August 25, 2008
Goodbye, Bay Meadows.
Bay Meadows, the storied horse racing track a few blocks from our place shut its doors for good last week. A brainchild of Bill Kyne, it first opened in 1934, when the rest of the Peninsula was still filled with farms and orchards. Smack between El Camino and Highway, it's now a prime piece of real estate and the track will quickly be replaced with condos and other standard high-density fare.
This weekend, Bay Meadows auctioned off all of their assets - chairs, track markers, signs, paintings, even ceiling tiles. Tania and I bought two great photographs as a memory to the place:
A photo of Bill Kyne with Abe Kemp, from some time in the 1930s or 1940s; and an awesome, large-format action shot of a 1974 steeple chase race:
August 6, 2008
First Mechanical Turk Experiment just Shipped!
I just finished editing my first MTurk book "Amazing but True Cat Stories" by Folks on the Internet. Submitters were paid to send stories and images about their cats. I selected, edited and laid out the stories in a Blurb book.
Update: The book now has its own page at projects/catbook