Rough Draft

SF Zoo and Muir Woods

On Memorial Day, I took a trip to the San Francisco Zoo and Muir Woods with Dana and Chris who are here for a visit on their CA vacation. This was my second trip to the zoo, but this time I had my camera! Pictures have been posted to Flickr.

There was a huge line to get into the zoo, but once inside it wasn't all that crowded. We got there kind of late in the day, 2:30, so the parking lot was full, but we got lucky and snagged a spot from someone leaving after only a couple minutes of driving around. The African Savannah area had been redone since the last time I was there. The penguin island was of course a big stop on our tour. I've got a cute video of a penguin waddling around on land and hopping up a step that I'll have to post at some point. Unfortunately, we missed the prairie dogs since the Children's Zoo closed at 4:30. However, we did just catch the koalas before their exhibit closed. And that yielded this photo that would have Japanese school girls yelling "Sugoi!" for minutes on end.

After the zoo, we headed to Muir Woods in Mill Valley (north of SF). This involved my first drive across the Golden Gate Bridge, which was pretty neat. Dana and Chris took some photos and videos that I'll post later. Not more than 10 minutes outside the city, we started our windy path through the mountains to Muir Woods. It was a really fun drive through lots of narrow, twisty roads.

Photos of the woods can be found here. Sadly, the pictures can't begin to capture the height of the redwood and sequoia trees we were surrounded by. It was a fun hike, and there were numerous paths we didn't get a chance to explore. I'll definitely be going back there.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

I just read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon and I highly recommend it. The book chronicles the story of a 15 year old autistic child name Christopher. Or rather, Christopher is one the one writing the book. I really liked the way you always knew what Christopher was thinking, because he would tell you, in a very matter-of-fact way, exactly what was going through his mind as various events unfolded. It's a very quick read, so if you've not read it, I recommend you pick it up at your local library.

New Super Mario Bros

After a failed trip (though I did up getting several CDs as well as bubble tea on that trip) earlier in the day, I did manage to pick up New Super Mario Bros. for my DS today. w00t! During an afternoon trip for bubble tea with some co-workers, we stopped by Target and they said they wouldn't have it until tomorrow and the girl at Gamestop said they only had copies that had been pre-ordered, but if I came back tomorrow morning they'd have more. Lame. After getting back to the office, I had an IM from Andrew saying the game was on sale at Circuit City and Fry's for $28 instead of $35. So later on just before I left work I called the Circuit City that's just down the street from my apartment. The guy I talked to unconvincingly said they had some in stock, so I figured I'd head over there and see. Turns out they had at least 20 copies on the shelf, so I grabbed one and was on my way (after a quick perusal of the CDs...bad Jason).

Anyway, the game itself is pure, unadulterated fun...and I've only played about 10 minutes (I'm just beat the World 1 mini castle). It's got all the classic Mario platformer gameplay and music and a few new items/moves to keep things fresh. If you own a DS, go get this game now. As for me, it's time to go kick more Koopa butt!

PS3 at E3

Sony held their pre-E3 press conference today and announced the PS3 would be available in the US on November 17th. There's two models priced at $499 and $599. Ouch. The less expensive model has a smaller hard drive, no HDMI out, no memory stick/SD/CompactFlash slots, and no wireless. If you're going to spend that kind of money, seems like you might as well spend the extra $100. (Pricing info from Joystiq)

They also showed the new controller. Gone is the boomerang controller shown last year and in its place is...something not unlike the current PS2 controller, sans vibration but it's wireless and has sensors that can detect motion in 6 directions. Sony's press release says it doesn't vibrate because it would interfere with the sensors. Sounds like b.s. to me (especially given that the Wii control supports vibration). I'd say this little lawsuit they lost is more likely the reason.

I really don't see the PS3 dominating the video game landscape the way the PS2 did.

Tomorrow morning Nintendo holds their press conference. Definitely looking forward to that after reading the article in Time.

Super Happy Dev House

Saturday night, after Startup School, Josh went to this thing in Hillsborough (just south of SF) called Super Happy Dev House. It sounded like a really good time; lots of interesting people and just a fun environment to hack on something. It's apparently a monthly thing, so I think I'll have to check it out one of these times. If anyone else is interested in going, let me know.

Startup School 2006

Josh was out here this past weekend to attend Startup School. We went to a reception on Friday evening at the Y Combinator offices in Mountain View. Talked to quite a few interesting people there, including the founders of Reddit. Also saw a demo of a couple robots these two guys have been working on for the past 5 years. The one robot was self balancing, i.e. you could push it with quite a bit of force and it would roll/lean back and then return to its initial position. It also had a functional hand that could be controller with something similar to a PowerGlove connected to a computer. This capability was demonstrated by taking bottles out of people's hands. Pretty cool stuff.

Saturday was the actual "school" at Stanford. This was the first time I'd been to the Stanford campus and while I didn't really see very much of it, it seemed like a really nice campus. The stand out talks for me were Paul Graham, Tim O'Reilly, and Chris Sacca. I also enjoyed listening to a variety of founders of some pretty big websites including Joe Kraus (founder of Excite and JotSpot), Joshua Schachter (founder of del.icio.us), and Caterina Fake (co-founder of Flickr). Probably the most inspirational aspect of the day was at the very end when a bunch of the members of the Y Combinator Winter Founder's Program took the stage to answer questions. I recognized several of them from the Startup School in Boston, and there was just something very real and inspirational about seeing people that not more than a few months ago made the leap and actually made the whole startup thing a reality.

Needless to say, I left feeling quite inspired. I still don't see myself leaving my current job for a least a year or two, but the idea of doing a startup with a couple friends at some point in the future is growing ever more appealing.