We're "improving" Street View for Google.

edit: new stuff at the bottom of the post
At least, I think we are.

Yall know what Street View is, right? If you look up an address on Google Maps, then click on the little person icon, you get a photograph of that address taken by a SV van that rolled through the neighborhood at some point. Here's a Street View of the 99 Ranch in Daly City.


And here's a house that sits just across the street from 99 Ranch. (At least they don't have to worry about parking!)


Ok, so Google has all these pictures of houses.

Have you noticed how the captcha words have changed? Remember how it was just one gibberish word for a long time, then they went to a two-word system with one scanned-in word from a book and one totally incomprehensible gibberish word, and we all hated it? But then the scanned-in word disappeared, and we started getting numbers instead.











They are cropped-out pictures of house numbers. From Street View. I have absolutely no evidence, except that it looks pretty fucking obvious to me. I have no good theory for why Google is doing this. I'm totally creeped out, but I know that's just a kneejerk reaction. What do you think?


eta:

It's not some anti-spam measure, it's Google using us as mechanical turks. I did a little testing, and it looks like you can fill in any number or letter (I tried up to 7 letters) for the "number picture" part of the capcha.

Badass crowd-sourced fireworks

I know that this is a totally uncool statement, especially among pet/horse owners, but I love fireworks. I deeply, truly, madly adore fireworks. I put aside all my cynical grownup ways and just stare at the sky going "oooooohhh lookit that blue one." When I was in my 20s, I made a point of catching every fireworks show I possibly could - I remember once, G and I saw fireworks in Heber Springs Arkansas, then drove back to Memphis in time to see the fireworks over the river.

Gradually my hatred for crowds and traffic began to conquer my love of big-city firework displays. I think we skipped them in '09, saw them in '10, skipped them in '11, and were skipping them this year too. Except, as it turns out, I saw plenty of fireworks from my back yard.

So last week, when I went to visit Laura, I drove home up the Pacific Coast Highway. It's possibly the most beautiful road in California: a two-lane highway, twisting along the rocky Pacific coast. The breathtaking scenery is nonstop - and right before you pop back into civilization, you go through the quaint little town of Pacifica. Apparently that's where everybody else in the whole metro area goes to buy fireworks, because one of those construction signs sat right outside of town, flashing NOT WORTH IT | $1000 FINE | ILLEGAL FIREWORKS.

When I saw that, I was like "Holy shit, and I thought the $336 red light cameras in Palo Alto were ridiculous. Screw you, California." And I thought no more of it, until last night.

It's a big-deal thousand-dollar fine that appears to be completely ignored by all 7 million Bay Area residents. Everybody shot off fireworks last night. And I don't mean bottle rockets - I mean I saw, from my backyard, at least 20 homes in my little valley shooting off commercial-grade fireworks. Five of them were really over the top and shot off shells for TWO HOURS. It was totally spectacular.

The cats disliked the whole thing, and I was very careful to keep them inside. Cers hates random booms from idiots setting off M80s in the afternoon, but once it got dark and the actual fireworks started, she settled down and watched them with me. She really was kind of interested in the different noises and the colored lights in the sky. It was pretty cool :)

And because I'm a pretty nerdy nerd, the whole experience made me think of this recent Freakonomics podcast. (If you don't want to listen, you can scroll to the bottom of the post and click on the yellow "audio transcript" button.) Clearly a construction sign warning of the $1000 fine isn't doing much to dissuade people, and I did watch those fireworks go off all night and think "well shit, everybody else is shooting off shells, I could totally get away with it too."

Tomorrow I'm going to do a long ride, our last big one before Gold Country next weekend.

Tunnel cat lives in tunnels

You may remember this photo from last month. It's Bambers, the psychotic fluffy cat, inhabiting/wearing a crinkly collapsible cat tunnel.


He still spends most of his time in the tunnel. We bought two more sections, so he has more tunnel to choose from.


He is not to be disturbed.


He ain't right.


He can FLY!


Or stare very creepily at you.


Every now and then, he comes out to sleep on the Flying Saucer Thing.

Don't stop!

Whatever you do, don't stop blogging while you're changing everything else in your life. You will be unable to start again, with each little daily anecdote accumulating in the backlog of Stuff You'll Never Actually Post. Or maybe that's just me - because that is, in fact, what's happened to me.

The Drafts folder of my blog might as well be the Siberian Exile folder. I'll try to bring some stuff back from there but no promises! I'm just going to try to post (or have scheduled to post) something every day for the rest of the month. Not necessarily horse related, no promises of quality, just some blather to get me back on track.

So here's a story about grocery stores.

Shortly after we moved out here, I discovered 99 Ranch, the Asian supermarket in Daly City. We made a few "touristy" scouting trips out there, staring in awe at the live fish and vast selection of mochi ball ice creams and honey-chrysanthemum drinks and black-skinned head-on chickens. I bought some food at Safeway and Costco. I kept thinking about 99 Ranch, and I pulled out this Thai cookbook I've had since 2005. I went on another scouting trip to 99 Ranch and yes, for the first time in my life, I could purchase EVERY ingredient for almost any recipe in the book. So I bought a wok and a rice cooker and started cooking Asian stuff almost every night.

But it was scary. You know how there's signs in the checkout islands reminding the checkers to do (or not do) certain things, like "CHECK BOTTOM OF CART" or "NO HOT FOOD ON WIC CARD"? The ones at 99 Ranch say "GREET | EYE CONTACT | SMILE." Because nobody wants to look you in the eye, smile, or say a word.

It was weird as fuck for a month. I admit, I took it personal at first, complaining to G about how they all hated me at the grocery store, but he pointed out, quite correctly, that nobody talked to anybody if they could help it. They weren't ignoring ME, it's just some Asian big-city protective adaptation.

The food was SO good and SO cheap and I kept going back, and eventually I got used to the people. (Limes for $.20 each. A huge bundle of Thai basil for $2. Like 75 tiny Thai bird chilis for under $2. I could go on forever!)

I didn't realize how used to the people I'd gotten until last week. I went and rode Dixie, and I had a hankering for something from Whole Foods - yogurt, I think - and I went to the Palo Alto Whole Foods. I wandered around and bought a few things. I was a little confused at the Asian food section - one brand of curry paste? one brand of fish sauce? One brand of coconut milk? - but it wasn't really weird til I got to the checkout.

I put my stuff down and handed my reusable bag to the bagger. Then the cashier started talking to me! Nonstop! She asked me what kind of eggplants I'd gotten (is this not your job, to know the produce?) and singlehandedly segued into a monologue about fruits and veggies and coffee and the weather. It was bizarre.

And that's when I realized I'd acclimated to 99 Ranch. Greet, eye contact, smile - totally optional.

House decorating, yet more hooves

Over the weekend we found homes for some of our art.

The dragon:


The unrealistically clean Dixie:


A birdhouse:


Etc.

Then today, the photos of me and Dixie from that photoshoot back in March arrived. Wait, that sounds wrong - we actually ordered them over the weekend, and they arrived very promptly - not that we've been waiting since March.


It's printed museum wrapped on canvas, so framing is optional.


We got the "I can ride!" picture printed too, as a paper print.


I finally came up with a plan for framing my fish ... uh... appliques? Quilted cutout things? I've never seen anything like them and I'm not sure how to describe them - the person I got them from said they were from some village in Central America.


I stretched the white background fabric on foamcore board, then tacked the fish piece on top - that way it stays 3D, and the edges are still visible.


Anyway, I've had them for almost 10 years, and I'm glad I'm finally doing something other than pushpinning them to the wall.


Here's Banders, as a visual palate cleanser. He is snoozing in one of those crinkly collapsible cat Slinky tunnels.



Monday I went out to see my horse. I wanted to ride my horse, but it was not to be. It was raining, and she'd been rolling.


She was quite serious about grinding the mud in to her right side.


"What are you looking at?"


Alas, I had to switch to my backup plan of staring at her feet.

Here's the front left - the thick false sole has pretty much shed out, but somehow over the weekend she sliced off the tip of her frog, too. She wasn't tender at all!




And here's the front right, which hadn't exfoliated ANY of the sole.




Somehow, with my amazingly dull knives and my quite sharp nippers, I managed to unjam the bars a bit.





With any kind of luck, the sole will be cleaner tomorrow...

As you can no doubt guess from the last two pictures, by then Dixie was having none of this stupid photograph-her-feet game. We had a big fight in the wash rack, then I did some ground work for about 45 minutes - getting her to lead nicely on the inside and the outside of circles. Once I finally got a nice inside turn at the walk, we called it quits. I let her graze, and took her over to stare at the Farm Animals. Between Dixie's pasture and the rest of the ranch, there's a paddock with two short, hairy, horned goats, and a paddock with a creepy looking alpaca and the world's most obese steer. Dixie's led past them pretty well for several weeks, but I hadn't let her really gawk at them before. She seemed to enjoy snorting at them.

Hoof nerds

Check out Christoph's post about false sole!

All I have to add is that he's way better at knife sharpening or something, because I couldn't begin to cut Dixie's out.

Almaden Quicksilver: no mojo

I do not know what the deal is. I am still so uninspired to blog, or to comment on my friends' blogs, or much of anything really. Apparently I'm still decompressing or something.

Anyway, on Thursday I went down to San Jose to Almaden Quicksilver park. Very cool info in that link. It was a mercury mine for over a century. There's an endurance ride held there, which is why I went - there had to be enough trail to make it worth the trip.



tl;dr: It was ungodly hot and Dixie got footy.

It was a pretty hilly ride, with a good steep climb immediately. This is about 5 minutes in, looking down at my rig.


SJ is disgusting and smoggy and you can't even SEE the bay. I decided it's spooky and unnatural to see the curve of the earth for the horizon. It is right and proper to see mountains at the horizon. It is acceptable to see ocean. Smoggy land horizon? Wrong.


There was a lot of boring mining road, with really pleasant little singletrack side trails through the woods.


And a lot of very cool mining ruins.


Really pretty place.


So we made it 5 miles out and Dixie said she was through trotting on the rocks. I turned her around and we went back to the trailer at a nice swingy walk. She was sound, no harm done, but she was clearly not comfortable trotting on rocks any more that day.

When we got back to about a mile from the trailer, I hopped off and walked her in. It was hot. It was SO GODDAMN HOT. I haven't been that hot since I 'bout got heatstroke doing nothing at all at Tevis '10. So gross. Humidity is so disgusting. Also it was a 35 degree F swing from our maritime-climate house (59 when I left/got home) to stupid hot smoggy SJ (94 disgusting degrees). This was what I thought of it:



Dixie sweated a lot, but she was aiight, really. She'd have done better with sponging, but I didn't know if there was water out there (there are troughs at a couple of spots that I found).


So after we got back to the trailer and I drank all the rest of the water and had a snack, I trimmed her hooves.

Hoof nerd digression

We headed out barefoot because I couldn't decide what to do about her feet. There's obviously a ton of false sole that's trying to come out, but I couldn't chip it out and I couldn't tell how thick it was and I just couldn't decide how to trim.

Hoof recap (all front right)
Here's immediately upon arrival in CA:


After Tuesday's ride (don't mind the rock, I did get it out)


And that's where I was on Thursday. Obviously that's false sole and it's getting ready to come out, but it was not budging. The best thing I could think to do was ride on hard ground, so that's what I did.

Here's post-ride (and post-prying and trimming)


In person, you could really see the huge chunks of sole that came out - they were at least 1/4" thick. Hard to get pictures that showed it though.


Anyway, now that I finally feel like I know where live sole is, I trimmed her walls down to that level. I pried out what sole I could with my nippers. I'm still wildly unsure about what's going on, but I think her feet are doing ok?


BEFORE side view:


They're definitely shorter!


I know there's tons of white line separation from the sole view, but I think that's normal considering all that sole is trying to exfoliate. She sure doesn't have flaring. Her walls are still like half an inch thick. I think I'd be happy if her heels came down a bit more, and I think they might if that sole finally comes out. I don't see any metabolic problems / event lines. The little hump at the coronet band should smooth out when the sole cracks out and I can actually trim the bars.


Oh! And I encountered a local endurance rider and was rather underwhelmed. She was leading her spotted horse down the mountain as I was riding up. All matching biothane tack, carrying her helmet, leading her horse down a big hill - I asked if she was an endurance rider, and said I was also an endurance rider who'd just moved to the area. And she said there were lots of e-riders out here, and had I signed up with the AERC website? I was like "I'm from Reno, I just haven't done any Bay Area rides" and she was like "oh ok."

Yall.

I was wearing NEON SMILEY TIGHTS, a neon blue long sleeve running shirt, and a helmet. I was riding a horse geared out entirely in biothane, with enormous matching pommel bags. And she asked if I'd joined AERC? Would anyone really dress this idiotically if she hadn't already committed to the sport? REALLY?