I’ve finally taken a pilgrimage to San Francisco that left me impressed.
About a month ago, on a bit of a lark, I pinged one of my good friends in the Bay Area who’s working on a stealthy startup, and asked if I could swing by for a tour. We hadn’t seen each other in a couple years, and so a date was set.
I packed up the truck with all the good development toys for swarf actuators, my camera, and various supplies, and hit the road early Monday morning. stopped in the central valley for a quick second breakfast and gas, and arrived in Half Moon Bay around noon. It turns out, if you leave at 5am, you can fly all the way up the 5 and not hit any traffic all the way there.
I visited my good friend Dr. Stone, took a quick walk on the beach while he ran some errands, and then we went and grabbed sushi for dinner at Sushi Main Street .
Stayed up all night playing a wild Co-op game Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime wherein you and your friends run around inside your lil spaceship, manning various functions one at a time (like the engine, or the shields, or the guns) to navigate around a 2D world, destroying the forces of Anti-Love and saving the bunnies they’ve captured.
This killed Dr. Stone’s old tower computer’s hard drive unfortunately, so we slept for a while, then went and checked out his startup. ( this section left intentionally blank ) There were lots of sweet doggo’s, and cows.
I hopped in my truck and drove up the scenic pacific coast highway to the city. I was reminded of the driving portion of Half-Life 2, and realized it was probably based on the same section of road. Traffic was delightfully light, and I found a parking spot right away as I headed to my long time hacker buddy Matt’s place in the mission, where he lives and works with Adelle, another good friend with supreme hacking and design skills.
The mission district is a pretty rad place, it reminds me of LA, but with amazing craftsman row houses on every street in a nice, 4 way stop grid. it’s a bit grimy on the streets, but nothing too heinous.
We went and grabbed dinner at a little hole in the wall southern food spot. They had great pork ribs and amazing beignets (I’ve always wanted to try them since our family friends from New Orleans went on and on about them). They were hot, fresh, and powdery.
Matt and Adelle hacked on some touch designer viz particle effects (that looks frankly incredible), and I broke out my CADdin laptop and onshape to crank out an enclosure for a control encoder to integrate into a cool jacket Matt and Adelle made for brightness control.
It got late, so I packed out and headed back down to Half Moon Bay for some more late night gaming. I played a frustrating game of Robo Rally with Dr. Stone, reminding me of the days of dead reckoning robot programming we’d slip into demos back in college. In the morning (or more like, early afternoon) we grabbed lunch at a local spot (The Barn) and parted ways. I took off north up the PCH to hang with Matt and Adelle once more.
They had some office work to do, so I stopped by Devil’s Slide on the way up to pass some time. This was the first time I’d had a chance to break out the camera in a while.
I was shooting with the old 7D, and a 17-35 f2.8 and a 70-200 f2.8, and mostly took pictures of the aging infrastructure and natural overgrowth along the scenic cliffside abandoned portion of PCH. Here’s a link to the whole album
I drove into the central business district to pick up Matt and Adelle and we headed back south to catch Dorkbot 100. We ran into some old friends from the maker/hacker/burner scene and watched a few impressive talks. I was floored by the awesome aesthetic of DNA Lounge, down to the payphone in the bar with a scrolling HACK THE PLANET LED matrix.
We headed back to the Mission, grabbed some tacos and crashed for the night.
Today I’ve been working on getting an environement setup on my laptop to prototype with the Odrive motor controller I picked up a couple weeks ago. It’s a non stop hackathon here in SF, going to miss it when I head back to LA later this week.
Keep punching the keys for god’s sake.
- Kyle