Thanks be I don’t need much sleep

I’m really enjoying driving around San Francisco, taking pictures and collecting locations with Gowalla.

It’s beautiful out here!

- Posted with BlogPress on my iPhone.

Location:The Embarcadero,San Francisco,United States

Laptop thefts at San Francisco cafés

Our local SFPD patrol officer just stopped by to warn us of a series of unattended laptop thefts at San Francisco cafés.

It happened at Bernie’s Café last autumn, a café in the Mission last week, and Starbucks in Noe Valley yesterday.

I’ve been looking at buying one of the Tryten cable locks but they’re not very good about responding to email and have a tiny footprint when I search. They may have sold a bunch of them, but nobody’s talking… which isn’t the case with Kensington cable locks, which seem to have damaged a good number of MacBook Pros.

Anyhow, be mindful of your portable computing toys. You We have been warned.

- Posted with BlogPress on my iPhone.

Location:24th St,San Francisco,United States

A plateau at two belt sizes down

My body is fighting back.

As I approach a twenty-pound weight loss – about a third of my goal – it’s holding on to all the pâté de foie gras and caffe lattes I’ve enjoyed over the years.
I’ve heard folks describe plateaus, in both fitness and martial arts, as being both frustrating and demoralizing. They’re right on both accounts.
I’ll be keeping to my plan on the weekends, as that seems to be slowing things down, and just see how that goes.
I’m lamenting not taking any kind of “before” pictures when I started being mindful of my caloric intake, around thanksgiving. So it goes.
Two belt sizes down is a cause to celebrate, albeit without chocolate macaroons. I’ll celebrate with a bit of sunshine in the 60F weather; a great improvement over the mid-40s of recent weeks.

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Location:24th St,San Francisco,United States

Burning Man tickets go on sale tomorrow!

Burning Man tickets go on sale tomorrow!

The less expensive tiers will sell out quickly, so jump into the queue early!

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Child-friendly Union City

Continuing our travels, we wind up in Union City near a playground with a view of BART. Lunch is at Mr. Kebab, a kid-friendly halal place with a plaza and outdoor seating.

Lots of places to take a kid when outside SF.

- Posted with BlogPress on my iPhone.

Location:Union Square,Union City,United States

Child-friendly San Carlos

Isaac has become quite enamored of the flight simulator gallery at the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos.

I prefer coming down here to buying the same software and hardware at home because of the social component: Isaac helps out with other visitors.

Downtown San Carlos, on the other side of Hwy 101, has a reasonable walking stretch populated with coffeeshops, antique shops, eateries – from Italian to Indian – and an ice cream parlor.

It’s not too far from the Pacific coast, with Half Moon Bay and Pacifica, nor from the walking trails at Crystal Springs.

One could have quite a varied day down here, kids included.

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BlogPress on my iPhone.

Location:Holly St,San Carlos,United States

SFPD Car 1152 Fail

So this morning we’re heading away from the Castro up Market/Portola, tailed by SFPD Car 1152.

The traffic, cowed by the presence of the police car, actually goes at the posted speed of 25-35 mph. (Have you tried driving at the speed limit? It’s an interesting experiment.)

At the top of the hill, at 08;53, we’re stopped by a red light. A full two seconds after the light changes to green not one but two cars sail through against the light!

What does SFPD Car 1152 do? Nothing! Thanks, officer, you lazy piece of work.

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BlogPress on my iPhone.

Location:Serra Bowl,Daly City,CA,United States

365 Posts

Getting up to speed with functional networked blogging software has been fun. Putting it into my daily workflow has been a bit more of a challenge.

My goal is at least one post daily, a la the 365 project, which aims to motivate artists to produce something for each day of a calendar year.

I think that’s close to what I was getting before, albeit in a more batched way. Now I’m trying to add a bit daily. We’ll see…

Heck, if you count the photos of my coffee cup in my lap. I guess we can go for 365 self-portraits as well.

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Decorating the iPhone

The iPhone doesn’t yet allow for live wallpapers (as does the newly-released Google Nexus One) but it’s just a matter of time. It’s not that we need them, but not having them, … :-)

In the meantime, you may enjoy some of the images I’ve collected surfing the ‘net all these years. They’re available* at this Flickr collection: iPhone wallpapers (others’). All of these images are being used without permission. If one belongs to you, please send me an attribution name, URL, or back-story. And, by all means, if you want it removed I’ll be only to happy to do so.

My own images, converted to 320×480 size, may be found at iPhone wallpaper (mine). These are shared with you under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

* One thing you folks in the future won’t believe is how amused we are by how easy it is to share digital content. These images live on my MacBook Pro in iPhone, which shares with Flickr, allowing me to trivially add and delete locally and have it all synchronized. Just fabulous. You will probably live in a world where everything lives “out there” in the cloud, redundantly, with perhaps a local copy. I want to visit you there.

How Apple embarrasses me

I started using Macs before 1984, when the platform was called “Lisa.” It’s been an awesome ride, and I’m nothing but grateful.

But that’s not to say that it’s not been entirely free of frustration. Most of my issues, if I can generalize to a single point of contention, is that they’re developed for the environment of the company’s offices in Cupertino, and not for the real world.

Starting with decades of power connectors which were more fulcrum than useful, levering off when a laptop was put into a lap, to iPhone ringtones which are just too quiet for city life, to the company’s ever-increasing attempts to lock out jailbroken iPhones (which will, ultimately, drive to over to Google’s Android phones), to my latest frustration: the inability to convert iPhone ringtones (.m4r) alert tones back to any other format; I want to make some .aiff files (to convert to .cab files to substitute the built-in iPhone SMS and email arrival tones).

I understand that some .m4r files are copy-protected, but can’t iTunes “just work” and check? No protection, convert.

Sheesh!