HOW_2745
Originally uploaded by how3ird.

The photo walk was a LOT of walking, in balmy 86° sunshine, pretty blue sky with whispy clouds. We started at the silent film museum, formerly Charlie Chaplin's Essanay Studios, walked under the RR tracks to the railway depot and toured the SF Railway Museum's display of half a dozen historic cars, then hoofed it across to the other side of Niles to the dog show at the park.

There's a separate small set of photos here of the Railway Post Office car.

CBS coverage with Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite 40 years ago tomorrow

Live coverage begins @8:01 "The Eagle has wings"


@1:50 "The Eagle has landed"

From Congressperson Anna Eshoo:

E-Newsletter July 16, 2009 Greetings! I'm writing to invite you to a special Town Hall Meeting to discuss the issue of High Speed Rail. Experts from the High Speed Rail Authority and Caltrain will make presentations and answer the many questions related to what is being planned. The meeting will be held on Saturday, July 25th at the Menlo Park City Council Chambers, 701 Laurel Street, Menlo Park, from 2:00 to 3:30p.m. The location is wheelchair accessible and there is parking nearby. For more information, you can visit my website at http://eshoo.house.gov or call our District Office at (650) 323-2984 or (408) 245-2339. If you're not able to attend, the Town Hall Meeting in Menlo Park will be Webcast live at http://eshoo.house.gov and I will take questions from Webcast viewers. Anyone with a question they can email it to me at AskAnna@mail.house.gov.

...and wondering if Harry Potter is really the bastard grandson of Col. Sherman T. Potter. They wear almost identical glasses.

OMG, Pixelpipe flipped it sideways.

The evening's Netflix DVD was Milk. Sean Penn is outstanding. Most of the rest of the cast is not. Victor Garber didn't get much screen time as Moscone, which was a blessing. He is about as much like Moscone as Cate Blanchett, only not as pretty.

Technically, the film sucks lemons through multiple garden hoses, sometimes simultaneously. Truly crappy cinematography, audio levels which jumped all over the place, I finally gave up and turned on subtitles. The black and white clips they showed at the start are disgustingly gratuitously artsy fartsy - all the TV news was in color 10 years before, this was not the 50's. The clips were poorly edited and should never have left the junior high art film project they came from.

The ending was also a study in how not to build suspense, how not to tell a story. The slo-mo at the finale was just stupid. And I never liked Tosca anyway.

The basic story is compelling, Penn carries the show well enough to make it worth seeing. The crowd scenes were impressive. I wonder if rackstraw ever found himself among those thousands of other extras.

There is a lot of history in there which I either had not known or had completely forgotten. At the height of his fame I was overseas, I didn't hear the story till I moved to CA a few years later, Dianne was Mayor.

I knew if I kept looking someone would post this on YouTube. I made the mistake of recording on my G1 phone with a 3rd party app which records in some broken form of motion JPEG which none of my 12,437 video apps can decode. I can play it on the phone, but that's all. So, here for your enjoyment is someone else's phone cam recording, a lot closer than I was.

AstroDude, a NASA astronaut I follow on Twitter, recently twitted: Why don't people understand that there is no point to non-scientific polls? I guess he doesn't understand people value their own opinions and just want to be heard. So in his honor, an unscientific, pointless poll:

Poll #1425654 Pointless Poll (hic!)
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

My favorite form of alcoholic refreshment is:

When I drink hard liquor, I prefer

My favorite liqueur is:

My favorite cocktail/mixed drink is:

When I drink wine, I prefer

When I drink beer, I prefer:

Edit add: oops, stupid poll builder ignored the 30-character setting for the fill-in-the-blanks, so just leave a comment if you have favorites.

"America The Beautiful" being played by the SF Symphony in the background.

40 minutes after the event, Shoreline parrking exit line is still wall2wall stop lights

Went to a bbq hoping to get some baby back ribs but they ran out of babies