Well, not quite television, but something called "Starz" which has produced very amusing Flash-y animation synopses of popular movies. I like their take on Pulp Fiction. And oh yes: all of the animations entail casting bunnies.
A useful wiki, especially if I had a more modern 'phone: the New York Wiki. Oh, if only it used Google Maps, as do so many sites do. Another interesting New York City pedestrian site: New York Songlines.
The Chronicle reports that Zipcar, flush with $10mm in VC largesse, are bringing their act to San Francisco. This is direct competition for the uppity local (and gov't-funded) City CarShare.
“There are hundreds of thousands, if not a million, people in San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland who could benefit from Zipcar.”
In the Bay Area, for instance, Zipcar sees the potential for as many as 1,000 cars. City CarShare now has about 90 cars available for sharing in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley.
Zipcar uses the Internet, phones, and wireless technology to make cars available 24 hours per day to its members.
Here’s how it works: Each member gets a card, called a Zipcard. When a member makes a reservation online, or on an automated phone line, the member’s card is activated. When the member waves the card at the reserved vehicle’s windshield, the car unlocks.
Reservations can be made anytime between one minute and a year in advance. Members pay $8.50 per hour or $59 per day, and like most car-sharing programs, the price includes gas, insurance, cleaning, and maintenance costs.
The technology and policy are very similar to City CarShare and to Portland's FlexCar program, but perhaps having additional resources available will spread the use of carshare programs, rather than decimating the public service. Or then again, perhaps the West Coast is not capable of sharing cars?
The Ponderer has a nice Greasemonkey script to annotate and bookmark google search results; the script checks for feeds from the resulting pages, and also summons lists of related tags from del.icio.us.
Caltrain commuter-rail service is expanding services again. Caltrain, unlike many other of the twenty-odd Bay Area transit agencies, focuses effectively on their bottom line. They realised last year, with the introduction of the Baby Bullet service, that they had hit on something that made extremely effective use of resources: each train was filled to capacity. The trains fast and on-time; and they are a cost-effective alternative to driving (and to other public transit services!).
... and one of the newly-added trains leaves San Francisco southbound at 9 AM. Suits me fine!
I nodded off in front of the computer screen this evening: quite some time has passed since that happened. I am not quite sure why, but this week felt draining even on Monday. I missed the regular (-ish) wings night that jimg and I usually enjoy, although Monday night's dinner (Ethiopian) was quite tasty and with excellent company. I have no tbeen spending much time on the bicycle, nor have I enjoyed much opportunity to read. Excelsior, and enough of complaining.
although the board approved the increases, some supervisors are still working to decrease the fees for residential parking permits with further increases to parking costs in commercial areas. The new parking penalty schedule already has a higher fee for missing payment on a meter downtown $50, rather than the $40 fine for overtime parking in other areas of The City.
Details on the rate increase appear on the Department of Parking and Traffic's web site.
Aside: isn't "The City" a particular area of downtown London? I cannot abide how The Examiner insists on referring to San Francisco as "The City".
One of my favourite stories is Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game (anthologised in a paperback my father read to us often; the collection also included "Miss Hinch", a creepy story indeed). The famous hunter Dr Zaroff mentions that his hench-man Ivan was a knouter for the tsar. Where does this word come from? Russian via French? French via Russian?
Mitchell's ice-creams delight. I love creamy, rich ice creams, and this venerable San Francisco shop at San Jose and 29th (do'n't forget to take a number as you walk in the door, or you wo'n't get a cone!) never fails to satisfy my ice-cream craving. Now that Greg is gone from Rick's Rather Rich Ice Cream, the best bay-area ice cream is a toss-up: sometimes I am happy to head over the bridge to Piedmont's bustling (and renovated) Fenton's; I am always happy to visit Mitchell's.
Five years ago, the San Francisco Chronicle's Scott Ostler decided to write about one interesting tit-bit of San Francisco each week over the course of a year, finding the one story for his weekly column in each of the city's forty-nine square miles. A good conceit, but it never came to fruition. His piece about Mitchell's omits my favourite aspect of the place: that you can have absolutely any cone dipped in chocolate. Yum.