Hanging on the fence next to the gates to the loading bay at the Hangar 1 facility in Alameda is this sign. I wonder what caused them to use this wording though? Had there been incidents of truck drivers arriving, ringing the bell and then driving off? Or, perhaps, getting out, ringing the bell and then hopping back in the cab and just driving through the gates?
The mind boggles!
Last weekend MUNI was running this open top trolley along the Embarcadero, apparently as a shuttle service for something. Aside from being a trolley I haven’t seen often, it also caught my eye because it was flying both the Stars & Stripes and a Union Jack flag (it is the one on the far side in this photo).
Not sure who it was shuttling, nor why there was a Union Jack flying on it – anybody know?
A grey, and relatively cold Memorial Day weekend here in Alameda. It actually rained a little on Saturday, was blustery and cold on Sunday and only a little better for Monday.
Today, of course, was back to blue skies and sunshine.
The photo was taken in the small playground area attached to the Ruby Bridges Elementary School here in Bayport, Alameda (even though Flickr still thinks that all the photos I take in Alameda are actually from Oakland).
How can the AT&T network have so many dead spots in the heart of one of the most high-tech areas on the planet?
And look at the signal strength – I had 4 our of 5 bars. I guess when they say more bars in more places they took it literally: the signal is strong, but the service is still unavailable.
Finally got around to uploading some of the photos from our Earth Day weekend trip to Oakland Zoo. Along with the shots of the white handed gibbons (one of my favourite animals at the zoo), you will find shots of macaws, giraffes, elephants, zebra, tortoises, camels, meerkats, alligators, a stick insect and more in my new Oakland Zoo set.
I installed a new app on my N95 the other day from the Nokia Beta Labs: Location Tagger. This is one of the things that should have been built into the camera application from day one on a GPS enabled phone, but I’m glad to see they’re catching up.
The photo on the right is my first test of this new feature. The photo was automatically geo-tagged (so, if you visit the photo’s page in Flickr, you can see it placed on a map). Flickr seems to be confused about the city (it thinks Alameda is Oakland!), but it shows up in the correct place on the map.
Why was I at Starbucks? Well, I stopped by to see whether AT&T had disabled the free Wi-Fi for iPhone users. The special free login page has indeed gone, replaced by the older iPhone login page, though it did still let me on using the iPhone credentials I had stored in my Devicescape account 🙂
Finally, I finally signed up for Twitter, and added the Twitter feed to the left column on the blog. Since it is connected to my IM client (Adium, for those wondering), I can send it short messages about what I’m up to, and they’ll end up here on the blog as well as on my Twitter page.
Last year San Francisco passed a law that made the plastic bags commonly provided by supermarkets illegal. This was a huge step forward in a number of ways, including reduction of the amount of these bags that will end up in the landfills, but most importantly perhaps it will help reduce the number of these plastic bags that end up in the bay and ocean, where they can harm or kill wildlife that doesn’t know what a plastic bag is.
Yesterday though I went to a small supermarket in San Francisco, and found that they were still handing out plastic bags. To side step the law, they seem to have made the bags from a thicker plastic and printed the word ‘Reusable’ on them. As if that will change the behaviour of the people taking them home. The previous type of plastic bags were reusable too, and, like this bag, could be returned to the supermarket for recycling. So, this seems to be just a way to exploit a loophole in a law that was intended to improve our environment. Hopefully, somebody will find a way to close this loophole, and force supermarkets like this one to use only bio-degradable bags, preferably paper ones.
If the paper ones cost more (as a sign in the supermarket suggested), then why not charge customers for them? That might encourage the use of truly reusable bags.
On the way back from Big Sur the other day I stopped off at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and spent a few hours enjoying the aquarium in relative peace (compared to the normal weekend crowds it was very quiet).
These unusual jelly fish are part of the Jellies: Living Art exhibit.
And apparently proud of it. This little Prius was parked in the north parking lot on the southbound side of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Who can argue with that! It is hanging in the organic food market in the SF Ferry Building, which is not where I would have expected to find it, but I’m not going to complain!