Featured Articles from SFGate

Finding military records -- and learning the truth about someone's war experience -- is not as difficult as it seems once you know where to start. B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley the authors of "Stolen Valor" a book that exposes phony Vietnam veterans have put together some helpful hints on the book's Web site (www.stolenvalor.com). To get your own military records simply write a letter to the National Personnel Records Center Army (or Air Force or Navy) Records Center 9700 Page Avenue St. Louis MO 63132 (more detailed information is available at www.nara.

In a nutshell: Chatroulette.com allows strangers to connect via random video chats. Cool factor: Users just fire up Chat Roulette and start talking to strangers through a Web cam and instant messaging system. When you get tired of them, you just push "next" and start a new session. Note: You'll need a Web cam. And though the terms of service forbid obscene or pornographic imagery, there is always a chance that's what you'll get, so be prepared.

2004-07-14 04:00:00 PST Boston -- Even though Apple Computer Inc. chief executive Steve Jobs chose not to attend this week's Macworld Expo in Boston the company's mercurial founder still managed to remain at the center of the show's attention. When Apple announced its decision not to participate in the Macworld show it became clear Jobs wouldn't occupy his traditional role as the event's opening keynote speaker. Instead show organizer IDG World Expo put together a reunion of the design team that built the first Macintosh desktop computers at Apple more than 20 years ago. Rather than giving Jobs credit as a key member of that effort the panel of designers used the event to repeatedly deride the executive saying his style of management had threatened the Mac's very existence.

Nearly 30 years after the first Smith & Hawken store opened in Mill Valley, the gardening retail chain is being closed by parent company Scotts Miracle-Gro Co., which said it will drop the brand by the end of this year. Smith & Hawken, founded by Dave Smith and Paul Hawken in 1979 to provide organic gardeners with handcrafted tools from England, aspired to be a model for socially responsible companies. Over the years, it became known as the gold standard in the industry. Thursday, it began its final sale, slashing prices by 20 to 30 percent.

T he landmark San Francisco Chronicle building sits like a grizzled old cinder block at 901 Mission St. San Francisco CA 94103. It's squat and bulky and desperately needs a paint job and a deep colon cleanse and some shrubbery. Do you want to see it? Do you want to see its cluttered rooftop and see all the buildings surrounding it and zoom in to the point where you can if you squint just right see various cars in the street and the giant parking garage next door and to where you can almost if you get a good magnifying glass observe various sunlight-deprived writers and editors milling about Mission Street smoking cigarettes and discussing how to win more Pulitzers?

He may be whistling past the graveyard, but Mayor Gavin Newsom insists he's not worried about the outcome of next month's vote to authorize construction of a stadium for the 49ers in Santa Clara. "They'll pass it and have a lot of press conferences calling it 'a historic day' and that the 49ers 'are proud to stay in the Bay Area,' " Newsom told The Chronicle's editorial board this week. "Then a year will become two and perhaps three" as Santa Clara and the 49ers try to put together a financing plan and get the approvals and agreements San Francisco already has lined up for a stadium in the Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment area.

Marriages get better after the children grow up and move out, according to a UC Berkeley study that analyzed the marital satisfaction of more than 100 women over 18 years. The study by three professors from UC Berkeley's department of psychology and Institute of Personality & Social Research questioned the women at the average ages of 43 in 1981, 52 in 1989 and 61 in 1998 and found that marriages grew increasingly better after the kids packed up and left. "We found that marital satisfaction increased as the women transitioned to an empty nest," said Sara Gorchoff, one of the authors of the study and a doctoral candidate in the psychology department.

Apple Inc. may sell as many as 15 million iPhones in the quarter ending in September, and up to 40 million in the current fiscal year as it begins manufacturing a new version, according to Rodman & Renshaw Equity Research. The company will produce nearly 12 million of the new iPhones in the September quarter, said Ashok Kumar, an analyst with Rodman & Renshaw. Combined with the existing iPhone 3GS, overall sales may rise to 15 million units in the period, double the 7.4 million in the fourth quarter that ended in September, he said.

If you've been living in this country at least 15 years, odds are you have a T-shirt collection. Odds are also that you can't remember where half of them came from, although, thankfully, it's usually spelled out for you in chunky type. I was in a volleyball tournament? I signed up for that credit card offer? And really, what fashionista in the Bay Area wears your standard men's T-shirts? They're big, they're boxy, they're shapeless -- in other words, terribly unflattering. The wonderful thing is that an ugly old T-shirt taking up space in your drawer can become something much, much better with a good-quality pair of scissors and a little ingenuity.

Sam Altman was leaving a computer science class at Stanford last year when he wondered where his friends were. It's an age-old question, but it got Altman thinking of a different way of arriving at the answer. Alton's creation, for which he left school after his sophomore year, is a service called Loopt, which allows mobile phone users to locate friends using Global Positioning Satellite technology on a cell phone. The service, which is being offered on Boost Mobile, provides a real-time cell-phone map that pinpoints the location of friends who have agreed to be tracked.

Rammed earth, sod, yak wool, reclaimed wood, oriented-strand board, straw ... nowadays, the smorgasbord of offerings in alternative building methods and materials is staggeringly abundant, if not a little confusing. On the one hand, you've got architectural innovators advocating prefabrication to make a better "housetrap." With high-tech products and cutting-edge mass production, they are trying to develop a new housing methodology: designerly, affordable, energy-efficient houses built to withstand anything, come hell or high water.

Harold Camping lets out a hearty chuckle when he considers the people who believe the world will end in 2012. "That date has not one stitch of biblical authority," Camping says from the Oakland office where he runs Family Radio, an evangelical station that reaches listeners around the world. "It's like a fairy tale." The real date for the end of times, he says, is in 2011. The Mayans and the recent Hollywood movie "2012" have put the apocalypse in the popular mind this year, but Camping has been at this business for a long time.

(05-31) 15:51 PDT San Francisco, CA (AP) -- The Port of San Francisco is donating 5,000 feet of containment boom to help crews trying to protect coastal areas from the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. City officials said Monday the boom was shipped to Louisiana from the Bay Area on Friday. The Port of San Francisco expects to receive a new boom to replace the one it is donating within the next five weeks. Containment booms are temporary floating barriers used to contain oil spills.

Q: When a downspout was replaced on my home a small amount of stucco was torn away from the building. The plumber duct-taped plastic sheeting to the area as temporary protection. I'd like to repair the stucco myself and wonder if the prepared stucco available in the hardware store will provide a good quality and durable repair and whether any special preparation of the damaged area is required. My home was built in 1939 and is in San Francisco's West of Twin Peaks area facing west.

There are words that, when combined, have the power to create far more questions that answers, and not many are more intriguing than the phrase "nude cruise." Having heard for years about voyages large and small populated entirely by folks wearing nothing more than SPF-4,000 sunscreen, I wanted to find out more -- purely in the interest of thorough journalism, of course. Imagine the benefits: no calculating outfits based on formal nights; no using the expensive laundry service on board; packing everything for a weeklong vacation in a fanny pack (so to speak)

Ask a group of interior designers to talk about the latest decorating trends and, chances are, they'll wince just a little. Here's the problem: Trends are often considered the pieces you buy one year and throw out the next, when they're no longer gracing the pages of your favorite shelter magazine. However, not every trend is fleeting. A few years ago, going green was hailed as one of the hottest trends. Now it is becoming a standard throughout the design industry. So we asked around and pulled together a list of 10 trends for 2010 that have some staying power.

On HGTV's "Color Splash," decorative painter and carpenter Danielle Hirsch has helped host David Bromstad create a funky lime green dining room, warm red living room and French-country mustard-yellow bedroom. But in her Mill Valley home, Hirsch favors a more subdued palette. "I like neutral colors in my house because it helps keep me fresh," she said. "If I had to come home to lots of bold colors every day, I don't know if I could look at them at work." Recalling the first time she set foot in her house, Hirsch described it as "a diamond in the rough."

If your garden supplies much of your family's yearly food intake, you'll want to do all you can to maximize your vegetables' nutritional quality. The following potent, correctly balanced fertilizing mix is composed entirely of natural substances. It's less expensive than commercial organic fertilizers, and it's much better for your soil than harsh synthetic chemical mixes. This mix, along with regular additions of compost, will produce incredible results. Organic components Seed meals and various kinds of lime are the most important ingredients.

We're here to help, said Chevron Corp . on Friday, promising "people, processes, anything that they think we can offer" to help combat the disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, the San Ramon energy company has dispatched experts in "subsea blow out" prevention from Houston, and employees from its Pascagoula refinery in Mississippi to assist the U.S. Coast Guard's efforts to limit the spill's spread. Chevron also has provided its erstwhile competitor with a portable wildlife rescue trailer.

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