I've always loved the pedestrian stairways in SF. They are hidden, magic portals between neighborhoods. Forbidden to automobiles, they are celebrations of a human-scale urbanism that once flourished in the United States but is now all but gone.

Today, I did a walk around the neighborhood that runs over several of them. I took some pictures and just dumped a bunch of images up here. I'm now working on putting together a mashup (I think? I still don't know what that means exactly) using Google maps to show where they are. Maybe someday I'll map them all out.

Went to see Deerhoof play play the soundstrack to films by Harry Smith at the Castro on Thursday night.

I hadn't known anything about Harry Smith, but he seems to have been quite a fixture of the conterculture/avant garde in the Bay Area in 60s. The feature presentation, Heaven and Earth Magic, is black and white stop-motion animation using photographic cutouts. It's a bit like the animated segments on Monty Python, but about 100x stranger.

I'm not quite sure what the movie was about. There seemed to be a narrative thread in there somewhere, but I couldn't quite tease it out. I'm not sure you're supposed to, though.

It was pretty amazing. You just don't see stuff like this anymore, never mind with a live soundtrack by an amazing band. Deerhoof added some sections of retro-electronic chirps (it often looked and sounded like Donkey Kong on acid) as well as some hits from their records. Good good.

The tragic accident on Castro had occurred just a few hours before. After the movie, we emerged onto the street to see burned-out husks of cars and motorcycles and cracked and singed storefronts.

From Ellen's YM status the other day:

I'm trying to joing the Skype revolution. I really like the idea. The addition of SkypeOut and now SkypeIn make it seem like it might be enough to make me finally ditch the land-line.

But I tried to use it call Grace the other night on her Verizon cell phone. No dice. "This area has been blocked. SF005."

What a shock. An industrial establishment tries to sabotage a disruptive technologies that consumers clearly want to use. Just for once, couldn't they just do the decent thing and allow themselves to be driven out of business?

Bad blogger, bad! Going to try do some catch up here...

Ok, going to catch up on some things here. A few weeks back, went to Vegas for work to demo for Forrester analysts. Basically a demo-off - bunch of high tech companies all give a 10 minute presentation, and then they're supposed to give an award to the 'coolest' one.

Went, did the thing, seemed to go ok. Big crazy A/V setup with huge screens everywhere. 1000-person room but probably only 100-150 attendees, which was a little weird. Demo went ok, but clearly was not as slick as, say, Adobe's - their guy obviously had an army of Flash gurus helping him out - but I like to think ours was longer on content.

But after all that, who won? I was waiting to blog to say we won, but we never heard anything either way. Lame.

And they do mean 10 minutes - there's a big scary red digital timer on the stage and on the podium. When it hits zero, the lights go out and the music comes up, whether you're done or not. :o

First official XP dual boot support. Now, even better, real Hypervisor-based virtualization is available.

This will remove the last big barrier to a broader OS X adoption: that one must-have Windows-only application that everyone seems to have. It is going to noticably erode Windows' marketshare. FUD and inertia in corporate IT will counter some of the erosion, but it won't stop it, especially in the home market.

And if Windows Vista sucks as hard as is suggested by early reports (not to mention badly-slipped release dates), it could all set the stage for a 'switcher' stampede over the next couple of yers.

Getting over a bit of being sick, finally took some time to watch the supposedly-best-picture-of-the-year last year, Crash. In light of the accolades it has received, I was awestruck by how bad it was.

And for once, I found some comfort in the fact that a great many people on IMDB agreed with me. Rather than waste more keystrokes on it, I'll just quote the best user comment I found there. I really don't see how I could come up with anything better than this:

I really liked all the parts that weren't crap
5 March 2006
1/10
Author: GuyMourning from United States

you could either watch crash or eat a big pile of crap. As I mentioned, before, I found this movie insulting for all the intelligent people who watched, the blatant stolen concept from the film Mangolia made me want to pee all over the film and jump up and down on it. Killing the creators would not be enough, not until everyone that took part of this film is dead, well this injustice be almost pardoned. I found the smell of the box, to be ugly, and I found the directing to be glossy. I feel as if the world doesn't know the deference between a good film and a pile of crap. If you like this movie, you are now stupid and should, spend the rest of the afternoon questioning your life, because you obviously don't have the basic intelligence to continue existing