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).
2024-10-17T18:34:31.480718
I'm yes on Prop 33, though I'm pretty YIMBY
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.
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.)
2024-10-10T16:08:17.430132
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.
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.
2024-09-28T15:50:31.822006
Milestone: 44 Million Hits
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.
2024-09-24T19:42:56.788564
Book Report: Alta California
It's a journey through space and time. In 1769, the Spaniards of Portolá expedition walked from San Diego to San Francisco Bay; a couple of people on the expedition took pretty good notes. Some time passed. A few years ago, author Nick Neely walked from San Diego to Palo Alto by San Francisco Bay, at the same time of year, keeping to Portolá's route and pace, mostly. In this book, he writes about his walk; but he also writes about layers of intervening history. The result is a report that swings wildly through time, moving steadily through space.
What do I mean by swinging through time? As the author tried to keep to Portolá's route, he relied on expeditioneers' notes about geological formations; those pretty much stayed the same. But plenty else had changed over the centuries. The author outpaced the expedition a few times. Where the expedition had to chop through undergrowth to clear a path for their pack animals, the author walked on a paved road. Where the expedition got bogged down in marshes, the author hiked across now-drained land. Where the expedition went slowly because of scurvy, the author didn't have scurvy because now we know better. The author got "separated" from the expedition a couple of times: Where the expedition kept to a straight course, the author went around USA military bases, because the expedition route is bombarded nowadays.
The author's hitch-y adherence to Portolá's timeline reminded me of my attempt to navigate SFMoMA's lobby for artist Janet Cardiff's video walk. In this immersive experience (he said, self-consciously), I carried around a little video player, watching a video shot by the artist making her way through the SFMoMA lobby. So I had to glance down at the video player to see where I should walk next; and I had to glance up to make sure that I didn't crash into any other present-day museum visitors. And more than once I caught myself instead dodging around recorded museum visitors, nearly crashing into present-day folks. So, I wasn't dodging military ordinance, I operated on a much smaller scale, but yeah, I get it, I kinda understand the dissonance.
Speaking of my challenges being much smaller scale than the author's: Yeah, I walked around SF Bay and I'm proud of that, but I'm not going to pooh-pooh the author's stunt of this long walk in California. Walking around SF Bay, I was never more than a half-day's walk from a motel. This book's author tromped through wilderness, tourist-resistant housing developments, farmland… He camped a lot; he trespassed and camped a lot, not because he's some raving scofflaw, but because plenty of nights he didn't have choices. Maybe my SF-Bay walks made me more impressed with his stunt? Uhm, I used to make fun of people who ate at Taco Bell while in California, a region with much better Mexican food available. But I notice in my around-SF-Bay walks, there's a Taco Bell in South San Mateo I stop at. The cuisine is nothing special; but I hit that spot at the end of a long day of walking. My brain exhorts if we just walk a little further, we can have much tastier food, but my legs say yeah, no, that "little further" is not happening today. So I eat Taco Bell burritos and check into a motel and go to bed and rest my poor, tired legs. Anyhow, the author gets food from gas stations, convenience stores, from Taco Bell; and I get it, I sympathize.
Speaking of recognizing that one's chosen challenge is much punier than that taken on by others: The author enountered some people on a Peace and Dignity run, Native Americans relay-running from Fairbanks Alaska to Panama: waaaaay further than a piddly half-the-length-of-California 650 mile stroll. At Panama, those runners would meet another group that had run up from Tierra del Fuego. Hoo boy. Anyhow. Anyhow.
Anyhow, swinging through time; it's not just ping-ponging between Portolá's time and the present day. Some historical displays teach current Californians how folks lived before the Spanish showed up. We get a bit of the history of Los Angeles' water system. Fossils tell us about life long before those folks. Zebras near the central coast survive and remind us of Hearst's folly. I learned more than I expected to about connections between the Portolá expedition and the Ortega Chile Company. I got glimpses of the Spaniards' enslaving California natives; thankfully I didn't get so many glimpses of the USA's killing of more natives (which didn't happen so close to the expedition route). The author passed through areas hit by nearing-present-day forest fires. And there are plenty of present-day points of interest; the author visited a farmland produce warehouse; a freeze-drier who turns animals into displays for natural history museums; a baseball game. He talked with homeless folks and folks with homes. He navigates around that beach that Vinod Khosla is trying to forbid the public from visiting. (Advice to Khosla: let some branch of the USA military conduct live-ordnance-style actvity on your beach; they will definitely forbid visitors.)
I thought it was pretty interesting.
2024-09-22T18:48:50.024797
The Page Slow Street folks said they had a new street mural by Matley Hurd, the same artist who did that Lyon Street mural. The mural was close to me, at Page and Masonic. So I checked it out.
2024-09-12T20:19:01.663604
Hello! It is not March, but the excellent EnigMarch folks occasionally send out a prompt word nonetheless. Today's prompt word is LETTER, in honor of International Literacy Day. That tells me it's a good time to make a puzzle.
Here we have six five-letter words, written up-down: sulks, Slemp, Nothe, oaten, bread, strut. But we don't have the middle letters right. We guessed they were L-E-T-T-E-R. But it turns out that's wrong. We tried pointing out that Slemp is the person's name behind the Slemp Foundation; and that Nothe is a fine placename in parts of England. But we're looking for different words; and none of their middle-letters are L, E, T, or R.
| S | S | N | O | B | S |
| U | L | O | A | R | T |
| L | E | T | T | E | R |
| K | M | H | E | A | U |
| S | P | E | N | D | T |
Once you've filled in the correct middle-letters, you'll see something that might let you know that it's time to do something. (make a puzzle or otherwise)
2024-09-08T01:40:51.968044
