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
Some pics from my San Francisco morning exercise walk:
- A new-to-me little free library in the shape of its accompanying house (kind of a thing in the Sunset District) at 14th Ave and Quintara (a.k.a. the end of the 6 Parnassus line)
- The accompanying house, a little washed out in the fog, i.e., a typical view around here
- Car parked in a driveway. Yeah, I already reported it to 311; no reason to think they did anything about it, though. Not pictured, not reported: another car parked in a driveway with a "Pro-Environmentalist / Anti-Fascist" window decal; yet another car parked in a driveway with an 🚫Elon sticker.
- Toy dinosaur on the hood of a car in a driveway
- Little Free Library in the shape of its accompanying house (did I mention this is kind of a thing in the Sunset District?) on Lincoln around 30th Ave.
- Chalk art at 20th Ave and Irving: That "Don't Panic / Organize" meme with the fish. Not shown: the probably-more-impressive art next to it which was scuffed by the time I got there.
2025-04-14T17:10:27.911169
Some photos from my morning exercise walk.
- Shot of the Golden Gate Bridge to be a home screen for my new phone
- Today's chalk art on 20th and Irving: Ha ha, so appropria— oh wait, she got the new iPhone? I got an Android. Oh well, still kinda appropriate.
- Yeah, yeah, already reported to SF311. No reason to think they dispatched a ticketmobile at oh-dark-thirty on a Sunday morning, though.
- I do like these frogs. 7th and Irving?
2025-04-06T15:44:28.929894
USA folks over 50 years old:
Some months back, the CDC started recommending that people
50+ years old get pneumococcal vaccine, against pneumonia,
which you don't want.
(Previously, they recommended the vaccine for people
65+ years old.)
I procrastinat gave my health plan a chance to nudge
all 50+ folks to get it.
Months later, I gave up on that and asked my doctor about it.
She quickly* said yep, get that vax, and set me up to get
an appointment. If you're 50+ and were waiting for your
doctor to nudge you, maybe it's time you nudged them instead.
*OK, first I had to slog through an irrelevant "answer" from an AI assistant and then repeat my question, but still quick overall.
2025-04-04T19:56:17.594115
I'm sufficiently vain to set a Google alert so I find out when I'm mentioned someplace new on the World Wide Web. Thus I found out I'm in the Acknowledgments section of a recent academic paper. Oh, neat!
Some nerds at a company called Scale A.I. set up a new benchmark for AIs. Here, a "benchmark" is a set of questions and answers; ask the same questions to several AIs, grade those AIs based on how many answers they get right. This new benchmark was unusual: They gathered together puzzles from places like the MIT Mystery Hunt and Puzzled Pint. I, with esteemed puzzle editor Neal Tibrewala, made some Puzzled Pint puzzles, thus the acknowledgment. (Some question the utility of this benchmark; is it useful to measure a chatbot's wordplay ability if customers don't care about that and instead want the chatbot's advice on, say, setting a tariff rate on an uninhabited set of islands in the Antarctic? This is a valid point. One nice thing about puzzles: They have unambiguously correct answers. Grading the answers to questions like "What tariff should we apply on these penguins?" isn't so straightforward.)
I chuckled. I wanted to keep up with whatever other silly things these "Scale" people came up with. I looked around to see if they had a blog I could follow. I found their blog! I saw some recent articles:
- "Scale AI products approved for purchase on AWS Marketplace for the U.S. National Security Community" (military intelligence can use Scale's A.I. vision tech to track my movements through a crowd so that autonomous drones can find and kill me)
- "Machine Perception for Human Protection: Creating Vision Algorithms to Augment Perimeter Security" (Finally, some good news: This tech would only try to kill me if I were on a boat, which is only rarely)
- "Introducing Thunderforge: AI for American Defense" (They're working with the ghouls at Anduril to make AI for military decisions, e.g., whether to find and kill me vs some other potential target.)
- "Letter from Alexandr Wang to President Trump on Winning the AI War" ("There is incredible evidence about how AI can improve government efficiency, decision-making, and service delivery." This is technically not a lie, since "incredible" can mean unbelievable.)
When a bunch of AIs try to solve Mystery Hunt puzzles and get 0.00% correct, it's a fun chuckle. But when Israel's military uses AI to figure out who to kill and ends up murdering aid workers and reporters, nobody's laughing.
Whew! Who knew looking over a vanity alert would just lead to a reminder that there are people playing at keeping me safe by means of scattershot murder. Here's hoping they fail at the scattershot murder part.
2025-04-03T21:50:42.898437
Book Report: True Blue Kangaroo
It's the third book in Curtis Chen's Kangaroo sci-fi/spy/comedy series. It continues the tradition of witty banter, action, and intrigue. Of course, I was mostly focused on looking out for the puzzle-y bits; Curtis was a pillar of the SF Bay Area's puzzlehunt community while he lived around here. This novel comes through: Our young and snarky protagonist, seeking to annoy a fussy fellow spy, uses the least secure variant of Pig Latin. Yes, Curtis used puzzlehunt-y lore to demonstrate character. (It's not puzzle-y, but I also noticed when the young and optimistic protagonist said, of a man-made sci-fi nanobot-altered-virus disaster, "because it's in the history books now and no one who lived through it will ever forget." And of course in my head I was already plotting out the 30-years-further-in-the-future sequel in which our now old and jaded protagonist, facing yet another nanobot-altered-virus disaster thinks oh for f*ck's sake, not again.) It's fun, give it a read; or if you haven't already read the first couple of books in the series I guess start there.
2025-04-01T18:35:09.310526
