Jennifer and Rosa at the De Young

Despite the rainy, windy weather we started by going to Golden Gate Park to visit the De Young Museum. The copper siding has a little more patina since I was there last. We wandered around looking at old landscape photos, modern art, and giant stone heads from the Olmec culture in southern Mexico.
Al Farrow’s CathedralOne of the more impressive pieces on display (for me) was Al Farrow’s Cathedral. Made almost entirely of gun parts, bullets and bones, it made quite an impression. Down the naive was a human spine; I’m rather curious where that came from since I can kind of imagine someone not minding their spine being in an art exhibit, I can’t imagine who that person would be (since Santo Guerro wasn’t a “real” person). I’m rather surprised there isn’t anything in Wikipedia about it yet.

Of course while at the De Young it’s almost mandatory to go visit the tower and take in the view. If you’re in the area I was assured that visiting the tower is still free. The view, even on a rainy day like we had, was spectacular.
Tower of the De Young MuseumWhat was funny to me was listening to the tourist pointing at landmarks and calling them by the completely wrong names/locations. Someone was pointing at the church up at the University of San Francisco and claiming it was the original Mission of San Francisco (which is completely obscured from view in that part of the City). Oh well. I’m sure I’ve done worse.

Next up, the California Academy of Sciences. This is probably my favorite museum in the city. We got there a little late but we managed to snag tickets to the Morrison Planetarium to see Life: A Cosmic Story. Narrated by Jodie Foster, it was quite an amazing show. Not a bad thing to see on our first planetarium show at the CalAcademy. Unfortunately for us this was the last show of the day, and the Academy was closing right afterwards.
T-Rex at the CalAcademyI guess we’ll just have to check out the rest the next time Jenn visits.

Later we had caffeine at Borderlands Cafe but that couldn’t stop the food coma after eating at Osha which has great Thai food.

“Bright” and “early” on Sunday we picked up Jon E and headed north to Sonoma for wine tasting. We’d had heavy wind and rain overnight and some of the roads were flooded but that didn’t deter us. We hit Gundlach Bundschu, Ravenswood and Bartholomew Park wineries. All were good and none of us got too buzzed (the portions are getting smaller and smaller every year; good and bad). Later that night we ate at Ti Couz and called it a night.

Now it’s Monday and I feel tired enough for an all day siesta. Too bad I’d get in trouble for that… It was a great weekend, though, and wonderful to get to know Jennifer better! Rosa and I will have to get up to Seattle to visit her sometime.

There are a couple reason for this. The first is that from and administrative POV things have finally gotten out of hand. The site runs on WordPress (and previously Blosxom) and I started when WP was still on version 1. I built my own theme based on my Blosxom template and imported the entries. It wasn’t perfect, but it got the job done. Themes in WP can be tricky, and I’ve been trying to upgrade mine with each significant release to include features, but it’s been a pain in the ass. Now I’m looking at what WP3 has to offer and I realize that there’s just no way I will be able to effectively upgrade my theme.

Another desire is to start working on a fresh site with my wife, Rosa. Both of us have dropped off Facebook (she did it quite a bit before I did) and we still like to communicate with the outside world, especially since our family and friends are scattered over several continents.

So we’re going to do it. We’re trying to come up with a name for the site and looking at various themes we could use. There are a load of great pre-built themes but I’m especially interested in Sandbox, Toolbox and JustCSS. These are barebones themes that you can customize and are something I was sorely missing when I built my own theme for this site from scratch. We’re also thinking of something along the lines of Magazine Basic and Platform because we like their layout.

Any other ideas?

1: It doesn’t actually enhance my social life.
2: Vicariously following my “friends” doesn’t enhance my relationship with them.
3: Facebook has some serious privacy issues, and that’s not all.
4: My personal life is my own, and doesn’t need to be complicated by a site that feels so impersonal.

Each one of those points could be an entire essay. Note that many of these same reasons apply to why I never got into many of the other “social” media trends except Twitter, and that was purely to get me some free software; huzzah!

It was great when they had Scrabulous but since then I’ve hardly used it. I rarely checked on friend’s profiles, never used any of their games, and pretty much only followed the news feed, which was almost useless since it posted people’s updates that I didn’t care to follow and removed the ability to customize it. After a while I stopped checking that even. Upon a wild occasion I would post my own status update. I think the last ones were wishing folks a Happy XMas (which I could do here) and posting pictures from the wedding, which I did post here. So why don’t I just do what I’m doing here, where the only privacy concerns are the ones I make myself, where you can read what you want (or not!), and live my life by arranging to meet people in person that I can and calling or sending an email to the people I can’t? No reason.

So, that’s all for now. Maybe (maybe!) someday I’ll return but in the meantime I’m going to make a concerted effort to update this site a bit more. I know, I’ve been saying that for a long time, but I’m hoping that this time it actually sticks.

In the meantime, I know in this “modern” and “social” environment that it’s kind of shocking to some if they see their “friend” suddenly not on their “list” and feel put out. I hope you find this page and realize it’s nothing personal against you. This is just something I wanted to do. We can still be friends in the real world.

The first set, from Castelló d’Empúries, is here. There aren’t as many pictures of family and friends as I would like, but we were hyper busy and distracted most of the time. I admit, I’m surprised I remembered to take any pictures at all…

October 9th, 2010

PS: Thanks, Jerome, for the awesome picture!

Photo by Jerome Abellar

So let’s get back to it, shall we? Yes!

World Cup is starting up. Here’s all the games, here are the game times set to Eastern Standard time and finally here is a map of where you can watch in the Bay Area. USA plays England first… Let’s make them suffer!

Meanwhile, while I haven’t been writing a whole lot, I have managed to watch the entire three “seasons” (Brits having a different idea of how many episodes constitutes a season than us) of an amazing BBC series called Black Books. See it. It’s comedy gold that will probably not be remade here in America (like The Office) because there’s too much smoking, drinking and swearing without any (well, only once) sex, murder or blowing things up. Brilliant. I need to find out who wrote the opening theme song…

Speaking of explosions, can anyone explain to me why they can’t simply blow up the hole in the Caribbean leaking all that oil? Or pour several thousand metric tons of concrete over the top? Seriously, it seems ridiculous they build these things without some sort of failsafe or cutoff valve.

Anyways, off we go!