Why I continue to enjoy Dreamhost: My site is down for hours and all I get is 44 cents?! That barely pays for the stamp I’m going to need to mail my foot all the way up your butt #
This bed has got stripes
The sheets and comforter cover outing that led me to muse on the (in)efficiency of cities eventually got washed and suddenly, the bed looked all grown up. I think Stephanie and I struck a pretty good balance. I didn’t want…
Windows Vista Point
I can’t be the only one who’s thought it. (I, however, take the Alexander Ave exit to get to work.) In related news, I’m planning on moving my primary laptop (Thinkpad T42) over to Ubuntu (for reasons mentioned earlier). It’s…
The Sausalito view
This is 400 feet from Federated Media’s offices: San Francisco Bay Panorama (I’m still playing with Hugin.) And check out the ducks (and other water fowl):
Escalating the war on comment spam
Well it had to happen sooner or later. I guess. Someone finally managed to get through my spam defenses. They were really pretty basic. An experiment really. I had: renamed wp-comments-post.php html-entity encoded the comment form’s action attribute (the value…
Water’s texture
San Francisco Bay and Angel Island, as seen from the Golden Gate Bridge
Urban hiking
There is always one day a year, usually in the very early spring, when I spend a long time outdoors without sunscreen and get burned. And learn my lesson for the rest of the summer. That day was today. Tony…
Taxes are like…
…taking a test where you’re encouraged to cheat, but in order to do so you have to fill out more forms. Which kind of integrates the punishment with the reward. Apparently tax programs make it really easy to cheat, but…
Train tunnel
Train tunnel under 280 at Mariposa, spotted while urban hiking
Sunday was only 82,800 seconds long
Yesterday I learned the hard way that there are not always 86,400 seconds in a day. It just so happens that yesterday on Sunday there were only 82,800 because yesterday Sunday was only 23 hours long. This is particularly tricky…
not (yet) off to France
Five minutes before rushing out the door to catch a bus to the BART to the airport to take a plane to New York and then to Paris, to arrive there at 10am Saturday morning, I saw that I had…
How to get to Paris
On Friday at 6pm, take the #27 bus to the Powell Street Muni/BART stop Get on the N train to the Caltrain station Take the 7:20 train down to San Jose Diridon, arriving around 8:50pm Catch the 9:30 VTA light…
Dejeuner à Paris
I have a momentary break—Stephanie is dozing beside me and we’re resting our feet after a day of climbing many stairs—to write a little about yesterday. Miraculously the wireless internet reaches our room. After getting to the hotel Sunday afternoon,…
Notre Dame sans bossu
After lunch, we walked towards the Île de la Cité, one of two large islands in the Seine, in the center of Paris. We wandered over Le Pont Neuf (the new bridge, built in 1607), taking pictures as we went.…
Raclette à Pain, Vin, Fromage (ou la raclette est la nouvelle fondue)
After Notre Dame we grabbed a nutella crepe and walked to the rive droite (right bank) of the Seine via the Île Saint-Louis. Stephanie bought a calling card and got in touch with her mom, and then we walked towards…
La Tour Eiffel
After a long time-zone adjusting sleep Sunday night, we headed in the direction of the Musée Rodin late Monday morning. Where we discovered that museums are closed on Mondays. Ok. Cross the museums off our list. What’s next? La Tour…
Paris après-midi
The rain we saw approaching from the Eiffel Tower continued on its way, so Stephanie and I did likewise, taking the Metro up to Montmartre, a northern neighborhood of Paris featured in Amélie and highly recommended by Stephanie’s sister. We…
La pizza Française
We’d purchased TGV tickets to Avignon for 10am Tuesday morning, back when we were planning the trip, based on the assumption we’d have three solid days in Paris, not a day and a half. But our hotel only had rooms…
Le Palais des Papes
So why did we go all the way down to the south of France only to stop in Avignon? Good question. Actually I didn’t even quite know the answer until we got there, other than having heard from Stephanie that…
Lou Mistrau en Provençal
…or le Mistral en Français (Mistral in English). At this point I should mention that it wasn’t just a little windy when we got off the train in Avignon. It was VERY windy. It was stop-you-in-your-tracks wind. Gale force wind.…
Sur le pont d’Avignon, l’on y danse, l’on y danse
The other reason to visit Avignon other than the Palais des Papes (and the castle-like wall around the city and the charming shops, etc) is the Pont St-Bénezet—known more famously as the Pont d’Avignon. You can think of it as…
Dejeuner en Arles
The Mistral winds were still blowing on Thursday (March 23 in blogtime). And we were starting to get a little tired of traveling, especially being at odds with the weather. In spite of the wind, we wandered around Arles looking…
La famille à Pertuis
Stephanie’s paternal grandmother and other extended family members live in Pertuis, a small town north of Aix-en-Provence. We rented a car in Arles for a day and started on our way east. Thankfully Stephanie drove (she has a French driver’s…
You saw it here first: Fight Errorism (unless you saw it somewhere else) #
Great writing prompt: Under a full moon, the crew began cutting the anchor chains with blowtorches. #
Holy crap I just felt another earthquake and it scared the shit out of me. The whole apartment lurched and then kind of rattled back and forth for a second or two. 2nd one in a week. The unexpected shaking is not as unsettling as the uncertainty of whether it will continue. #
File this under “things I’d never have expected Tim Bray to say”: But for my money, the most interesting is the souped-up PHP #
Holy cow badness: WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, Upgrade to 2.1.2 #
Not the Onion: Switzerland Accidentally Invades Small Country #
Wow. Check out the videos: Condom device wins Most Beautiful award #
Video of the day: Help The Police, Help, Help the Police #
Heh. The last audio is Reagan laughing, before Zapruder mutters, “Holy shit, how does this keep happening to me?” #
Kristina on public education: i am doll parts? (apparently you can’t say the word “Vagina” in high school in Westchester County, NY”) #
Headline of the day: Articifial Intelligence busted for practicing law without a license (it’s tough out there for intelligence these days) #
To read soon: The Theme-Parking, Megachurching, Franchising, Exurbing, McMansioning of America (via Corey) #
Joy on the effect of TV and hiding it: Considering the TV Cozy #
Holy shit this is cool: ARCHOS 404 camcorder. (via Kristina)
Of course my Canon SD400 does this, granted it doesn’t have a 20GB hard drive—but it could have the equivalent of an 8GB hard drive, for only $56!. #
Quote of the day: In Poland, Linux makes women swoon in ecstasy. (that looks nothing like an O’Reilly book, btw) #
Headline of the day: Carr Mill gives the finger to Weaver Street patrons
Update: Paul Jones protests: Leaving the Weave. WOW! #
What would a unicorn do? Impale evil things, ha! #
Totally awesome series of maps of Europe’s railway networks: Trainspotting Bükkes #
On the front page of the Santa Rosa PD yesterday: Blogging for dollars blurs line of truth #
Quote of the day: The San Francisco coffeehouse is the new Palo Alto garage. It’s where all the innovation is happening. —Kevin Burton, Tailrank.com (incidentally, FM, my employer, provides advertising for Tailrank) #
This is awesome: A very strange trip in which I personally visited all 50 states in a week’s vacation.
I feel like I just said this very sentence the other day:
The problem with having only two weeks of vacation per year is that this leaves you with generally only one week off in the summer, the other week generally burned up at the Christmas holidays.
Incredible video of a lunar transit of the sun from the STEREO-B spacecraft
No way! A person born on February 29 may be called a “leapling” #
Wow, it’s not every day that you’re called a “cultural treasure”: iBiblio website digital repository and community have become cultural treasures of the state of North Carolina #
This is TOTALLY radical: Il Lee: Ballpoint Abstractions (to do at the San Jose Museum of Art, March 11–July 8, 2007) #
tshirt of the day: i rock at basic #
Hardy-har-har: Chicken fat clogged a major traffic artery Tuesday #
Stephanie’s list of things to bring back from France: Oh so impatient! #
Jesus, New York Times! You can’t publish an article that describes how a 17 year old built a spectrograph for $300 and not give us some idea of how she did it. Slipshod I tell you, slipshod. #
I had classes at UNC with some of the folks in Roman Candle (Logan, Skip, Timshel), and I just heard their song, “Something left to say,” on Indie Pop Rocks, which is the closest thing I know to “making it” in my book. Congrats. #
Headline of the day: U.S. airlines cancel more than 2,000 flights #
Ouch: McCain uninformed about HIV (let’s get him out of the race please, shall we?) #