Yesterday was fun.

Work

I started the day quite badly. Sunday night I worked the late shift at work, answering the calls until 10pm, then I worked the early shift on Monday which means answering from 6am. I forgot to turn my phone off between 10 and 6 and in the middle of the night, someone called to cancel their tour for Monday due to illness. 2am in the morning I answered my phone thinking it was 6am. I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night so I arrived at work exhausted before I even started.

Playstation

But I got off work at 4.30pm and walked up to Mission St. I had been checking on Craigslist for a Playstation 2 just so I would have something to do if it was wet outside and I was totally bored (which thankfully doesn’t happen often here). There was a guy in Mission selling one with a ton of games and controllers or $100, so I needed to take the 14 bus into the Mission.

Stupid me, I took the wrong bus. I didn’t know there were 3 14 buses!

I ended up in outer mission, which is miles away. I eventually found my way back and got the Playstation, but without half the games. They were mostly crap. And I bargained him down on the price a bit, so I got the whole deal for $95. Tried it out this morning and it works like a charm. He also left one of the disks inside, so I got another one without even knowing it.

Free tickets to Advanced movie screening

I had to rush back downtown as I was meeting Valerie there. It was six months yesterday that we’ve been together so I planned a bit of a date. I met her (about 30 minutes late) at the Metreon, which is essentially a glorified cinema, and we waited in line for a movie that I had got free tickets to.

The movie is called ‘21‘. It’s based on a true story about a guy who is trying to get to medical school, but can’t raise the $300,000 he needs to pay the fees. His teacher notices he is very good with numbers and invites him to join the MIT Blackjack team, who use a system of counting the cards in a blackjack game to beat the dealer. Every weekend, the team flies to Vegas and uses their technique to win big at the casinos. Apparently this method of counting cards is not illegal, but casinos have strict measures in place to stop this activity.

The movie was pretty good, an intriguing story and well acted but it was a little Hollywood for my liking. There were all the cliched things, and at times it was predictable and a little fantasized which made it difficult to believe in parts.

Q&A

But by far the coolest part was that the guy who the movie is based on did a brief Q&A after the movie. He answered a lot of questions, and was very interesting. He’s basically banned from Las Vegas and can’t be within 20 ft of a blackjack table at any casino. Every casino in America knows his face and he can’t play anywhere.

The movie comes out on Friday here, and on April 11th back home, I think. It’s worth checking out if you like those sorts of movies.

Italian Food

The cinema organised some blackjack after the movie at nearby Jillian’s bar across the street, but I took Valerie to Buca di Beppo instead, which a great Italian restaurant that I went to over Christmas. It was great, I really love Italian food over here - it’s one type of restaurant that I could order almost anything off the menu and know I would like it. Usually there’s only a few things on a restaurant’s menu that I would go for. In the end we both settled for lasagna because it looked just too tasty. And it was. It was just the perfect size because I was just able to finish it and no more. Very satisfying.

Happy six months Valerie. Poor girl has been stuck with me for too long…

Happy Easter to everybody, joyeux paques tout le monde! And especially thank you to Lauren for the Percy Piglets, they were delicious!

It’s kinda sad that the American’s celebrate an Irish holiday more than the Irish. The biggest celebrations of Saint Patrick’s Day are in Chicago, Boston and New York, and in Chicago they even go to the extent of dying the river green.

San Francisco is no different. On Saturday they had the big St Patrick’s Day celebrations where thousands of ‘Irish’ people lined Market St appropriately attired in green to watch the parade go past.

I think I was one of the few genuine Irish people there that day, but I did feel very proud to be Irish. It’s also a little weird that everyone waves the Tricolour about and no one gets threatened. Much different to home where stupid people seem to get offended by which flag you support. I think that’s one of the main reasons why we don’t celebrate St Patrick’s Day as much at home.

After the parade, there was a huge festival thing at the Civic Center. There was a band playing and stalls set up selling the typical tourist garb, then there was all the beer companies giving out free beer for coming to their stalls. To be honest, it was pretty lame. I stayed about an hour and then left.

On the way home, Johnny Foley’s - the Irish pub close to my home - was flooded with people. There were people spilling out onto the street all drinking their Guinness, just because it’s an Irish bar. The other bar on the other side of the street was nowhere near as crowded.

Yesterday, on the real St Patrick’s Day, I decided it would be nice to get away from the city and do something different. I managed to secure a day off work as it was an Irish holiday, so I took Valerie down to Great America. It’s a theme park located close in Santa Clara, close to San Jose. I went there before and it was awesome, but we went by car and it only took about 40 minutes to get there. This time we didn’t have a car, so we decided on BART which got us close, but we’d have to take a few buses to get there afterwards. In total it took almost 2 hours to get there, and when we got the friggin’ park was closed. I couldn’t believe it. I had checked their website just a few days before and they said they were open for the season on March 16th. I forgot to check the night before, where they said they were only open on weekends. Luckily my tickets are valid for the whole season.

We didn’t waste the day, though. We found a mall called Great Mall nearby and spent a good few hours there. It was huge but we didn’t buy much. There was a Disney outlet store that sells all the crap from Disney stores that didn’t get sold first time around, at discount prices. I got a straw cowboy hat from Pirates of the Caribbean originally priced at $24 for just 99c. Bargain. We got a mini golf set too for some tournaments at home. Had lunch at a Korean fast food place, which was pretty good. I also bought a basketball so I can keep in shape.

On the way home, rather humourously, Valerie was too slow getting off the BART. I got off in Oakland, and she had to get off at Macarthur station and come back. After everything, I got back to San Francisco and had to wait 20 minutes for her getting back.

Last night then I skipped the St Patrick’s Day Festival, because I’d had enough by this stage, and went to play basketball up on Russian Hill. The court is awesome, had great basketball and tennis facilities and has a panoramic view of the entire bay with Alcatraz right in the middle. Brilliant.

Yesterday they officially launched Hulu - a website with a very stupid name but lots of great content. It’s basically a video site with loads of TV channels and and movies available to stream for free. Most videos are pretty good quality, and the player is nice. There is limited advertising throughout the presentations but it’s much less advertising than you’d get watching these shows on tv - typically it’s about 15 seconds of ads per 10 minutes during half hour shows.

It’s owned by Rupert Murdoch, so at least we know it won’t be taken offline like many other sites that offer similar things. I watched two new episodes of the Simpsons last night and was very impressed.

Oh, and it’s only available in the US. Sorry!

This past weekend the weather was good so I spent Sunday afternoon at Baker Beach. It’s one of numerous beaches around San Francisco, and arguably the best. Usually when Valerie and I go to the beach we go to Ocean Beach which stretches the entire length of the west coast of the city, but it gets battered by the fierce Pacific winds and is usually quite cold. We went last week and stayed 10 minutes because it was so cold.

Baker Beach is much better. It’s considerably smaller and has a nudist section on the northern end. It’s sheltered from the winds that Ocean Beach experiences and it has an excellent view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

We brought my frisbee and a little ball to play with. The frisbee was awesome fun for a while until the wind caught it and landed it in the sea. The current is so strong in the water that the waves break every few seconds and it took exactly that long for my frisbee to disappear. I was notably disappointed.

I also didn’t eat hardly all day and was absolutely starving when I got home. Luckily my friend Yaching from Taiwan was cooking dinner, and she’s an awesome cook so we had fried chicken and tuna salad which was nice. Minus the salad.

I also managed to finally get my photo’s from Monterey, Carmel and Big Sur photos onto my computer. I posted Monterey and Carmel before, so here’s a few from Big Sur.

I went out to see Lifehouse last night playing a sold out show at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco. I was very excited about it since Lifehouse are one of those bands that rarely leaves the US, making this a golden opportunity to see them since I may never be able to do so again. And how did it go? Well, to be honest, it wasn’t great.

I arrived after work and met Valerie (the stereotypical Lifehouse fan) at the Warfield, which is a nice venue similar in size and style to the Grand Opera House in Belfast with a capacity of about 3,000. I’d say about 75% of the attendee’s were female, and of those at least another 75% were teenagers. In fact, most of the guys that were there had the sort of facial expression that had ‘my girlfriend made me come here’ written all over it.

We missed the first support act in favour of getting some hot wings from the food bar. Took 20 minutes to get them, and they were very spicy, but stupid venue policy dictates no drinks in the main theater so I had to sit there and suffer for a quarter of an hour. Our seats were right along the back row of the upper balcony, typical of Ticketmaster who always seem to give you the crappiest seats they can offer despite choosing ‘best available’ option from their seating selection on their website (cf. Foo Fighters where I actually bought tickets in the pre-sale and still ended up upper balcony with a fantastic view of the air conditioning system). Luckily the Warfield is small enough to be able to see from every seat, but it hardly seems fair that front row of the balcony is the same price as back row and it’s just dumb luck where you get placed.

Matt Nathanson

The main support came from a chap named Matt Nathanson with his band. The sound was a little muffed and I could barely hear both his guitar or his voice but he was very good, even if I could only understand what he said when the drummer wasn’t playing. His music isn’t anything original but he’s a funny guy and sings very well, so give him a listen. He was nice enough to do a meet n greet afterwards, which dozens of starstruck girls flocked to afterwards (including my girl…he smiled, made up some lame story about living in France many years ago, and signed her ticket ‘To Vanerie’..hah!). He seemed to do a good job of getting the crowd warmed up and buzzing for the main act to follow.

Lifehouse

So Lifehouse came out about 20 minutes later and opened with a completely unknown song, that was a little lack-luster and down tempo. The Foo’s did the same thing, but then ripped into The Pretender straight after. I guess I was expecting something similar, but the second song was more familiar but not one of their best. There wasn’t even as much as a ‘How you doing San Francisco?’ until about 4 songs in, and even then it was merely that - one sentence. I’m not blasting Jason Wade - I realise he’s a shy guy and it’s not his style, but even the music was obscure. I’ve listened to Lifehouse for years, as far back as 2001 or 2002 I’m sure at the beginning of their fame and own all four of their albums, but their choice of songs was definitely poor as I had wasn’t really getting into anything they were playing. And it wasn’t just me - all the little teeny boppers pogoing in the front row were even looking a little frustrated at the lack of the big hits.

About 4 or 5 songs in came Hanging By a Moment which proved a favourite with the audience and a glimmer that maybe better was to come. It was a good performance and things picked up momentarily, even a bit of talking from Jason but nothing spectacular that you would almost expect from a band that writes such great songs. The acoustic guitar came out and they played You and Me which got almost everybody to set their cameras and cellphones to record. Other songs included First Time, Spin and Simon, but that’s about it for the hits. Everything else was the more obscure songs that typically make the end of an album, when only the hardcore are still listening. I waited in anticipation of Out of Breath, Come Back Down, Breathing and of course Everything. Without doubt, Everything is one of their best known songs and their best in my opinion. But even the encore didn’t feature Everything, or even Storm which is another awesome song (that they re-recorded for their last album!). They played another song that I’d never heard and that was it, they were gone and everyone piled out. It was a strict hour and a half performance and despite a huge cheering crowd at the end, I couldn’t help but feel more than a little disappointed. And I think most people were the same. The two girls sitting beside us were totally excited at the start and were heckling throughout the first few numbers, but midway through the set I spotted one of them dozing off. The couple to my other side barely cracked a smile all night.

Verdict

It’s sad when a band you really admire let you down. I remember seeing REM in Belfast and being really disappointed, too. Perhaps the recent experience of seeing a full show like the Foo Fighters was an unfair benchmark to compare this gig too, but usually I prefer the smaller gigs. I still think that best shows I’ve ever attended have been the ones that fly under the radar - like The Answer at the Empire in 2005, Foy Vance at the Old Museum Arts Center in 2004, and Biffy Clyro in the Nerve Centre way back in 2004 too. Luckily Lifehouse tickets weren’t terribly expensive (with fees, think it was around $35) but they are one band I won’t hurry back to see, which is a shame. Do yourself a favour and go see Matt Nathanson instead.