Yesterday Maureen and I came across a group of people feeding the "wild parrots of telegraph hill," and they shared some seeds.

More photos here.

Beer Pong (also known as Beirut) has a much more extensive entry in Wikipedia than the capital city of Lebanon, Beirut.

The De Young Museum, of San Francisco, looks really cool from the sky. The twisting tower and unusual angles make it look like an optical illusion.

Here is a photo of the previous de Young, which was fatally destabalized in the 1989 earthquake.

WebCrawler has some craaaaazy URLs. For example, search for 'ruby' and you'll get:

The markup for it's front page is also pretty radical. HTML 3 compatable baby! Rip out the stylesheets, and she looks the same. Makes me nostalgic for the ____ old days.

I've been getting a pretty heavy flow of comment spam since I started this blog, which I guess is the nature of allowing comments. I was blocking comments based on banned IP addresses, but there seem to be a lot of zombie machines out there, making the pool of IPs basically limitless. What I had been doing is hand-pruning any spam that was posted, but that got pretty old after a while. So I finally took the time to add Akismet with the RoR Akismet plugin. Very painless installation, but first you must get an Akismet API ket by creating a wordpress account.

I've also added comments into the normal flow of the posts. It didn't really make sense to me to bury those on another page, especially if they contribute to the content of the post.

If you do try posting a comment, but it doesn't take, that's Akismet producing a false-positive. Try making your comment less spammy.

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at ”

—Oscar Wilde

From the entertaining strange maps blog.