Simon Willison on half-moon-bay

5 posts tagged “half-moon-bay”

2025

Our local BBQ spot here in El Granada - Breakwater Barbecue - had a soft opening this weekend in their new location.

Here's the new building. They're still working on replacing the sign from the previous restaurant occupant:

Exterior photo of a restaurant with a faded sign reading "MONSTER CHEF Fine Japanese Restaurant" the building is cream-colored with red tile roofs and large windows. It has a little bit of a railway station vibe to it if you squint at it just the right way.

It's actually our old railway station! From 1905 to 1920 the Ocean Shore Railroad ran steam trains from San Francisco down through Half Moon Bay most of the way to Santa Cruz, though they never quite connected the two cities.

The restaurant has some photos on the wall of the old railroad. Here's what that same building looked like >100 years ago.

Historical black and white photograph showing a train station with a steam train on the left and a Spanish-style station building with arched entrances on the right. It's clearly the same building, though the modern one has had a bunch of extra extensions added to it and doesn't look nearly as much like a train station.

# 4th May 2025, 5:09 pm / half-moon-bay, photos, history

2024

Teresa T is name of the whale in Pillar Point Harbor near Half Moon Bay

There is a young humpback whale in the harbor at Pillar Point, just north of Half Moon Bay, California right now. Their name is Teresa T and they were first spotted on Thursday afternoon.

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1:04 am / 8th September 2024 / photography, wildlife, half-moon-bay

Wikipedia: Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society (via) I created my first Wikipedia page! The Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society is a really neat live music venue in Half Moon Bay which has been showcasing world-class jazz talent for over 50 years. I attended a concert there for the first time on Sunday and was surprised to see it didn’t have a page yet.

Creating a Wikipedia page is an interesting process. New pages on English Wikipedia created by infrequent editors stay in “draft” mode until they’ve been approved by a member of “WikiProject Articles for creation”—the standards are really high, especially around sources of citations. I spent quite a while tracking down good citation references for the key facts I used in my first draft for the page.

# 5th March 2024, 4:21 pm / wikipedia, music, half-moon-bay

2022

Measuring traffic during the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival

This weekend was the 50th annual Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival.

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3:41 pm / 19th October 2022 / data-journalism, natalie-downe, projects, sqlite, datasette, git-scraping, git-history, datasette-lite, half-moon-bay

Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival traffic on Saturday 15th October 2022 (via) It’s the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival this weekend... and its impact on the traffic between our little town of El Granada and Half Moon Bay—8 minutes drive away—is notorious. So I built a git scraper that archives estimated driving times from the Google Maps Navigation API, and used git-history to turn that scraped data into a SQLite database and visualize it on a chart.

# 16th October 2022, 3:56 am / projects, git-scraping, git-history, half-moon-bay

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