I continue to check my little dashboard of #SanFrancisco COVID numbers each morning to
decide whether to get coffee at an indoor coffee shop or a pushchart. You might remember
that I track three stats. I blog about it when some stat crosses from a pretty-safe value to a not-so-safe value or vice-versa.
A couple of weeks back, I blogged to point out that two out of those three stats were annoyingly wriggling above-and-below the "pretty-safe"
line. Today I blog with good news and bad news. Good news: they stopped wriggling above-and-below. Bad news: they're both staying above the
line; and when some slow wastewater data finally showed up, it turns out that the COVID-in-wastewater stat never actually dipped into the
"pretty-safe" zone.
It's weird that the test positivity number has gone up so much at the same time that the COVID-in-wastewater has gone down.
It's weird that SF's COVID-in-wastewater went down at the same time that the overall San Francisco Bay Area's number has gone up.
What does it all mean? Your guess is as good as mine.
Anyhow, I'm still going places: a couple of stats are kinda-high but one stat is still low.
When I multiply them together, overall things still seem low.
I'm not so happy that the two reliable indicators are bad while the not-so-reliable indicator is good.
I made this little dashboard so I could quickly glance at it and know what to do.
That one out-of-step stat has me second-guessing things. This morning, I did my grocery shopping in person
(not swapping air with many people doing my grocery shopping before 7am), but didn't drop
in to the Beanery for coffee on the way home (lots of customers at the Beanery, even around 7am).
Note to self: Before today, I just multiplied these numbers together.
But today, I was looking askance at the New Cases number. I changed my multiplying
formula to give more "weight" to the COVID-in-wastewater and test positive% numbers.
Anyhow, keep an eye out for each other. Don't be surprised if your neighbor who makes their decisions
solely based on recent test-postitive% numbers has been keeping to themselves lately.
Permalink
2026-08-25T18:13:05.505701
Some things I saw on my exercise walk in #SanFrancisco this morning:
- Another Outside Lands leftover mural by Indelible Funk, this one advocating Music for the People.
- When your home looks boring so you try to spice it up with a couple of Dr Seuss-esque helical topiary tree thingies, but fail to consult his works for a more lively color scheme.
- Someone tore down flyers and painted over the remaining tape on a utility pole, but a San Francisco Crosstown Trails enthusiast already put a fresh pair of wayfinding stickers up.
- My breakfast, because the Mastodon social network still encourages me to post four pictures at a time.
Not seen: new Kal Zakzouk art. The chalk art at 20th/Irving has been the same design for nearly a month. I hope there's a benign reason for that.
Permalink
2026-08-22T18:16:57.897702
#SanFrancisco vandals are out of control.
Permalink
2026-08-21T12:58:14.916773
The Outside Lands concert in SanFrancisco was a while ago,
but the city has yet to paint over the signage-mural things, so I got to enjoy these
indeliblefunk signage-murals.
Permalink
2026-08-18T18:46:39.599051
Wow, it's the site's 54 millionth hit. 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:
3.235.215.92 - - [16/Aug/2026:10:14:14 +0000] "GET /new/2010/05/29/phae-decaying-you-remember-how-i-wrote-that-href/ HTTP/1.1" 200 4200 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot) Chrome/119.0.6045.214 Safari/537.36"
OK, looks like Amazon.com has a webcrawler that fetches web pages to feed to an AI
so Amazon can understand reviews better. E.g. by fetching my old blog post about a
dangerous-but-impressive play structure no longer in
a children's playground,
perhaps some huge×huge matrix of weights somewhere slightly increased a number associated with "concern for safety."
Robots continue to dominate the traffic. That's both because AI companies crawl pages; and because people don't tend to follow links from AIs to source documents.
E.g. Google says that zero (0) people clicked Google results to visit my pages in the last month.
Wow, I'd heard that Google was sending fewer people to websites since most folks were content with the AI summary. It sure seems true.
Digging through yesterday's logs, I found some probably-human visitors. I noted where the first came from: kagi.com, a much less popular search page.
Apparently some kagi.com users still click links and visit websites.
OK, looking at one web-visitor is an anecdote, not statistics…but it's weird, man.
Or perhaps it's the new normal.
Anyhow, if the web traffic here became 99.9% robots, I suppose I would keep blogging.
Even if web traffic were 100% robots, this would still be a handy place to draft posts for my socials 🤣
Permalink
2026-08-17T13:28:27.199347
I continue to check my little dashboard of #SanFrancisco COVID numbers each morning to
decide whether to go inside the local good-but-not-amazing sandwich shop. If you've been following me for a while, you might remember
that I track three stats. I blog about it when some stat crosses from a pretty-safe value to a not-so-safe value or vice-versa; but first
I wait a week after the stat crosses the pretty-safe-line to see if it stays on that side of the line. These stats are pretty
noisy, and I don't want to blog "Everybody panic!" on Monday and then "Everybody stop panicking!" on Wednesday. Usually, things settle
down within a week or two and then I do/don't blog about it as appropriate. But lately, stuff has been happening and not settling down.
Below is a graph of how things have been going in SF for the last two months. A couple of stats have been bouncing up and down across the
pretty-safe line for the past ~three weeks.
Yeah, it's weird that the COVID-in-wastewater stat was going down at the same time that the other stats were going up. It's not necessarily super-weird; if there's a surge, you don't necessarily see it in all the stats at the same time. But it's weird that SF's wastewater number was going down at the same time that California's overall wastewater number was going up; also at the same time that the overall San Francisco Bay Area's wastewater number was going up. Over the past few weeks, the
California Department of Public Health, for all regions they track, has raised their level from "Very Low" to "Low". ("Low" doesn't sound so bad until you remember that the Department is thinking in terms of "Have things gotten bad enough yet such that hospitals in the region are filling up and we should send patients to other regions?")
Anyhow, what have I been doing lately, indoor-sandwich-wise?
As I did
half a year ago,
I'm still going inside places. But if these stats ever make up their mind on "up" vs "down" and choose "up," then I
might restrict myself to getting sandwiches at Luke's Local, who will hand them to me through the window.
Permalink
2026-08-11T14:58:50.556230
About a month ago, I pointed out
an "equine vine" wire-frame garden ornament thingy
in Golden Gate Park.
I dunno if it's worth seeking out, but if you do want to seek it out, then my
location description "Kezar Stadium" wasn't so helpful—Kezar is a stadium-sized stadium,
and is 99.9+% not this wire-frame garden ornament thingy.
So I took some photos of Kezar Stadium and then scribbled annotations on them to help folks find this thing.
View from near the Willard/Polytechnic stadium entrance. I circled the spot you're looking for.
View from several yards east of the spot, with the spot circled. It really doesn't stand out much; the wire-frame thingy you're looking for is about the same color as the fence it's behind. It doesn't even stand out from the wall it's in front of.
View from outside the stadium's west entrance. The ornament-thingy is circled. Notice that as you approach the west entrance, a tall hedge prevents you from seeing the ornament-thingy.
View from standing next to the arch, inside the stadium, near the west entrance. The ornament-thingy is circled
Permalink
2026-08-06T21:25:05.368500
Donated blood this morning. They asked me some new questions,
interested in my recent contact with anyone with Ebola.
😬 Let's be careful out there, everybody.
Permalink
2026-08-04T20:48:25.616109
Spotted some art on tree stumps around #SanFrancisco walking between
SFPursuit sites this weekend.
- The little blue house on the tall tree stump near the 19th Ave entrance to Golden Gate Park has a "For Sale" sign out plus American Gothic squirrels.
- A Hello Kitty pussyhat on a not-so-tall tree stump near Arguello and Euclid.
Permalink
2026-08-03T00:31:09.709920
New-to-me sidewalk art in #SanFrancisco 's Upper Haight, Page Street near Lyon.
A piece by Eclair Bandersnatch. In my pic, it looks like her hair eroded, but that's just my camera failing to depict glitter. Her hair had a lot of glitter.
An assemblage of toys.
Permalink
2026-07-29T16:06:36.095133
