I Love the Bay Area

A New York friend is coming to San Francisco for a weekend to attend a wedding. She’s staying in Union Square and only has one full day to tour the city on her own, and this is what I recommended: 1) Get up whenever, stroll around Union Square/Market St. 2) Optionally check out Yerba Buena Gardens and the Museum of Modern Art, or the California Historical Society Museum, or the Cartoon Art Museum. 3) Around lunchtime, make your way to…

You know, there are days when it feels like the whole world is smiling on you. Yesterday I went for a run at about 7 pm up in the Berkeley Hills on the side of Strawberry Canyon. As I was coming down the hill, the sun was setting over the Bay and there were wild blackberries blooming on the trailside. I love this place.

This past weekend, my grandparents moved out of their home in the Berkeley Hills of nearly half a century. As many of you know, that house is very near and dear to my heart. As I told them, if they were selling it (they’re not), I would sell everything that I owned to be able to keep that house in our family. On Monday evening, I took a tour of the house, in its empty and soon-to-be-rented state, and went…

I got my passport back! I had to get extra pages added to my U.S. passport. The website says it can take up to six weeks, but I got mine back in under two. Sweet! Today, I went to the Asian Art Museum and met Ala Ebtekar, a Berkeley-born Iranian hip-hop visual artist. We chatted a bit and he told me to Rose Market in Mountain View to get some real-deal koobideh as well as other staples like bastani (Persian…

Starting July 12, 2006, you can fly direct to the Azores. Wow.

Veljo and I walked around Telegraph and around campus this afternoon. Seeing Cody’s in its dying days is quite sad — many of the bookshelves, particularly in the back of the store are totally empty. It looks like they’re going to turn that space into two retail locations. They also had a slide show of some of the early days of Cody’s playing on a computer there — before it was Cody’s it was a Shell station. Who knew? Also…

Every so often you get in a funk with your own music collection and want to listen to something a bit different. After being exposed to Soma FM, courtesy of my co-worker, Curt Poff (who gave me a Soma FM sticker), I finally tuned in. I’ve been loving their Indie Pop Rocks! feed, which is exactly the kind of music I love, but it’s fresh and new every day. I’m sold.

Ron Thompson’s Feet, Caffè Trieste, Berkeley Photo by Alan Wiig

MuniWireless.com: BART/Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority (CCPJA), the operators of the Capitol Corridor commuter train, are asking the telecommunications industry to help them take the next big step in providing mobile broadband services, including Internet, email, Virtual Private Network (VPN) access, video downloads and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to their riders’ laptops, PDAs and cell phones—while the Capitol Corridor train is moving at full speed between Auburn and San Jose. Results of the initial technical trials will lead toward…

Here’s an awesome photo of my favorite bridge. The Chronicle published it today in conjunction with this piece saying that the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge won’t be done until 2013. Most interesting part comes from the timeline: November 1998: Residents of San Francisco, Oakland, Emeryville and Berkeley vote that passenger rail service should be “part of the redesign of the Bay Bridge” — an advisory measure initiated by Willie Brown. Awesome!