Yesterday Maureen and I came across a group of people feeding the "wild parrots of telegraph hill," and they shared some seeds.

More photos here.

Beer Pong (also known as Beirut) has a much more extensive entry in Wikipedia than the capital city of Lebanon, Beirut.

The De Young Museum, of San Francisco, looks really cool from the sky. The twisting tower and unusual angles make it look like an optical illusion.

Here is a photo of the previous de Young, which was fatally destabalized in the 1989 earthquake.

WebCrawler has some craaaaazy URLs. For example, search for 'ruby' and you'll get:

The markup for it's front page is also pretty radical. HTML 3 compatable baby! Rip out the stylesheets, and she looks the same. Makes me nostalgic for the ____ old days.

I've been getting a pretty heavy flow of comment spam since I started this blog, which I guess is the nature of allowing comments. I was blocking comments based on banned IP addresses, but there seem to be a lot of zombie machines out there, making the pool of IPs basically limitless. What I had been doing is hand-pruning any spam that was posted, but that got pretty old after a while. So I finally took the time to add Akismet with the RoR Akismet plugin. Very painless installation, but first you must get an Akismet API ket by creating a wordpress account.

I've also added comments into the normal flow of the posts. It didn't really make sense to me to bury those on another page, especially if they contribute to the content of the post.

If you do try posting a comment, but it doesn't take, that's Akismet producing a false-positive. Try making your comment less spammy.

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at ”

—Oscar Wilde

From the entertaining strange maps blog.

Maureen, Paul, Jessi and I drove down the California coast on highway 1 yesterday. Here are some pictures from our trip. The beach was in Carmel.

More here.

I built a javascript widget that animates a tag cloud to show the increased and decreased usage of tags over time.

If you want to see a demo, or download the script, visit the animated tag-cloud demo page. Here is a screen-shot:

Here are a couple photos from a walk I took a walk a couple nights ago. The first is a shot of Telegraph Hill and the Bay Bridge from Russian Hill, and the second is boats in Fisherman's Wharf with Christmas lights on them.

I accidentally just discovered something awesome about OS X. If you have a touchpad, hold the control key with your left hand, place your right pointer finger in the middle of the touchpad in a solitary position, and slide upwards on the trackpad with your right middle-finger. The effect is the entire OS zooming in and out. This should be really amazing with Leopard's resolution independence.

Here is a screenshot in actual-size:

Digg it!