What could be better in life than robots and cocktails? Well, nothing! Roboexotica is the premier cocktail making robot event which happens in Vienna each year. This week it comes to San Francisco. Join us for good music, cocktails, and robots that pour you drinks, insult you, and test your BAC….
Sat. May 10th 8pm-2am
Space, 354 5th St. San Francisco, CA
Me love cookies. Me tend to get out of control when me see cookies. Me know it not natural to react so strongly to cookies, but me have weakness….
Me was thinking and me just don’t get it. Why is me a monster? No one else called monster on Sesame Street….
How can they be so callous? Me know there something wrong with me, but who in Sesame Street doesn’t suffer from mental disease or psychological disorder? They don’t call the vampire with math fetish monster, and me pretty sure he undead and drinks blood…
Stefan Sagmeister, one of my favorite print designers, is going to be giving a talk at Stanford tomorrow. It’ll be in Pigott Hall (Bldg 260, Room 113) at 8pm. Here’s more on him
Stefan Sagmeister is one of the most influential graphic designers in the world working today. Since 1993 Sagmeister Inc., has focused on all things printed, including posters, brochures, books, and graphics and packaging for music clients…He’s created iconic album covers for Lou Reed, the Talking Heads, and the Rolling Stones…
Also, here’s a talk that he did at TED in 2004 that I recently watched while on the train. It’s called “Yes, design can make you happy.” I don’t know if design always makes me happy but this talk definitely did!
A couple days ago I heard this song on the radio and it seemed familiar for some reason. I’d never heard it before, but it reminded me of the music my mom used to blast on our tiny tape player in the kitchen when I was growing up (which I think I used to hate but now find strangely comforting…kind of like fish sauce on mangoes).
The song is called Shave Your Beard by Dengue Fever and it’s a cover of a classic Cambodian pop song. I don’t think my mom ever listened to Cambodian pop when I was growing up, but she listened to a lot of Cantonese pop…I guess there must be some similarities.
Bella is a 6mo old corgie that I’m puppysitting for the week. We went to the beach yesterday where she ran and ran and ran (doing the full speed ahead i’m so excited my ears are gonna BURST puppy gallop!) Then we visited raj, jess, bob, and zara. It was a great day! (except for the part where she peed on zara’s rug).
I recently got this for some friends of mine who are about to become parents, but I pretty much think it could be useful to all sorts of people….like
roommates (whose turn is it to scrub the toilet? spin the wheel!)
siblings (whose turn is it to organize mom’s birthday party? spin the wheel!)
coworkers (who gets to have the nice desk by the window? spin the wheel!)
Of course there are much more mature and logical ways of going about everyday decision-making, but the one thing this solution has going for it is that you can’t really hold a grudge against or argue with chance…and it’s probably a whole lot faster. (in the absence of a wheel, a game of heads or tails also works quite well)
About a week and a half ago, a new state budget was proposed and under it’s terms, 48 (almost 20%) of California’s state parks would close, including these beautiful Bay Area parks
The whole list is over here. You can petition against these closures through the California State Parks Foundation website which will help you send a letter to your local Assembly Member and Senator if you give them your name and address. There’s a prewritten message you can use or you can write one of your own.
I’d be really sad to see these parks close and hope you’ll send a letter! If you don’t want to disclose your critical info on a website and you live in Bernal, you can also fax a letter to Senator Carole Migden (916) 445-4722 and contact Assembly member Mark Leno.
It’s called moneygami! I wish there were instructions to go with this gallery but I imagine they’ll come soon. My favorites are the penguin and dog above.
A place devoted just to pie! They’ve been around for a year on 25th and Mission but I never knew. I came across it on my way home the other day so I stopped in and had a slice of banana cream pie. It was yummy! Creamy but not too heavy or sweet with small banana chunks. Also, what’s really neat about this place is that the proceeds from the shop support a farm in Pescadero which in turn supplies the ingredients for the pies…and the teenagers who work behind the counter also work at the farm once a month to grow the ingredients and help make the pies. It’s an inspiring project!
Here are some pics from my recent trip! I did an 8 day trek in Torres del Paine called the Paine Circuit which is in southern Chile. It was beautiful! It was also really really hard. I can’t lie…there were many times I wished I were lying on a warm beach in Bali that week…especially when I was kind of lost, at the edge of a precipice, and the wind was so fierce, I had to grab hold of a tree or my makeshift trekking poles that I dug into the ground to keep myself from being blown off the mountain. The wind was UNREAL. I had to stop whenever I heard it coming behind me, hunch down close to the ground, and prepare myself to get hit. it came in phases like mini-tornadoes.
The weight of my pack also made it difficult for me to put one foot in front of the other sometimes. I’d never gone on such a long backpacking trip before and at the end of the first day, my back hurt so much, I gave my SLR to a chilean woman at the refugio by our first camp. Luckily I still had a small pocket cam which I used for the pics above (hooray for small pocket cams!)
The crazy wind and weight of my pack aside, the trip was great! I met lots of nice people, and learned a lot. It was one of the most beautiful places I’ve been to and I’m glad I went when I still had knees. I’m fairly certain they’re done for now. They’ve just told me that they will no longer be in on anything I decide to do this year. They are going on stike!
Here’s a map of the trek.
The penguins were at a penguin colony on Seno Otway, about an hour from Punta Arenas. To get to Torres del Paine, you have to fly to Punta Arenas (about 4-5 hrs from Santiago, Chile), take a bus to Puerto Natales (about 3-4 hours) and then another bus to the park (about 2-3 hours). It takes a while!
I’d pretty much given up until the 9th msg came through and I got one! yay! I can’t believe that it’s been a year already and it’s *STILL* so hard to get a Wii on Amazon. Yes, I know it’s possible to get one at a store if you live in Missouri (or just not in the Bay Area)…or if you wait in line at Best Buy at the crack of dawn, but I really didn’t want to do that (cause I’m lazy). I just wanted to get one online for the office and WiiMe came through!
That’s a line from this article of sage advice called How to Road Trip by Leslie Harpold. Leslie passed away last year in December and her site’s been taken down, but I’m glad bits and pieces of her writing still live elsewhere online.
This is pretty neat. ThirstyLight is a plant sensor that you stick in the dirt next to your plant and when your plant needs watering, it’ll start to blink!
I have a feeling I wouldn’t notice the blinky light on some of my plants though (because they’re tucked away in a corner)…but if they also made a small beeping noise when they’re thirsty, they would definitely get watered.
SoCha is a cozy cafe in Bernal that just opened up 2 weeks ago. The food and coffee seem to be standard cafe fare but some nice things about this place are:
live music almost every night! Here’s the schedule. I’m sitting in the cafe right now and a couple guys are playing the cello and piano.
free wifi…and magazines to peruse
a large back room with cozy bench seats.
a small beer and wine list.
movie night on wednesdays
unlike Ritual further up the street, it’s not totally packed. There are lots of tables!
I think there’s also a brunch menu on the weekends so we should come here for brunch one day!
Rescued from our collective electronic trash bins and lovingly preserved for posterity, here’s a set of doodles inspired by spam subject lines. viagra and boob boosting vitamins never looked so good.
I think it’s time for our semi-annual lobster event. Killing My Lobster’s new show is at the ODC every Friday through December 8. They were awesome last year. We should go!
I was at a recording studio in Oakland for work and this was the very first thing I saw when I walked in (so of course I had to take a picture of it :-)
It took almost 4 hours for a 6min track to be recorded, cut, and mixed. (Being a sound engineer seems to require A LOT of patience…for reasons having nothing to do with the process of recording, cutting, or mixing).
After the track was bounced, we rushed it over to the Paramount for a show with only 5 minutes to spare before it was needed.
We missed most of the show but watched the last 10 minutes from backstage. (more blurry pics here!)
