Haighting on San Francisco

I recently made a whirlwind trip to San Francisco, and caught up with some friends that have entered the smug cloud.  We had lunch in the Haight, near where they live, which was fun.

Haight-Ashbury used to be the grungy alternative part of San Francisco, and although it has retained some of that feel, it now has a more touristy flavour.  Still, there are heaps of bars, restaurants, and random wafts of pot smoke to be experienced.

I also spent a bit of time wandering around Golden Gate park.  It is an amazing place, and a real treasure for those living in San Francisco.  It is huge, bigger than Central Park in New York, and runs all the way from the Haight down to the Pacific Ocean.  Flowers were in bloom, and people were walking, playing frisbee golf, and playing volleyball in the sunshine.

The next day we headed up to Lands End, which was really pretty.  It reminded me a lot of the Monterey coastline - lots of pine trees and cliffs.



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The camera obscura at the cliff house was surprisingly good.  Light enters through the funny little pyramid on top, and is reflected and focused with a mirror and lens onto a concave table inside the structure.  The result is a live, moving, colour picture of what is going on outside.  It is actually a little creepy - we felt like sorcerers standing over a magic pool, or gods looking down on our minions.

For some reason, the Lands End conservationists thought it was a good idea to place little blue plastic flags everywhere that a seedling has been planted as part of their vegetation restoration effort.  What the?  Way to pollute the environment you are trying to save with a whole lot of plastic and rusty metal...

We walked around the Lands End trail to the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, which sounds like a war memorial, but is actually a beautiful French-style building containing an art gallery.  While we were there a bunch of people were dancing what looked like the tango in the courtyard.  I <3 San Francisco.

As my mum calls it: 'The Google'

While I was in San Francisco, I checked out Google HQ in Mountain View, about an hour south of San Francisco in Silicon Valley.

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Many of the big technology players have their headquarters in silicon valley - Google, Apple, Intel, Cisco, HP, Adobe, Oracle etc. 

The Google campus is pretty impressive, and feels a lot like a university campus (see here for a video tour).  It was a beautiful day when I visited, and everyone was outside sitting at the picnic tables eating their free, tasty lunch.

There was even a cool sand sculpture outside a building where they had a 'beach' party a couple of nights ago.  The campus is big enough that Google provides a whole fleet of bikes, in suitably primary google colours, for getting around.  You can see these bikes propped up against pretty much every building in the area.

After checking out the campus I drove over to Palo Alto (home of Stanford University) for dinner.  The town centre along University Ave. is one of the prettiest streets I have seen in the US.  It is lined with bars, cafes, restaurants, and art galleries - kind of like Chapel St. in Melbourne but with more of a University feel.

Hung like a Parliament

Election 2010.  Time to get our nerd on and visit the national tally room at Exhibition Park, to be at the heart of the action.  After dropping in on a friend's birthday party, we arrived about 9:30pm, by which time a normal election would have well and truly been called, but not this one. 

We stood in a cold queue outside for about 30min before we were let in.  Luckily for us, that was just a few minutes before Bob Brown turned up and got a big cheer from the Labor-Green heartland that is Canberra.  He proceeded to give an interview right in front of where we were standing, and we were in the background of a lot of TV footage. 

Unfortunately we couldn't hear a word of what he said, and that pretty much summed up the experience of the tally room - you are at the heart of the action, but really have no idea what is going on.  The TV sets are constructed along one side of the room, but they are too far back to hear what is being said.

The tally board itself is kind of cute, with tally monkeys running around behind it updating the numbers manually like the scoreboard at Adelaide Oval.  They could just have a projector displaying the electronic tally board the AEC has on its website, but they have opted for olde worlde charm.

We finished off the night at another friends' election party, which was actually fairly depressing.  It didn't matter who you voted for, with a hung parliament everyone loses.

Carn Stew! World squash converges on Canberra

The venue certainly isn't as cool as a glass box with a view of the pyramids, or hitting a yellow dot around in Grand Central station, but for the next few days the Convention Centre in Canberra is the focus of the squash world for the Australian Squash Open.

Some of the best squash players in the world are in town - 17 of the top 18 male players.  Tonight we saw, for free, the world #4 and #7 amongst others. Watching native Canberran Stewart Boswell ('carn stew!) go up against Thierry Lincou was great, even if the home favourite lost.  Boswell is in blue below.

The comp continues through to Sunday, tomorrow is the last day you can get in for free.

Stacks: Plenty, Coffees: 3, Red Bulls: 1

We spent yesterday at Perisher skiing, on a hastily-planned day trip. A friend had two spare seats in the car, and picked us up at 5am. I was more than a little worried about how bad the snow was going to be - I had heard talk of this being the worst July season in a number of years (despite some fairly creative positive-spin media reporting). So I decided to snowboard, since it wasn't going to bother me that the black runs were all closed if a blue was scary enough on a snowboard.

That was a good decision, but I was pleasantly surprised by the snow quality - those shiny new snow machines have saved the season, and I had a great day on the Mt. Perisher double.

The Baltimore 'Green Zone'

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A friend of a friend is moving to Baltimore and asked Em and I which parts of Baltimore we considered safe. I figured other people might be interested so I created this map. Note that it has been some time since I was in Baltimore (07-08), and I mainly hung out around the Inner Harbor so this map is biased towards that area. It also completely disregards some nice areas such as those up near the Hopkins Homewood campus (and probably many others) because we barely went there.

The 'green zone' represents where I would feel comfortable walking at night (yes, not everywhere is like the wire, but certain parts definitely are). The area I would walk in during the day is a bit larger, and I might get around to adding that at some point.

While I was doing this I looked around for existing map overlays for Bmore and found this awesome crime map, the Gay Baltimore map, and a fairly shitty bar map.

Bmore redux: tubing the gunpowder

I was back in Bmore this week for a quick visit.  On the way over I saw George from Masterchef and a bejillion socceroos supporters in the airport.

I recovered from the jetlag with a lazy float down the gunpowder river, something I've wanted to do since we rode part of the north central rail trail back in 2008!  A friend and I hired a tube in Monkton ($15) and got a ride in the shuttle ($5) to give us about 2.5 hours of floating.

The scenery is pretty amazing - it is very jungle-like and with the mist on the water in places it felt like we were floating into Jurassic Park.   The only sounds we heard were birds and the occasional cyclist riding past on the rail trail that follows the river.  The flow is fast enough that you make good progress, but slow enough that there is no whitewater.  The water is super cold, apparently it is piped from the bottom of a dam upstream, which keeps your beer comfortably chilly.

I had a great time catching up with friends and had some good meals: revisited Fogo de Chao, and went to Henningers and Ryleigh's Oyster Bar for the first time.  I also sampled some of my favourite things about the US: bagels, magic hat number 9 beer, Chipotle, and cheap outdoors gear.

Gap Adventures: Special trip to Hoth, Tatooine and more!

I just saw this, and it pretty much made my day:

Em and I were planning a trip to South America, but I hear the Ewok harvest festival on Endor is amazing...

juzt a leetle furzer

5 hour ACT Metrogaine

With many excuses (some good) from my friends about why they couldn't do the 5-hour Metrogaine with me, I decided to enter as a one-man team.  This was a luxury permitted by the organisers because the event was held within the confines of suburbia well-endowed with mobile phone coverage.

The controls were a mix of normal bush controls located in parks and less accessible areas, and questions such as 'What bird is NOT featured on the toilet block?' (which was my favourite control).  There was a 40 point penalty for incorrect answers to discourage guessing.  Nav was ridiculously easy, which was a refreshing change (see previous Rogaine experience) - this event was mainly about speed and route planning.

The weather was atrocious, it basically poured the entire day, except for a couple of hours at the start when it was only light drizzle.  As a result #61 was pretty much in the Molonglo River, despite the setter putting it back a number of metres from the water the day before.

I had to cut everything below #70 off, and couldn't stomach crossing Mt. Taylor for #60, due to time constraints.  My knee acted up about 2 hours in, which meant no more running and a 20 point time penalty for being 2 minutes late despite sprinting down Red Hill and tragically passing up #34, which was less than 100m from the road.  All up I estimate I covered about 27 km and scored respectably in the middle of the pack.

Despite the terrible weather I had a great time and enjoyed the course.