Dyepot, Teapot

I’ve been home since Wednesday night, so it’s probably time to finish posting about the road trip and move on to something else.

Sunday night I had dinner in the Mission district, first tacos at Pancho Villa, then a dessert crepe at Ti Couz.

Monday morning was spent on laundry, as mentioned before. Then in the afternoon I headed to SOMA to see Citizen Space. It’s a nice office, comfortable place to catch up on email, and they seem very open to people dropping by.

After that, I took the cable car up to Lombard St.

Twisty as advertised.

Then back downtown to do a little shopping. I’ve been having some pants problems. I can’t find an exact duplicate of the ones I like that wore out, and I hate ordering things online only to discover that the sizing isn’t as expected. It’s really irritating how many places don’t stock their full size range in the store.

The Old Navy on Market has not just the XL and XXL sizes I’ve seen here in Portland, but an actual Women’s Plus section of the store, all the way up to 4X. They even had larger mannequins for the displays. So now I have two pairs of reasonably comfortable pants. The fit around the waist is a little weird, but not enough to be irritating.

Tuesday we started the drive back north, but first I had a couple hours free to explore Golden Gate Park. I spent most of it in the Botanical Garden.

Laurie and I loaded back into the car and started north along highway 101.

This went fairly smoothly, though we had some trouble getting back on the highway after stopping for food in Santa Rosa. The highway entrances and exits aren’t paired, and there are no signs directing you back to 101. Instead, they expect you to know the area well enough to follow the signs for highway 12, understanding that it overlaps with 101 through town. This is not very friendly to people just passing though.

We made it to the redwoods by dark, and camped at Richardson Grove State Park.

Scenic, but noisy. The year-round camping area is well within earshot of the highway.

Most of the rest of the trip was driving and driving and driving. With a couple of small detours, including an elk viewing area.

I had a really good time over the week I was gone, and I’m really happy that Laurie decided to take a road trip and asked if anyone wanted to come along. It was much fun.

And now I’m home, with too much to get done, and a really annoying cold I picked up at the hostel. Achoo.

1) Tourists (the kind you can spot a mile away) look as astoundingly ridiculous as they do because these are people who only ever set foot inside a city when they are on vacation. As a result, they are completely unequipped to figure out what kind of gear would be practical in this environment, and instead substitute things that various catalog companies tell them will be practical and appropriate. Contrast with the gear and clothing of the city natives, which may appear impractical or even ridiculous and yet has not resulted in starvation or frostbite.

2) Any kind of usable reputation system has to find a good way to handle localized types of reputation. For example, I know enough people in the tech community in Portland that I can usually find someone to talk to at various events. Yet this is only useful in San Francisco if I ask someone I know in Portland for an introduction to someone here, or if I stalk my Twitter contacts aggressively.

3) I forgot what the third item was. Maybe something to do with blogging? Travel? Reasons I am not a rock star? (but that last one’s probably only funny to me at this point.)

I didn’t write a post yesterday, so now I have two days to catch up on. This might be long and picture-heavy.

I’m writing from a laundromat on O’Farrell called Joey’s. They serve ice cream, coffee, and sausages. The laundry prices seem competitive. And there’s wifi (yay!).

A few highlights from Saturday:

I started my day at the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market.

Then I took the streetcar to Pier 39.

A few piers down from there, I found a submarine.

Also:

Coin-operated gizmos.

My evening’s entertainment was dinner at Edinburgh Castle, which is a pub that serves fish & chips, delivered in paper wrappings from a little take-out place around the corner. There I met Derri, a canned-foods journalist from London, who was hanging out in SF for a couple of days after a conference. She was disappointed that the bartender had never heard of HP sauce or mushy peas. The fish & chips were authentically bland, but they have a decent selection of beer on tap.

Moving along to Sunday: my general plan was to go look at the bay some more, then wander through Japantown for a bit. The first part went as expected.

Fishermen, seagulls, a view of Alcatraz …

and people out for a swim?

This was about when I started wishing I could stay in town an extra week, go kayaking, check out SFMOMA, hang out at the beach getting sunburnt (oh wait already did that one). I’m on my last full day and there are still all sorts of things I’d like to do.

Next: Japantown. I had noticed a couple of things mentioning the Cherry Blossom Festival, but somehow I got it into my head that the festivities weren’t for another week.

I’m very happy to have been wrong about that. I spent two hours sitting around and watching the parade. There were kimonos. There were swords. There were cosplay outfits.

I even saw the mayor riding a Segway. (He hopped out of his car to ask the parade volunteer if he could try it, then zipped around the group in front of him at high speed. His security guys looked a little nervous about this.)

It was quite a party.

P.S. Can anyone tell me about the shrines several groups were carrying, like the one above? It seemed to be related to celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Osaka-San Francisco sister city relationship. There were about 6 different groups carrying these, each chanting something different, but since I don’t speak Japanese, I don’t know what they were saying.

I’ve traveled enough to learn that I need to walk around in a new place to get the geography clear in my head, because otherwise I feel lost and uncomfortable. So yesterday I walked from the hostel to Chinatown and back, then around again through the city center area. This worked; I feel like I know where I am now.

Chinatown was sort of under- and overwhelming at the same time. Grant Ave. had clusters of gawking tourists, cheap import shops, some interesting collectibles and antiques, and a lot of restaurants with people outside waving menu flyers.

Stockton has a different sort of crowdedness: little old Chinese men and women buying fresh fish and roast chickens and unidentifiable (to me) dried things. I had planned to get lunch in the area, but after wandering around a bit I realized I had no way to work out which restaurants were any good (having failed to write this info down before heading out), so instead I wandered into a bakery and bought a couple of buns. The yellow bean and ginger one was really interesting, but I couldn’t finish it. The unfilled pineapple bun worked out better.

Afterward, more wander wander until I was tired enough to come back to the hostel for a nap.

In the evening I met up with some of the Podcast Hotel crowd at the JPG Magazine gallery opening/party.

We hung out at the gallery for a while, then carpooled over to Velvet Cantina in the Mission for dinner. Lots of fun conversation with John, Alex, and Marshall about social media, reputation systems, and general internetty stuff.

Today’s plan is to go check out the market by the Ferry Building, then head up to Fisherman’s Wharf and Pier 39, after which I will probably want another nap and a shower. And then maybe I’ll crash the Podcast Hotel wrap party.

We made it to San Francisco safely. I am tired. Too much car.

But look, on the way we went to the beach:

We camped at the Umpqua Lighthouse State Park Wednesday night, then Thursday cut back over to I-5, and headed south until we were here. There may have been a little difficulty finding Highway 505 that resulted in going back over the same stretch of I-5 a couple times because you can only get to the entrance heading south. Maybe.

And now I’m at the City Center HI. We got in around 10:30 or 11. Slept okay, but the radiator in the room makes weird sloshy noises and I may have to try earplugs. There’s a lounge with tables and many outlets.

In a little while I’ll go see Chinatown.

I’m taking advantage of my really flexible no-office schedule to accompany a friend on a road trip to San Francisco. Neat things about this: I can’t remember the last time I decided to travel on ~3 days notice (and pulled it off), I’ve never been to SF, people I know from Portland will also be there for Podcast Hotel so maybe I can figure out how to meet up with them without paying the $50/day event registration fee, I’m bringing my camera (of course), and I expect to have ample access to wifi.

My plans involve a fair amount of sightseeing, so let me know if there’s anything I really should see or do (already have Chinatown, sea lions, that really twisty street…). Brewpubs? Bookstores? Bakeries? Yarn/fabric/etc?

I’ll be back a week from tomorrow, but expect to hear from me before then.

I’ve been trying to think of ways I can keep people coming back to the Yog’s Notebook site between new issues, and also do more to build a reader community. This week we launch a weekly blog for reviews, links, and other fun content. The first feature is a post from Lucas about Kurt Vonnegut and Cat’s Cradle.

I have a shop on Etsy that has been very neglected for several months, but I just started listing some new things.

First up is handmade paper. It’s a mix of recycled scraps and cotton linter. Occasionally there are letters from the used paper that stayed intact through the pulping process.

The second item is hand-dyed sock yarn. A while back (~3 years ago?) I asked my brother, who was working as a prep cook, to save onion skins for me, so I’ve had a couple bags of the stuff sitting around, waiting for me to do something. This batch came out a bright gold color. I’m really pleased with it.

I’ll have more yarn and more paper soon, and probably other things as well. Any requests?

Someone on Absolute Write asked about near-future research, for the purposes of writing a story that takes place around 2025. People were jumping in with various suggestions, so I gave it a try, and I think it’s an interesting enough topic to repeat here.

I think the main things I would expect in the next 20 years are:

We finally see the full extension of what always-on internet connectivity can do. Not so much in the “no need to leave your home” sense, but more of using it as an added layer to your daily life, using external computers to augment your own memory and mental power. We already do this when we use Google to find an address rather than writing it down for later. I think we’ll allow ourselves to be more dependent on these aids.

Continued social polarization. Some areas following very liberal laws and community values, and some areas just the opposite.

Very complex and criss-crossed economic networks, down to the personal level. I might have clothing custom-tailored in Romania, buy gadgets from Finland and Japan, and medical treatment from India. Also imagine these networks in reverse. What skill can your part of the world provide that everyone else will want to buy?

Clothing isn’t going to change a lot. It might get a little more utilitarian, with fibers engineered for particular purposes, and clever pocket arrangements for all the gadgets we carry.

Assuming that efforts to address climate change remain moderate, some areas are going to be wrecked by freak weather patterns the way New Orleans was. Expect a lot of disruption in travel and shipping at times, as well as displaced communities.

Customized (or highly targeted) media content will be much more common, either via a proliferation of content channels each after a small, specialized market, or smart agents that collect things based on your preferences. Actually, the combination of both would make sense.

Most things that can be digitized will be, but there will continue to be a strong interest in paper books, physical copies of music in whatever format, etc. Both because not everyone is going to have the same level of tech available to them, and because people appreciate the physical object. The production of these items may also tend toward higher quality special editions (already happening with books and records, maybe we’ll see a movie version?).

Last item: it’s going to be noisier. More things trying to get our attention, more content directed at us, more crowded urban environments. Take up meditation now, get a head start on dealing with it.

Like all predictions of the future, this one is liable to look utterly ridiculous within six months, if not tomorrow.

Your turn, if you want it. What does the future look like?

Lucas and I went for a walk around Laurelhurst Park this afternoon. Last time we were there, they had warning tape around the duck pond and signs saying to stay out of the water due to toxic algae. This time, no yellow tape, but the pond was green.

Healthy green? Scary green? I have no idea.

Also, we saw a duck orgy. One female, three males, huffing and puffing and chasing her all around the pond.

A heron caught some kind of goldfish or koi while we were standing around, but I didn’t get a picture of that. Just a blur of orange and blue out of the corner of my eye.