The final shots taken at Fort Funston last Saturday. This time they are not hang gliding related though; behind the viewing deck area there is a fenced off area, in which were a number of these yellow flowers.
Flowers at Fort Funston
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Author Archives: John
Spriggs Rants
There are a couple of nice photos over on my friend Grif’s weblog. The one to the right of an arched bridge with an interesting sky (I like clouds in photos!). The other one is a collage of red and green leaves simply titled vines. Check them out, along with the many other photos he has posted over there.
Updated: Grif’s site moved to a new home and in the move the rants blog is down. The photo blog is still live though, so I have moved all the links to there for now.
Windsock
Another hang gliding photo from Fort Funston at the weekend.
Hang Gliding
Drove up to Fort Funston in San Francisco at the weekend and managed to get some shots of a couple of hang gliders taking off. These guys jump off a cliff just to the left of the observation deck and then soar up into the sky passing the front of the deck. Great for getting in-flight photos!
Interview with a link spammer
Over at The Register they are running an interview with a link spammer. Nothing different than you’d expect:
If you’re affected by this spam, say because you run a blog, or a website, or like the other 99.9 per cent of Net users just come across the stuff, Sam explain the important thing to remember is it’s nothing personal. They’re not targeting you personally.
Or this gem:
“The question of morals is one for the individual. While it’s legal, it will continue. It could be argued that a website owner is actually inviting content to their site when they allow comments.”
Interesting to note the comments towards the end about captchas (tests that are easy for humans, but tough for computers, like recognising random numbers in distorted images). I was thinking about adding one of those to my comments form to slow them down a little more. That said, my current defences seem to be holding up pretty well, so perhaps I’ll leave it as-is for the moment.
Snow Cones
Three pine cone in the snow photos from around the cabin we stayed in at Kings Beach (at the north end of Lake Tahoe).
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2700 Moraga Street
Yesterday afternoon we stopped by an art-deco style house in the sunset district of San Francisco (on the corner of Moraga Street & 33rd Avenue). The house, being offered by Zephyr Real Estate, has outstanding views over the Pacific Ocean and beautiful hardwood floors throughout. Upstairs, the feel is very much art-deco sophistication. The kitchen includes a diner-style breakfast nook. Downstairs, the family room has a wet bar, and wood panel walls, making for a very cabin-like feel.
On the downside, both the kitchen & bathroom would need some updating, and it was a little smaller than we were looking for, especially for the $798,000 asking price. The third bedroom, downstairs off the garage, is also more of an office space. With only a powder room downstairs it is less practical as a guest bedroom.
The shot above was one I snapped as we were leaving the house. The listing on Zephyr’s website has more photos; here’s a few of the interior ones:
 Dining room |
 Living room |
 Kitchen |
 Family room |
 Bedroom |
Links
I added some links towards the bottom of the left column on every page of the blog (well, OK, I re-enabled the links feature in the index template and actually entered both the links and some categories for them into WordPress). For now there are four categories:
- Photography – Links to photography related sites
- Technology – Links to general technology related sites and gadget blogs
- Wi-Fi – Links to Wi-Fi and other wireless networking related sites
- Miscellaneous – Links to sites that don’t fall into any of the three categories above
I will add new links to these lists over time, and I’m always open to suggestions for new sites to list.
Lake Tahoe
Phase 18 – Harbor
Didn’t attend last week’s lottery, but Carl kindly posted the average prices on my blog so I have updated the graph for the Harbor prices. Notice that they were down very slightly this time from last – I assume that this is because of the larger lot sizes in the previous phase bumping those prices up rather than this phase’s actually going down.
I also updated the master plan to indicate that phase 18 has been sold now.
I noticed some comments on the previous entry including the new excuse for the lottery system (the limit on the number of permits that the city releases). This is as weak as the other excuses, but at least points the finger at an external body thereby deflecting the criticism. Why is it weak? Well, they could still maintain a list of people interested in each floorplan, then rather than the lottery they could simply call the next person on the list for each plan. If you don’t want it, you drop to the bottom of the list for that plan.
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