Dullroar

From my parents: Pneumatic Vacuum Elevators - Home Elevator Sales, Service, and Installation . Residential Elevators for new or existing homes. You know those pneumatic tubes they used to use in stores and offices? Well, now they do that for people. It's like Futurama! Key quote from the web site: "on electricity cut-off the vacuum elevator automatically descends to ground floor." Yeah.

And from my sister: a knitted elvis wig pattern. Face it, you've always wanted Elvis hair. If you can't (or don't want to) grow it, now you can knit it.

Posted by Andy at 08:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Well, been a slow week here at dullroar, because the rest of my life has been hectic. Of note: an elderly woman in a Toyota Prius gave me the finger on Thursday.

Posted by Andy at 08:06 PM | Permalink

At Market St. and Duboce in San Francisco, thee's a trippy mural (shown at right - click on it for a larger version) all about the wonders of reading. I especially like the way the books blend into houses. As Joe pointed out, this mural has something in common with the South Side Goodwill mural that I blogged about back in February. That mural is also about books (and the weird faded bluish green people who reach for them). I think I like the style of the Pittsburgh mural, but the San Francisco mural is a lot more lyrical.

The books in the picture are: Chaim Potok, "The Chosen", Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "100 Years of Solitude", Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", "The Art Book", Cervantes' "Don Quixote", J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye", and Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". An eclectic mix, but all good.

Now that you've put up with my hack criticism, for more information about the mural, try this page. It's evidently part of a larger "Bay Area Mural Awareness Month" program. That's one major difference between Pittsburgh and San Francisco's murals: SF murals are usually documented somewhere. I keep trying, but finding information about Pittsburgh murals is always a challenge. (Disclaimer: I only look for information about the web, so differing amounts of Internet penetration into various cities yadda yadda yadda blah blah blah, don't sue me.)

Posted by Andy at 02:06 PM | Permalink

On the way from one side of San Francisco to the other, Joe and I passed Arriba Juntos's building (on Mission between 14th and 15th), which is painted with an amazing mural (shown at right - click on it for a larger version). The rest of the block looked a little desolate, which only emphasized this mural. On the lower right of the mural, there's a scroll with some writing on it:

We're blessed to have a mother who comforts our souls with summer breezes, cleansing our bodies with every drop of her sows. Respect her kindness, her love, and her nature. Never throw oil into the stormdrain and always recycle... don't allow the sacrifices made for the future and offered by Earth to have been in vain.

To end on a random note, Arriba Juntos seems to go by its initials, AJ. My hometown synagogue, Adath Jeshurun, also goes by AJ.

Posted by Andy at 02:03 PM | Permalink

Gizmodo has a blurb and some pics of trompe l'oeil murals on decorated telco cabinets. Awesome.

Posted by Andy at 03:50 PM | Permalink

Remember how I said that awful billboards urging us to give blood had invaded Pittsburgh? A while after I posted, they disappeared (not that my post had anything to do with it). But another billboard along the same lines has appeared (see the pic on the right), and this one is even more disturbing. There's the sappy "thank you for my blood" message, same as last time. And there's the sappy kid, same as last time. But what's that propped against the kid's chest? Why, it's a plastic bag of blood! You know it's happy fun time when Ma and Pa take the blood out of the fridge and let the kids play with it. Or perhaps this kid sidled up to the counter at the central blood bank and asked for a pint to go, stat. (Though really, the kid looks so spacey I doubt he even knows he's got a bag of please-let-it-be-fake human blood on him.) What are these people thinking? This is just sick and wrong.

Posted by Andy at 08:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

On the side of the building at 421 Main St. in Half Moon Bay, California, there's a mural that "pays tribute to the traditions, hard work, and spirit of the men and women who founded the Coastside." Or at least, that's what the plaque next to the mural says. It's interesting how the artists pieced together the component images collage-style. And who could argue with a picture that puts the church on one side, the jail on the other, and the people in between?

By the way, the mural was painted by Adriana Gallego and Claudio Dirochea. You can click on the image for a larger version, but I have to say, there's a much better version of the picture online, here. I think the photographer for that picture used a ladder to escape horrible perspective skew (tm).

Posted by Andy at 10:38 AM | Permalink

On the corner of Brody where it crosses Market in San Francisco's SoMa section, there's a video game mural painted on the side of an antique shop. There's Donkey Kong, Q*Bert, Space Invaders, ghosts from Pac Man, an Atari joystick, and don't miss the "1 UP" and "2 UP". And as Joe pointed out, the Mercedes coupe that's parked below Q*Bert probably dates from about the same era as these video games.

The picture at right is just a detail from the mural. Click on it for the whole shebang.

Posted by Andy at 10:57 PM | Permalink

Last week it was a good 25 degrees warmer in San Francisco, which made it optimal mural-hunting weather. I'll be posting mural pictures over the next week or so. As the picture on the right shows, getting around in San Francisco is not simple. Mad props to my pals Joe and Sarah for supporting the insanity.

Also, I can now boast that I've been to the Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia. When we walked in, the proprietor asked "Are you pez collectors?" I replied, "Not yet."

Posted by Andy at 08:41 PM | Permalink

This CNN article, CNN.com - Bush wants cheap high-speed Internet access for all by 2007 - Mar 26, 2004, is all about how Bush wants us all to have access to broadband by 2007.

Ok, the first problem is that "broadband" is an almost meaningless term. Does he mean broadband like we have today, with downloads of a paltry 1 Mbps? I think it's safe to say that 1 Mbps in 2007 is going to be just like getting a brand new Pentium II today. In other words, so slooooooow that it's useless. And what does it mean to have "access" to broadband? Making sure the nearest library has a link? Or truly making it affordable for everybody? Who can say?

DSL and cable modems aren't fast enough for the latest apps (streaming movies, serving multi-player games, videoconferencing), and the result is that the best apps aren't being deployed (or even built!) because only a few college kids would have the bandwidth to use them.

What the U.S. needs is a real broadband policy, not just a promise to deliver late-90's technology to people by 2007. Whoever understands the technology best will be best able to make use of it. Take cell phones as an example. The leaders in the handset business are from places where cell phone use has taken off. Not the U.S., where cell phone penetration is comparatively low, prices are high, and the latest apps like mcommerce are still almost unheard of.

The U.S. needs a plan to get to (at least) 100 Mbps access as soon as possible. If we don't create the environment in which the next generation of network technologies can thrive, then we're going to see those technologies developed somewhere else. You think outsourcing is bad? (It's not, but that's another rant entirely.) Try watching another country innovate better than the U.S.

What surprises me about Bush is not just that his ideology is so foreign to me (I'm a Democrat, so I expected that). What surprises me is that he's doing a demonstrably bad job. Broadband? Please. Mars on a couple billion bucks? Yeah right. Adequate resources for rebuilding Afghanistan and Iraq? Don't even get me started.

Posted by Andy at 04:02 PM | Permalink

This week I'm in California, hanging out in the bay area for a project meeting and seeing friends. I spent a couple hours between meetings in Tilden Park this afternoon. Perfect weather and a spectacular view. I keep forgetting how beautiful the bay area can be.

Posted by Andy at 01:33 AM | Permalink