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.

some dumpsters surrounded by a temporary fence; some trees loom in the background. A piece of paper taped to the closest dumpster reads: Bay to Breakers

in the foreground, cropped view of the intersection of Haight and Shrader streets. You can see the restaurant Cha Cha Cha, a couple of its neighbors, and street signs. In the background, behind the buildings, are a couple of orange cranes building the new hospital at UCSF Parnassus. Above one of the cranes is a faint white circle; it's the moon, I promise

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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:

graph charting three values compared to a "pretty-safe" value. For a while all three charted values were nice and low, but recently the green one has crept up again

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.

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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

art-deco(?) style building with a sign on the corner that says Mart SF (but was blank for a while and said Twitter for a while before that)

Ready to try again & make new mistakes

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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?

Bay Area Young Survivors Breast Cancer Memorial Garden

like a foosball table, but made of cement

Bike racks, shadows. One rack has a sticker: "↑ Elbows Up ↑"

Stretch of road surrounded by dunes. Some sand has covered part of the road

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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.

pair of safety scissors hanging from a hook on the side of a bookshelf

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.

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2025-04-30T15:11:07.866229

Some pretty impressive sidewalk chalk art on Irving St at 20th Ave in San Francisco this morning:

Sidewalk chalk art. We are looking up at an altered Statue of Liberty against warm-colored clouds. Altered: Instead of broken chains of freed slaves at her feet, her wrists are cuffed to chains. She wears the US flag as a bandanna. There is big text superimposed, all caps: Never! In the upper-left corner, more text: To change everything we need everone (sic, dangit). Around the border is text in languages I cannot read, alas; I guess Chinese, Hebrew and Greek-or-Russian?

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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)

little free library decorated to look like a gray house with a bay window

a gray house with bay windows painted the same as that little free library. there are trash bins out front, one of which has liquid running to the gutter. I put my coffee on a recycling bin lid so I'd have both hands free to take a picture. Alas, it was so windy this morning that my coffee blew over. I guess I'm lucky it happened before tariff-taxes raised raised coffee prices

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.

green building with a boarded-over entrance, yet there are folks obviously living inside

screen shot of map: a couple of buildings are connected by a little el

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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.

little free library decorated to look like the house it's next to (next pic)

modernist(?) looking house with a little free library next to it

toy dinosaur (not obviously on the hood of a car, but it was)

little free library that looks like the house it's in front of; each is painted green with a black roof

Chalk art of that don't panic--organize meme with the fish. There's also Blinky the red Pac-Man ghost and a weeping heart-skull guy

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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?

in the foreground, the residential hilly streets of SF's Richmond District. In the background, the Golden Gate Bridge peeks over a hill

chalk art: a lady in the style of one of those old-timey romance comics weeps as she wails, "World War 3? But I just bought the new iPhone"

graffiti art on a utility box: dark hyperwave frogs pose on a mushroom

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2025-04-06T15:44:28.929894