Towse: views from the hill

DLGDyer’s Coffee Mug Heaven

… via John Walkenbach’s J-Walkblog which also brought us this hypnotic sight from b3ta. (Caution: Dramamine may be needed.)

Foodie blog alert!

101 Cookbooks.

Ymmmm.

How To Build a Grotto

What You Need to Know

Nine years ago, I teamed up with novelists Po Bronson and Ethan Canin to co-found a workspace for writers. Today, The San Francisco Writer’s Grotto (as we call it) is still going strong. We now have nine writers sharing space in a loft-style building in an industrial part of town. Entertainment Weekly recently called us “One of the few solid literary communities outside the media centers of New York and LA.” Here’s what we’ve learned along the way.

The Grotto

Google adds their first server rack to the Computer History Museum’s permanent collection.

The first Google corkboard server rack, a do-it-yourself contraption which was one of about 30 in our fledgling company’s first data center back in prehistoric, mist-enshrouded 1999. A few specs: each tray contained eight 22GB hard drives and one power supply, and the rack itself required no fewer than 86 hand-installed cooling fans

Those were the days, and they were only five years ago.

Recent estimates (Google ain’t saying) are that Google is running 100K servers with 4 petabytes (mas o menos) of disk storage.

They’ve come a long way, baby.

Jason Kottke created an HTML version of the 9/11 Commission’s Executive Summary with permalinks.

Here’s the link to the Washington Post’s PDF version.

The full report (585 pps!) is available from the GPO as a PDF file.

[via MetaFilter]

[ NYTimes, registration required. Registration is free. Still don’t like that? Check into http://www.bugmenot.com/.]

In California, ‘Garage Mahals’ Are Not Just for Cars

By NICHOLAS GRUDIN

BAKERSFIELD, Calif.

At 6 feet 10 inches tall, the financial consultant Brad Barnes needs a lot of things custom built. His home’s doors are more than a foot higher than standard, and a go-cart he made for himself for fun looks about the size of a Mini Cooper. But what’s most indicative of this man’s need for space is his garage, which with six car bays is at the cutting edge of a trend in high-end real estate: the “garage mahal.”

“If I had it to do again, I’d do 12 — I’d go double-deep,” he said, standing on the gleaming light green epoxy finish that covers the garage’s cement floor.

[...]

The article goes on at length about garage mahals. It quotes Gopal Ahluwalia of the National Association of Home Builders, who claims that in “The West” he estimates that 10% of new houses are being built with four-car garages or larger.

Yow.

Bakersfield has room to spare. San Francisco doesn’t.

We have good friends in San Francisco who have a five-car garage, but that’s an anomaly. They were thrilled to find the home when they were house shopping because not only was it a wonderful old building, but also he needed the garage space. He restores old Alfas and usually has several in various stages of restoration.

In San Francisco, parking spaces are at a premium. Craig’s List even has a category for people needing/leasing parking spaces in the city.

These days it costs $100K+ to call in Add-A-Garage and have your quaint cottage jacked up, your basement excavated, and a garage added underneath. Even at those prices, Add-A-Garage’s business has boomed in the last few years. Neighbors are squawking because each new basement garage includes a driveway that eliminates a section of public curbside street parking.

On Telegraph Hill, many of the dwellings do not have private spaces. Check out open houses on a Sunday and the question is always asked, “Is there parking?” Dwellers park on the street, if they can find a spot (with their $27/yr “A” parking sticker they can park more than two hours at a stretch) or they lease a space nearby.

We lease two spaces in a garage three blocks from our place. One space is primarily used for visitors. The car(s) are usually only used when we are coming in to or heading out of town.

Cost for the leases is not cheap, but we have no alternative (besides giving up cars altogether) because there is no place to Add-A-Garage. Spaces that need tarps because the garage leaks are $50/mo less than non-leaky spaces. If we’d opted for a space nearer to our place, we would be paying an additional $100/mo. If we wanted a covered space closer in, well … the cost would be extraordinary.

Parking is a pain, but the silver lining is that a lack of parking tends to keep the car-mad suburbanites in the suburbs where they can have their four-car garages and drive their white Humvee down to Starbucks for their morning triple grande non-fat caramel macchiato.

The European Space Agency brings news of ship-sinking monster waves.

Think good thoughts for my MINI, which is “in transit” as I write this.

Zoom! Zoom!

We here at Book-A-Minute Classics have come up with a solution. We’ve taken all kinds of great works of literature and boiled them down to their essence, extracting all the filler (and believe me, there’s a lot of it sometimes). In just one minute, you can read entire books and learn everything your teachers will expect you to know.

Check out Return of the King for a taste.

(You have read Return of the King, haven’t you?)

From another blog somewhere along the line, I clicked through a link to Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology.

I read some of his writing, clicked through a couple links and, finally, tapped into his horoscopes for the week of July 22 (which is like um. the week that starts tomorrow!)

OK, fine. I’m not someone who “believes,” but this horoscope would almost get me believing:

You’ll be glad to know you’re coming to the end of the Suffering Season. If you’ve made it through these past few weeks with your sense of humor intact, you now have cosmic permission to give yourself a big shiny reward. To make the best of these last few days, carry Henry Miller’s declaration around with you: ‘Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems painful can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.’

Why should that stun me?

Smack dab on my ‘puter screen is one of Tom Revell’s little yellow Stickies. On that Sticky is written

Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such. — Henry Miller

Weird, eh?

Internet Resources for Writers is included on the Hot Links list at the Cedar Falls High School’s Tiger Hi-Line Online.

Who else is on the list?

• Journalist Express
• Power Reporting
• American Online Columnists
• Arts and Living Daily
• Poynter Online
• IMDB
• Refdesk’s Journalist’s Tools
• ESPN

to name just a few of the sites on the list of twenty-seven links.

Good company.