Recyclists of SF

San Francisco - nexus for the industries of silicon and logic, erstwhile hub for countless wide-eyed Flower Children and their pharmacopoeia of psychedelics, and home to the most efficient army of hunter-gatherer recyclers known to mankind. These scavengers rove about the city filling carts of all descriptions with aluminum, plastic, and glass gold, pausing only to swig the last dregs of partially re-fermented beer from that hastily-discarded PBR. There's a lesson in here somewhere about economics: by raising its bottle deposits to the point where serial bottle-returning becomes a decent source of quick cash, California has effectively crowd-sourced recycling. As a result, they're able to post 74% recycling of beverage containers.

(I can hear the Hounds howling - this wealth-redistribution racket is straight-up capital-C Communism, a conspiracy perpetrated by Obama and his sleeper-agent terrorist-Jew-Illuminati cohort ever since the Dark Time of Marx to pave the way for such unimaginable horrors as public health care and tighter bank regulations!)

The bottle deposit is an effective tax on laziness, which is perfectly fine by me. After all, it's a fair bet that even if we taxed the beverage companies for making these containers in the first place, polluter-pays style, we'd end up paying this portion anyways (unless, in accounting for the total cost of production, that can of Coke became prohibitively expensive...)

In San Francisco, Startup == Pub

Any event where you wake up the next morning with two free shirts, a deck of cards, a jar of bubble soap, a stack of business cards, and a video of yourself ziplining across an office hallway is a resounding success. Enter Startup Crawl, an open house on some of San Francisco's hottest startups. It's part pub crawl, part power-speed-networking, part tech-speak geekout session, and 100% SF-style general hilarity. Where else can some lowly Canadian undergrads walk in off the street - in jeans and T-shirts, no less - and end up throwing back Don Julio with the CEO over talk about scalability and the startup life within the half hour? Where else can you climb out a window to have rooftop beers with high-wired entrepreneurs preparing for next morning's Y Combinator pitch? The list of such meritocratic hedonist enclaves is short indeed.

This event deserves to be ported elsewhere - where's the beef, Waterloo?

802.11x In The City

Another morning, another wireless hotspot courtesy of the thriving West Coast coffee-shop culture. This one is located within the confines of Cup Of Java, a fairly standard joint that just so happens to have a Casio CTK-471 sitting around - any instrument on the keyboard-piano spectrum, even a cheap MIDI-spewing plastic-encased Casio, earns bonus points. I order the Greek Omelet, which comes nestled between a bed of -

Actually, never mind that. I'm no food critic; that's what we have Yelp for. (Hooray for externalized memory!)

In San Francisco, every coffee shop comes with its very own resident Bluetooth headset-wearing intravenous-caffeine-drip work-from-home maven; the more popular ones boast entire armies of these laptop-toting soldiers, each one vying for a slice of the ether. (I'm taking more than my fair share with Transmission (more proof that the highly publicized takedown and subsequent sale of The Pirate Bay does jack-all to staunch the, er, torrential (yeah, I winced too, but it seemed like most appropriate adjective) flow of information), and am watching nervously over my shoulder for the legions of RIAA men-in-black that are no doubt waiting to haul my recidivist pirate ass into court.) I'm half tempted to whip out Wireshark to see what exactly these people are doing, but that would most likely cross the line between harmless curiosity and feline genocide.

...and I'm off to scour a couple of thrift stores before grabbing the bus into work.

The Gubernator Strikes Back

Need one more reason to be proud of your elected officials? Here you go. While we're at it, here's another epic fail courtesy of our beloved civil engineers.

What else? I went ATVing at the Pismo Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area, an unnecessarily obtuse moniker for what amounts to a giant outdoor sandbox filled with off-road vehicles of every description. As a testament to its rugged nature, the area is rife with Second-Amendment freaks on oversized rollcages-with-wheels proudly festooned with Southern Confederate flags. If you've ever wanted to live out those Mad Max post-apocalyptic fantasies of petrol-fueled villainy, this is most definitely the place.

Found a super-chill haven of hippie-dom sandwiched between Mission and Valencia. The Oz Hookah Lounge delivers drunk revelry, multiflavoured smoke haze, cushions, and a panoply of psychedelic patterns at nearly every hour of the night. This particular visit was punctuated by a host of inebriated Iranian expats carrying beer-laden ice buckets and gin-and-tonics from a nearby bar, which they promptly distributed amongst the crowd.

Halloween's coming - get your costumes together! Photographic evidence is requested, lest the veracity of your respective accounts be called into question.

My One Lunar Cycle No-Post-iversary

Yeah, it's been that long. 28 Days Later, stuffs and things at varying orbitals of excitement have been happening with acceptable regularity:

• Not only am I the proud owner of a longboard, but this particular plank of my comprehensive transportation platform now bears the inimitable insignia of one Randall Munroe. (I can only wonder what joyous blasphemies #666 will bring.)
  
• Finally made it out to the infamous DNA Lounge; this SF institution has the peculiar distinction of being owned by ex-Netscape programmer Jamie Zawinski.
• Canadian Thanksgiving shindig, complete with full turkey and pumpkin pie. Need I say more? (No, but I should probably add this: there's another Canadian Thanksgiving dinner this Sunday hosted by the Stanford Canadian Club; despite what their (apparently infrequently updated) site says, it really is this weekend.)
  
• Pretty Lights at The Independent last night. If you haven't seen them, you really should.

How's Facebook? (Come on - if you care enough about me to read my pithy musings, you're probably expecting an answer to this question.) Intense. It pains me to say it, but Facebook has so far provided much more in the way of personal development and work-related awesomeness than Google ever did. How can that be? It comes down to recruiting strategy: Google casts as wide a net as possible, hoping to grab what it considers to be the best of the best before someone else does. In my opinion, this strategy is bound to backfire. You end up with a zillion interns and, well, less than a zillion interesting and/or useful projects; it doesn't take a math major to see that you can't pair each intern up with something worthwhile to work on. (It does take a math major, however, to look at the whole situation and start rambling about bijections.) Here's the point: half of the interns coming out of Google are extremely wary of returning, and that can't be good. ("Half" here is an extremely unscientific guesstimate, but several co-interns (who will obviously remain nameless in such a public forum as The Internet) have expressed similar sentiments.)

The Ongoing Saga of Evan's Search For Housing in San Francisco

I've finally uploaded a couple of albums, as promised - one for our intern-squad trip to LA, one for random.choice() style samplings of SF. The latter album will hopefully expand as the term progresses!

The small handful of people that actually read this thing might have noticed a considerable lull in post volume - and not without good reason. For illustration, here's a timeline of my weekend:

• Friday, 9 pm: pass out from exhaustion. Turns out I still haven't caught up on sleep from the month of death, a fact which late-night mid-week meanderings in Mission can only exacerbate.
• Saturday, 9 am: wake up, foot it to Lower Haight for breakfast.
• Saturday, 11 am: still at breakfast place, firing salvos of Craigslist replies. Aiming for the clusterbomb strategy; the housing search in San Francisco is not exactly easy, especially when you're a male international student looking for something short-term.
  
• Saturday, 12 pm: moved on to Upper Haight, where I score myself a longboard.
• Saturday, 1 pm: running laps around here to the dismay of tourists and local art cognoscenti alike. Still need practice before I can take this thing to the streets.
• Saturday, 2 pm: finally work up enough confidence to book it down to Stockton and Market, where I've got an overpriced screen-repair appointment at the not-so-aptly-named Genius Bar.
• Saturday, 4 pm: with everything in working order, I work my way back to the hostel.
• Saturday, 5 pm: keycard doesn't work. Uh oh.
• Saturday, 5:30 pm: I learn that, contrary to my understanding, the hostel has fubar'd my reservation; I was supposed to check out this morning. At least they're nice enough not to charge me for the privilege.
• Saturday, 6:50 pm: after a hasty sack-packing and another ear-grinding leg on the BART, I'm standing on the San Jose-bound platform at Millbrae Caltrain. The plan? Lug myself to the office, drop my stuff off, and find a nice comfortable couch to crash on. Oh, and I just missed the train.
• Saturday, 8:30 pm: I finally get to the office.
• Saturday, 9 pm: I check my email, where I find a welcome bit of good news - one of the Craigslist postings actually responded.
  
• Saturday, 9:30 pm: One of my coworkers happens to be working late on a rush job; he kindly offers me a place to crash for the night.
• Saturday, 11 pm: I'm watching Clash of the Titans. Hey, this nomad business isn't half bad.
• Sunday, 11 am: me, my longboard, and I make it out to the Caltrain for a trip back into SF. Not having a place to stay, I ping jverkoeyen; he volunteers the services of his fine floor for the cause. Random discovery - turns out there's a farmers' market right outside California Ave. Caltrain every Sunday.
  
• Sunday, 2 pm: standing at Embarcadero and Market. The Craigslist poster rings me; I've arranged a viewing at 4 pm. Between then and now, I've got to find Jeff and get my ass across most of downtown SF to the far side of Mission. Whatever will I do?
• Sunday, 3 pm: turns out Jeff and his girlfriend Emily shelled out for a mattress and bedframe off Craigslist and need help moving it. In return, they'll ship me across town in a Zipcar pickup truck and pass off a set of keys so I can get into their place.
• Sunday, 3:40 pm: I reach the room I'm viewing with time to spare. The tenants show me around. Good vibes all around; these people are exactly the kind of laid-back I need right now.
• Sunday, 5 pm: eating in some supposedly Cambodian restaurant near Mission.
  
• Sunday, 8 pm: a meal, a spot of rainy longboarding, a none-too-quick bus ride, and a short hike later, I reach Jeff's place. It's exactly as sparsely furnished as I had imagined.
• Sunday, 9 pm: I find a corner supermarket with the help of a map Jeff left on the counter.
• Sunday, 9:30 pm: I'm eating a hasty meal of baguette, cheese, turkey, pasta salad, nectarine, and orange juice under Bay Bridge.
• Sunday, 11:30 pm: restless, I take a brief promenade about the apartment complex grounds. Nice pool; there's something pleasantly surreal about living in the shadow of an enormous bridge.
• Sunday, 12 am: lights out. Too much busy-work roaming for one weekend.

And that was it. Gasp. I must have covered the whole city a zillion times.

On the upside, I've landed a place to live for the rest of the term; I'm bunking up in my favourite hostel in SF until move-in. That, and I have yet to injure myself longboarding. (Depending on who you ask, that's either a good sign or an indication that I'm not doing it right. We'll see - I've got plenty of time and hills to reverse this trend with.)

Board in SF

Shelled out a wad of cash today for a longboard, which I've been (painlessly (so far, at least)) riding around SF on. My goal is to cut door-to-door times in the city core by 60-75% compared to the estimated walking time on Google Maps. (I'd estimate 80-90% for cycling, but this is immeasurably cooler - not to mention far more prone to catastrophic failure.)

And, yeah, I promised pics a few days back. I have yet to deliver on that promise, but I'll definitely post here when I do!

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