Larry Hosken: New

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.

coyote trotting along in search of breakfast old (Edwardian?) house with a fancy mural painted on the front: plants, animals and a big all-caps "Elizabeth"

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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.)

chart tracking three numbers over the past 60 days: # of newly-reported cases, positive test %, COVID-in-wastewater levels

I'm running out of excuses to procrastinate on some of my gnarlier errands.

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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.

selfie taken in a beat-up lobby mirror

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.

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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.

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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.

mysterious traffic cones atop a street mural detail of a hummingbird from a street mural view of most of the mural. I bet it would look better if a drone took an overhead pic tho view of most of the mural; you can see Hurd's signature

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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)

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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.

graph charting three numbers: The new reported cases number is low; the test positivity % was high a couple of months ago, but is now low; the COVID in sewers number are still a little above the pretty-safe line, but a couple of months ago were waaaay above that pretty-safe line

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.

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2024-09-06T11:50:10.722880

Flu shot: acquired

selfie with upper arm in foreground, head kinda blurry in background. upper arm has a band-aid

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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.

two pastries (one with a bite taken out of it) sit on the little bags they came in. They look like regular egg custard tarts, except carmelized on top like a flan and their crusts look croissant-darkish instead of pie-lightish photo that's been altered with a circle and an arrow to call attention to something and some text that says 'pastry, i think?'. Original photo had a crow (or raven? I'm not a corvid expert) in the foreground with something in its beak; in the background you can see bits of Golden Gate Park, the Richmond District, the Presidio and a couple of smidgens of the Golden Gate Bridge

*At Pineapple King on Irving in San Francisco.

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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.

a flyer advertising a dating app that tries to say 'Stop swiping' but it has been torn and now says 'Stop wiping'

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2024-08-24T20:46:07.297601

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