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Three especially-popular blog posts from last year: Some people think I went overboard writing an app and designing an elaborate ritual to tell me where to take my walks, but… In which I bel...
- Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Cambridge, MA in the frickin wintertime AGAIN
I'm back from Boston, having helped run the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt. For now, you can see the puzzles at pennypark.fun, but soon-ish we hope to move them to https://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/. (That's what I...
- Book Report: Gideon the Ninth
It's a horror-scifi-mystery: necromancers travel to a distant world to study secret death magic. They're murdered one by one. Fortunately, they're terrible people. Thus, instead of sorrowfully mourni...
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At today's Poll Worker training class, the instructor said that 80% of us volunteer election clerks would never see a ballot marking device (BMD) in action. That's too bad, since my curiosity about t...
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[Content warning: implied violence] This morning, I went for a stroll on the Embarcadero. I came up to a small gathered crowd and stopped when someone pointed out the reason for the crowd—a jo...
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I got some snail-mail from Mike Bloomberg. I opened up the envelope, but there was no check inside. I don't understand his strategy as well as I thought I did, I guess. ...
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This morning, I went for a walk along the Embarcadero. Not much happened. I appreciated that. ...
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Today I walked over to City Hall and voted. I didn't vote in the usual San Francisco way (marking pieces of paper with a pen). Instead, I used a ballot-marking device (BMD)—I interacted with a ...
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On Tuesday, I'll be volunteering as a poll worker at the site of a 2-Tone Game puzzle. Yes, I'll be working on an election at a place that I turned into a puzzle. This will be so very on-brand for me...
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The advice works! Normally, I unconsciously touch my face pretty often. But I never do so while washing my hands. Just keep washing hands. ...
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As I walked past UCSF Parnassus (a combo medical school+hospital), there was a big sign out front saying DRILL IN PROGRESS. Behind that sign were some big tents set up in the emergency room parking l...
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I wrote some notes about working the recent election. People wail and gnash their teeth about changes in election technology, but I was really glad to be using plastic security seals that I could clo...
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Wow, it's the site's 36 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 s...
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The census sure asks a lot of questions about April 1, April Fool's Day. Don't mind me, I'll just be sitting over here muttering "Must not prank census." to myself over and over. ...
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That DRILL IN PROGRESS sign is up again in the UCSF Parnassus Hospital emergency room parking lot. Once again, there are tents up. This time, it's fenced off, presumably to keep clueless doofuses lik...
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Are you up for filling out daily surveys and sharing your phone's location data to help some UCSF researchers track how Covid-19 is spreading around the world? Install this app on your phone (perhaps...
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A question about manners for you: Rumor has it that wearing a mask in public won't be frowned upon much longer. I have a used disposable N95 mask left over from a fire season. I wore it for some qui...
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How I've been doing lately (nothing exciting): I mostly sit around and read stuff on the internet, like you're doing right now. I subscribed to a local newssite, the SF Chronicle, because I noticed ...
- Haircut Day
I got tired of remembering not to brush my hair out of my face. I gave myself a haircut. The haircut doesn't look great. On the other hand, maybe it's sufficiently off-putting that folks will remembe...
- Book Report: The Fighters (Americans in Combat)
The USA invades countries every so often. This book tells the stories of some American soldiers in combat. Some things go well. Some things go wrong. If I knew a kid considering joining the military,...
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San Francisco fans of parks and the Pythagorean theorem will appreciate this picture. ...
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I thought I knew what "home industry" meant but maybe it should also mean industrial music sheltering at home Ten Grand Goldie official video from Einstürzende Neubauten on Vimeo. It's all very ...
- Book Report: Cult of the Dead Cow (Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World)
Nowadays we talk about the Centers for Disease Control a bunch but back in the Aughts, when we said the cDC, we probably meant the Cult of the Dead Cow. This was a group of hackers. Some of them were...
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Learning new habits isn't so difficult, compared to unlearning old habits. I learned a rigorous hand-washing routine pretty quickly. But even after weeks of shelter-at-home, I struggle to stop old ha...
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My local blood bank (Vitalant, operating in the San Francisco bay area) wrote to say that they're especially interested in plasma donations from folks who have recovered from Covid-19. Apparently, th...
- Book Report: The Grid (The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future)
In my head, an electrical company's control room looks like some Hollywood vision of NORAD: a map of the region with blinking red lights to indicate imminent-brownout warnings. But my head is wrong....
- Pull List
In these unprecedentedly contagious times, I must not shop inside the comic book store. Instead, I can order ahead so the excellent proprietor can hand comics to me at the front door. This nudged me ...
- Book Report: Republic of Lies
This book explores some recent hoaxes and fake news, concentrating on stories that got gullible folks to take political action. (Does blundering around with a rifle count as "political action"? Maybe...
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octothorpean.org will shut down around June 30, 2020. It had a good run. Teams are still playing—there's about one new team per day. In May, three teams solved the big scary metapuzzle. So wh...
- Book Report: The Library Book
Susan Orlean writes about the Los Angeles main library. There's history, an unsolved mystery, but my favorite bits were about day-to-day operations at the modern-day library. There's not so much emph...
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I got sick. Fortunately, it felt more like an annoying-flu-thing rather than a lethal-pandemic-thing. But the sickness surprised me, sneaking past my shelter-in-place defenses. These days, I hardly i...
- Book Report: One Person, No Vote
It's a whirlwind tour of voter suppression in the USA. Nowadays, Depending on who you ask, North Carolina is no longer considered a fully-functioning democracy; how did we land in this situation? No...
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Yesterday, I walked along a stretch of Fulton Street to see the message recently painted there. It wasn't so easy to read on the ground; it made more sense from the vantage of, say, a local news heli...
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Yes, the flying pig is wearing a facemask. 240 Third Ave, near Clement. ...
- Book Report: Lean Impact
This book advises do-gooders (workers at NGOs, charities, and the like) how to apply Lean Startup principles to their good works. I.e., don't try to come up with a perfect plan at the beginning; inst...
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I have signed up at The Storygraph Beta, which recommends books. Nowadays, it's strange nowadays to find a recommendation system that isn't part of some online merchant. Anyhow, most folks on there l...
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Public health art by Susan Kare, I bet. Walkway at Presidio Ave Presidio Gate, San Francisco. ...
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https://plague.wtf shows plague graphs for USA states. It is pretty scary and scary pretty. ...
- Randonautica
I had a system to randomly choose exercise-walking routes. I put that system aside when the pandemic reared up. The system chose routes that often involved a bus ride to the walk's starting point and...
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My walks took me past civic efforts. I traversed part of the leftover marks from the recent attempt at breaking the world's longest hopscotch course record in the NoPa neighborhood. And I saw the new...
- Book Report: Agency
The characters in Agency do as they are bid, going to and fro with little understanding of their place in history. I'm not sure if that means that the title is a pun or an anti-pun or some ironic com...
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Returned some books to the SFPL main library today, AMA. ...
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I got an email from a game show that's casting. If you're a trivia nerd in California, they'd love to hear from you: I'm Joanna, one of the Casting Producers for the hit quiz game TV show, "The Cha...
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Free puzzle hunt team name: Gorgeous Ladies of Penciling ...
- Book Report: The Vapors
Once upon a time in the USA, gambling was illegal across the land. A few cities and towns went ahead and had illegal gambling. Those cities stopped one by one until just one was left: Hot Springs, Ar...
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In wildfire season, I'm not so fond of this legally-mandated un-disable-able smoke alarm, yep. Anyhow, I'm awake now. ...
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If you're in the SF Bay Area and your COVID pod contains enough puzzle nerds to take on an escape room, check out Trivium Games, a.k.a. the folks behind the Ghost Patrol puzzle hunts. They made a Gho...
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I got a flu shot al fresco today. ...
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Wildfire smoke having relented in San Francisco, I resumed my exercise-walks. I noticed some Hash House Harrier marks on the ground. The Hash House Harriers, you will recall, is the drinking club wit...
- link: Web War Stories
Computer nerds, take note: I just enjoyed watching "Overflow," a @WebWarStories episode about debugging and fixing a gnarly computer bug. The bug occurred on a rapidly-growing-popular web site, so th...
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Smoke-surrounded folks: You know how the Purple Air map has that menu with LRAPA and AQandU items? And how those items might help get the map data to use a formula closer to the EPA's? That menu has ...
- Book Report: How to Do Nothing
In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell exhorts us to occasionally look up from social networks and instead look around at the places and people around us. These days, at least here in the SF Bay Area, thi...
- RandoWalk
A while back, you might recall, I tried using the Randonautica app. The app chooses a random walk destination nearby. i got frustrated with the app and uninstalled it: when I switched between apps on...
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Meanwhile in San Francisco, Women's March is today at Civic Center from 11 to noon; the right-wingnut "Free Speech" rally is today at Civic Center at 1pm. Seems like there could be some amazingly unp...
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Wow, it's the site's 37 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 s...
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The postal service hasn't been delivering my mail. (Some of y'all with amazing memories might think, "This has happened to Larry before." Yep, it's happening again.) If you sent me a birthday card/n...
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#IVoted in person today. This might surprise my fellow Californians—California's dodging the pandemic by voting by mail this month. I was sent a mail-in ballot to fill in and return. But this m...
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You might remember back in 2018, I volunteered at a polling place in a house's garage up in the hills. I'm remembering it because in today's news, Lisa Gautier and her excellent garage polling place ...
- Book Report: The Dark Net
[Content warning: oh gee whiz, the book has just about all of them.] This book is a survey of sketchy places on the internet… and it gets pretty darned sketchy. Some of it is mostly harmless...
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My mail now shows up regularly again, but my missing mail seems to be gone forever. My mail-in ballot never reached me, so it's a good thing I voted in person. ...
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I figured some stuff out that I hope to remember the next time USA presidential primary season rolls around.* Leading up to the primaries, people argue about electability. Pundits use electability t...
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My family's doing Zoomsgiving this year. I just finished sitting in on our practice-run Zoom call. It went pretty well. There were a few times when we bumped into the usual video-meeting annoyances&m...
- Book Report: Ninth Step Station, Season 2
I read the next part of this cyberpunk buddy-cop boo serie unit of fiction. It was fun. I gave up on waiting for it to come out as an ebook. It's published as a serial; in theory, each "season" of th...
- Comic Report: The Wizerd! and the Potion of Dreams
This goofy comic takes place in a Dungeons-&-Dragons-style universe, but doesn't get too grim. E.g., the authoritarian ruler keeps all the townsfolk locked up (veering towards grim…) until...
- Comic Report: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist
This comic has been racking up awards lately, but it's good nevertheless. It's little autobiographic bits from a cartoonist, but it's funny nevertheless. (It's by Adrian Tomine, so you might worry it...
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I'm making latkes from my grandmother's recipe. It's written down on a 1964 calendar page inserted into my mom's recipe book. I guess I should copy it out here so I can find it be searching teh inter...
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Site's corollary: Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by software complexity. –Dick Sites ...
- Book Report: Fall; or Dodge In Hell
Did Not Finish. This science-fiction novel posits a digital afterlife. Some of the narrative takes place in this afterlife, some in the real world. Alas, I found the afterlife bits dull. I think I wa...
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A coincidence reported in a cousin's Christmas letter: My cousin is married to a firefighter; one of their sons is also a firefighter. During this year's California wildfires, both father and son fou...
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Fun fact: This glasses "lens" is actually two lenses stacked together. (Disclaimer: this fact is "fun" to learn by reading about. It's not so much fun to learn by having a lens fall out of your ...