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.