379981
Seen this morning at the Waller Street Skate Park: an in-real-life Cons pair:
I looked around and saw a car but no obvious cdr, so perhaps this was a list of length one.
(Sorry if this sounds confusing, but I hope it amused both LISP programmers in my audience.)
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2024-10-10T16:08:17.430132
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2024-10-07T11:46:06.705299
Rescuing a couple of photos from my camera roll:
🐶 A coyote in Golden Gate Park around sunrise. This coyote lay down on some lawn; in the low light, some joggers went past without noticing. That coyote just looked like an unruly hank of grass. I didn't get a photo of that, but did snap a pic of that fur blending into some wood chips.
🏠 "Elizabeth" house on Belvedere St. I dunno who Elizabeth is, but I guess she got inspired by that tiger-jungle mural at the top of her street
and went all out decorating her own house.
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2024-10-02T18:49:37.454709
I continue to check my little dashboard of San Francisco COVID numbers each morning to figure out whether going into the supermarket to pick out the best avocado is worth the risk or will be an embarrassing thing to explain to the medical professionals treating my long-COVID-induced dementia.
Lately, all the SF numbers have looked pretty-safe. (I blogged a few weeks ago when the numbers, overall, looked safe enough to me such that I resumed going inside public places. At the time, the SF COVID-in-wastewater numbers still looked kinda high, but the other numbers reassured me. Now, all the numbers I track look good to me.)
I'm running out of excuses to procrastinate on some of my gnarlier errands.
Permalink
2024-09-28T15:50:31.822006
Wow, it's the site's 44 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:
85.208.96.199 - - [22/Sep/2024:03:51:25 +0000] "GET /departures/SFO/hawk_hill/27_lobby.html HTTP/1.1" 200 849 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SemrushBot/7~bl; +http://www.semrush.com/bot.html)"
Semrush is a service for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) people.
If you have a website, you can pay SEO people to suggest tweaks to your site so that it will show up higher in Google searches.
(Some of these SEO people are legit; many are scammy. But that's a tangent for another day.) When you're trying
to figure out the best way to tweak a site, it helps to have lots of data about it and other sites: text on the pages, what they
link to, and more. Semrush has a bot to gather that data so that not every SEO nerd has to figure out such a bot on their own.
That bot was confirming that a
page showing a picture of a photo I took back in 2009 hasn't changed since.
It's not such an interesting thing to do; a good task to delegate to a bot.
Oh now I'm getting distracted by the photo.
I guess back in 2009, I was carrying a camera separate from my phone. Ancient times, I guess.
People are more interesting than bots. Glancing at "nearby" log lines, I guess that humans at around that time were
playing Bewordled, my word-nerd idea of
a "match 3" game. Anyhow, welcome to the bots, welcome to the humans. Have a nice time.
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2024-09-24T19:42:56.788564
