Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

Sporadic pontification

Fazal

Pablo Designs Brazo LED lamp

2009-05-11 Stuff Reviews

I bought one of these beauties from Room & Board (also available from Design Within Reach) in the bronze finish.

It’s a task lamp with 18 white LEDs. Light intensity can be controlled via a rotary knob, although the lowest level is still fairly bright. The Brazo can be adjusted in 4 degrees of freedom for maximal control. The base and arm are aluminum (available in bronze, natural silver, white and black) with a machined concentric reticular pattern that looks impressive, although I am concerned it will also be a very effective dust trap. Best of all, it’s designed locally in San Francisco by a Venezuelan-born designer.

Highly recommended.

City government waste in San Francisco

2009-05-01 Economics San Francisco Soapbox

A 33% hike in Muni fares was announced today. This will hit the poorest people in the city first, and to add insult to injury, this is accompanied with cuts in service.

San Francisco has a budget of over $6B, about the same size as much larger cities as Chicago or Paris, and exceeding the budget of 20 of the US states. It also exceeds the entire GNP of countries like Mongolia or Georgia (in the Caucasus). San Franciscans get little to show for it in services.

One reason why: SF has over 8,000 city employees making over $100,000 a year (the head of Muni is one of them, making $325,000, or more than US Cabinet ministers who make $191,000). The share of the city budget spent on those high flyers is over $1B…

Feedburner down again

2009-04-30 Web

I just tried unsuccessfully to subscribe to a feed hosted by the annoying bozos at FeedBurner. From my Temboz feed error counters, it seems FB feeds have been failing with 503 errors for at least the last 5 hours or so, par for the course.

Just another reason why outsourcing vital services to the cloud is not always a good strategy.

gondwana ~>GET -eUS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Fooducate
GET http://feeds.feedburner.com/Fooducate
User-Agent: lwp-request/1.39

GET http://feeds.feedburner.com/Fooducate --> 503 Service Unavailable
Connection: close
Server: NS_6.1
Content-Length: 62
Client-Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:31:18 GMT
Client-Peer: 66.150.96.119:80

<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>An Error Occurred</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>An Error Occurred</h1>
503 Service Unavailable
</BODY>
</HTML>

Update (2009-04-30):

It is possible the problem lies with my ISP (although I could replicate it at work as well). I can ping FB from my Joyent accelerator but not from home where my Temboz instance runs.

A work-around is to use the newer Google server feeds2.feedburner.com instead. For Temboz, all you need to do is run sqlite3 rss.db and the command:

update fm_feeds
set feed_xml=replace(feed_xml, 'feeds.feedburner.com', 'feeds2.feedburner.com')
where feed_xml like 'http://feeds.feedburner%';

Anthony’s Cookies grand opening

2009-04-26 Food San Francisco Mylos Reviews

Anthony

Another gourmet treats shop joined the burgeoning scene in the Mission. Anthony’s Cookies opened today to a line that stretched around the corner.

Opening

As one of the officials present said, it takes courage to start a business in this economic climate. Specially in as business-hostile a city as San Francisco, if I may add.

Anthony

Inside the store was a buzzing hive of activity, with the eponymous proprietor busy preparing batches of free cookies for the awaiting hordes. At $5 for a half dozen, these cookies are a steal. I tried the double chocolate chip, it came fresh from the oven and had a strong chocolate aroma and the right texture. All in all, a great addition to a neighborhood that already has more than its share of good places to indulge a sweet tooth. I added him to my Google map of recommended bakeries, ice cream parlors and sweet shops in San Francisco.