Santa Barbara
-
Sunlight Day
Whether report The Sun is behind clouds here in Santa Barbara, but I still have faith that it’ll be clear by late afternoon, which is how things go here. Meanwhile, Bloomington has had lots of rain while I’ve been gone. Monroe Lake is moving toward flood stage, with 1,605 cfs (cubic feet per second) flowing… Continue reading
-
Santa Barbarian Again
No complaints. Back at the ranch for the next two days in California’s most beautiful town. Man, I do love it here. Alas, I mostly live elsewhere, and I love those places too. Continue reading
-
Archives as Commons
Tenth in the News Commons series. The Santa Barbara News-Press was born in 1868 and died in 2023 at age 155. Its glory years ran from 1932 until 2000, when the New York Times sold it to Wendy McCaw, who rode it to hell. That ride began with the Santa Barbara News Press Controversy in 2006 and ended… Continue reading
-
Deeper News
Fifth in the News Commons series. Let’s say you’re a public official. Or an engineer. Or a journalist researching a matter of importance, such as a new reservoir or a zoning change. What do you need? In a word, facts. This should go without saying, but it bears saying because lots of facts are hard… Continue reading
-
FM Stations Down on Gibraltar Peak
[Update: 11:20 AM Wednesday 18 January] Well, I woke this morning to hear all the signals from Gibraltar Peak back on the air. I don’t know if the site is on generator power, or if electric power has been restored. This pop-out from a map symbol on Southern California Edison’s Power Outage Awareness Map suggests the… Continue reading
-
Heavy Weather
Most of California has just two seasons: rain and fire. Rain is another name for Winter, and it peaks in January. In most years, January in California isn’t any more wet than, say, New York, Miami or Chicago. But every few years California gets monsoons. Big ones. This is one of those years. The eighteen gallon storage… Continue reading
-
About a pretty pole
The tallest structure in Santa Barbara’s skyline is a (roughly) 200-foot pole painted red and white. It stands in a city equipment yard, not far from the ocean and the city’s famous Wharf. You can see it in the photo above, with the Wharf behind it. As landmarks go it’s not much, but I like… Continue reading
-
Toward no longer running naked through the digital world
We live in two worlds now: the natural one where we have bodies that obey the laws of gravity and space/time, and the virtual one where there is no gravity or distance (though there is time). In other words, we are now digital as well as physical beings, and this is new to a human… Continue reading
-
Geology answers for Montecito and Santa Barbara
Just before it started, the geology meeting at the Santa Barbara Central Library on Thursday looked like this from the front of the room (where I also tweeted the same pano): Our speakers were geology professor Ed Keller of UCSB and Engineering Geologist Larry Gurrola, who also works and studies with Ed: As a geology freak,… Continue reading
-
Doing the after math
When I flew out of California on the 14th, this blog was still working. When I went here to post about the Thomas Fire on 15th, it wasn’t. (Somebody later told me Harvard was moving servers around, so maybe that was it.) But then the fire looked to be under control. It wasn’t. On the… Continue reading
-
#ThomasFire live
[Update: 7:22am Monday December 11] Two views of ThomasFire developments. First, MODIS fire detections, plotted on Google Earth Pro, current at 7am Pacific time: Second, a screenshot of the NCWG (National Wildfire Coordinating Group) map of the area, 7:18am Pacific time: On the map itself, you can click on each of those squares and get… Continue reading
-
Bad and dead air
That was yesterday. Hard to tell from just looking at it, but that’s a 180° shot, panning from east to west across California’s South Coast, most of which is masked by smoke from the Thomas Fire. We weren’t in the smoke then, but we are now, so there’s not much to shoot. Just something more… Continue reading
-
Jack Ucciferri for 4th District
Santa Barbara is one of the world’s great sea coast towns. It’s also in a good position to be one of the world’s great Internet coast towns too. Luckily, Santa Barbara is advantaged by its location not just on the ocean, but on some of the thickest Internet trunk lines (called “backbones”) in the world.… Continue reading
-
Ya(cht) gotta love the Web
A giant yacht was anchored just outside the harbor in Santa Barbara for much of this past week: Among its impressive features (though not especially visible in this, my shitty photo) is the helicopter on one of the aft decks. I wanted to know exactly what this thing was, so I watched local media for… Continue reading
-
Real vs. Gimmicked Loyalty
My loyalty to Peet’s Coffee is absolute. I have loved Peet’s since it was a single store in Berkeley. I told my wife in 2001 that I wouldn’t move anywhere outside the Bay Area unless there was a Peet’s nearby. That pre-qualified Santa Barbara, where we live now. When we travel to where Peets has retail stores, we buy… Continue reading
-
The biggest bust in Santa Barbara is about to go down
Emanuele Orazio Fenzi, better known as Francesco Franceschi (1843-1924), was an Italian horticulturist responsible for vastly increasing the botanical variety of Santa Barbara (introducing more than 900 species). He was also for awhile the primary landowner on the Riviera, a loaf-shaped hill overlooking the city’s downtown. Most of that hill is now covered with houses,… Continue reading
-
Shooting my escape to Paradise
Here is how New York looked through my front window yesterday at 3:51am, when I was packing to fly and drive from JFK to LAX to Santa Barbara: I shoveled a path to the street four times: the first three through light and fluffy snow, and the fourth through rain, slush and a ridge of… Continue reading
-
There goes the fire season
Got big rain today in Santa Barbara, and across all of California, or so it appears: Rainfall records were broken. As expected, there were mudslides. One friend going to Malibu was smart to avoid the Pacific Coast Highway. The drought persists, of course. We’ll need many more storms like this to make up for the… Continue reading
-
No Tony Bennett 🙁
So last night we went to see Tony Bennett in a sold-out show at the Granada Theater in downtown Santa Barbara. Right in the middle of dinner beforehand at Jane, a nice restaurant in the next block up State Street, electric power went out. (Substation failure, it says here.) Later, over at the theater, we… Continue reading
-
Public radio explodes in Santa Barbara
When we moved to Santa Barbara in 2001, the public radio pickings were pretty slim: 88.3 KCLU, a faint signal from Thousand Oaks. 88.7 KQSC, a strong local station on Gibraltar Peak carrying the classical music programming of Los Angeles’ KUSC. Santa Barbara also had classical KDB on 93.7, an equal-sized signal on Gibraltar Peak. 89.1… Continue reading