So much for the daily updates. I have been taking an awful lot of pictures and video (with my Flip mini) but various events have conspired to either prevent or discourage me from actually posting. Fireworks followed lighting of the Olympic cauldron at Canada Place. We attended Ladies Moguls on Saturday and Mens Moguls on [...]

So much for the daily updates. I have been taking an awful lot of pictures and video (with my Flip mini) but various events have conspired to either prevent or discourage me from actually posting.

Fireworks followed lighting of the Olympic cauldron at Canada Place.

We attended Ladies Moguls on Saturday and Mens Moguls on Sunday at Cypress Mountain. There’s more to say about Cypress Mountain but I’m not going to go into it here because it’ll only raise my blood pressure. Do a Google News search for “Cypress Mountain” and you’ll get the gist.

Canadian Moguls star Jennifer Heil prepares for her silver-medal winning run.

We’re persevering, though, and have replaced most of the canceled tickets with other events in town. Mostly hockey. We’ll be seeing a lot of hockey, both Womens and Mens. Speaking of which, why are the skiing events for women called “Ladies” but the hockey events are called “Womens”?

Face-off near the end of Womens USA vs. Russia hockey at UBC Thunderbird Arena.

The aspect of this trip that’s making all the ticketing troubles fade away is the restaurant and bar scene here in Vancouver. The Gastown area, where we’re staying, is almost nothing but pubs, restaurants, bars, etc for several blocks in every direction.

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Not to mention many, many more places in the downtown area and other neighborhoods. We’ve been here six days, have been to a minimum of two different places per day (no repeats) and there’s no end in sight. At some point I’ll list them all here; I have saved all the receipts both for reference and to apply for GST refund when we get home.

The lights of Gastown as viewed from near the Gassy Jack statue.

There’s plenty to do outside of eating, drinking and the occasional Olympic event, of course. VANOC has set up two “LiveCity” locations, one very close to us in the downtown area and one a bit further away in Yaletown. We found ourselves near the Yaletown location on Tuesday night and stuck around for a while to watch some event coverage, medal ceremonies and a musical act. One of the songs they played might be familiar to longtime Disneyland fans…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3txwe0oH_54]

Today is an off day, with no events scheduled (or canceled…) so we’re doing some more exploring. Vancouver is much like San Francisco in that it’s very walkable, but unlike San Francisco the hills are merely “hills” and not “nearly vertical summits”. Public transit is free to visitors during the Games and we’ve used that a few times, but are mostly walking from place to place.

I’ll continue adding pictures to this photo album every couple of days, and do blog updates when I can. You might be interested in following my Twitter feed at least for the duration; most of what ends up in blog posts is Tweeted live as it happens.

The “comments” section under every SFGate.com article is a cesspool (I’m not the first person to say this but I can’t immediately find where it was said first) filled with hate, bigotry, trolling and various evil. Sure, you don’t -have- to click through to the comments but SFGate helpfully shows the three highest-rated comments below [...]

The “comments” section under every SFGate.com article is a cesspool (I’m not the first person to say this but I can’t immediately find where it was said first) filled with hate, bigotry, trolling and various evil. Sure, you don’t -have- to click through to the comments but SFGate helpfully shows the three highest-rated comments below each article–and the worst, and most prolific, commenters have hacking scripts that artificially inflate their comments’ ratings. Here’s another view on SFGate’s comment section: link.

Feeling that “out of sight, out of mind” is a good policy, my first UserScript hides several DIVs associated with comments on SFGate article pages. Here’s the source:

// ==UserScript==// @name SFGate-NoComments// @namespace http://www.userscripts.org// @description Hide comments on SFGate.com articles// @version 0.2// @include http://www.sfgate.com/*// @copyright 2010+, Andrew Rich (http://www.project-insomnia.com)// @license (CC) Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/// ==/UserScript==

var commentsDiv = document.getElementById('commentspage');commentsDiv.style.display = 'none';var commentslinksSpan = document.getElementById('commentslinks');commentslinksSpan.style.display = 'none';var commentBoxWrapperDiv = document.getElementById('articlePageCommentBoxWrapper');commentBoxWrapperDiv.style.display = 'none';var recCommentsDiv = document.getElementById('sfgate_recommended_comments');recCommentsDiv.style.display = 'none';var commentsListDiv = document.getElementById('commentslist');commentsListDiv.style.display = 'none';var commentsContainerDivAttrs = document.getElementById('Comments_Container_viewall').attributes;commentsContainerDivAttrs.getNamedItem('class').value = '';var commentsContainerDiv = document.getElementById('Comments_Container_viewall');commentsContainerDiv.style.visibility = 'hidden';

I hope this is useful to you and thank you for reading. You can install it easily from the UserScripts.org link above. Tested in Safari 4.0.4 (5531.21.10) with GreaseKit 1.7 on Mac OS X 10.5.8 Build 9L30. Should work in other UserScript-supporting browsers (Firefox, Opera, Chrome “Dev Channel”) without issue.

Chinese take-out Like many dishes that are combinations of many ingredients, a day or so in the refrigerator gives the flavors a chance to meld and deepen. One day later, it’s better than it was when we brought it home. My favorite local Chinese take-out place is Jing Jing, on Emerson St in downtown Palo [...]

Chinese take-out
Like many dishes that are combinations of many ingredients, a day or so in the refrigerator gives the flavors a chance to meld and deepen. One day later, it’s better than it was when we brought it home.

My favorite local Chinese take-out place is Jing Jing, on Emerson St in downtown Palo Alto. They specialize in hot-and-spicy Szechwan Hunan‎ cuisine and, barring a couple of missteps, almost everything I’ve tried has been very tasty and well executed.

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Adobe Acrobat Reader doesn’t provide an uninstall utility on Mac OS X (despite claiming to do so on their support site) and after installing it for a single test, I wanted it gone. Following are the steps I took to remove Adobe Acrobat Reader from my MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.7). Note [...]

Adobe Acrobat Reader doesn’t provide an uninstall utility on Mac OS X (despite claiming to do so on their support site) and after installing it for a single test, I wanted it gone. Following are the steps I took to remove Adobe Acrobat Reader from my MacBook Pro running Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.7).

Note that these instructions will likely remove all Adobe software, including AIR if you have that installed; AIR is installed automatically (and without telling you) with Acrobat Reader.

Delete these folders from Finder:

• /Applications/Adobe Acrobat
• /Applications/Utilities/Adobe Utilities

In Terminal, type sudo find / -name *Adobe*
From that list, delete these:

• /Library/Application Support/Adobe
• /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin
• /Users/(your user account)/Library/Application Support/Adobe
• /Users/(your user account)/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Acrobat
• /Users/(your user account)/Library/Caches/Adobe
• /Users/(your user account)/Library/Logs/Adobe
• /Users/Shared/Library/Application Support/Adobe

In Terminal, type sudo find / -name *Acrobat*
From that list, delete:

• /Users/(your user account)/Library/Caches/Acrobat

Reboot. I don’t like having to, but several of the Adobe components were locked or in use and I couldn’t completely delete them. After rebooting, a sample PDF linked from a Web site opened in Safari via Preview, and a downloaded PDF opened in Preview standalone just like they used to.

Right now it looks like I got everything, but I’ll update this post if I find any more remnants.

I barely knew my great-uncle Isadore Berson, having only met him a few times–though he did send us a generous wedding gift–but we did inherit three of his large nature prints when my grandmother Sylvia passed away a few years ago. I just hung one of them in our newly-completed SunPorch and thought I might [...]

I barely knew my great-uncle Isadore Berson, having only met him a few times–though he did send us a generous wedding gift–but we did inherit three of his large nature prints when my grandmother Sylvia passed away a few years ago. I just hung one of them in our newly-completed SunPorch and thought I might Google Uncle Izzy to see if any of his work was online. I was certainly surprised and pleased to find this small collection on Flickr–I don’t know Crick3 but I am glad to see that family members asked him to scan and post some of Uncle Izzy’s work.

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=69832