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If you want to join me at to a free weekly yoga session each Wednesday morning at The Crucible in Oakland (conveniently 2 blocks from West Oakland BART), send me an email. This isn’t open to the public but if you’re a friend, you’re welcome.

A little bit about the sessions:
Run by Roxanna Shohadaee, doing Vinyasa Yoga, there is music and the room is lightly heated. I’ve been twice and quite enjoyed it.

The Feedly RSS Reader for Chrome should not be trusted. Since they are cheating to get signups, it’s impossible to say what other bad things they are doing behind the scenes with your data.

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The face of spam keeps changing. It used to be email, then blog comments, now it’s comment stuffing (as in “ballot stuffing”). Look at this screenshot and tell me what you think looks fishy:

Let me give you a hint, the exact same comment was repeated word-for-word by over 40 different people in the review section of this Chrome Extension.

I know it’s a near impossible task, but you should always be on the lookout for fake people (AKA Sockpuppets) recommending products. I reported this incident to Google but it’s happened a lot before and it will happen a lot in the future.

An Obituary for CELLspace (via) Go to the original site for pix and other good writings!

CELLspace, community arts center, closed its doors at the end of 2012.

During the late 90s and early aughts, there was no better place to see the Mission District’s artistic, multicultural vibe than CELLspace. San Francisco prankster Chicken John was known to decorate the 10,000 square foot warehouse as a Las Vegas casino; the Flaming Lotus Girls created their first large scale fire installations in the CELLspace Metal Shop, and during Carnaval, the space would burst at the seams from the ritual drumming, colorful rattling costumes and sheer number of teenagers involved in groups like Loco Bloco and Danza Azteca.

Michael Sturtz was so impressed by CELLspace that he named his industrial arts school, The Crucible, after their art gallery.

“The name was inspired by the Crucible Steel Gallery, which was the CELLspace gallery at the time,” he said.
Continue reading ‘RIP CELLSpace’ »

This is completely amazing, my good friend Molly Carocci has received the highest honor possible for a civilian, she has been appointed Poet Laureate of Cheese Weasel Day by the esteemed Cheese Weasel committee!

Visit CheeseWeaselDay.com to read the whole story!

I’m honored to see that the esteemed committee discovered Molly’s poetic talents from my own blog!

Join me for the Crucible’s spring open house, it’s free! 10a-4p this Saturday April 6th.
Email me! Check out the online flyer.

You may have heard through the grapevine that Megan and I are getting married!

Now we’re looking for engagement and wedding jewelry! It’s quite appropriate for us to either make it ourselves or have it made custom by a local jeweler. If you or someone you know can help with either of these ventures, we’d love to hear from you!

She said yes!

I’ve received so many comments from people about how to beat a speeding ticket in New Jersey in my first post and my followup post that I opened up this third post for comments. Note that everything you need to know is in my first post on the subject. You don’t really need to read this third post.

That said, feel free to add your own comments. Do not ask a question like the following, those issues have already been covered many times. Read the post!

I got a speeding ticket in xxx. I was going xx in a xx zone. I shouldn’t have gotten the ticket because xxx and xxx and xxx. How do I get out of the ticket? What should I do?

If this information saves you $500, I would appreciate a $5 donation. Don’t send me anything until AFTER you have been to the courthouse and saved money! Here is a Paypal donation link:

Last week I went in to Cole Hardware looking for discounted compact fluorescent light bulbs. You see, PG&E has this CFL subsidy program where you can get a CFL for $1 instead of the market value of $6-15. They were out and the guy said, “Hmm, we had them for a long while but I think PG&E stopped doing it.”

(update, I just checked the PG&E website and I see a lot of retailers are in the program, and some of the large chains (Lowes, OSH, Home Depot) have LED bulbs in the program too. Cool)

This got me thinking…

My initial thoughts are that it’s kind of OK that this program is winding down. Now everyone is familiar with CFL bulbs, the price of CFL bulbs has come down (they used to be $20+),  and just as importantly, CFL bulbs now have real competition on store shelves from the new LED bulbs.

This got me thinking…

LED lighting has really taken off. Last month I noticed that Sausalito’s streetlamps are all LED (if you squint when looking at the fixtures, you can see that it’s like 50 tiny LED bulbs instead of one big sodium bulb. I saw that a good portion of the Westfield Mall in San Francisco is lit with LEDs. At the same time, the LED lighting industry is a bit like the wild west. For instance, when I was chatting with the guy at Cole Hardware, he walked me over to a cabinet that was lit in LEDs. They had all gotten very dim just two years after installation (update: I think it’s the power supply and not the LEDs, the LEDs wouldn’t have all dimmed so evenly together). Big companies like GE are touting their LED lighting systems.

It’s interesting to compare the lighting side-by-side

type          lumens per watt
Incandescent    14
Halogen         18
CFL             60
LED             70
Hi pres sodium  90
T5 fluorescent  100

CFL vs LED… that’s a surprisingly meh-worthy difference. And regular fluorescent tubes are more efficient than LEDs! LEDs are getting better… they have 200 lumen per watt LED bulbs in the laboratory.

But right now it’s kind of a wash.

I did not expect to see that!

Read the whole thing (and watch the video!) on TheVerge.com

We asked Pauline how he managed to get an invite, and he gave us the following response:

“Easy, my mother in law was in Congress for 20 years and I passed the background check due to my spotless record!”

(Previously)