iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 06/09/2026

My favourite thing about San Francisco is how easy it is to walk up a hill and suddenly feel like you’re in a separate place from the city.

A zoomed in view of tall colorful houses/apartments around Bernal Hill, seen from a distant high spot. The west curved trail up the hill is prominently visible, with some tiny people walking on it.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 13/07/2026

Kodak Gold 200 or Pro Image 100 (cheap despite the name), they saturate nicely in post. A remjetless cinefilm clone could be fun for LA too. Pictured: Pro Image from Amtrak

A saturated moody photo of a mottled grassy field with a dark blue overcast cloudy sky. A long cloud gap lights a distant band of field.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 28/06/2026

The SFMTA puts the trans in transit. @sfmta.com

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 29/05/2026

Throwback to that time, in the middle of helping a friend move, I found a stray kitten and had to carry it in a pathetically mewing uhaul box down to SF Animal Care. Pictured

Vallery on the phone on the sidewalk. There a small orange kitten hungrily begging next to her.

A “found cat” poster in SOMA, in front of a bike lane.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 22/05/2026

I think this might be a new favourite angle for the bridge.

The Golden Gate Bridge at a pinky dusk, as seen from a long distance south. The treetops from the Presidio and Golden Gate Park are in the foreground.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 21/05/2026

One highway boondoggle that has frustrated me for ages is the McTavish exchange in BC. To throw a bone to environmental concerns over a massive interchange project, the province added a bus exchange. …and now all those buses pay a ~2 minute time tax to drive around the loop each way. It’s worse!

Screenshot of Google maps, showing a windy bus interchange, nestled between two highway interchanges

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 12/05/2026

Was going through pictures from a few years ago… I can’t believe what a different era this feels like it’s from.

The view inside an older BART train in the 4-seat segment, looking across the other seats and out the window. There is piercing late day sun shining across the highway and hills.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 12/04/2026

Fun fact: the BART yellow line, at 100.1 km long, could wrap around multiple major moons of Saturn. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_o...

The standard map of the BART rail system.

An image of the moon Pan, shaped roughly like a round scraped-up piece of ravioli. There is a narrow yellow band drawn across it.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 26/03/2026

Thanks, Mayor Lurie. sfstandard.com/newsletters/...

An article screenshot that reads:

Video from Dec. 11, obtained by Power Play, shows Lurie’s Rivian colliding with an F-Market & Wharves streetcar heading southbound on Market Street. The $134,000 electric vehicle (bought and donated to the city by Lurie himself) stops abruptly at the intersection of Octavia Boulevard while turning on its police lights, attempting to make a U-turn at a prohibited left-turn intersection. The streetcar does not have time to stop and collides with the Rivian, pushing it a couple of feet to the left of the road

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 14/03/2026

It’s an interesting one to keep tweaking. Tulips are particularly mobile and like to bend toward light, shockingly well for cut plants.

Another photo of the flower arrangement. There is more of a prominently lean to the left, and several tulips have been swapped out.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 12/03/2026

A dramatic change from last night as the tulips react to the warmth + sun. I had to make some fixes, which unfortunately skewed the geometry even further 😅. All of my lines are muddied.

The same tulip and cherry arrangement. The tulips have gone from barely open to wide open, dramatically in some cases. The stems are in slightly different positions, and the tallest is shortened.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 11/03/2026

Look at that beautiful red carpet.

Vibrant film photo of a 9 San Bruno bus on Market St. It’s driving down one of two bright red transit lanes in the center of a 4 lane street. There are green bike lanes on both sides.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 10/03/2026

San Francisco’s Muni finds that traffic delays can cost millions per year for a busy line to keep up: www.sfmta.com/sites/defaul... Inversely, bus lanes see avg 15% decrease in trip time, meaning more frequent buses or $ that can go elsewhere ✨without cutting service✨ www.sfmta.com/project-upda...

An official slide deck that reads:

As congestion increases in areas where transit does not have traffic priority measures, transit service becomes slower and more expensive to provide.

It contains a table showing that a route with buses every 10 minutes needs to spend $2 million more a year for every 15 minutes added to the trip time.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 10/03/2026

I feel like the fewer pieces I include, the better I do.

An amateur ikebana arrangement in a shallow bowl. A tall white Persian buttercup stands straight in the background, with a trio of lavender hyacinths of different heights in front of it. One buttercup bud pokes out to the right, and one long leaf is folded down on the left.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 22/02/2026

Bringing the branches home on a bike was an experience. Shoutout SOMA bike lanes.

Vallery in a pink coat and bike helmet waiting at a bike lane intersection, smiling and taking a selfie. There’s a newspaper-wrapped bundle of tall flowering branches behind her.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 22/02/2026

This weekend’s moment of calm.

An amateur Ikebana arrangement in a tall fluted bowl. A curved plum branch with a few flowers leans slightly to the right, while two pink tulips in the centre curve slightly left. One small purple iris leans left at the bottom. All emerge from the same point in the water.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 14/02/2026

A very beginner stab at ikebana. I love spring bulb flowers in general, it’s one of my personal marks of the seasons shifting.

An arrangement of white and white-pink tulips of varying heights. They are standing upright in a shallow brassy bowl. One white tulip leans out prominently to the left, while most of the others form a line upward toward the centre right. One low leaf prominently folds over the front-right of the bowl.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 12/02/2026

He knew when he was owed vegetables by social contract, and would stubbornly camp out and stare. We unfortunately trained him that “pig eats first“. 🤣 Curzon Dax was the namesake to Jadzia Dax, another guinea pig I loved dearly. He was an absolute master at predicting and dodging eye drops.

An elderly black and orange Abyssinian guinea pig, raising his head upward expectantly at the edge of his cage

Jadzia Dax, a sleek black guinea pig with patches of orange-brown fur. She’s sitting on a hand towel in a spot of sun, next to an enclosure.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 12/02/2026

More Curzon facts by request: 2 vets were impressed by how good his teeth were He was a bit of an oddball for a guinea pig - more hidey, more climby, a picky eater Was cared for by a whole rota of people when I got stuck out of the country. He was grumpy when he didn’t have regular attention.

A black and orange guinea pig standing trying to get vegetables off the top of a purple castle house.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 12/02/2026

Fun facts about Curzon for newer followers:   He was repeatedly surrendered over fighting, so he lived solo (normally not recommended) Lived in 4+ Bay Area counties He's been on BART, Muni, and AC Transit Peed on a laptop once LOVED tubes and tunnels Knew if you peeled an orange 20ft away

A black and orange Abyssinian guinea pig, standing on trampled hay, reaching to take an orange segment from an offering hand.

A guinea pig who has stepped forward from his treat and onto a laptop. Vallery is on screen in a video call, looking amused.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 12/02/2026

Some sad personal news: Curzon passed away this week at the old age of (about) 7. We adopted him from the Marin Humane Society in 2019, and he's been a wonderful and jouyous companion through some tough years. His presence will be deeply missed.

A black and orange Abyssinian guinea pig with typical short spiky and ruffled fur. He's standing on a black couch, sniffing a similarly colored "Distributed Algorithms" book.

Looking straight down at a guinea pig, who is standing tall against his cage bars, begging.

A black guinea pig head sticking out of a pink and blue fleece tunnel, looking up.

A guinea pig in his enclosure, leaning out from behind a fleece curtain, his front paws on a fleece tunnel to beg for food. He has a large white cataract in his eye, and he's a little more grey.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 18/01/2026

I don’t think there’s a better way to wait out a model training.

The sunset from Twin Peaks in San Francisco. The view looks over a steep road on a grassy hill, over the city toward the Golden Gate Bridge and the bay mouth. The sky is a vivid wash of pink clouds with a yellow horizon.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 03/01/2026

“What’s that, you haven’t ticked the button to do the thing you don’t want? Would you like to?”

A LLM-coded Bluesky support email suggesting that I can hide my account.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 30/12/2025

Real good sunset from a few weeks ago.

A dusky purple-toned photo looking over the Mission district toward Bernal Heights, with Mission Street's distinct orange lights prominent. The sky is layers of hazy purple clouds, with a more distant orange-pink layer in the middle.

A vibrant sunset over a dark Twin Peaks against a dark blue sky. Streaks of pink cirrus(?) clouds stretch across the sky. The lower clouds near the horizon glow orange and yellow.

The view over the Fillmore district & Pac heights at sunset. The foreground is dimly lit, with a soccer field prominent. There is a slight pink glow from the wash of dull pink clouds in the sky.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 22/12/2025

Why yes, my guinea pig takes BART.

A pet carrier on BART with the top opened. A black and orange guinea pig is peering out. Powell station is visible out the window.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 29/11/2025

They've got really cool and varied stations! I loved Lionel-Groulx for the optimized transfers - it's stacked platforms, where each platform has an Orange-Green cross platform transfer. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel-...

A photo looking across a subway station platform. An identical lower platform is visible, with escalators linking the two.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 13/11/2025

Goodnight, sweet prince. Muni's last Breda makes its second-last run. #byebyebreda

A distant photo of a grey Breda train at night, sitting briefly at a stop in Dolores park. Behind it are rising houses lit in orange light.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 31/10/2025

I'm frustrated with how devops/SRE/whatever culture often shortcuts from "here's failure models that we may choose not to address as a cost/complexity tradeoff" to "some failure modes are just inevitable". Not habitually pushing away from the failure gradient means you drift more into failure.

Rasmussen's dynamic systems model. It shows a triangular relationship between economic failure, unacceptable workload, and performance failure, where systems need to be pushed away from each side with counter decisions/efforts.

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Vallery Lancey @isthelaststop.com · 26/10/2025

I’m proud of how the spooky L turned out! Always lovely to see so many families enjoying the Great Hauntway from all over the city. Thanks to @sunsetdunes.org for all the work that goes into the Great Hauntway, and the support in getting the Spooky L authorized again.

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