I'm a lasagna boy!

In which the police have my back

The SFPD locked down part of Divisadero this afternoon after some hooligans shot at a broomstick-wielding septuagenarian:

Police believe the incident involved two men in their 20s who apparently had a dispute with an older man who was sweeping outside a barber shop. The two suspected allegedly chased the older man, who at some point struck one of the two young men with his broomstick. One of the young men then pulled a gun and fired at least once, missing the older man, police said. A 42-year-old old male driving a vehicle a block away, however, was grazed in the head by the bullet. ... Police cordoned off the area to conduct a door-to-door search for more than two hours with information indicating the suspects entered one of the local businesses. Neither were located, police said. Police also were unable to locate the older man involved in the incident and witnesses at the scene were apparently uncooperative.

On parking in San Francisco

I have long wanted to open a bar, and while driving through the Mission this afternoon Aram and Scott pointed out that the Gestalt-Zeitgeist axis is missing one essential item from the stock of German in English: Schadenfreude. Excellent. I'll open a bar, call it Schadenfreude, and make a mint. Happy hour will entail laughing at the misery of others, trying to balance on the pitched, waxed floor (a "slippery slope". Geddit?), and sloshing back perfect Martinis.

Anna suggests that I derive a certain nasty pleasure from having cars tagged and towed, especially when they block the sidewalk or a driveway. (She has, however, disabused me of the rambunctious habit of moving bodily over the hood of a car blocking the sidewalk.) Someone else has
the counterpart: threatening retaliation if his car is towed.

In which he sees a shadow of an object

The Daily Californian has a sobering story about two cyclists run down by an elderly driver: one subsequently died from the injuries.

Corinne Crawford, a UC Berkeley graduate student in the classics department, died Tuesday evening after being taken off life support following a collision with a vehicle Sunday.
Crawford, who was a member of the Cal Cycling team, was returning from a bike ride to Mt. Diablo with teammate Jan Christian Claussen when both were struck by a vehicle at the intersection of Olympic Boulevard and Newell Avenue in Walnut Creek, said Lauren Tompkins, a captain on the cycling team and Crawford’s friend.

Crawford was taken to the John Muir Medical Center Intensive Care Unit in Walnut Creek, where her family kept her on life support long enough to donate her organs to others in need.

commensal

I mis-read the root for this word in Natalie Angier's excellent article on parasites, but the New York Times pounced on my hapless double-click (which I intended to select, so that I could look up "commensal" on-line) and popped up a medical definition: "Of, relating to, or characterized by a symbiotic relationship in which one species is benefited while the other is unaffected." It comes from the Latin "mēnsa" via the Middle English for "to share a meal", apparently.

In which we refuse

One of the aspects of Manhattan that I have always enjoyed are the ubiquitous curbside rubbish bins. Sometimes lined with black plastic, usually a wire mesh receptacle: nothing fancy, but something functional. Baghdad by the Bay has a dearth of these receptacles, and now San Francisco has even fewer trash cans.

Why? According to a 2002 study for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, " ... San Francisco has at least twice the number of trash receptacles as New York, four times more than Los Angeles and five times more than Portland ... ". I wonder, then, why I so often find myself staring at piles of trash on a street-corner, needing to call 28-CLEAN, or tucking waste into my pocket for lack of a convenient receptacle. Outside of the downtown (and who goes downtown in San Francisco?), rare are the streetside bins. The heavy, cast concrete bins (with the ludicrous pyramid-of-recyclables atop) make only cameo appearances in the areas around the Civic Center. San Francisco's Mayor has some ludicrous ideas about how this move will encourage
business owners to arrange for waste-hauling contracts (did you know that any business that sells a food or beverage must have a waste receptacle outside? I didn't.). Mitchell Brothers have put out a cardboard box. That's classy.
The SFist has some words on ditto.

On liking things on the web

Information I can get through Swisstrains, a fantastic fan-site that the SBB should integrate, if they have any sense whatsoever!, might not be useful to me specifically, but the design and beauty of the site amaze and fascinate me. Wow! So clever.

updateI broke this page, through a poorly-chosen default value for a new variable in an outer loop. That'll teach me. (Teach me what, exactly?)

In praise of Craigslist

Spring cleaning has come a little late to this household, but with a two truckloads to a prominent national charity, the massive garage sale a few weeks ago, and a steady stream of posts to Craigslist, we have managed to divest about a tonne of crap and hopefully save it from landfill. I started asking for beer instead of the $5 or $10 most remaining bits are probably worth (why did I have those old Volvo seat covers? the entire stereo system from that late, lamented car?), and now I have a 'fridge full of cold beer. The guys at the corner store are doing a brisk business today.
Craigslist is awesome: it connects me and all my random stuff with the divers other folk who want specific pieces of what I have (or, in some cases, hundreds of Ethernet cables, all lengths, colours; dozens of DC transformers and power bricks; cases of cheap wine) and no longer need. (Did I ever?) Fantastic!

Historical note: One of the first people I met upon arriving in San Francisco was Craig himself, sociably working from the (now-defunct) Tassajara Bread Bakery on Cole. My brush with someone who changed the way things work.

In which we fall for the charm of the blinking lights

I had been using TomatoTorrent, a simply, Cocoa-y app that did lots of nice things with BitTorrent. It does not, however, recover well from tracker failures (isn't that what p2p is all about?!?), and does not manage bandwidth as marvellously as does Azureus. I was leery at first, given the nature of the project (exploring Java's SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit).

I used to stare into the closet full of (computer) hardware here at home, watching the drive lights, the switch lights, the router lights: dozens of LEDs reassuring me with their green and yellow flicker. And now? Now I watch avidly the steel, cold blue of the download screen on Azureus.

In which we cycle safely

Is New York safe for casual cycling? Even as traffic accidents claim lives daily, some of the more dense, more recently-developed areas of the city receive more attention for different modes of transportation (and recreation!), and "bike boxes" allow for sensible mixing of bicycle lanes, intersections, and auto traffic.

ObRant: Bike lanes suck.

Much of cycling safely comes down to one rather abstract concept: respect. In specific instances, this includes the respect that cyclists need to pay to the rock-and-a-hard-place position we are in, between two-ton juggernauts of steel and the unyielding asphalt; the respect that we merit from drivers, commercial and private, who often fail to understand how a few seconds of their time means a safer, more comfortable road; but, most importantly, the respect due from cyclists to pedestrians and to cars, to all other users of the road. The common resource of the road cannot be shared equitably, but all users must respect that they are not alone on the road. Double-parking is selfishness, and undercuts respect for other users; cycling the wrong way down a street, ditto. Myriad examples I might mention, but all come back to the notion of respect.

Mass Ave and Harvard Square

Under the heading of "Jacked Up? No More!", we find these old houses moving aside in the name of progress, along Mass Ave and away from Harvard Square.

In which you can get there from here

Or, more specifically, Théré from Héré.

In which MUNI feels the heat

updateWe fixed the glitch. The SFist has its usual biting take on MUNI: "Fails at Everything".

As MUNI's web site has this information in a proprietary format, I converted it to something readily accessible on the internet (Google Spreadsheets link), and have the contents here:

AS OF 11:17 A.M.

METRO SERVICE FROM WEST PORTAL TO EMBARCADERO IS MOVING SLOWLY INBOUND.

DUE TO A MECHANICAL PROBLEM, THE J-CHURCH AND N-JUDAH LINES ARE AFFECTED AT DUBOCE & CHURCH.

FRIDAY, JUNE 22, 2007

THROUGH OUT THE MORNING WE CONTINUE TO EXPERICE A SIGNAL SYSTEM PROBLEM

WE ARE OPERATING TRAINS IN MANUAL MODE TO ENSURE THE SAFETY OF OUR RIDING PUBLIC.

ALL METRO LINES ARE AFFECTED: J, K, L, M, N AND T.

WE ARE RUNNING SUPPLEMENTAL MOTORCOACH  SERVICE

WE HAVE CREWS ADDRESSING THE ISSUE, IT IS LIKELY THAT IT WILL BE A FEW HOURS.  AND, WE ARE ENCOURAGING OUR RIDERS TO ALLOW EXTRA TRAVEL TIME.

(Capitals, mis-spellings, et al. are original to the memo.) An update from the Chronicle reads:

Commuters who are planning to ride the Muni metro this afternoon and evening should consider using buses or streetcars, because a problem with the signaling system is causing delays on all lines and isn't expected to be fixed until tonight. The problem started around 4:30 a.m., said Janis Yuen, spokeswoman for the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency. Muni has enlisted more buses to serve passengers who normally would take the subway, she said. In an unrelated matter, a mechanical problem that occurred around 10:45 a.m. at Duboce Avenue and Church Street additionally snarled the J-Church and N-Judah lines, Yuen said

In which we control the spin

A while ago,
Apple added Spin Control to the OS, in order to monitor and collect data on application hangs. I have been using it to collect samples about Firefox, which has really been lodged in my craw. I am correlating the samples from this app with my network logs. Yuck.

char[r]ette

CMU's Architecture Librarian defines the charette as "a creative process akin to visual brainstorming that is used by design professionals to develop solutions to a design problem within a limited timeframe"; Wikipedia says it is "... pronounced [shuh-ret], often misspelled charette and sometimes called a design charrette) consists of an intense period of design activity."

In which we get all grumpy

Although I will never approach the public visibility nor the biliousness of Camper's Hate Blog, I do confess that I barely suppress rage at the inadequacy of some written communication -- and, very specifically, when people who respond to an email message respond to the poster and misspell their name, substituting the common spelling ("Rachel") for a less-common one ("Rachael").
Aside: Bitch Magnet is an excellent name for a band. I went to a show of theirs at CMU when I saw a poster bearing the band's named and laughed aloud. I do not keep the assiduous records what bolsinga does, but I suppose this was in '89 or thereabouts. I don't even remember the other two (or three?) acts on the bill.

In which we need to get to the J-Church on time

From the June issue of the Noe Valley Voice, something priceless and amusing:

Like the J-Church line itself, the project to determine just what makes Noe Valley's main train late has fallen behind schedule. In a memo issued May 8, the team in charge of the J-Church Pilot Project announced that it required a six-week extension because the opening of the new T-line had caused problems with rail operator availability and schedule changes.

According to the memo, which was signed by TEP Program Manager Julie Kirschbaum and Chief Operations Officer Kenneth McDonald, "Reports from regular J-Church riders...indicated that the first weeks of the [three-month] pilot were a success. They observed more trains, shorter headways, and greater reliability on the J-Church Line."

During the week of April 1, on-time performance averaged 72.5 percent, with 84 percent of trains on time during the morning commute. Unfortunately, that success soon ground to a halt. During the week of April 19, on-time performance reached a low of 55.9 percent.

The team believes that it can evaluate improvements to the J-Church line after the complications due to the T-line are addressed, so they plan to re-evaluate the J-Church Pilot Project in early September instead of mid-July. Anyone who has questions about the extension should contact Kirschbaum at 701-4305.

In which he'll flip you for real

SFist has a fascinating, gruesome story about the legendary intersection at Octavia and Market.

In which we take a fall for the beta

Peer Guardian and Privoxy. I have time to play around with p2p shielding because the new Beta of the Safari web browser keeps taking a dive, knocking out my laptop (and, intermittently, work that I am doing -- !). It ducks into an unkill-able state, and I can't manage to whack it from the Dock, from Activity Monitor, from the Force Quit Applications menu, nor even from a command line (kill -9)! Re-booting seems to help, although it occasionally produces unbearable tuning signals upon reboot (wait, I did sync before flipping the power switch, right? I have to bounce on the power because properly shutting down the MacBookPro fails when it tries to kill Safari, which is the whole reason I'm shutting down in the first place ...).

In which we laugh out loud

Apelad's Laugh-Out-Loud Cats vintage-style comic is one of the best (internet) things ever. I'm adding it to the list of things that make me laugh.

knout

After years of wondering what a knouter might be, a correspondent pointed out the obvious: it comes from knout, the whip of the Russians (perhaps imported from Scandinavia, perhaps a Tatar device, perhaps Germanic) and comparable to a cat o' nine tails. Thus: a knouter is one who uses the knout, and Ivan in Richard Connell's story The Most Dangerous Game had served in the capacity of torturer to the Russian court.

In which I wonder: where do all the unknown tokens go?

0:1: syntax error: A unknown token can't go here. (-2740), courtesy AppleScript.

In which we follow the orange-paint road

A truck spilled orange paint on the highway. Excellent video.

In which I has a hat

While shifting stuff around over the week-end ("packing"), I found my hat.

The Brooklyn Cyclones baseball cap that I have worn off and on for the past several years, and which fits comfortably under a cycling helmet. Oh! and I found the grey cap which I mislaid last week: in the wash. Fortunately, the good folks at Walz Caps have done a good job with the wool blend, and my grey cap fits as neatly as ever it did.

UPDATE: Coincidence? I think not!

In which high-speed cameras catch it

On The Road

A few months ago, I re-read parts of "On The Road", but didn't finish the whole novel -- I simply couldn't!

the fuss over Kerouac did not move Cheryl Salem, a 44-year-old mother of two who grew up in the house where Kerouac was born and called in the ad for the apartment to the Lowell Sun. That Kerouac once lived there did not seem that big a selling point, said Salem, whose family has owned the property for two generations.

"A lot of people don't know who he is," she explained, shrugging her shoulders.

"People seem to care more about the washer-dryer hook up," added Salem ...

In which we ride a white elephant

I wrote about the Personal Rapid Transit system at West Virginia University a few weeks ago; today's New York Times has a piece on ditto, with the headline City’s White Elephant Now Looks Like a Transit Workhorse. The long-term development of the PRT system, now in its thirty-second year, has allowed for quick expansion of the city around the University, and for the Uni itself to spread out.

Like something out of The Jetsons, the PRT is a technological oddity: "Riders can push a button and select which of the five stops they want on the system’s 3.6-mile route; it is like a horizontal elevator that can go 30 miles per hour. The driverless, 21-passenger fiberglass cars, gliding on rubber wheels and powered by electric motors, pick up riders and deliver them to their stops quickly, bypassing intermediate stations along the concrete and steel guide way. It is this individualized destination option that sets it apart from other cities’ systems."

The system does not expect to receive more federal funding, however, even as it seeks to expand: at $30m per mile, it is not cheap. The system receives much of its operating expenses through the University; it is closed when school is not in session (how odd!). It has a remarkable 98% uptime record, which sure beats MUNI.

In which MUNI melts down and down

The San Francisco Chronicle has a decent piece on what is wrong with MUNI.

UPDATE: Further reflections on MUNI, including feature, reveal that MUNI is internally as disorganized as any medium-sized bureaucracy, but that hardly beggars sympathy from me. What else is wrong with MUNI? Chronic driver shortages, which result in missed runs, which in turn mean more people waiting for fewer buses (and fuller buses, which is never pleasant for those of us who live anywhere along the Civic Center—Haight corridor. Yuck.).

On cheese

Cheeses I like:

Matos St George,

Tomme Crayeuse, a delicious Savoie I first tasted at Coopers,

Montgomery Cheddar, from Neal's Yard Dairy (which I first visited en route to a cheap meal at Belgo in Covent Garden).

In which we fix our bike to the sidewalk

The Williamsburg hipsters can tonight rejoice: the sidewalk outside the L station is being
widened in order to accomodate bicycle parking. That's right: bicycle parking encroaching on car parking.

barratry

barratry, spuriously creating quarrels in order to produce lawsuits and other legal make-work, also means the act of bringing lawsuits solely in order to harass.

In which one man drives while the other man dreams

The New York Times has a grandiose account of CC Meyers's phenomenal work on the 80-580 interchange, which his company completed under bid. Good ol' moxie, the sort that Kafka longed for in Amerika (of which there is a new translation).

Mr. Myers said he made one misstep in the ramp project: telling a TV reporter it would be completed before Memorial Day weekend. It was, but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had wanted to make that promise public himself. “I’m not going to play games with him,” Mr. Myers said.

The governor praised Mr. Myers at a news conference, but did not introduce him until reporters began asking questions: all for Mr. Myers.

That made him especially glad he had worn those ostrich cowboy boots. “I wanted to be a lot taller than him that day,” he said.

The welding sub-contractor's description of having two drivers in each truck, so they could drive more-or-less continously reminded me of the Pere Ubu's "historical" collection of bootlegs titled " One Man Drives While The Other Man Screams", itself from the old trucker motto, "One Man Drives While The Other Man Sleeps." Perhaps that last word should be "dreams"; that has a suggestion of "screams" which seems altogether appropriate for truck-driving in this context, because a addle-pated truck driver took out this impossibly important interchange. Another confounded truck driver hosed part of the Lincoln Tunnel th' other day. Great photo:

UPDATE: SFist has some comments about other notable truck accidents, including the ostrich spill on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Iliad

Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies is using a robot in Venice to scan a thousands-year-old manuscript of Homer's Iliad: "As each page was photographed, the classics scholar on duty in the hallway outside the workroom would examine its image to make sure all the text was legible."

In which there's no fire where there's smoke

This year, MUNI's Christmas list will include smoke detectors, so that they will no longer rely on work-of-mouth reports of smoke. I just found out that the Market Street tunnel was closed after various people reported smoke near the Embarcadero platform. The likely culprit: steaming and smoking brake pads.
In other MUNI news: the T-Third, N-Judah, J-Church, and 15-Third (that's right! the bus is back!) will all receive new schedules, and some return to normal.

In which we back up

I backed up all of my CDs today. That's all twenty years of buying CDs (from The Wailing Ultimate (an anthology of Homestead Records' superstars, cheap at $10 from Phantom of the Attic), to Wilco's Sky Blue Sky, which came with a bonus DVfuckingD jam session), piled on to about 120' of shelf space. They now take up three (logically) massive hard drives which fit into less than 1' of shelf space.
Most of the CDs which I was super-duper-extra excited to find -- say something by the Brotzman/Drake Duo, or the Ubu Dance Party double-disc tribute to Pere Ubu -- have close to nil resale value, because until that special someone comes along to go through a similar frisson of joy, these just take up shelf space. Then again, my ultra-limited Duophonic promos from the 90s do not have the value I thought they would hold -- they are not going to put my kids through college. The corresponding elpees and singles, though -- those have some cash value. Still, the time has come to move these out: they take up too much wall space, and space is precious.

In which we ride the bluegreenway

Paul and I took an early-morning cycle ride along the Third Street corridor in San Francisco, where we saw lots of abandoned warehouses, plenty of new loft-style condominium construction, and many, many playgrounds. We were turned away from Hunters Point Naval Shipyard by a finger-wagging guard, but rode over the adjacent hill towards Candlestick Point. Photos.

On recovery

A good piece by Joan Ryan, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle: Trauma transforms doctor.

The impact snapped the cyclist's spinal column. He slid backward under the Range Rover, clear through to the other side, folded at the waist like a napkin. The SUV's undercarriage left a streak of motor oil on his cycling shirt.

... The driver panicked and took off. Witnesses helped police track the vehicle to Fairfax. They found Frazee's chinstrap snagged on the SUV's undercarriage.
The driver served 60 days in jail for leaving the scene and driving with a suspended license but was not found at fault in the collision. He claimed Frazee had gone out of control and hurtled into the vehicle. Frazee has no memory of the accident except that he was going fast enough to pass two cars on the downhill.

In which we find a magic number

Mental Floss Magazine offers Fifteen Reasons to Love Mister Rogers, including "writer Tom Junod explained that Mr. Rogers weighed in at exactly 143 pounds every day for the last 30 years of his life. He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t eat the flesh of any animals, and was extremely disciplined in his daily routine. And while I’m not sure if any of that was because he’d mostly grown up a chubby, single child, Junod points out that Rogers found beauty in the number 143. According to the piece, Rogers came “to see that number as a gift… because, as he says, “the number 143 means ‘I love you.’ It takes one letter to say ‘I’ and four letters to say ‘love’ and three letters to say ‘you.’ One hundred and forty-three.”". Awwwwwww!