Wow, it's the site's 50 millionth hit. 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:
68.221.75.24 - - [05/Nov/2025:16:34:02 +0000] "GET /frivolity/prog/phraser/words_500K.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 6452256 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot"
Ah, it looks like a bot is reading words_500K.txt, that long list of words I use when writing and solving word puzzles. This bot says it's from openai.com, the ChatGPT company. If I look up the 68.221.75.24 address at the beginning, I learn that the machine making this request is running on Microsoft's Azure cloud. Or it could be a bot from some other company running elsewhere; that "openai.com" and "68.221.75.24" info is fake-able. That's something you read about on the socials, these days. Some web-publisher gets annoyed at a bot from an AI company, and blocks it; just to notice that requests start coming in seemingly from other organizations running on some other cloud…but that data is fake, it's just the annoying bot trying to be sneaky. It's easy to understand why a web-publisher might get annoyed; some of these bots are pretty stupid. If your memory is amazing, you might recall some months back when I posted about this site's 47-millionth hit, it was a bot checking to see if I'd added a little graphic (I hadn't.), which it re-checked 2000+ times over the course of that day. At the time, I wrote "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!'"
When I looked at yesterday's logs to pick out the 50 millionth hit, I saw it was openai looking at words_500K.txt; and then my eyes looked up and saw that the previous hit was openai looking at words_500K.txt; and then my eyes flicked down and saw that the next hit was openai looking at words_500K.txt. I search the logs: Of yesterday's ~15000 hits, ~5000 of them (about ⅓) were this stupid bot checking words_500K.txt. I update that file a couple of times a year, but OpenAI's stupid crawler-bot checks three times a minute.
It occurs to me that a lot of these AI companies are maybe using AI to write their computer programs. Thus, they might have a lot of darned-poorly written computer programs. Maybe that's why their crawler-bots re-check unchanging web pages so enthusiastically? Anyhow, welcome to the site, bots and humans of varying levels of sophistication. Enjoy your read.
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2025-11-06T16:06:32.162821
I continue to check my little dashboard of #SanFrancisco COVID numbers each morning to figure out whether ducking into a little shop to get out of the rain is sensibly staying dry or likely to be an embarrassing thing to bring up with my doctor when discussing the risk trade-offs that led to my hypothetical long-term lung problems. Lately, all three numbers that I track have been looking good! The last time I posted, two of the numbers looked good, but the wastewater-number still looked high. But it's come down since then, whew!
Guess I'll try to stay dry.
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2025-11-06T17:01:08.239282
After many attempts, yesterday I finally got to see Naga blowing bubbles.
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2025-11-03T18:25:32.092871
(This used to be a blog post about how I now wear a little whistle
around my neck on a loop of string. But after forgetting to
wear the whistle a couple of times, I moved the whistle to my
keychain. Anyhow, here's a picture of a little whistle when it
was still on a loop of string.)
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2025-11-02T14:35:24.530599
It's about how to use your time well.
The book begins by making fun of the productivity bros, those social
media personalities who tell you
that you need to use your time more effectively by setting up passive
income so you become rich in your sleep by, say, writing a best-selling book.
(That's why so many billionaires got their starts as authors,
you guys.)
Poking holes in these dorks' scams is like shooting fish in a barrel,
but it's a good jumping off point into thinking about how we experience
time.
It's all very well to use vibrations of a cesium atom control your
time if you're trying to coordinate movements of trains on a network
of tracks, but that doesn't capture the scale of events we encounter.
It's all very well to find out what kinds of wages employers might offer
for your time, but that doesn't tell you what your time is worth.
Some "fun" quotes:
May Anderson, an admin for a Facebook Group for working moms,
told me that she had given up on mainstream time management books,
comparing them to the common financial advice, "Just don't buy the
damn latte."
…we might imagine, as Angela Y. Davis did in 1981, that
"child care should be socialized, meal preparation should should
be socialized, housework should be industrialized, and all these
services should be readily available to working-class people."
On the origins of California's Save the Redwoods League (it's better now!):
Ridiculous as it sounds, Madison Grant associated redwoods with
the Nordic race and equated the threat to their survival with
threats to racial purity.
Writing about how we experience time, she writes about how we experience
life. As part of her research, she noted how Georges Perec took notes
about time watching a plaza; noticing rhythms in bus arrivals, clothes
of passersby, things you'd normally let pass out of mind, discarding
memories for more efficient storage. But first she got my attention by
pointing out Perec was one of those Oulipo wordplay nerds, who wrote
La disparition, that novel that doesn't use the letter E.
Chapter 5 gets into the polycrisis. It's not clear how much future
the human race has; the difference between a time-line and a
time-line-segment gets concrete.
You experience time differently if you're paralyzed
by dread. And you should resist falling into dread, thinking that we're
predestined for doom. Long before the productivity bros, the people who
though a
lot about efficient time use were slave owners; they were so wrapped
up in their warped world-view that they couldn't understand how crazy
their thoughts sounded to anyone who respected people. We see the echos
in the thinking of energy executives: "of course we had to frack
that oil and then send it through leaky pipelines; people want oil though
they keep telling us they don't." But we don't need to keep
cooking the planet with fossil fuel fumes, no matter what you might think
if you listen to too many rationalizations from energy company execs.
Uh, yeah, so this book gets heavy in places.
Probably part of the reason that this book hit me so hard is that
it's embedded in the San Francisco bay area. To illustrate a different
time scale, the author visits a tide pool; to illustrate the polycrisis,
she visits the coastal town of Pacifica, where former cliffside homes
now lie in the ocean; she visits the Prelinger Library, the Chapel of
the Chimes, she goes to the places I've gone.
She thinks about the kinds of things one thinks about when visiting those
places.
Anyhow: yeah, interesting. Check it out. Leave some time for recovery,
it does get heavy.
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2025-10-27T14:51:57.932565
I saw some art on my morning walk in #SanFrancisco today.
At the Animal Connection pet store at 35th Ave and Irving, a new-to-me doggo mural.
At 20th and Irving, some chalk art I suppose by Kal Zakzouk.
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2025-10-26T18:07:34.833760
Walking in Golden Gate Park today, I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon
The San Francisco Old Car Picnic.
I don't know much about cars, but I do appreciate a shiny paint job.
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2025-10-18T21:53:07.009247
October 10–11 2025, I walked, roughly, around San Francisco.
The Crosstown Trail people published The Roundabout, a walking guide to streets and trails around the edge of San Francisco. I saw it would take me through a new-ish housing development in Hunters Point that had been in the news a lot; and a swath of Sunnydale I didn't know. It would be an excuse to visit some parts of town I hadn't seen in years. So I went. I took some photos. I took some notes to keep in mind for next time. It got kinda long for a blog post, so I made a whole web page for it: Roundabout 2025.
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2025-10-14T22:35:44.451047
As Hallowe'en approaches, some of the seasonal displays at the grocery store give mixed messages.
It's not wrong, but it might make more sense above the yogurt instead of the strawberries.
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2025-10-13T14:29:10.286846
I continue to check my little dashboard of #SanFrancisco COVID numbers each morning to figure out whether brunching at a neighborhood crêperie is a fine way to occasionally take a break from my own cooking or a foolish boost to future dementia risk. Lately, some good news and some bad news. As you may remember (depending on whether you read my posts and/or your current dementia state), I track three SF COVID numbers. Lately, the PCR test positivity % has been low. That's good! Also lately, the COVID-in-wastewater numbers have been high. That's bad!
There's an old joke from the age of mechanical timepieces: Someone with a watch always knows what time it is. Someone with two watches is never quite sure. To figure out whether I'm willing to swap inside air with my fellow San Franciscans, I let the dashboard multiply together the numbers I track and look at the overall product. Overall, I'm still happy to go places (he wrote, licking omelet juice from his lips). There were a few days about a month and a half ago in which I avoided going indoors…but as more data came in, I looked back and thought that I prrrrobably would have been willing to go out those days, too.
Some good news for data nerds: The Cal-SuWers dashboard, where I get SF COVID-in-wastewater data, now also has data (and graphs and such) for flu and RSV. They used to mostly post new data weekly (confusingly, with some data coming in at other times), but now post data every weekday. According to them, overall California COVID levels are falling and are now "low". (For the past few weeks, they were plateau-ed at "high".) They also say that SF Bay Area levels are low, though they used to be high. Here's hoping that SF's recent bump is just an aberration and we'll catch up with the rest of the Bay Area soon.
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2025-10-07T16:07:45.798585
