Parking Day was a while ago, but I still haven’t posted pics. Now that I have a worspress client on my iPod, I have no excuse to not post!

Filed under: excursions, photos, san francisco, tiki lifestyle | 2 Comments
Tagged: ParkingDay

After a long hiatus, George made an appearance at Mike’s 35th bday bbq!

Saz made George back in 2003 to preside over the TikiCrawler. Max made the tronix for the fire, and foo did the welding for the frame.

The TikiCrawler was an awesome group project.. We need a new project this year! Also, I need a TikiCrawler to drive around the city. Even hammocks are faster than muni :)

Photo credits: mike and catweasel!

Filed under: inspiration, tiki lifestyle, tronix | 1 Comment
Tagged: mike , saz , tikicrawler

Da drinky robots are comin to us! :-)

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

Filed under: tiki lifestyle, upcoming | 0 Comments
Tagged: drinkyrobots

LA may have pot vending machines, but Missouri has Tiki Rings!, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

If only I had some quarters…

Filed under: bobslobster, tiki lifestyle | 3 Comments

Check out this gorgeous timelapse that Mike made:

(click play to start) (link to other sizes)

Filed under: tiki lifestyle, video | 6 Comments
Tagged: CHDK , mike , sunset , timelapse

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!)

Filed under: tiki lifestyle | 0 Comments

Oooh…time for a tiki shopping spree! At the Forbidden Island, Alameda’s first and only tiki bar.

On Sunday, September 23rd from 3-7pm, Forbidden Island will once again host Northern California’s largest sale of collectible & vintage tiki, Hawaiiana, rockabilly, and mid-century modern goods. The sale will feature an incredible selection of original art, collectable mugs and décor, vintage aloha & rockabilly clothes, vinyl, furniture, and much more. We’ll also be offering drink specials and a few surprises. Come early for the best selection- it’s guaranteed to be a sell-out event! Don’t miss it!

i would go but i’m trying to shed belongings, not acquire more. i’d be up for sipping a tiki drink at the bar though :-)

Filed under: bay area, tiki lifestyle | 0 Comments

Throw out your Don Ho records! (via boing boing)

Filed under: tiki lifestyle | 1 Comment
Tagged: neat

Okay TR crew, given that this year’s themes for the LS party are “tropical, tiki, jungle, safari, pirate, and nautical,” we’d be totally remiss if we didn’t make an appearance in our finest grass skirts.

Filed under: tiki lifestyle, tikibar, upcoming | 4 Comments

Here’s a link to the finished drawing. (and where you can get one too.)

Filed under: doodles, tiki lifestyle, zara | 8 Comments
Tagged: timelapse

This comes to me from my friend Dan. Apparently Petropics has a whole line of tiki pet food and toys. Too bad I have no pets of my own to do a taste test. I wonder if zara would be opposed to trying this stuff out?

Filed under: tiki lifestyle | 1 Comment
Tagged: toys

I always wanted a service that could send a box of razor blades, a bottle of rum, some cocktail umbrellas, a few pineapples, and a single black sock to me every three months. Finally, Amazon has stepped up to the plate with their Subscribe & Save service. Well, they only have razor blades and a few grocery items right now, but I’m sure they’ll add the rum soon enough.

You get 15% off when you add an item to your Subscribe & Save list, even if you remove the item after a single shipment.

• automatically receive a new shipment of the item in intervals you select–every one, two, three, or six months
• get a discount on our everyday price
• get free shipping on every Subscribe & Save shipment

Filed under: tiki lifestyle | 1 Comment

What’s summer without a summer read and a little armchair travel. Apparently, this book has it all. Via Drawn…

James Teitelbaum and Santa Monica Press are pleased to announce the June, 2007 release of Tiki Road Trip 2, the follow-up to James Teitelbaum’s hugely successful book, Tiki Road Trip (Santa Monica Press, 2003).

Tiki Road Trip is your best - and only - comprehensive travel guide for those seeking a south seas adventure in the big city, an island escape from the urban jungle, or the location of the nearest metropolitan luau. At 360 pages (compared to 280 in the old edition) and packed with new images, this edition of Tiki Road Trip is a huge leap forward from the previous edition, and is absolutely mandatory summer reading.

Filed under: books, tiki lifestyle, tikibar | 1 Comment

Our neighbors dug a hole in their back yard, and um… roasted a pig in it. I didn’t realize “pig in a blanket” meant acutally wrapping a dead pig in a blanket and then throwing it in a hole in the ground along with some coals and rocks! I brought over a couple pitchers of mai tais, which didn’t last too long!

Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.

photo linky!

Filed under: food, san francisco, tiki lifestyle | 0 Comments
Tagged: bernal

Adam Koford is a cartoonist who runs the distributed E-Hobo effort that illustrated the 800 hobo names from John Hodgman’s Areas of My Expertise. He was also selling custom-painted postcards illustrating your own hobo name, and Mikey commissioned a drawing of TikiRobot Raj and his Superdog Zara!

Mikey gave me the art-card yesterday at the Ranch and it totally blew me away! So beautiful and perfect! I love the way Adam captured Zara’s Z-tag, and floppy ears, and my flaming head! Thanks much to both of you!

Links!

• TikiRobot Raj on flickr
• TikiRobot Raj on Adam’s blog, Hobotopia
• Your Hobo Names set on flickr
• The 700 Hobos Project on flickr
• e-hobo.com
  

Filed under: doodles, inspiration, tiki lifestyle, zara | 4 Comments

T-girrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl is making this table with a pretty ceramic Tiki mosaic! Here is a pic of the work in progress:

Filed under: tiki lifestyle | 1 Comment
Tagged: crafty

I saw an awesome pickup truck this morning … sorry, no picture. But it was an old school pickup, teal colored with “Tiki Go Go” in fabulous Tiki fonts. It turns out to be Chef Kelley Hawks. The food looks super good, but at $350/person for 5 entrees, I think I’m going to stick with almond butter on a whole wheat english muffin. “A thoughtful gift for new parents or newlyweds” … Neither of those are on the horizon but feel free to buy it for me anyway!

Filed under: bay area, food, tiki lifestyle | 2 Comments
Tagged: family

Link to Robot Makes Tea on CNN

Filed under: lifehacking, tiki lifestyle | 3 Comments
Tagged: neat

No…this isn’t an item from the SkyMaul catalog…it’s actually something you can buy right now, today. And I think it’s brilliant!

HOLY TOAST BREAD STAMP

In the beginning…there was bread…. Make that boring bread an inspiration by embossing it before you toast! Our easy-to-use HOLY TOAST stamper always makes a good impression.

Press the stamper into an ordinary slice of bread, toast it, and behold a miracle!

Filed under: tiki lifestyle | 1 Comment
Tagged: neat

pineapple-jack, originally uploaded by Kim’s Suitcase.

Filed under: bobslobster, tiki lifestyle | 4 Comments

About a month ago I was going on about trying to use a newsreader to keep up with all the RSS flying around. I tried Google News Reader, hated it. I tried about 10 other RSS readers, both web based and client software (mac)… I felt like they all missed the point.

When I’m reading RSS, I actually don’t give a monkey’s tail about the RSS. RSS is stupid, unformatted, unstyled text with no soul and even less information. The way to consume RSS coming from websites is to read it in it’s richest form: from the website itself. Some client newsreaders go a short way down this path by giving you button to open the article in your web browser. But this is totally lame. I mean, a drunk dog could open up a web browser and sit there through the World Wide Wait and sift through the blink tags and advertisements and try to read the article.

I am happy to make the first public mention of TikiRobotReader, a Mac OS X application that (eventually) will handle RSS in a way that is not totally dain bramaged. TRR is Open Source, a Cocoa application, and a work in progress.

The basic idea is that for a given Article, TRR will download the link to the article’s web representation and convert it to PDF so the articles are all nice and shiny and ready for your skimming pleasure, no waiting required. Here is what I want TRR to be:

Principles of Operation

• Simple keyboard commands everywhere. Should be operable one-handed while eating lunch.
• RSS is disposable content. It’s not critical like most (personal) Email.
• Read the content as presented by the website, not some random choice of Font and Color.
• Blog posts and status messages from friends are way more important than Yahoo/CNN headlines.
• Streamline the reading process. No nagging feelings of “should I delete this article or save it?”
• Download and cache web pages as PDF. Zero latency when switching articles.
  • PDF loads immediately, vs 1-5 seconds for an HTML page to render
  • PDF is a static page, no blinking and bouncing flash ads and animated GIFs
• RSS is a source of content. Provide easy hooks for the sinks: Sharing and Research.

The current release is ugly as hell, but functional. At this point TRR is best enjoyed by running out of XCode so you can debug crashes and implement nifty features. I will be using it as my daily news reader in this fashion. But the nightly builds are functional and get the idea across. Feel free to contribute! Design ideas are helpful and code contributions are always a good thing. TikiRobotReader is meant to present RSS the way you, the discerning TikiRobot! blog reader, think is best. TRR will be a great place to implement all those Web 2.0/client features we want but can’t get anywhere else.

Link to TikiRobotReader nightly build
Link to TikiRobotReader SourceForge page

Filed under: all talk, code code, design, lifehacking, meta, osx, tiki lifestyle | 5 Comments
Tagged: apps , cocoa

I’m thinking about staying up all night once per week, trying to learn about what physiological effects that might have. I’m proposing this as an alternative to building up sleep debt by getting 5-6 hours of sleep a night. I haven’t really found any conclusive information, but here are some interesting tidbits on sleep:

• The function of sleep has not been fully determined
• The Army is researching modafinil as a way of keeping soldiers awake 80 out of 88 hours, two 40 hour shifts seperated by 8 hours sleep
• Microsleep is defined as brief (several seconds) runs of theta or delta activities that break through the otherwise beta or alpha EEG of waking. This is what happens when you fall asleep at the wheel, etc
• All-Nighters are a bit of a macho thing among some business travelers (pdf, bugmenot )

For my own purposes … there is a lot of stuff I want to get done, mostly software. Late at night is quiet and free of interruptions. I’m wondering if getting on this schedule would make me more or less productive overall. Also will exercise help? How long would I be able to stay on the schedule?

Filed under: all talk, support, tiki lifestyle, tronix | 2 Comments

Even though mang has moved to NYC, he’s still a San Franciscan at heart. Here’s a phonecam shot I got yesterday from mang, taking his surfboard from Manhattan to Long Beach on the train!

Incidentally, we went to the Exploratorium yesterday and got to see the very fun exhibit mang worked on this summer. Everybody loved it! We’re going again on Oct 4, and you should come!

Filed under: excursions, tiki lifestyle | 2 Comments

Today I’m learning what this Ruby on Rails thingy is all about. As you can see from the screencasts, it’s a web development environment optimized for Hackers on Speed. But I’m thinking I might be able to crank out a page or two. Apparently textmate is required equipment.

I think my CGI.pm days are over :-(

Link to Ruby on Rails

Filed under: code code, tiki lifestyle | 3 Comments
Tagged: ruby

Jesse will know just what to do with it

Filed under: no code, photos, tiki lifestyle | 1 Comment