Archived entries for friends
Bay to Breakers
Or, yet another reason for San Franciscans to don costumes.
Yesterday, Ben, Erika and I ran in San Francisco’s 98th annual Bay to Breakers race. B2B is a 12K (7.5 mile) run from the San Francisco Bay to Ocean Beach. It’s known for being a party disguised as a race.
Highlights include crazy costumes, a tortilla toss, a school of salmon who wear fish hats and run upstream from finish to start, centipede groups of 13 who compete in a connected line, giant floats lots and lots of naked runners. It’s unlike any other race I’ve ever done, and I’ve only seen the costumes that passed me on their way to the start.
I tried to get back to a suitable spectating location once I finished the race, but the roads were so packed (80,000 runners + crowds) that I couldn’t get close. Next year I’ll run in costume, I swear.
Erika brought flowers for Ben and I to carry since
we were under dressed (as runners).
Erika, on the other hand, was well dressed in her
Burning Man BumbleBee dress.
Token naked guy photo, because, well… there
are a lot of them. And they all carry bags.
There were a lot of Elvii at the race – this one
finished up just in front of me.
Bird on a Wire
bird on a wire, 19th and Valencia
My friend Raphael had a job to do last week, and I had the honor of assisting him in seeing it through. He was asked to help his friend Rhys Newman carry out his project Bird on a Wire. (Check out his sketches — they’re amazing!) Rhys constructed and sent 12 pairs of birdhouses to 12 cities — Tokyo, Sydney, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto, Seattle, Builth Wells, Brighton, Helsinki, Buenos Aires, Panguitch Lake & Cardiff — and asked his friends to hang them from a neighborhood wire. Raph was charged with hanging his houses in the Mission. The first time we tried to hang them we were at 16th & Mission, at the heart of Mission crazy. It was a lot easier than you think to throw string over an electric wire at a busy intersection in SF. Ben climbed on top of dumpster, hurled the weighted string over the wire, used it like a pulley to hike the birdhouses up. But alas, the string wasn’t threaded through the houses at the right angle, and we couldn’t get them to tip over the wire. So it was back to the drawing board. Raph did a few more tests at home to perfect the angle of the threading, and a few days later we tried again. We started back at 16th and Mission, where I was promptly offered methadone pills and cocaine, but we luckily discovered the cops in the middle of the intersection before we got to work. So naturally, we relocated. We eventually hung them on 19th Street just west of Valencia, on a quiet street with a view to the Sutro Tower. And 5 days later, they’re still there! Check out the photos of the trial run and the final go on Flickr.
Arduino team featured in Wired Magazine
“Check this out,” Massimo Banzi says. The burly, bearded engineer wanders over to inspect a chipmaking robot—a “pick and place” machine the size of a pizza oven.“
- Team Arduino: Gianluca Martino, Massimo Banzi, and David Cuartielles Photo: James Day
Massimo and the boys from Arduino are featured in the six-page spread “Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?” by Clive Thompson. Way to go Arduino!
Digesting Design Engaged
A couple weeks back I had the honor of co-hosting the Design Engaged 2008 conference in Montreal with Andrew Otwell, Boris Anthony and Mouna Andraos. We’d been planning for the event for 6 months, and I can’t believe it’s now come and gone. I couldn’t have been more delighted during the conference itself, sitting in a room with 30+ friends (old and new) and reaquainting myself with the luxury of thinking about design. I realized that I don’t get to think about design all that often in my day job at the moment, and that’s a real shame. (That’s not to say I don’t think, but I think more about people and process than about ideas and instances.) I came away from DE with a new energy, excited about taking part in the conversations that were going on around me, and looking forward sharing my own work next year. I’m still digesting everything that went on during the weekend, but in the meantime I’ve published a hundred or so photos of the event on Flickr.
Update: Nicholas Nova did an excellent write up of the event on his blog Pasta&Vinegar.
Thanks Nicholas!
Five Things
well my friend Heather tagged me with her Five Things meme, so I’m going to try to play along.
First, the background.
1. Post the rules of the game at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read the player’s blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.
//What were you doing five years ago?
June 2003? Living in the west village. Ending a relationship, starting a new job. Training for a half-ironman triathlon, thinking about packing up my life and moving to Europe.
//What are five things on your to-do list for today?
well, the day is nearly over, but on my (non-existent) list I had this morning:
1. figure out if I’m going to London this weekend
2. figure out if I’m going to Philadelphia this weekend
3. pay parking ticket
4. scope two new projects
5. run, bike or swim
//What are five snacks you enjoy?
1. chips and salsa
2. frozen yogurt/tasti-delite
3. mixed nuts
4. peanut butter pretzels
5. green tea icy drinks
//What are five things you would do if you were a billionaire?
1. Give a lot of it a away
2. Support my family
3. Have multiple homes by sea, by snow, by mountains, by cities
4. Work part-time instead of full-time
5. Hire a personal trainer and a personal chef
//What are five of your bad habits?
1. Procrastinating
2. Multitasking
3. Negative thinking
4. Drinking too much wine
5. Eating too much bread
//What are five places where you have lived?
1. Wilson Blvd – A big house in Arlington, VA with an indie recording studio in the basement. Lived with 3 guys who were the studio engineers. Bands on sleeping on the floor and impromptu live sessions were a regular occurrence.
2. Rue de Bayle – an amazingly old and small but quaint little apartment in the center of Montpellier Centre Ville. Conveniently located so that all the fun came to me.
3. Oakley Street & Goswell Road, London – chelsea flat rented for 6 months at an unfathomable weekly rate, thanks to the dotcom budgets of e-business consulting; and a gorgeous flat in Clerkenwell, owned by my boss at Fjord. Simple, elegant, and also well beyond my means.
4. Talponia, Ivrea. Talponia means mole-city, which really says enough. A partially-underground communal dwelling originally conceived as a sketch with sardine-like studios with peel-back tops.
5. Bedford Street -The West Village, my favorite place in NYC
//What are five jobs you’ve had?
1. VP UX – Schematic, HUGE
2. Project Manager, Producer – Prada
3. Photographic Services Manager – Feld Entertainment (Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey)
4. Photo Editor – AOL, MFPG Books
5. Sales Clerk – Sam Goody, Art Explosion, CVS
And now I have to tag 5 people. So Michael, Reyna, Molly, Becky and Michelle, you’re it.
Congratulations Timothy & Adelle!
On Saturday evening in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, Timothy Gillen married Adelle Fey. The wedding was a blast. Evidence available on Flickr, highlights below.
welcome bekks!
My friend Becky joined the world of online rambling this week, and it’s so great to hear from/read about her. Has almost inspired me to start writing again, but that might take more initiative than I can muster at 5 to 12 on a Sunday. For now I’ll just say silver tequila is much much nicer than the yellow stuff, but it doesn’t go all that well with wine.
old friends and the beach
this morning rob and jeannine woke me up with a plan to go to the beach. it was just spontaneous enough to work. so we packed up, met up in their hood, and trained our way out to far rockaway, queens — out past jfk airport. my friends jack/mike and caroline, who i’ve seen once since i’ve been back, just moved out there to a rental home on a newly rebuilt block that looks like something out of the truman show. it was at least a million degrees on the sand, but we persevered with frequent trips to the water and iced gin and tonics. jack and caroline even had a pizza delivered to the beach! last thing i want to eat on a hot day by the water, but it was novel nonetheless. after the beach we stopped back at their truman show house for a tour, a beer an some sudoku. then we rode back to manhattan and all the way up to central park for festive outing #2. outing #2 was a party for some recently-married friends of a friend of rob and jeannine. so no one i know. we showed up at 8 for a party that ended at 9. shared some wine, ate the lunches we’d packed for the beach, and were quickly ushered out of the park by flashlight-toting parks people in charge of picking up trash and shooing out people. our attendance at the party was brief.
then on the way home i got a text message from my brother saying he’d run into long lost friend yvonne. she’s not really lost, just married with children and we haven’t seen eachother in at least 6 years. my brother gave her my number, and hey sent me this pic:
it was so completely random that i called her immediately. i paced up and down the street as we talked, and found myself circling a shadow in the sidewalk on 7th avenue & 15th. there i am, deep in talk with my old friend yvonne, stilled covered in salt water slime and carrying a towel and a blanket, and suddenly i’m approached by another old friend! my friend chris jones, from college, who lives in nyc as well but i had completely forgotten about in recent years. he’d lost track of me as well, and was equally surprised. so i’ve got yvonne exclaiming hello on the phone and chris exclaiming hello in person and i’m trying to explain to each who the other is and why this situation is random. since when does random wandering on random phone calls lead to random run ins with random friends? what an odd night. only after i said goodbye to yvonne and caught up with chris did i realize what a fright i looked in my sandy beach clothes and burn. i explained that i’d been to the beach and he looked a bit relieved that i had an excuse for looking so disheveled. we exchanged numbers and i returned home in a bit of a daze. i’ll talk to chris later this week, and see yvonne i hope this weekend. a full day for one that started with an unexpected suggestion about the beach. yay for a real saturday.
Liam
How cute is he? I’m so excited to meet him next weekend! I’m happy that i’ll get to see his parents too. I can already tell saying goodbye to him will be difficult. Many more photos to come.