Views from Twin Peaks In San Francisco on a Clear Christmas Day, 2007
There were other things happening on Christmas Day in San Francisco besides the tiger mauling at the Zoo. It actually was a very clear day. We took some pictures from Twin Peaks because you so rarely get such a clear view. Links go to full downloads.
San Francisco View From Twin Peaks 1
San Francisco View From Twin Peaks 2
The Angry.Org Story
Details will continue to be added as time permits...
Back in 1994/1995 I was working for Faludi Computing Inc. as a consultant and we wanted to play around and get familiar with DNS. So, we decided to put a basic webserver up with a funny domain name to test configurations and how the DNS propagated out to the rest of the internet. The domain name I chose was
angry.org
Robert Faludi (founder of the appropriately named Faludi Computing) allows me to put the site up on our super fast (at the time) ISDN line. It was a very slow, pretty old Mac IIci with like 8 megs of RAM running WebStar and using basic html files. We had a CGI in there that would just take form submissions and email them to me so I could save them as html and post them back to the site.
Basically, people could submit the things they got angry about and I would post them unedited on the net. We got a lot of traffic. We got put on the 'Cool Sites of the Week' back in 1995 and then on Netscape (remember them?) 'What's Cool' list. This basically shutdown the ISDN line for the business and nuked the IIci running MacOS 7 or an earliy version of 8 at the time. Anyway, got through that and went to an immediate publishing system with FileMaker and Lasso and WebStar. People could post directly to the web, which was big at the time. We also gave out free email addresses at @angry.org and got some press in a book back in the day from Hank Duderstadt on the world's weirdest webpages (ISBN-13: 9781886411128)
More to follow as I remember the details...
The Internet Archive has some info and pages from angry.org way back when, but not so much. Work a look if you are interested.
Also, we had some people created satellite sites that amazingly have continued to persevere in the absence of angry.org. I know one still seems active @ angry.net. Pretty cool. Oh, and the reason I shut it down was because people got mad and starting to send threating legal letters, and I wasn't making any money of it.
Sucks how that works.
If you have any good ideas on how angry.org could make a comeback and/or if you would like to assist or buy the domain outright and go with it.
San Francisco restaurant ratings online
There are so many restaurants in San Francisco and so many sites that have bias and or sponsored reviews it is nice to have some sort of site with clear ratings. Cleanscores.com covers San Francisco and now Los Angeles restaurants and posts the inspection scores of the local authorities.
Yes, they don't post service ratings, etc. or individual opinions (a la Yelp) but it is great information to get and another point of reference when you think about trying a new place to eat here in San Francisco.
For example, you might want to know which restaurants have 'severe rats and mice' or where 'employees do not wash their hands'.
Getting rid of gophers in the garden
The gophers in San Francisco are tough and smart. There are not many places or them to go, so if you do have a garden, they know how to stay around. I guess they are also pretty tough because they must hit a lot of cement! The other aspect is, at least where we are located, the depth of dirt is only about 15" or so before you hit solid rock, so tunnels can easily collapse if you try complex traps or other removal tools.
Anyway, we have the 'noise/vibration posts' that are supposed to annoy them to leave, but they really do not work for us and we didn't want to go with poison because we have cats roaming the neighborhood as well as our dog. We decided to try the Juicy Fruit gum trick and it didn't work at first but as we tried different attempts, we got it to really be effective.
Here is what we did.
First, if you see a mound, don't mess with it except to open it slightly
Then, with a pair of rubber gloves on, cover them in dirt and roll a few sticks of Juicy Fruit gum into tight balls one at a time and try to get them down the gopher hole as far as possible. For each hole, I tend to put 5 or six balls in there. Lastly, cover the hole.
Getting the gloves dirty prior to rolling the gum seems to be the trick since it might mask any human and/or rubber scent. The gum is very fragrant and if you leave the hole and tunnel intact and cover the mound, the scent will travel back down through the tunnels and attract the gopher to it where they will eat the gum and it will adversly affect their digestive systems.
It is difficult to gauge the effectiveness of this, but the lack of any further activity (mounds, tunnels, etc.) in the garden is good enough for me. Also, we have been lucky enough on one occasion to see he direct effect - a gopher laying on the top of the dirt having issues from the gum intake and in a state where he was easily removed from the garden.
You might give this a shot, since the expense on this is minimal and it is actually the most effective way we have seen to get the job done.
Read and Write NTFS on OS X Leopard
It finally is possible and stable.
Thanks to MacFuse and NTFS-3G. I have it running on an Intel MacBook Pro and Leopard (OS X 10.5).
This is extremely useful in dealing with large files between operating systems. We have Lacie Firewire/USB external drive that is NTFS to handle large files (greater than 4 gig) and now read/write is a breeze.