Today I came across a comment on Bill Burgua's recent article about the Second Saturday Art Walk. Larry was exasperated about the crime he witnessed on our most recent art walk, specifcially citing the vandalism near his place of residence. He wrote: "The last Second Sat event I got graffiti outside on my apartment building as well as inside and this is a controlled acces building. Out of Control! City council talking about walkable alleys when we dont even have walkable streets." I often read the complaints from my neighbors concerning the escalating crime during Second Saturday. My personal feeling is that it's no different from the drunks and litterbugs I see roaming the streets ever

Not having any relatives west of the Mississippi, my family often traveled up to Portland to spend Thanksgiving with old friends. We'd usually pick up a couple books on tape from the Contra Costa library before heading out on road trips like these, but pianist George Winston's albums Autumn and December always traveled with us. Because of these albums' bonding themes – holidays, family, journeys – the music grew into an important memory from childhood. In some ways, it ceased being art for me, in that I couldn't evaluate it with a critical eye as I developed musically. This isn't to say that I think George Winston is a bad composer or pianist. In the same way I occasionally eat at a child

Have you ever noticed yourself straining to make out someone's profile picture? Perhaps you've had trouble seeing detail in an article photo. If so, you'll be pleased to know that tonight we've rolled out an update to The Sacramento Press that should make your pictures clearer and smoother than they've been before. Initially, you'll only see the difference in pictures uploaded after today, but in a few days we'll go back and fix everything uploaded to the site since day one. In addition, article images now appear in the order in which they were uploaded, and we're now accepting a few more image file types (although we recommend sticking with JPEG or PNG files). We also added a few new cap

The Sacramento Press was updated tonight with a grab bag of wish-list items, tweaks, and bug fixes that have been accumulating over the last two months. Recently, we've been using email as a tool to pass on news and workshop event details to you. Now, with this new release, we've started verifying  email addresses on our site. So, for all new signups (or if you're already signed up and you change your email address) you'll get an email that contains a link to visit that lets us know your email address is in good working order. This will help us better communicate with you. We run a lot of free, fun workshops here in our downtown office, and having a working email is really important for u

Free Webcam Chat at Ustream This is a live feed from our office window, which is the epicenter of the hazardous materials threat ongoing at the Sacramento Valley Station Light Rail stop. The feed captures a small fraction of the law enforcement officers involved, but shows the ones at the center of the problem UPDATE: Live feed was discontinued at approximately 12:45p.m. as all the law enforcement had left the scene.

Shake off those winter blues with a sport that's fun, fast, and family-friendly. Play inline hockey at DISC, a sports facility owned by members of the Davis community that's right off highway 80 in East Davis. There are leagues year-round that are suitable for all skill levels. Even if you've never skated before you can pick up the sport quickly by enrolling in a class that will get you up to speed in no time. I just recently learned to play inline hockey and started my first season in the beginner's league last summer. The players and facility owners were welcoming, friendly, and fun to play with. It's been great learning and playing a sport with people of all ages and backgrounds. The e

Another Sacramento Press update just went live. Among the two dozen changes we made to the site tonight are a few that concern storylines. We've noticed that it may take an article or two to get a sense for the common thread in your subject. Perhaps you intended to write about one thing but ended up writing about another. If this has happened to you, you'll be glad to know that you can now rename your storylines. Other changes we pushed out include some icon fixes, tweaks to our RSS feeds, making profile edits more forgiving, and many more tweaks, bug fixes, and improvements.

 Someone thought it would be a good idea to abandon a couple of chickens at one of the UC Davis housing complexes. Two months and ten fold as many critters later, one can hardly walk next door without incurring the disapproving clucks of these easily-startled fowl. At least the students can now save some cash and ditch their alarm clocks for that au-naturale 7:00 am wake-up call.

Hello again. Last I wrote we had made our first few changes to the Sacramento Press website. Time does fly, I suppose, because we're just about done with another update. If all goes well, you'll probably be seeing it in action sometime next week. And like last time, this isn't revolutionary stuff; we're still fine-tuning the engine to make sure everything's solid before we roll out the shiny new features. So, what's in this update? Right now we have fifteen additions, tweaks, and squashed bugs coded up and ready to go, including fixes to an RSS feed that broke last week, the ability to rename your storyline, and a few graphics changes throughout the site (ever notice that the thumbs down

Tonight I'm starting a new storyline (yes, this one). Here I'll be giving you a look at the Sacramento Press from a nuts-and-bolts point of view. Whenever we roll out a sparkly, new feature for you to use or fix a bug that's been causing you trouble, I'll try to let you know about it here. If you ever want to discuss the site or have any questions about something we've added, let me know in a comment! And to christen this storyline, let me tell you about the release we pushed out tonight. It may not seem like a big change, and that's because it's mostly a collection of odds and ends we only discovered we needed after going live two weeks ago. Have you ever uploaded an image when writing a

 Saturday night, the San Jose Sharks beat the LA Kings at the HP Pavilion. The sharks now have two wins and 0 losses.