Frisco Vista

I’ve deactivated all plugins on this site, which might make some aspects seem a little odd. I was hit by the Pharma hack, which works through plugins (and infects parts of your databases, but deactivating the plugins cures the symptoms). I’ve had a lot on my plate, and I’m not sure when I’ll have the time to fix this. Eventually I will get back to blogging on a regular basis.

Frisco Vista is taking some time off. Back soon.

The city would not at first seem an AskMen kind of place. But they rank it the third best city in the world to live in (after Chicago — hey, they’re men’s men, the cold and wind don’t bother them — and Barcelona, and before London and Sydney). This is mainly, I guess, because it is one of the healthiest sizeable cities, it is tech savvy and has a “culture of innovation,” and the people are educated and smart.

But they’re a little confused about at least one thing. “The city’s boy-to-girl ratio (male: 51%; female: 49%) doesn’t seem promising at first,” they write, “but remember this is San Francisco, so you can shave a good 8% to 10% off the competition right there.”

I guess if you ask men, only the guys are gay.

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Can anyone recommend a good host? I have had too much down time on my sites lately — which wouldn’t be the end of the world except the host’s communication has also been extremely poor — and much as I hate relocating my sites I might be forced to move.

BTW, I hope to get caught up and back to regular blogging this weekend.

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This week we’ve seen images of Market Street, Gough Street, Lombard Street, and Fell Street, all located in the same U.S. city. Which city? The answer is revealed after the jump

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Okay, over the past few posts we’ve seen Market Street, Lombard Street, Gough Street, and now Fell Street. What’s this city?

Here’s a bonus clue: The city we’ve been looking at features a Holocaust Memorial, located across from the U.S. Custom House on Gay Street.

Answer in next post.

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We’ve seen Market Street, Gough Street, and now Lombard Street. Where are we?

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Continuing the series started with the previous post. Where do we find this Gough Street?

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Okay, a lot of cities have Market Streets. Stay tuned for a better clue . . .

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This photo of a guard tower on Alcatraz comes from vgm8383′s photostream.

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This exquisite image taken near Point Reyes comes from Miwok.’s photostream.

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Travels in virtual NoCal

• Asia blooms at Quarryhill Botanical Garden
• An Alcatraz hotel?
• All-Bay Team selected
• San Francisco solar map
• Dennis Richmond signs off
• Photo Tour of a San Francisco Tugboat

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I was siderailed by a medical issue, but now I’m back and blogging.

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Yep, that’s what it is. Some guy was widening his driveway. I’m using the dirt to fill in my swimming pool, which will now be a garden. It will require about ten piles like this one.

A week of travel in virtual NoCal

• Golden State rush
• SF Noir 2008
• Aerial photography in 1906 San Francisco
• Pillow fight in San Franicsco on Valentine’s Day

Link love
Who’s been linking in

• Eye on blogs: not about the election
• Post-election drinkage

This blog was hacked into, briefly, yesterday morning; little harm was done.

It’s important to plug vulnerabilities, which can exist in themes or plugins, older versions of WordPress, or improper configurations. My mistake may have been in being careless about updating my application and plugins.

Another possible vulnerability was the Democracy plugin. It enables you to host polls via WordPress. But because it in effect gives users a degree of writing permission it opens a little gate that might be exploited. It’s cool, but I never used it much, and I’ve deactivated Democracy on all my blogs. If I need to run a poll I’ll just host it offsite, like B in the D. I also followed Matt Cutt’s advice and created a blank index file for the plugins directory so as not to leak information about the plugins that are active.

Here are some helpful links:

• Three tips to protect your WordPress installation
• WordPress Scanner
• WordPress security plugins
• Hardening WordPress with .htaccess

I might not have this absolutely clamped down yet, but it’s certainly tighter than it was.

Notes from a week of travel in virtual NoCal.

• Emeryville mayor, leaving meeting about pedestrian bridge, runs over and kills a pedestrian
• Warriors: crazy, beautiful, dangerous
• J-Pop store to open in Japantown
• Dining with mom
• Andy Ross resigns from Cody’s Bookstore
• Exploring the ghost ship SS Independence (*don’t miss)

It’s a pity — at least from the standpoint of spectacle — that the Sutro Baths, a large swimming pool complex built in the nineteenth century, proved impossible to maintain. The baths were destroyed in 1966, when they burnt to the ground. The Cliff House project has a page with many historic photos of the baths, such as this one:

The baths were the brainchild of Adolfo Sutro, a leading Frisco fat cat who first made his fortune in the Comstock silver mines and ended up owning most of the Western part of San Francisco.

The baths opened to the public in 1898, promoted as the largest indoor swimming facility in the world. There were seven pools with varying temperatures (at ten degree intervals), from chilly to steaming. Trampolines, flying rings, slides, swings, toboggan slides, and diving platforms were placed around the pools for plunging in style.

The vast scale of the baths proved their undoing. Operating and maintenance costs were so high that Sutro’s heirs were unable to keep them running. At the time of the fire they were already in the process of being demolished. The Cliff House Project has before and after photos (and many more photos than I am showing here, as well as links to other sites).

Today the ruins of the baths can be visited. Later I will add one or two of my photos of them.

Dateline Oakland
Murder Suspect Identified through Gang’s MySpace Page

(Is there any need to read the story?)

I had a chance to eat at Tamarindo Antojeria the other day. It’s located 468 8th Street in downtown Oakland. (The nicely restored brick-walled restaurant is in the city’s Old Town district.) Their website is www.tamarindoantojeria.com, and the phone is 510.444.1944.

Although it was a Wednesday the restaurant was very crowded. We arrived early because we were heading for a 7:30 event, so we got a table right away (the one on the left in the picture above), but people who arrived just after us had to wait.

Tamarindo was voted “Best Mexican Restaurant 2006″ by the East Bay Express. But it’s not much like most Mexican restaurants. You won’t find massive burritos here. Instead you get alta cocina, a sort of nouvelle cuisine take on creative Mexican cooking. Small, exquisite dishes, reasonably priced. We had the green salad, which was fresh and tasy, and the mole de tamarindo, which was excellent. Our other dish, a chile relleno was fine, if a tad odd with sour cream and cheese and bits of tortillas that were prepared just to the point of beginning to get crisp.

The food is accompanied by a good wine list, although they ding you a bit on the prices, which are a little out of scale with the food. We had beer, and it accompanied the food perfectly.

At the home page, www.friscovista.com, I’ve posted a new site intro.

Also I’m trying using a linkroll as a navigation element (on that same page). We’ll see how it works.