Install a majestic artistic fountain on top of the Salesforce tower

The San Francisco skyline has been forever changed by the large erect Salesforce tower thrusting up into the heavens.

While it is a glorious sight to behold, I think we can make it better!! I propose to install an artistic fountain at the tip of the tower (above the shaft). To conserve water we will build 2 large spherical water tanks at the base of the tower that will collect and recycle the water as it flows down the shaft of the building.

Please sign this petition to show your support for helping us beautify the tower and the skyline!


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SF SPCA uses walking butt-plug to terrorize the homeless.

The city ordered the SPCA to keep its robot off the sidewalks or face a penalty of up to $1,000 per day for operating in the public right-of-way without a permit.

"We weren't able to use the sidewalks at all when there's needles and tents and bikes, so from a walking standpoint I find the robot much easier to navigate than an encampment," Jennifer Scarlett, the S.F. SPCA's president, told the Business Times.

Once the SPCA started using the robot on the sidewalks around its campus in early November, Scarlett said, there were no more homeless encampments. [...]

The people in the encampments showed their displeasure with the robot's presence at least once. Within about a week of the robot starting its automated route along the sidewalks, some people setting up a camp "put a tarp over it, knocked it over and put barbecue sauce on all the sensors," Scarlett said. [...]

The robot is a K5 unit and has a top speed of three miles per hour, according to Knightscope's website. The units are more than five feet tall and weigh 400 pounds. They are equipped with four cameras, "each capable of reading up to 300 license plates per minute" and sending alerts when trespassers or people on a "blacklist" are in an area. [...]

Having humans replace the robot's 24/7 shift would be "cost prohibitive," though, Scarlett said. The robot costs about $6 per hour to rent, she said. The minimum wage in San Francisco is $14 per hour.

Gosh, that sounds "prohibitive". I guess they have "no choice" in the matter.


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DNA Lounge: Wherein Santa wants you to donate, and Santa wants you to write blurbs.

I hope you love this image as much as I do:

I hope you love it so much that you share it with all of your friends so many times over the next few weeks that they get so sick of seeing it that they go fiiiiiine I'll donate already, geeeez!"

We would be eternally grateful if you would sign up for the DNA Lounge Patreon on a recurring basis, but if you'd like to make a one-time donation, that works too!

Even though we're now a Legacy Business, we still need your financial help. Hopefully you've been enjoying those awesome sound upgrades that we just made, but they did not come cheap. As I mentioned on the occasion of our thirty-second anniversary (!!!) in addition to this traditionally being a very slow time of the year for our business, we also recently had some really expensive equipment failures and plumbing disasters to contend with. So we very much could use your help.

But of course one of the best things you can do is to just show up! And bring your friends. We've got a lot of cool stuff going on this month, check it out:

Anyway, blurbs. Santa wants you to write blurbs.

We do a number of DJ events, and it's always difficult getting blurbs written for them. Most of them just have a repeating blurb describing the party in general terms, without describing the artists at any particular event.

For some parties, that makes plenty of sense. Some parties are the sort of event where people show up on the reputation of the party itself, and the majority of them don't have a particular interest in who is DJing that night: they just know that the music they will hear is their kind of thing.

But there are other parties where the headliners are touring DJs, and people care deeply about them in particular. When I look at the comments on these parties' Facebook events and on Twitter I see a lot of people being extremely concerned about set times, because they're here for that one particular DJ that they really don't want to miss. It seems to me that parties like Control, Acid Rain, and So Stoked are very much the kind of events where the specific DJs tend to have enthusiastic fans of them personally.

But we rarely end up having blurbs for the headliners. If the promoters do write a blurb for the specific event instead of re-using the generic one, it's typically just, "Come party party party mind blown party" without any, you know, adjectives. (Hey, blurbs are hard to write. And the artists themselves rarely bother writing their own bios.)

Even though our traditional division of labor with outside promoters is that we run the venue and they, you know, promote, it's a group effort, and we try to help out in any way we can. So we do things like sending email to past ticket buyers saying, "Hey, you bought tickets for Control last time, with DJ So-and-So, the next one is coming up with DJ Other-Guy." But these emails go out and.... they don't tell you anything about DJ Other-Guy, because nobody wrote that blurb.

I gotta believe that if someone is obsessive about DJ So-and-So but have never heard of DJ Other-Guy, that there are words we could say to them that would improve the odds of them coming to the show.


Are you a musical obsessive who enjoys many of the modern forms of EDM that we've been hosting here of late?

Would you like to write short blurbs for us? Mail me!

Compensation will be proportionate with how good at it you are!

Omar has been writing them for our rock shows and doing a great job of it, but we could really use some help on the dance music side.


What happened to SpamAssassin?

For the last few weeks, sa-update says "channel: no '' record found, channel failed", presumably because neither that nor resolve.

Also apparently all the SARE rulesets are gone?

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

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It's official, ADSL works over wet string

Attn AT&T:

He got some proper string, and made it wet... It turns out he needed salty water to get anywhere.

A 2m length... And the result - it works!!! Not even that slow (3½Mb/s down) though slow uplink. Don't dare touch the string though...



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