Software and Opinions » sanfrancisco

A Modest Proposal regarding littering and the homeless

Ian McKellar — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 21:18:52 +0000

In SFist I read that Scott Weiner, my district supervisor wants to give our San Francisco homeless brethren food stamps instead of cash when they bring bottles and cans in for recycling. I think he’s thinking about it all wrong. What we should do is deputize all of our homeless so that they can issue littering fines. Pay them a small percentage of the fine as a bounty. Give them cheap video recorders to collect the evidence. It would solve our littering enforcement problem and help address the poverty of some of the poorest members of our society.

The Julie Project – moving story of a mother, drug addict and AIDS sufferer

Ian McKellar — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 22:47:58 +0000

I first met Julie on February 28, 1993. Julie, 18, stood in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel, barefoot, pants unzipped, and an 8 day-old infant in her arms. She lived in San Francisco’s SRO district, a neighborhood of soup kitchens and cheap rooms. Her room was piled with clothes, overfull ashtrays and trash. She lived with Jack, father of her first baby Rachael, and who had given her AIDS. She left him months later to stop using drugs.

via Darcy Padilla | The Julie Project.

Bikes of San Francisco (by Tor Weeks)

Ian McKellar — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 19:00:37 +0000

Free Technical Books, Online

Ian McKellar — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 23:56:39 +0000

(Inspired by James Tauber, I’m going to try to write a blog post every day for November. Some of them will be here but others will be over on my personal blog.)

When Oreilly originally launched their Safari Books Online service in 2001 I was really excited. I love technical books but they’re expensive to buy and heavy to carry around. It turned out that they were expensive to read online too. Full access to Safari costs almost $500/year and a limited ten-books-a-month plan costs over $250/year. I don’t spend nearly that much money on technical books as it is, and while I’d save some time over just Googling for information that’s available freely online I’m basically a cheapskate.

Today I noticed that San Francisco Public Library offers access to SBO. A bit of digging showed me that the Oakland Public Library (where my lovely wife works) also have a Safari subscription. With my library card number I can about a third of the books on the main site – but that seems to be a broad and deep collection. There’s no downloading and the lynda.com videos aren’t available. But the price is great.