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.
Permalink
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.
Permalink
2024-09-24T19:42:56.788564
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.
Permalink
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.
Permalink
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)
Permalink
2024-09-08T01:40:51.968044
I continue to check my little dashboard of San Francisco COVID numbers each morning to figure out whether going into an ice cream shop to procure inessential-but-tasty treats endangers just my waistline or also my lungs, heart, long-term dementia chances, etc, etc.
Lately, the SF numbers have come down enough such that I've resumed indoor inessential activities.
About a week and a half ago, while San Francisco's numbers were dipping to pretty-safe levels, I saw posts on my socials that California's overall numbers were at some record high. So I guess some parts of California are having a bad time. But for now, in San Francisco, I appreciate this opportunity to go into the market that carries that brand of hummus I like.
Permalink
2024-09-06T11:50:10.722880
Flu shot: acquired
Permalink
2024-09-06T19:32:28.663182
Today I got* a new-to-me pastry: croissant egg tarts (焦糖可頌蛋撻). (Am I the only one who wants to call them craan tat? Anyhow.)
Correctly anticipating that eating these would leave a mess of pastry flakes around me, I didn't eat these at home (a place I'd have to clean up).
Instead, I went to the bench behind the Parnassus Ave Starbucks, where birds provide pastry-fragment cleanup service.
*At Pineapple King on Irving in San Francisco.
Permalink
2024-08-31T17:16:34.399316
If you use the Luvvly dating app and wonder why there's an influx of
users with juvenile humor from San Francisco's Haight area, I wonder
if this flyer has something to do with it.
Permalink
2024-08-24T20:46:07.297601
