Mixed feelings on my last day in San Francisco: sad to be leaving one of the coolest cities I’ve been in, but looking forward to seeing home and family. I’m sipping my Starbucks Chantico hot chocolate and thinking of the things here I’ll miss (that being one of them). Other things I’ll miss:
- Cheap prices of jeans and clothes in general, either in normal stores or outlets. I bought a pair of Levi’s jeans for $10.84, including tax. $10.84; so good I said it twice.
- Seeing stuff on TV first. I’ve watched the first three episodes of BSG; who knows when it’ll make its way to European TV.
- Big American brunches. As good as a proper Irish breakfast. English muffins go great with eggs.
- Events. There are so many techie events here in the Bay Area it hurts for a geek like me to leave. But it’s also a great place for concerts and shows. We’re going to see Jim White tonight in the Great American Music Hall on O’Farrell. The Pernice Brothers are playing as well.
- M-bags. I love sending home big bags of used books via the USPS m-bag media mail service.
- The BMG music club. 12 CDs for the price of 1. Enough said.
- Lipton Brisk iced tea and Mountain Dew. The latter is not essential, but I like it sometimes. I also like powdered Gatorade (bringing some home).
Product placement in films is driving me crazy. I went to see the Island, and still can’t figure out how Puma and Aquafina and Xbox made their way into the controlled environment of the cloning centre. It reminded me of seeing the impossible Powerade ads in the virtual world of Matrix Revolutions.
Went to the SDForum / SoftTECH event on online communities last night in the Golden Gate Club in the Presidio.
The photo shows the panel of speakers: Scott Wilder from QuickBooks, Tony Christopher from Digital Places, Sylvia Marino from Edmunds, Zack Rosen from CivicSpace, and the chair Eugene Eric Kim from Blue Oxen. Eugene is going to next week’s Wikimania so we’ll no doubt meet there again…
There were some questions about integrating other technologies such as VOIP and SMS into online communities; Zach gave an interesting description of how Asterisk could be integrated into an online community; I briefly mentioned Regi’s Boards Beep project on boards.ie which generated a good bit of interest.
Met a bunch of people there, including Kare, Nancy, Kaliya, Billy, Clay, Ron, and Chris. Had a good chat with Kieran from CivicSpace about the SIOC Drupal module.
On Tuesday evening, I met up with the meetup.com San Francisco weblogger group, where we talked about blogging for business and profitability (lots of topics related to our it@cork Blogging for Business event). Had some interesting discussions with Paul, Chris, and Gavin.
Afterwards, I went along to this month’s Tag Tuesday event, featuring the podcast cataloguers (sp.) Odeo. The photo shows a shot of the tags from their website demonstration, and that decapitated head belongs to Niall who I met at the event. Dia dhuit, Niall! Also talked to Ryan (again), Eran (discussed microformats corresponding to SIOC) and Tantek from Technorati, Amber, Rabble and Blaine from Odeo (chatted about YARS), Evo and Mark from Jedi, Ashton (sp.), and David from USF.
I visited DERI Stanford today; didn’t get to meet Charles or Michael but had interesting chats with Nat and Tim about some of their work (e.g. games.stanford.edu).
Axel from DERI Innsbruck is currently here on the exchange program; Chris is also visiting here at the moment.
Got a day tour to Yosemite on Thursday. What a wonderful place. The views are just spectacular, and you may get some idea of this from the pictures I managed to get with our fairly basic camera.
Normally this (one day) wouldn’t be enough, but it was really, really hot there, so in one way I was relieved we weren’t staying too much longer. But will definitely have to go back again; this was my second visit (the last was 16 years ago).
Whew! I’ve days of adventures to catch up on. Our car rental was due back on Wednesday, so we crammed in as much as possible at the beginning of the week. Plus the fact that we went on a trip to Yosemite meant that I’ve been offline for most of the week…
Anyway, drove down the coastline along California 1. We were starving, but found a great little spot called Gayle’s where we loaded up on breakfast croissants and coffee. Then went on to the pretty town of Monterey, perused the shops and visited the impressive aquarium (and of course I took lots of photos of the fishes). After that, we went on to the even prettier town of Carmel-by-the-Sea.
Visited Berkeley this morning. They have a really nice campus and I liked the trees at the entrance: 200 foot-high hardwoods, the largest in North America. Had a delicious lunch in Alice Water’s Chez Panisse.
Going to see Beck tonight, he’s playing at the Bill Graham Auditorium in the City.
Watched the first episode of the new series of Battlestar Galactica, which premiered on Sci-Fi US at 10 PM last night. Without spoiling anything, it was very good; after an intense first season, you wondered if they could keep up the pace for the second season: and they have.
After that, we popped along to A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books for the midnight launch of the latest in the Harry Potter series, “The Half-Blood Prince”. At 12:01, the boxes of books were broken out, and the teenagers went wild. The salespeople said that they had 500 copies of the book, and there was quite a big crowd there so I’d imagine that most of them were sold. I can only imagine how mad (crazy) it must have been at one of the mainstream booksellers like Borders or Barnes & Noble.
Had a busy day yesterday, because we also drove to Napa, visited the Francis Coppola, Ehlers and Beringers (briefly) vineyards, and saw the Old Faithful Geyser do its thing. Some photos are here.
I partook in another great American pastime today (no, not American football this time) - we drove to the mall to do some shopping. This was my first US / automatic car driving experience (apart from picking up the car from the rental company last night), and it went swimmingly, thanks to previous practice on the (European) continent and the fact that automatic cars are really very easy to drive. Google maps also helped us on our travels along the I-101.
Went to this massive place called the Great Mall of the Bay Area, which was once a Ford car factory. It is on Great Mall Parkway, which leads me to wonder if the road had a different name once or was the guy who named the roads strangely prescient. Stocked up on my clothes for the year in the Old Navy and Gap outlet stores. Question: How can Levi’s jeans be $20 here but four to five times that price in Ireland? They must travel first class across the ocean…
Stopped off at a Century 25 screen cinema at Union City on the way home (as the traffic was a _bit_ congested on the I-880), but couldn’t find anything to watch (why have 25 screens if you’re only going to show 14 films?). Drove over the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge, with great views of the fog-covered city. And finished off the evening with a nice meal in new restaurant Chouquet’s.
We went to see the wonderful Demetri Martin at the Punch Line Comedy Club last night. I first latched on to Demetri when I watched his comedy special “If I” on BBC4 TV late one night about two years ago, and have been a fan since. I’d highly recommend Demetri’s live standup to comedy fans; my face was sore from laughing afterwards. Leo Allen and Matt Morales were in support. As Adrian Mole might say, they were quite good.
The event will form part of a new CD that Demetri is recording so will look forward to that. We also went to the Kilkenny Cat Laughs festival last year, mainly to see the great Demetri. I didn’t get any pictures of him last night (cameras banned) but here are some blurry photographs of Demetri from last year.
I think that I found a long lost relative of Demetri’s when holidaying in Budapest last year. His surname is Marton and you just have to compare the hair to know that there is something there!
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