Well frankly, last night was bloody good fun. I’m just going to throw out a quick good morning to David Galbraith, Jish, Heather, Derek, Ben & Mena, Rebecca B, Lance, Sippey, Webb, Ezra, Jim Speth, Ben Cerveny, Min Jung and the other million other people who I can’t quite focus on or remember at this precise moment because of slightly too many cocktails with long straws.
So I kind of slacked off yesterday, if truth be told. Not a lot of exploring, not a lot of drenching myself in San Francisco – just a fair amount of doing things I like to do that I don’t really often get the opportunity to do. So I went to see two films (the other one was the Manchurian Candidate – much recommended), bought a couple of books, a case for my iPod, had a really nice Clam Chowder and portion of Fish and Chips at San Francisco’s best American restaurant and sat in Starbucks for a bit (thanks Anil) starting to catch up on all the cool stuff that’s been going on around the web in the million years since we started working on representing programming on Radio 3.
Today I think is going to be more about getting some of the flavour of the city – or at least starting to ramp up my mucking around with local geeks. Hopefully I’m going to go see Danah’s kittens in the next couple of hours, go see Heather at Taco Bell around lunchtime, and then go see a movie with Leslie this afternoon.
But all of this is really preamble to the main event which should be happening this evening – a drink and catch-up with local geeks at San Francisco’s famous Tonga Room and Hurricane Bar from 8.30 this evening. Come along if you can. It’ll be fun…
So I’m in San Francisco. It’s 9am. What shall I do today?
Thought around 11am: There are lots of films I would love to see and I am pretty wiped out after Los Angeles… Maybe one of these would be a ncie way to spend the early afternoon? Collatoral, Alien vs. Predator, Bourne Supremacy, Manchurian Candidate, The Village, I, Robot. Or I could go book-shopping. I want to get that copy of All The President’s Spin that I saw on Jon Stewart last night. And I’d like to go down to Kid Robot and look around there. And I really fancy some good seafood (been obsessed with fresh shrimp ever since we stopped off on the way back from Malibu the other day). And I need more T-shirts.
1pm: Oooh – The San Francisco Apple Store is really awesome. It looks like someone dumped an enormous Apple box in the middle of the street and filled it with lovely lovely shiny mac-related products. I’m going to have a quick explore around here and see if I can get my iPod a new case. Then I think off to the Metreon to look at film times. God you guys must be fascinated. This stuff is pure weblog gold…
5pm: So I just went to see The Village and goddam it if I didn’t think it was pretty okay actually. I mean I think I had the twist spoiled for me a bit by a stray comment I heard the other day, but generally pretty watchable. And now I’m in the Starbucks over the road trying to work out what to do next! Will it be Aliens vs. Predator? Or a bit of shopping? Or a bit of a walk? It’s all so terribly exciting…
Ping. Now in San Francisco after cool drive with fun people in which I mostly slept and pointed at wind farms and acres of densely packed cows. Had subsequent great fun at the SixApart Mixer thing where I met loads of people – some for the first time, others not. Looked slightly nervous around some people who do really good work. Touched a couple of them without them noticing (or at least without them calling the police – hey Doug!). Got a free USB dongle thing and saw the 3.1 release of MT which doesn’t seem overly dramatic at first but kind of sits in the back of your head and wiggles its tush in the direction of interesting things. Cab back to Leslie’s place – talking about The O.C. and TV shows in general when I get to pull out my trump card – super-secret super-cool thing that made Leslie go oooooh. Don’t think I’m going to make it to LobbyCon now though. Shame!
I’m quite enjoying not taking this weblog as seriously as normal for a few days. It feels pretty liberating, although possibly not very productive or good in the longer term. God knows what it’s going to be like going back to London. I can already feel it on the horizon and must confess am vaguely dreading it.
Briefest of updates:
So I got to America several hours late and was then taken off to Immigration because some American doofus with the same passport number as I (except from America rather than from the UK) had his passport stolen. Hence I had to be taken off into this little room for an hour and a half while they checked that I wasn’t trying to steal American children and sell them into slavery or something. I left home at 11.30am UK time and actually got out of the airport in the states at around 9am UK time the following morning. That’s a full seven hour delay! Grr! Which was annoying for me but more annoying for Kerry and Erik who were waiting for me in the arrivals lounge…
Since I’ve got here though, things have got much more entertaining. Let’s see:
Hmmm. And I talked too soon, it seems, because here I am stuck in the bloody airport as the flight has been delayed three and a half hours. Which means I’m left at the mercy of T-mobile’s extortionate £10-for-three-hours Wifi in an enormous room without any bloody power sockets. And there are queues everywhere. And it’s really hot. And… And… And…
Right then! I’m off on holiday. If I get any free time, I’m going to try and polish off the rest of the New Musical Functionality series on the plane or in a café in San Francisco, but no promises, because frankly I need a bit of a break from all this web nonsense. Updates are likely to be sporadic in the meantime and when they occur are likely to be more chatty and journally than normal. Otherwise LA, San Francisco – California in general – here I come!
Quick brief apologies to people who are waiting patiently for the next part of the New Musical Functionality series. I’m off to Los Angeles and San Francisco in the middle of the week and this means I have to get a number of work and home things sorted out quickly before I go and and hence I’m a little behind. I wrote the first draft all the way through about a month ago, but the more I look at it the more I want to enhance and extend it without doing the same thing I did to the portability and access section (ie. drown it in detail and almost completely lose the core point). Anyway, hopefully I’ll get the rest of the series out before I leave for the States. Thanks for being patient!
On the subject of the USA, I’m probably going to try and say hello to a few of my favourite geeks while in San Francisco – probably culminating in some kind of frenzied uncool geek-out booze in somewhere cheesy like The Tonga Room sometime between the 12th and 18th of August (I love the Tonga Room). So there’s a possible date for your diary…
I don’t even know how to describe IMwatching.net except that it’s imaginative and awesomely creepy. The concept in a nutshell – it’s a way of keeping track of when someone was online in IM and when they were not and what their status messages were. One for stalkers, obsessive compulsives and those who think their husbands lie to them, I guess…