Creative Problem Solver. Programmer. Bodysurfing. Sometime Comics.
Blogger since 2001.

own yr www rn! #IndieWeb

Victory at Sea

Minor post-session adventure. Surfer got hurt in the water, approached me, side of his head pouring blood. Walked out of the water. Tourist gave up his shirt to use to stanch the blood. I carried the bloody board and we walked to the @lifeguardsofsandiego main lifeguard tower. As always lifeguards were professional and got the fella bandaged up quick and the guy called his wife with his watch.

Links Morn a variety of links

MovieBob has a new video series that is astounding and wonderful: “THIS MOVIE EXISTS”: GINGER (1971), THE CRUSADES (1935), HAPPILY EVER AFTER (1993)–all three are weird and surprising in many ways. I love learning about films at the edges of moviedom!


James shares his self-doubts in a way I find brave. Evening listening:

Asking yourself the question “what can I make next?” is good until it’s not. I am excited by the premise of building something new unless days pass without ideas; then, things get more stressful.

I can’t help with stress beyond expressing the fact that I feel that at times too. But when he shares:

But I am left feeling like I need to explore music from more 2000s rappers, and R&B music.

James blogs on tech nerdery but he’s also among the most raw sharers blogging right now. And heck yes I have hip-hop some hip hop recommendations. Truly many of them are more late 80s and early 90s but still. If you want R&B more generally that’s a far vaster history. You might want to his some soul music along the way. But James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder’s 1970s work, Marvin Gaye are all pretty perennial. James if you ever lack for musical recommendations I’ll try to step up!


Mark Evanier writes about Hollywood Boulevard in his post The Street of Disappointment. I remember well visiting World Book & News (now defunct, mentioned in February) on Cahuenga right off Hollywood in the 1980s and when I worked on Sunset Blvd in the early 2000s I would walk Hollywood on my lunch hours. It’s not the center of entertainment, but it is very Los Angeles and very specifically Californian. From Musso & Franks‘ classic restaurant to Frederick’s of Hollywood‘s huge selection of trashy lingerie (not to be confused with the actual Trashy Lingerie store further west on La Cienega). Oh, and probably those last two links would be inappropriate for work. I do love L.A.

He also mentioned that Junior’s burned down, which saddens me very much.


The Bodysurf Blog is working on a comprehensive history of bodysurfing. Excellent.


Pablo shared bravely this month. I have had the honor of having a fair number of people come out to me in the 1990s and I always felt honored when they shared that with me. And my ex-spouse as part of our slow-motion breakup learned a great deal about their own sexuality and I was always encouraging of them sorting out how they are and how they would like to live. People must be who they are. I’m proud of you Pablo!


And I have no place to put this, but I don’t care for these words: collab, inspo, sammie.


Jeremy Keith on sharing writing on the web:

It’s true that the world doesn’t need another think piece. The world doesn’t need to hear your thoughts on some topic. The world doesn’t need to hear what you’ve been up to recently.

But you know what? Screw what the world needs.

Even if you talk about a sammie collab–that might be inspo for others, like and subscribe!


Also, I don’t agree with every culinary opinion in this Slate piece about burritos but it’s worth a read.


The Web We Want is an intriguing idea, collecting feedback on what tooling and aspects we need and want on the web.


Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle is a thorough expression of what folks might do with Mickey Mouse from Steamboat Willie now that it entered the public domain.


And lastly, I loved researching the Coronado Bridge yesterday. I think the piece turned out well.


Thanks for reading, have a great day!

No, bridges don’t float. Some Coronado Bay Bridge history.

I watched video of the Francis Scott Key Bridge falling this morning. It’s horrifying.

There is a connection to The Wire. Season 2 was set at the ports. David Simon, humanist and writer and creator on The Wire, tweeted this:

Thinking first of the people on the bridge. But the mind wanders to a port city strangling. All the people who rely on ships in and out. The auto-ship imports, Domino Sugar, coal exports, dockwork, whatever container traffic we didn’t lose to Norfolk. Industries. Jobs. Families.


The collapse in Baltimore got me thinking about local bridges here in San Diego. And the main one we have is the Coronado Bay Bridge. San Diego is no longer a major port city. We do have some shipping but most cargo comes into the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. I don’t think much San Diego manufacturing, or even Mexican manufacturing, leaves the Port of San Diego. Many fewer lives depend on San Diego’s Coronado Bridge being in place than on the Key Bridge.

I am from San Diego. I grew up here, in increments. As much as I identify with this place I spent only 5 of my first 18 years here. But I heard the folk tale that the Coronado Bay Bridge “floated.” Wikipedia calls it an “urban legend.”

A decades-old local urban legend claims the center span of the bridge was engineered to float in the event of collapse, allowing Naval ships to push the debris and clear the bay. The myth may have developed as a result of the hollow box design of the 1,880-foot center span, combined with the low-profile barges that made it appear to float on its own during construction. However, Caltrans and the bridge’s principal architect, Robert Mosher, maintain that the legend is false.

Panoramic photo I took in June 2017 from a ferry to Coronado which shows the bridge in the distance.

The bridge itself has an unusual profile. It’s very tall and very high and very thin. So that lends itself to speculation as to why. The other part of the natural speculation is the broad importance of the US Navy to San Diego’s growth owing to Naval Base San Diego. That is, what if 32nd Street is attacked? If a foreign power blew up the bridge how hobbled would the Navy be? And so the answer to “why would it need to float?” would be “because if the Soviets blow it up, we’d have to clear out the debris quickly, so of course when it was designed it was for that purpose. So the logic goes.

There’s a 1982 story from The San Diego Reader: Byrd Thysell, Coronado bridge manager, gives a tour The sky above, the bay below. It mentions that:

A bridge connecting Coronado to San Diego was first proposed in 1926 by the J.D. and A.B. Spreckels Securities Company of San Diego, but Navy opposition (should the bridge collapse, more than one hundred navy ships would be trapped in the southern part of the harbor)

And this:

…Navy opposition began to wane, though as recently as May, 1962 the navy had proclaimed it was against the bridge because “structural failure, sabotage, or disaster” could trap more than 300 vessels, including 120 active-duty ships. IN September the Navy said its worries would end if a second ocean-entry passage were channeled at the South end of the bay. The following month Navy Undersecretary Paul Fay stated that although the Navy would continue its opposition to the bridge, if one were built, the Navy would not curtail its San Diego operations, and if it felt the community really wanted the bridge, all objections would be withdrawn.

And apparently there has been a rumor of explosives planted in the bridge, and also along the strand, to allow naval vessels to leave the bay in the event of catastrophe. Matthew Alice addressed this question in The San Diego Reader on April 13, 1995: Explosives planted in the Coronado bridge: How ships will escape from the bay in case of sabotage. The response is pithy and not full of detail, but those Alice columns always strike me as authoritative:

Most of [Coronado] has been unhappy about the bridge since San Diegans first started discussing it in the mid-1920s.

Even back then, the Navy had real concerns about ships being trapped in the harbor if the bridge were sabotaged. So of course, there’s a contingency plan. Special units of the Navy are trained to clear bridge debris in case of a collapse, and that does include placing explosives in predetermined locations to break up the fallen structure and make it easier to remove. All this was considered during the bridge design, but there’s no dynamite actually built into it.

The 1982 story is a wonder of local and state politics. It also describes that upon opening the bridge the regular ferry service shut down. There are still ferries that run from San Diego to Coronado, but they don’t carry cars. That ferry had been running since the 1880s.

As it is the most important ships the Navy has here in 2024 are aircraft carriers and submarines, and neither category of ship berth in San Diego Bay past the bridge. The carriers berth across the channel from our (civilian) airport. That base is at the northern end of Coronado. And subs berth facing Coronado along Point Loma at the sub base. The 32nd Street base–which I remember as a kid as a bustling base where my grandfather bought ice cream in gigantic cardboard tubs–is less important now than it was then.

I made a diagram of the city with the bridge.

Naval Base Coronado describes itself as:

Unequalled in operational scope and complexity, NBC provides a shore-based platform for helicopters, aircraft carriers, SEAL Teams and other ashore and afloat commands for access to a comprehensive quantity of ground, sea, air, and undersea operational and training space. NBC accommodates the requirements of 16 helicopter squadrons, 2 fixed wing squadrons, two aircraft carriers, four SEAL Teams, Navy Expeditionary Combat Command squadrons, and other air, surface and subsurface commands.

Presumably not having to deal with getting hemmed in by debris or needing to blow anything up to exit the bay is part of that mission statement.

In 2009 I could use Twitter in Lynx. Can I do that in 2024?

No.

This browser is no longer supported. Please switch to a supported browser to continue using twitter.com. You can see a list of supported browsers in our Help

I am directed to the Help Center: Supported Browsers page.

Here’s a screenshot of when I was able to tweet with Lynx in 2009. And the tweet I tweeted.

Do you know what Lynx is? (from 2019)

Surf Sucks: Time For Misc

Ugh.

Surf report for south San Diego is dismal this morning:

It’s a total mess out there this morning as potent storm front continues to blow through the area. A new and strong WNW swell has moved into our areas and is overriding what ever swell activity is out there. Shoulder to overhead sets are the norm with top open areas seeing more solid well overhead waves. Strong rain pockets with a nasty onshore WNW wind means dirty waters and badly blown out conditions. Continued strong High to Low tidal swings just add to todays woes.

So what’s up? I updated my tilde.club page the other day.


I added code the other day to add minimal og:image tag to my site today. I was tired of posting links to my website on LinkedIn, Mastodon, Facebook and other external sites and having it not make great choices about a feature image. All it takes is a single image to be added.

So a preview, here’s one from yesterday, looks like this:

This happens behind the scenes, as long as I set a featured image for the post in WordPress.


Apparently a lot of folks claiming little green men and alien contact were lying. Unsurprising.


On the 60th anniversary of The Incredible Mr. Limpet — a movie I always loved as a kid. That integration of animation and live action was always a favorite thing.


One of the things that is continual bother to me is the extent to which Instagram shapes what we see there. Demoted, Deleted, and Denied: There’s More Than Just Shadowbanning on Instagram from February. This past week saw several people point out there’s a new setting in the app which is defaulted to Limit and that setting is for showing political content.

Political content Political content is likely to mention governments, elections, or social topics that affect a group of people and/or society at large. Limit You might see less political or social topics in your suggested content. Don't limit You might see more political or social topics in your suggested content. This affects suggestions in Explore, Reels, Feed Recommendations and Suggested Users. It does not affect the content from accounts you follow. This setting also applies to Threads.

This change rolled out in February: Continuing our Approach to Political Content on Instagram and Threads which says:

If you decide to follow accounts that post political content, we don’t want to get between you and their posts, but we also don’t want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow.

Frustratingly, it’s not easy to tell whether posts from accounts I have followed have been suppressed. Instagram remains opaque in terms of what we see. I know that in those rare occasions I mention something political the tendency seems to be for those posts to get less comments and likes. There’s a good deal of perfectly plausible deniability by parent company Meta about shadow banning posts in that way.

This is why I prefer to get things from websites people own, and their own RSS feeds. That way, I can see what they post and there’s no mystery.


Yes I’ll read anything Anil Dash writes about Prince. And Letterman too? Oh heck yes: Prince, Letterman and Insufferability. A response to this video:


Google’s mistake with Gemini from Cathy O’Neil, writing on the Google LLM tool that output non-white World War II Nazis with diverse genders and skin tones:

In reality equity and fairness are narrowly defined, contextual notions. When we decide it’s fair to use a FICO score in order to determine an interest rate on a loan, that’s very different from using a FICO score to decide how many weeks of unemployment insurance you should receive after breaking your leg. You cannot decide that “FICO scores are legitimate discriminators” as a universal rule, just as “diverse skin tones and genders” is not a universal good, especially when “diverse” is not even a well-defined notion unless you specify a geographic area or culture.

This mistake that Google made was not a coincidence, by the way. It’s a result of a combination of laziness (as in, they just didn’t think very hard about this) and capitalism (as in, it would be expensive to do this right).

That aspect of technology companies to want to spend as little as possible to do work is the most insidious. That lesson from all five seasons about the truth of human institutions: they want to do more with less, and for many things, you can’t do more with less.


I mentioned my Broadcast Studio Operations class in my post Misc Loquacious Linquacious Cascade:

The class “Broadcast Studio Operations” taught all the skills in a tv studio. We learned to all the parts of directing a tv show, and part of the formal process was to direct camera operators to move to the person talking. To do that the director had to be aware of not just the technical staff but the conversation happening on a “talk show.” With a 2 camera set up you had to listen and be ready for an answer. If Camera 1 was on the interviewer and Camera 2 was on the guest, you listened to the interviewer setting up a question and over the audio channel for the team I would say “Camera 2 go to a closeup on the guest” and then the technical director to “Ready Camera 2” and then to “Take Camera 2.” And when just one person is dominating conversation there’s nothing to do. If the show is a conversation there ought to be a give and take, at least in a show like that. This very technical aspect of making what we called “television” (is it still that?) actually let me hear the flow in a conversation and made me (a bit) less likely to dominate conversation.

I have a photo from that class! Low light. No flash. Mediocre photographer (me):

I had taken a B&W Photography class and dropped it. But I had that Tri-X film and took photos. Years later I had the negatives scanned.


Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot. Chatbots are a great idea and a great cost savings unless they aren’t.

Speaking of Chatbots, remember Microsoft Agent from 1997? I tweeted an image December 6, 2019.

Microsoft Agent. 1997. A helluva thing.

And this, December 6, 2019:

None of it much better than ELIZA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA I do like ELIZAs that will hit the edge of their usefulness and handoff to a human.

What was Agent? Introduction:

Microsoft Agent enables software developers and Web authors to incorporate a new form of user interaction, known as conversational interfaces, that leverages natural aspects of human social communication. In addition to mouse and keyboard input, Microsoft Agent includes optional support for speech recognition so applications can respond to voice commands. Characters can respond using synthesized speech, recorded audio, or text in a cartoon word balloon.
The conversational interface approach facilitated by the Microsoft Agent services does not replace conventional graphical user interface (GUI) design. Instead, character interaction can be easily blended with the conventional interface components such as windows, menus, and controls to extend and enhance your application’s interface.

Conversational interfaces keep happening. Will they ever be big wins? Well, surely eventually, maybe. Or not.

The best thing at the beach today was an older couple giggling at their kite.

QOTD: James

From HTML’s readability, robustness, and intuitiveness:

Indeed, I feel excited when I write, and proud when I have written, a HTML document. The process is relaxing. I can think about what I want to represent — lists, paragraphs, italicised text, and so on — and explicitly state what I want and where I want it. Then, I can start thinking about CSS, but that is another kettle of fish entirely. At the end, I have a web page that shows my content that I can share with others. I really do love HTML.

Same, James, Same.

“Nancy” a short film about Nancy Meherne

The description:

Nancy Meherne, 92, lives a simple life by the sea in Sumner, New Zealand, gardening and hitting the surf on a board made by Christchurch’s legendary gumboot-manufacturing Skellerup factory. The surfboard – made in the 1970s – is a little worse for wear, but Nancy – made in the 1920s – exudes an infectious amount of joy riding the waves on her vintage piece of foam.

Nancy died in 2022.

Here’s the article about her attached to the short film, from The Guardian.

I’ve never heard of her before this morning. Riding waves, riding a bike, dancing to FM radio is the way to be.

Hatchback