On cue, to coincide with my departure from San Francisco, our team conquered the famed 'Mad Dog in the Fog' weekly trivia contest. We finally won! After 2 years of regular defeats the thorn in my side was finally removed. I almost cried. We missed only one question. Much thanks must be passed on to the legendary Frank Niebres who emerged as the clear MVP. I can now retire.

Oh yes, that was his name. (see below) Baby Gramps. I have seldom been entertained to the degree I was last Thursday night by this incredibly talented steel guitar master. I'm not a music review writer so I can hardly do justice to this man's brilliance, but I must give it a shot. His style is thetrical really, he jumps and bleats and barks and shakes while wacking the living hell out of his guitar all while completely in control of the indstrument. He dominates it like an expert dog handler shouts orders to a hyperactive yet totally submisive beagle. And he makes you laugh your ass off too, while you can't help but jump up and clap and sing along. Baby Gramps. Check him out.

Countdown to London has really begun. And what am I doing to celebrate? I'm at work. It's almost midnight. At least I'm getting a lot done. Mostly personal stuff anyways. Jesus, I should be playing hookie or something. I may have to roll in a bit late tommorow just to avoid the madness, but I have apartments to phone in London. Looks like I may just luck out and get something close to work. Prices are beyond outrageous though, makes SF look cheep.

Well whadda ya know? Tom has made his first appearence in the illustrious wired magazine! Woo hoo! Way to go brother.

Mill Valley is actually not that sterile. I had a great time tonight at a joint called "sweetwater". Mitch Stein and his crew played and were thoroughly entertaining. As was the opening act, whose CD I would have bought had they not sold out. Can't remember the name, but it was one crazy old guy from Seattle and his steel guitar. Totally amazing. He barked like a dog and whooped periodically while he sang. Pure genius. Some of it's on tape.

Anyways, time is winding down for me in San Francisco. I have 11 nights left here! Each night ought to be something special, we shall see how it all turns out!

For some reason, these photos came out rather blurry, but then again, so are my memories of Sturday night. 'twas a rather successful party at the old 995 house. Something of a going away event for myself, and something of a regular old party. Just about everyone showed up. Anyways, [photos here]

This is just tooo cool. A live map of the bay area showing all aircraft currently in flight. You can watch 'em line up at various airports. [link] You can actually click on each plane and see what airline it is, and all sorts of info about it's altitude and heading. Definitely a major acomplishment in terms of online interfaces.

Fabulous idea! I can't believe no one thought of this sooner, would have been worth a million dollers in the dot-com heydeys. So - you can order pizza, chinese, thai, indian, almost anything to your home. But San Francisco's number one take out food has never been available for delivery, until now - BurritoDelivery.com. Of course, I don't know how tasty they are! I'll try it this week.

Well, the new Moreover site is done. Not that I had much to do with the design, but I had to implement the whole thing and re-write large portions so they worked with our CGI scripts and showcase. I'm also on a quest to get my tube map recognized in google. If you have a blog and are itnerested in transportation, copy this hyperlink! Geographically accurate London Tube Map.

I was going to take a cab home, late last night, but there was a #21 bus coming along. I got on with one other guy. Something broke and it started making a horrendous dragging noise. I told the driver and he wasn't interested. Eventually, he asked how far I was going. He figured we could make it to Fillmore. He went and checked the tires. All intact. I offered to take a closer look and rode a few blocks with my head out the window while this rasta dude with headphones encouraged me. I couldn't really see much, but it sounded like we were dragging a large object. He decided to take the bus to the "yard". It happened to be on the way to my house. After he dropped me off, I saw a trail of sparks following the bus. Oh well. A fun ride!

Thank god our security personel disarmed this potential threat.

Phenomenal accomplishment this week! The classic London Tube Map, wonderful though it may be, is tragically flawed geographically. In fact, it's very hard to correlate places on it with their actual locations in London. So... I searched and searched for a tube map, that is drawn in geographic reality. After a long search I was unable to find one. So I made one myself! Here it is:

I created it by piecing together a massive map of london from streetmap.co.uk then drew the lines out connecting the stations. I have the original photoshop file, though it is 50 MEG in size. The map here is a very shrunk-down version without the city streets beneath.

Here's another neat link about the history of the London Tube Map.