I got a haircut. $8 courtesy of the Happy Hair Studio in Chinatown. He was a little too liberal with the clippers for my liking, but it’ll neaten things up for a while.

I also met Valerie. Valerie is really nice. And she’s hot. And French. I met her last week after the Yosemite trip, she lives two door down from me. Gives me a good excuse to speak French! She speaks good English but has a very cute French accent. We’re watching a movie later.

Alcatraz

Thursday night at long last I finally went to Alcatraz. It’s continually booked out and I never got the chance to go before so it was especially nice that I got to go to the Rock for free for an industry mixer. Free food, free drinks and a free tour. Perfect night out. The boss asked me to look respectable so I had to wear a shirt and tie, which I had bought for the conference in San Jose and is still too small.

The tour itself is a guided audio tour, narrated by one of the former prison guards. It’s a really interesting tour, and they’ve even got the cells which Frank Morris and the other two prisoners escaped from in tact complete with the holes they made in the wall. It’s an awesome place, quite a bit smaller than I expected but still very cool. There’s a part of the tour which takes you to the solitary cells, which even with the doors open are scary to be in. Prisoners were kept in their cells in complete darkness 24 hours a day, and only allowed out for exercise once a week. Scary thought. It is also said that when the wind was calm, prisoners could hear people in Fisherman’s Wharf, in San Francisco. Alcatraz was also the only prison in the country which provided the prisons with hot showers. Not for comfort, more so the prisoners would not become accustomed to cold water should they escape and attempt to swim to San Francisco. The water around the island is extremely cold and has very strong currents, not to mention sharks.

So the free food was awesome, there was clam chowder which is similar to chicken soup and loads of cheese. Open bar too! Dessert was a seemingly endless supply of cookies and brownies which I partook of in excess. I also may or may not have loaded my coat pockets with Ghirardelli chocolates.

Anyway I have loads of photos, and I really should upload them to Flickr but I can’t be bothered right now. Here’s one of my favourite shots taken from the boat.

Yosemite

Ok, so onto the crazy weekend part. (more…)

Ok, it’s been like a month since I went to see Joe Satriani in Hyde Street Studios. I got a phone call yesterday telling me that Joe had signed a copy of the Legacy edition of Surfing with the Alien and they’d post it out to me. And it arrived yesterday! Very nice man he is too.

It’s the original album with some B-sides and DVD footage from the recording. Pretty nifty.

Tomorrow after work I’m attending a business mixer organised by the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau. It should be fun, I’ll get to meet loads of people from the tourism industry in the city, which in many cases is putting a face to the name. Plus there’s a free tour and free food. I should probably point out that it’s taking place on The Rock i.e. Alcatraz Island. The email invitation I got has the following instruction:

Please do not wear orange jumpsuits, black and white stripes, handcuffs, or any clothing that may be seen as disrespectful to the history of Alcatraz.

SFCVB Email

Damn, I’ll have to rethink my wardrobe!

I’m not 100% sure of the circumstances surrounding the situation, but from what I read in the comments the kids Pluto is chasing kicked him in the nuts. I needn’t say any more, the video on it’s own is hilarious!

No, it’s not a novelty band - it is what it says it is: a notebook toaster. Designer Sasha Tseng has designed this cute little toaster that comes complete with a notepad on top that burns your message into the toast! Check it out:

How cool is that? I want one just so I can toast some bread that says “Haha, I used all the butter!”. Or to be cruel, “I used the last of the bread”. It’s a bit of a novelty and I’m not sure if they’re on sale yet but it’s a genius design.

This toaster comes only a week after the unveiling of the Transparent Toaster:

This also amazing piece of technology uses heat-retaining glass to turn your bread into the perfect piece of toast. It takes the guesswork out of browning the bread just right. No more fiddling with dials and stuff, just pop it out when it looks just right. Only downside I can see is that both toasters only do one slice at a time. I mean, that’s pretty slow - who eats one slice? Hmm, I wonder what the funniest thing you could write on the toast would be…

Firstly, I have yet another new address which you can find on my contact page should you need it.

Secondly, I had a very boring and extremely unproductive day at work today. Seeing as it’s Labour Day and everyone appears to be at the Golden Gate Park for the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love at the park. I was in the park yesterday and the hippies were already causing a nuisance of themselves with their tuneless percussion and singing. Most of them were already tripped out on weed, so I was going to shout favourable remarks regarding the establishment and cause a fuss about the war but thought better of it just before doing so.

With my multitudes of time to myself I investigated the whole Web 2.0 thing. Casual readers beware: what is about to ensue is a verbal onslaught of nerd stuff which some people may find both boring and confusing. Those not familiar with this stuff can skip the next paragraph unless you want to learn something new.

For those still following allow me to introduce my findings. I discovered that the hot thing in web development right now is Web 2.0 i.e. user generated content. Think Youtube, Facebook, Delicious… and specifically for the web developer i.e. me, is Ruby on Rails (or RoR for short). What RoR allows the developer to do is to easily create web-based applications and creates powerful database driven content. It’s basically the next step up from PHP and ASP. It’s got it all - dynamic content, database integration, AJAX. It’s the shiz. To that end, I just ordered myself Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications which is published by SitePoint. SitePoint use many different authors but the format for each book is similar - they introduce the basics and teach you all you need to know by working through an example project. I’ve bought two books from them before and they’re both excellent. They’re always great for reference too. I can vouch for any of these books. I’ve come a long way in my web development career. Last year around this time I was just finishing teaching myself CSS and how to abandon tables, then by Easter this year I was able to create a database driven site using PHP and MySQL. This is a fast moving industry and you gotta keep on top of what’s hot so Ruby is my next challenge. And I’m looking forward to getting started!

On a more generic note, yesterday I found a British grocery store called You Say Tomato. It’s flippin’ expensive but stocks all the goodies that a homesick Brit remembers from good oul Norn Iron. I picked myself up a bag of Fox’s Glacier Mints and a bottle of Ribena. Oh how I’ve missed Ribena! I adjusted quite well going from 4 pints a day to cold turkey overnight when I moved here, but now that I have it I seriously hope it doesn’t start an expensive habit. It’s actually much more expensive than alcohol! I snapped a pic of me and the Ribena I purchased, simply because it reminds me of the days when we were inseperable:

A bottle that size cost me $7.99 and the glacier mints cost $4.00 so with tax I had just enough to cover the two things, reluctantly having to leave back the chocolate covered Hob Nobs I also simply had to have. They weren’t as important as the Ribena as I’ve replaced my Hob Nob craving with milk and Oreo’s which are quite simply America’s greatest accomplishment to date. On that note, if anyone should happen to be in Tesco  this week (Stephen, that’s assumed in your case) then perhaps a packet of chocolate Hob Nobs could find their way over here? I’m willing to exchange it for a box of Oreo’s if the offer comes along!