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!
It’s been 16 years since I last attended a baseball game; coincidentally, that too was the SF Giants. Since then, I’ve gleaned nothing more about the sport, and as a result the baseball game I attended yesterday was as much a mystery to me as that I attended in 1989. I did enjoy the garlic fries, salted pretzel, Italian sausage on sourdough roll and popcorn that I partook of (animal!). In fact, it seemed that the baseball game was more of a socialising event than a sporting event, with lots of chatting and drinking and food being consumed by all (I just had to join in).
But anyway, small world phenomenon struck again (if you are my regular reader, then you’ll remember the last occurence at the Flickr event). The guy in front of me asks if heard an Irish accent, and reveals that he is a frequent visitor to Doolin (about 10 miles from my home home) as well as Galway. Freaky.
Then today, while walking up to the University of San Francisco, I hear my name being called out behind me, and who is it but a former student of mine who is now working in the City here. Freaky again!
I was at the Junko Mizuno “Pure Trance” manga book signing at the Super 7 Store in Japantown this afternoon.
There was a sizeable crowd in line with their copies of “Pure Trance” in hand. Mizuno-san evolved the manga from art she had created for techno album covers. A few pictures are available from my Flickr set.
So after the MetaFilter event, a bunch of us headed on to the Flickr meetup at the Crossroads cafe. A nice relaxed venue for a meetup, and I can attest to their great hot chocolates and tasty meatloaf with onion marmalade baps!
Met lots of Flickr enthusiasts too, and I’ve made a list of who I met as a reminder to my future selves: striatic, missmobtown, High Fidelity, Kodama, Courtney, Jason, Eddy, Nicole, Kai, Eddie and Nadia. Also met one of the founders, Stewart (co-founder Caterina was also at the meetup). Again, I didn’t really realise who Stewart was, but I remember we were talking about pulling the worst faces for photographs, and I was explaining how my buddy amp turned this into this.
Had a brief but interesting discussion with Ryan King from Technorati about microformats (which is related to my research work on SIOC), and also chatted with Will Luo from Applied Minds about RDF stores. Illustrating the small world phenomenon (in tech circles at least), I met Scott Beale from Laughing Squid who was talking about an employee they had from Galway, who turned out to be none other than someone I knew, John McDonnell!
Edit: There are some photos from the event at the Flickr tags for sflickr and sflickr0707.
I went along to the MetaFilter event at the House of Shields last night. I must admit to being a newbie to the world of MetaFilter, but I had read about them in this month’s Web Designer magazine during my flight here - there was an article on “Creating a Web Community” that mentioned the Ask MetaFilter support area - and I found out that they have similar size userbase to our own boards.ie, so I thought I’d pop along and do some learning.
As it happened, I was sitting right beside MetaFilter creator Matt Haughey towards the end of the event (without knowing who he was), to whom I innocently (or ignorantly!) introduced myself just before he had to leave for his flight back to Oregon.
Met some other interesting people there, including Jasmeet, Merlin, Quasistoic, Kafkaesque, Vacapinta, ikkyu2, jasper411, Bob, and some more who also went to the Flickr meetup…
San Francisco’s 4th of July Celebration
Was a good one, the best fireworks I’ve seen. Everything from smiley faces, cubes, stars, and all in duplicate as there were synchronised versions of the fireworks on the west and east side of the City. I hope to add some photographs once I organise my collection.
Yesterday, we walked over and back across the Golden Gate bridge. It was slightly foggy, but still had some amazing views. My aunt brought us to Sausalito, a pretty little waterfront town just across the bridge.
Also went to see War of the Worlds. I enjoyed it, great effects, and relatively tense for a Spielberg blockbuster. It has its flaws (how many times can they escape from those stupid Martians?), but overall I’d recommend it.
Greetings from Independence Day-celebrating USA!
Yesterday, met with family here and went for lunch on Union Street’s Pasta Pomodoro. After that, went to see Miyazaki’s latest offering, Howl’s Moving Castle in the AMC Kabuki 8 Screen which is in nearby Japantown. It was good, but not as satisfactory as Spirited Away or Mononoke because of some unresolved characters and in part due to it being slightly too long. America’s (and the world’s) critics weren’t as harsh; the film is currently listed third by US film critics in terms of those currently on release and rated, and IMDB gives it a rating of 8.2.
Went to the Japan Center in Japantown and spent an hour or two browsing the books in Kinokuniya, where I picked up the manga of Battle Angel Alita: Last Orders 1 and Nausicaa 1. Lots of interesting DVDs and CDs there too, I saw Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala, a great film which I might pick up before I go back.
Called home using SkypeOut - what an amazing rate they give, 1.5 cents per minute to and from most countries in the “western world” - that 10 euro call credit I bought is going to last a long time!
And to tonight, we’ll probably pop along to the waterfront to watch the fireworks from Pier 39, I think it kicks off at 9:30-ish. Should be fun!
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