sux et veritas

Back in early July I wrote a little about the naming of Lynx, the project we're wrapping up right now. Our engagement director Dan and his wife conveniently scheduled the arrival of their baby (and Dan's consequent paternity leave) to coincide with only the last couple days of the project, but Baby Diego had other plans and decided to show up about 10 days early. I wanted to get a lynx-themed baby card to send to them from the team, but Hallmark inexplicably has not yet taken advantage of this potentially lucrative niche market, and so I had to make a card myself, third-grader style, with felt tipped pens and card stock. Please note that it is a baby lynx peeking out of the bundle:



Speaking of little bobcats, James and I hiked at Tomales Point on Saturday and get a load of what we saw there:





We also saw lots of Tule Elk, but those are totally par for the course in the Point Reyes area so those weren't as exciting somehow. Plus they don't have fangs or claws, and Dan and I don't have a running joke about them.

The excitement continued on Saturday night when I realized about $1500 had evaporated from my checking account via fraudulent PayPal transfers. As is typical, James came to the rescue and applied his mad Internet forensics skillz to ascertain that the breach had occurred not via my home machine (which is a Mac behind two firewalls, so that was unlikely anyway), and not via PayPal per se, but via the "junior high school level" (no, James, tell us how you really feel) security protocols in place at my grad school alumni association--whose forwarding email alias I have long used and which unfortunately was also my PayPal login ID. The details are not terribly interesting and I should be getting all my money back within a few days, but this all just goes to show that if you are such a pretentious tool that you want to have a fancypants Ivy League school in your email address, you should probably just go for YaleTool at gmail dot com or some such--because while the Elis are great at winning squash tournaments and coming up with clever Latin slogans to shout at football games, apparently they know fuckall about web security.

Before all that went down, however, we stopped at Pizzeria Picco in Larkspur and had a fabulous meal after our long hike among the elk. Picco had recently been written up in the New York Times for its soft serve ice cream, and their pizza is nothing to complain about either. My favorite was the Marin, which is a white pie with paper-thin baby red potato slices and rosemary. Picco is only about 10 miles north of the city, so if you're a San Franciscan and have a car you should totally get your ass up there ASAP. I have five words for you: Scharffen Berger chocolate soft serve.