I got my amateur radio (”ham”) license last week, but I haven’t posted my callsign very widely because I applied for a vanity callsign as soon as I got my license. (It isn’t possible to apply for a vanity call until one has been granted a license.) It usually takes 18-20 calendar days for a vanity callsign to be granted, so I expect to announce my new call on March 17.
I’m interested in finding other local hams, so I visited QRZ.com and pulled up “my” grid square, CM98ho. The grid doesn’t quite line up with my neighborhood boundaries, so I also needed to look at grid CM98hn for the southern section. The map shows about 20 markers (which may represent more than one person) in Arden Park:
To get to QRZ’s gridmap display, go to QRZ’s search page, enter “grid: CM98ho”, then click on one of the listed callsigns. If that person hasn’t restricted their information, click on the green bar that says “click for more detail”. A map will appear on the right. Click on the “Explore on GridMap” link below the map.
Racism is still with us. My wife opened the curtains this morning and got to see this:
I’m so mad about this, I can’t even write anything more about this right now.
When we first moved back to Sacramento a few months ago, one of our first priorities was finding a purveyor of that great American staple–pizza! We checked the yellow pages and found a Round Table nearby, so we tried them. The place was nearly deserted, and we soon found some of the reasons: the service wasn’t very good, and the pizza was worse. Thinking that maybe they were having a bad night, we gave them another chance about a week later, but they blew that one also. The staff was too busy chatting to take our order when we walked up to the counter, and then they brought us a pizza that wasn’t fully cooked. 
A few days later my wife and I were driving around the neighborhood. Tucked into a corner of a nearby stripmall I noticed a sign, “Wenelli’s Pizza.” It looked kind of quirky and interesting, so we decided to check it out. It turned out to be the most incredible pizza place I’ve ever tried! It’s a small family-owned place with space for about 40 people, and it’s usually pretty busy, although we’ve never had to stand around waiting for a table. (Now we know why Round Table down the street is always empty.) The pizza is excellent and the service is friendly and personal. They have some good beers on tap, as well as Budweiser and Coors Lite. 
Wenelli’s Pizza
4215 Arden Way (map)
Sacramento, CA 95864
(916) 482-1008
About six months ago, we moved into the Arden Park neighborhood of Sacramento. I had heard that there was a web site for the neighborhood, but when I googled “Arden Park” most of the results were outside of California. It turns out that it was hiding in plain sight!
ArdenPark.org is a community bulletin board running phpBB software. There hasn’t been much traffic recently, probably because people weren’t aware of it. Hopefully this post will help boost the page rank of the site and/or direct interested viewers to it.
While I was searching for Arden Park’s community web site, I came across several related sites:
It’s been a while since I had something good to say about a Republican official, but California State Assemblyman Roger Niello earned a few points by introducing Assembly Bill 394 during the 2005-2006 session. According to a recent article in the Sacramento Bee, this law will make it easier for homeowners to strike discriminatory language from their CC&R’s.
Assemblyman Niello’s interest was caught by a January 2005 article in the Sacramento Bee. (I can’t find the original article on the Bee’s website, but the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reprinted the Bee article and still has it available online.)
(From the Bee article:)
Gregg Fishman and his wife moved into Sacramento’s upscale Arden Park neighborhood in 2001, enchanted by the shady Modesto ash, lush parks, large lots and friendly atmosphere.
They didn’t realize that, along with their 1950s-era California ranch-style home, they were buying a piece of America’s racist past.
Tucked into their property records, in tiny type, is the “Racial Occupancy” clause:
“No persons of any race other than White Caucasian race shall use or occupy any building or any lot except . . . by domestic servants of a different race domiciled with an owner or tenant . . .”
AB 394 was passed unanimously by both the California Senate and Assembly. It was signed into law by the Governor on 22 September 2005. (The full text of the Bill is available on the Official California Legislative Information website.)
When we moved into Arden Park earlier this year, I had noticed that we have a similar clause in our CC&R’s. There is another clause which allows for the CC&R’s to be revised or amended every decade, so I was planning on getting the discriminatory clause stricken when the CC&R’s were up for renewal in 2010. But the current situation is preferable because, a) it applies to the whole state, not just my neighborhood, and b) it frees up my time and energy for other causes!
I stumbled across the ArdenParkTrees website while searching for something else, and since it was using PHP I decided to dig into the code to see if they were using WordPress or something similar. Unfortunately, the first thing I discovered was some browser-detection jiggery written by Milonic. Now, I don’t have anything against Milonic, but browser-detection in general is anathema to web publishing — The web should be viewable by any browser!
I may have to whip up a WP demonstration site with their content and see if I can talk the webmasters into switching platforms.
The Sacramento Boardgames, Cardgames, & Miniatures Meetup Group held their first Saturday game day yesterday at the Arden-Dimick library. I’m pretty sure we had 26 people playing at one point, but I was too busy playing to keep track of people entering and leaving.
Kevin has put a list of games that we played on the ‘Geek. This list allows comments, so if you were at this event be sure to jot down your thoughts on the games you played or the event in general.
