Russian Hill is one of my favorite places to go walking in San Francisco, partly because of the proximity to my home and partly because of the amazing views and the variety of things to see. So I was delighted to find an article in the Chronicle the other day about… wait for it… walking on Russian Hill!

Even better, the article is actually a walking tour highlighting specific buildings and their architectural styles. It’s one of the “Urban Outings” columns “presented by Greenbelt Alliance, the Bay Area’s advocate for open spaces and vibrant places, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.”

Article and photos: Russian Hill hike, San Francisco
Greenbelt Alliance


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From my daily perusal of the Chronicle:

Air New Zealand conducted a two-hour test flight Monday in which one of four Rolls-Royce engines on a jetliner was powered by a biofuel blend, another step down the long path the airline industry is taking to reduce carbon emissions.

Engine No. 1 of the Boeing 747-400 that departed Auckland International Airport was fueled by a 50-50 blend of standard Jet A1 fuel – effectively kerosene – and synthetic paraffinic kerosene derived from Jatropha oil, which comes from a shrub that grows in tropical and subtropical areas and is largely used as a hedge plant.

Air New Zealand’s chief pilot, Capt. David Morgan, said the flight went without incident, additional evidence for sustainable sources of oil being used by an industry that produces up to 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

“We accomplished everything we set out to do,” Morgan said in a post-flight interview. “It was a very successful test flight, and Jatropha is a reliable second-generation biofuel going forward.”

More: Airline flight-tests biofuel in a jet’s engine


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From the New York Times:

DARMSTADT, Germany “” From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace.

In Berthold Kaufmann”™s home, there is, to be fair, one radiator for emergency backup in the living room “” but it is not in use. Even on the coldest nights in central Germany, Mr. Kaufmann”™s new “passive house” and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer.

Read More: No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in “Passive Houses”


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From the Chronicle:

The cooks of San Francisco, where sauteing is a sacred rite for some, now have a place to send their used cooking oil without turning the city’s sewer system into a choked maze of congealed grease.

On Saturday, the city kicked off a four-day cooking oil recycling drive, during which residents can drop off their discarded olive oil, canola oil and other kitchen grease for eventual use in the city’s fleet of biofuel vehicles. At the last grease recycling drive, over Thanksgiving weekend, San Franciscans unloaded more than 2 tons of cooking oil.

More: Grease drive: SF turns cooking oil into fuel


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From Trees Have Rights Too:

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Time now to address Planetary Rights.

Just as the humanitarian crisis of the Second World War gave birth to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 60 years ago in 1948, so now we have a planetary crisis that needs to be addressed with equal urgency. Now is the time to call for a Universal Declaration of Planetary Rights.

What happens next is up to us. Our future can be a world where we live in harmony with nature. Our planet is in crisis, and the United Nations are uniquely placed to implement the necessary foundations to create a new world where prevention and protection stand hand in hand.

Trees Have Rights Too is a campaign to encourage the United Nations to take this bold and vitally important step. I hope you will join us in our journey to create our new harmonious interconnected world.

Trees Have Rights Too
Trees Have Rights Too on Facebook


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  • I re-caulked part of the tile seam area around my bathtub. First I got some advice about it from the local hardware and tiling guy then spent some time pulling out the very poorly installed grout/caulk that someone else did in the past and finally I re-did it. It looks so much better, it’s cleaner and it should seal properly now.
  • It’s fascinating to find weirdly installed things around my apartment; some of the items I’ve found are just super bizarre. It’s really satisfying to remove ’em and re-do ’em, though!
  • I was on sort of a roll with the household projects so I installed some new light fixtures in the bathroom, and a new soap dish, too. Oh, and I hung a new clock on the wall.
  • The new pillows and stools look great!
  • I went to set up an extra wireless router for some friends and ended up also pulling out another router and installing the newest version of the DD-WRT OS on it. I first tried DD-WRT a long time ago because it allowed increasing the wireless power output (I was beaming my signal from a 15th floor window to a Starbucks at street level); now DD-WRT has all kinds of new features and is compatible with lots of wireless routers. Neat geeky geek-out wireless networking fun! Check out DD-WRT.

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I tend to decide the final title and URL (slug) of my posts right before I publish, but I often have some other working slug in place while I’m still editing. WordPress cleverly remembers that old slug even after I’ve changed it. That feature makes sense if someone changes the slug of a post that has already been published and wants any links to the old URL to still work. But for me it tends to leave a lot of junk slugs that were never meant to be accessed.

So how to remove them?

First, list the old slugs saved in the wp_postmeta table:

select * from wp_postmeta where meta_key = "_wp_old_slug";

To remove one, delete by its meta_id:

delete from wp_postmeta where meta_id = ##;

To remove them all:

delete from wp_postmeta where meta_key = "_wp_old_slug";

I highly recommend testing on a copy before doing any of this on a live WordPress database.


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