Yesterday I had a great time lindy hopping with 20-some other folks as part of the "Sunday Streets" festival in the Mission District of San Francisco. "Sunday Streets" is a city-sponsored series of events that creates car-free areas on the weekend for people to stroll, shop, eat, listen to music and just hang out….
Category: SF Bay Area
San Francisco Quaker Meeting: Sublime Silence in Downtown SF
Today I finally got to check out the San Francisco Quaker Meeting, almost completing my tour of local Bay Area Quaker communities. A fairly nondescript building on 9th Street near Market, the San Francisco meeting gathers every Sunday at 11am for worship, followed by socializing and committee meetings. This morning there were about 30-40 Friends…
Biking in San Francisco: From Mission Bay to the Golden Gate
I spent this weekend doing a lot of biking in San Francisco, which is a great way to get to know the city and to get around. I've been told that SF is one of the great biking cities in the United States. But it's famous hills and narrow, windy streets were wee bit intimidating….
Using Augmented Reality to Find Swing Dancing in San Francisco
I have been playing around with some augmented reality apps recently, including the Layar AR system, one of the most popular ones out there today. Layar provides a common platform for developers to share their augmented reality data using common standards, and then share them with a global community of users. There are currently more…
Virtual Worlds, Transgender Photos, and My Life as a Dancing Cyborg
Last Saturday I was involved in a really interesting conversation on the subject of "The Customizable Body: The Present / Future of Identity" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The featured speakers were Second Life founder Philip Rosedale and photographer Amos Mac, documents trans male lifestyles in his zine Original Plumbing. I love…
Easter with the Santos Clan (pics, video)
Easter with the Santos clan was a very festive affair this year, hosted by the Martin family in their lovely house in Hercules, CA. I had a great time hanging out with the fam, eating a ridiculous amount of amazing food, playing with my littlest cousins, and just relaxing on a gorgeous Easter sunday. Check…
Gauchos bring Gypsy Jazz to the Mission
On Wednesday night I had the pleasure of catching the Gauchos jazz sextet perform at the delightfully divey Amnesia Bar in the Mission District. The Gauchos play mostly gypsy jazz, ala Django Rheinhart, throwing in some other tango and New Orleans street jazz for good measure. They got some serious chops, tight grooves, and…
LookBack Maps: Bringing the Past to the Present with Augmented Reality
I have been playing around with augmented reality apps lately, seeing how they might be used for education and civic engagement. The field is still in its beginning stages, but we are already starting to see some interesting applications of AR. Of course, augmented reality applications have been around since the early 1990s. But it…
A San Francisco Monday: Bayside Jog, Coffee Snobbery, Food Truckin, and Swank Swing
I had a fantastic Monday in San Francisco that reminds me of why I'm so excited about living here. I woke up early, threw on my sneaks and headed out from the pad I'm crashing at in Mission Bay. Then I went for an energizing 2 mile run by the waterside through the Embaracadero and…
Hiking with the Familia in the Oakland Hills
Yesterday I had a fantastic time stomping around the Redwood Regional Park in the Oakland Hills with a bunch of my cousins. I had no idea that such a dense, beautiful redwood forest was so close to downtown Oakland! The occasion was the birthday of my cousin Mel. So a bunch of the cousins (and…