I’m sitting in the San Francisco airport with about an hour to kill, so I figured it was the ideal time to write the last on-the-road blog post before arriving home late tonight.

I was quite sad to leave the pacific northwest last Saturday. The entire experience bordered on sensory overload for me between the rain forests, the rocky coast, the massive mountains and the deep glacier-fed lakes. Fortunately, my journey didn’t end there and, as it turns out, the final leg of the trip was the perfect transitional buffer between the relative solitude and tranquility of the old growth forests and the incredibly busy summer I have piling up for me back at work.

I flew from Portland to San Francisco Saturday night, arriving fairly late but still making good time picking up my rental and heading out to stay with relatives in the Mission district. Quick aside: I’ve rented from Budget and Enterprise this week and, while both were fine, I’m going to give Enterprise the major edge for simplicity and customer service. Both services gave me free upgrades (due to the standard class I rented being sold out with my late arriving flights). At SFO, I ended up with a brand new (I was the first renter with it only having 150 miles and that new car smell) black 2011 Hyundai Santa Fe. I’m really not an SUV guy and this was at least mid-sized and not truckasaurus. It was GREAT however, right down to the bluetooth in the audio system that bonded seamlessly with my iPhone 4 which I used for both calls and GPS navigation. If the thing got better mileage and I wasn’t pining for an electric (or, more realistically, a hybrid-electric), I might consider buying one.

Anyway, in true San Francisco fashion, even arriving at my relatives’ house well after 10 PM doesn’t mean the night is over. The Mission is a very artistic district of the city and, two blocks away, one of their best friends, Carl, was having an open house and exhibiting his mind-blow, highly creative robots. My uncle’s bachelor party was held in the same space some years ago and I was thrilled to get to see a few of my favorite of his works again as well as a whole series of new pieces that were both gorgeous and capable of shredding you like a weed whacker when cranked up to their full RPMs. I only had my iPhone with me at that moment, so I at least grabbed a little video of a few of them:

(NOTE: Some of the media – specifically the videos – will appear temporarily as links. Once I get home, I’ll be in a position to re-embed them with proper poster frames. Check back!)

http://halfpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/bots-2.mov

http://halfpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/bots-1.mov

(Thanks, stupid SFO free WiFi, for dropping the connection and causing me to lose three paragraphs I wrote before moving to another seat nearer to my gate. Thanks SO very much.)

One of my best friends, Wiley, who was my intern at SBC when he was in high school some 15 years ago, is also out here from Virginia this week. He’s attending WWDC having, as team leader, just completed the first edition of Rosetta Stone’s iPad application in record time. We teamed up on Sunday for a great day of visiting friends and eating fantastic food. It started with excellent Dim Sum at the Mayflower, followed by a stroll around the ruins of Sutro Baths on the coast. Sunday night, however, was the meal for which I had made reservations weeks ago: Zuni Cafe. If you’ve never eaten there, you really should. While everything on their menu is delicious, I have a particular weakness for their brick-oven roasted chicken (for two) with its highly addictive bread salad. It takes an hour to prepare once ordered, time well spent with good wine and, in my case, a hands-on demo of Rosetta’s iPad app from the guy who wrote a lot of the code and led the development process. Quite the treat for this geek.

Monday morning began one of the planned highlights of my trip to San Francisco: an early morning drive across the Golden Gate and up through the hills to Petaluma, home of Leo Laporte’s TWiT Cottage. The timing was very specific since my goal was to sit in-studio to watch Alex Lindsay and Tom Merritt’s live coverage of the WWDC keynote. I sat in the jump seat in the corner just off camera, a great location to stay out of the shot but observe the entire process firsthand. With Alex sitting a few feet away and only at a slight angle to my position, I couldn’t resist using my iPad to tap out cue-card-like thoughts, questions and comments to flash at him during

the course of the coverage. While my role there was purely that of guest, it’s hard to break some of the past producer tendencies carried over from TWiP in this kind of situation. With only a few minutes in between shows and a quick run to the TWiT Toilet (which has a cranky handle, by the way, and a post-it note informing you of this condition), I returned to my corner seat while Alex began hosting a special episode of MacBreak Weekly.

I spent most of my time there trying to take in all of the great character the cottage exudes. Everywhere you look you see mementos, knick-knacks and fun notes to Leo and the gang scribbled by past guests. The warm wood interior, with the glass cabinets and shelves is genuine but fully encased in a dizzying framework of lights, cables and cameras that cramp the place but create the inviting atmosphere you see on the various TWiT shows. Leo was down in LA for E3 coverage, so other members of the team sat on the big blue bouncy ball and operated the Tricaster throughout the two shows I hung out for. And, as impressive and intimate as the cottage might be, the new studios being built a couple of blocks down the street are going to take their capabilities to a whole new level. Divided between Leo’s TWiT universe and Alex’s Pixel Corps team, the facility will be chock full of the latest production tools and a full cadre of capable geeks processing media of every imaginable kind.

The visit gave me a chance to catch up with Alex in person for a couple of hours, a refreshing change from our usual jumbled mix of random emails, text messages, phone chats and periodic pre- or post-show Skype chats. He showed off the new 24-camera motion capture studio they are just completing, the first of its kind that I had ever seen. It was being calibrated during my visit and seeing the real-time tracking of the little reflective balls velcro’d to your clothing or, in this case, on the end of a precisely calibrated rod used for tuning the system was fascinting. Alex’s description of what is happening now and what is being planned for PXC in the coming months is pretty enticing, appealing to both my media interests and my role as a network engineer and systems geek.

(Well, this is a first… started the post in the airport and, if lucky, will finish and post it here from 20,000 feet using inflight WiFi.)

After a great day at the TWiT Cottage, I headed back to the Mission and, on the advice of my relatives, walked four blocks to have some of the best sushi I’ve had in ages at a seriously fun place called Blowfish Sushi. The atmosphere is great, the fish fresh, the rolls creative and the anime playing on the big projection screen behind the chefs (I sat at the sushi bar where I could watch them create their masterpieces) was a great touch. I’m not a big anime fan, but seeing it playing without audio while a great selection of music plays in the rest of the joint just added some great energy to the scene. The heavily tattooed wait staff was equally fun and full of great advice on rolls to try. The chefs loved to show off their creations and I grabbed a few shots on my iPhone (as I am wont to do). Wiley and I got back together after his first full day at WWDC, discussed the announcements in our usual geeky detail and met up with a friend of his at a dive on a street whose name I can’t even recall now. All in all, a great day.

I started to wind down the trip on Tuesday and took a more relaxed pace. I spent a while just driving around randomly and exploring various neighborhoods of San Francisco. There’s something thrilling and slightly alarming about taking an SUV up and down the insanely steep streets… the kind where the top of the street simply meets the sky and you have no idea what’s on the other side until you nose down what feels like about a 60 degree slope. At one point I drove by and then was passed by the enormous SFPD Bomb Squad van, lights flashing, which I ended up following (only half intentionally) until I realized a healthy self-preservation instinct would dictate that going the opposite direction is probably far wiser. Shortly afterward, Frederick Van Johnson and I met up on Townsend for a great, leisurely lunch at Tres Agave, chatting the whole time about the podcasting scene, future plans and highlights of my previous week in the northwest. We took a quick spin around the area afterward as he pointed out great spots for street photography on a future trip. Here’s an in-iPhone-processed shot he grabbed of me at the start of our lunch.

Speaking of driving in San Francisco… there’s one word for parking around there: infuriating. Most any gap you see is there not because it’s an open parking space, but because it’s a driveway or otherwise covered in signage laying out reasons why you can’t park there between X and Y hours on various days of the week with the exception of this or that… stuff you practically need an iPhone app to calculate but have to quickly parse while someone is behind you honking their horn to get by (or whipping around you in one of the three lanes to your right or left). Then there are the bus lanes, the taxi and bus-only left turns and the fact that you’ll be pulled from your car by a cop and summarily tazed to death if you’re seen easing through a right turn while any pedestrian, legitimately or not, has so much as a toe on the pavement in your general vicinity. My uncle told me this morning that San Francisco makes up about 2% of the California population but pays something like 35% of the parking fees collected in the state every year. I believe it. How I managed to not run over someone or scratch up my new-car-smell rental over five days is a mystery to me.

My final evening there was a fun one, very family and friend-centric. I picked up my uncle and we, in turn, then picked up my little four year old cousin from what looks to be a fantastic pre-school and my aunt from her office, then headed across the bay bridge to Oakland. This was my first time across the bridge and my uncle gave me a steady stream of fascinating information about the roads, the bridge, the history, the new replacement bridge that is appearing parallel to this one. Barges and massive waterborne cranes are floating all over the area as they prepare to start attaching the decking with suspension cables from the massive center tower that looms over the current bridge. Our destination was a unique meal at a place called Homeroom where we met up with my other cousin (whom I’d not seen in easily 30 years prior to this trip), her husband and their pre-school aged son.

Homeroom is a neat place. There’s a sort of schoolroom atmosphere to everything, including a set of card catalog drawers (straight out of grade school) where you fill in a card that you file to track your visits (with little stars). So many visits and, I suspect, you get a meal or side or something or other. Homeroom does one dish: Mac’n'Cheese… gourmet style. I had a nice glass of Riesling while partaking of a hot, oven-baked bowl of homemade Gouda, pecorino and chorizo mac’n'cheese complete with bread crumbs on top. I couldn’t finish it all, partly from its size and partly from the sheer knee-weakening richness of the dish. We followed it up with homemade warm “oreo” cookies a good three inches in diameter. If you’re in or around Oakland, this is really worth a few visits!

On our way back into town, we took a quick detour so I could drive by one of the places I dream of seeing on the inside someday: Pixar. I talked with the guard at the gate for a minute (super nice guy) and took a quick shot through the gate of the enormous ball and lamp in their lawn, giant physical versions of the characters you see in their opening logo sequence. My fondest wish was for John Lassiter or Brad Bird to glance out the window, see me forlornly shooting through the bars of the fence with my camera and order me brought inside for a tour and ice cream. Somehow, this didn’t happen. Maybe someday…

Wiley and I took the town again for my final night there by making a return trip (for me) and a first visit (for him) to Blowfish Sushi. I was still full of God’s Own Mac’n'Cheese, but I still had to squeeze in two pieces of yellowtail nigiri. Wiley ordered a sashimi combo of some sort that arrived on a pile of shaved ice decorated with flowers, bamboo and fruit and set in a bowl positively gushing out a cloud of dry ice that drifted over the bar and down toward our legs. Ten points to Blowfish Sushi for a wickedly nice presentation.

So this morning was just the scramble to the airport which, it turns out, I did well ahead of schedule and with no real stress. I’m now trying to wrap up this post at about 30,000 feet using in-flight WiFi and a rapidly draining MacBook Pro battery. And, no, the 17″ MBP is NOT made for coach seating. This is a real chore of odd angles and neck strain. I was going to write up a list of observations from the trip, mostly technical and photography related, but I’ll save that for home in the next couple of days.

More to come!