Yerba Buena Gardens Children's Playground

It's hard to take pictures in San Francisco. This is due to a number of things conspiring against me, but mostly it's because the sun sets early and Ramona hates sleep. We went hung out in San Francisco this afternoon and I actually got to take a few pictures. I can't believe I have an almost 3 year old.

Hackbright Day 15: Pro Set. That's way super fun.

Friday was uneventful and eventful. We reviewed all 17,000 new languages we learned this week. It was also install day, where everyone was told what to install to run everything we do in lab on their laptops. I figured out that I somehow totally fucked up my install of Chrubuntu and damaged the Chrome OS in the process. It's not a huge deal because my plan is to actually just reinstall Chrome OS and un-partition the teeny-tiny hard drive. Apparently there's something called Crouton that will let you run Ubuntu on top of the Chrome OS. I've come to the conclusion that getting that Chromebook was a mistake. Not a huge one, but typing on it makes my right hand hurt and it's hard to look at. 

We also got to see working examples of javascript webapps. One of the TAs has made some games, the best of which is called Pro Set. Similar to set in that i t's a concentration/matching game, it's also a lot more difficult, hence the "Pro" part.

Since I was basically set with install day (and also because I'm pretty sure that my install is the easiest what with apt-get install life), I was pretty much by myself in lab. I talked with one of the TAs for a really long time about Hackbright and life in general. It was good. I don't have a Hackbright alum mentor, so this was a nice way to absorb information and good vibes from someone who graduated the program and found success.

Friday night was also board game night. Colby came down to Hackbright, and we all played a game of friendly taboo, a concentration game called Ricochet Robots, and then some crazy taboo/charade game. It was really fun to interact with people in a non-work setting. It's something I feel like I don't do enough. 

On Saturday we FINALLY found a place to live after Nov 1. Thank jebus crust. We'll be in Alameda until the end of February. Hopefully by then, everyone will be employed and then we can focus on where we'll be living more permanently. 

On Sunday morning, I went to a Ladies Tech Brunch at some superfancy high rise apartment in the Financial District. It was nice, but there were a lot of people, and it was definitely good for networking that I just wasn't in the right frame of mind to pursue. I did meet a couple people that I'd like to keep in touch with, though, and I think it encouraged me to go to a PyLadies SF meetup when I can. After that, another HBer and I went to La Boheme Cafe in the Mission to meet up with a bunch of HBers + a HB instructor who were mostly just co-working. I love how accessible and friendly everyone, especially the instructors, are. Hackbright is shaping up into a good decision.

And my 10 second review of La Boheme Cafe:

I'm way too lazy to edit this. Pretend it's cropped.

• great space to work
• good, strong coffee
• pretty good food, and they use zataar spice on their pitas so you know they must know something
• will definitely return

San Francisco Things: Brooks Park

There's a little park called Brooks Park near our Airbnb. I've never explored it because it's usually dark by the time I get home and it's up a super steep hill and I have the "opportunity" to climb many hills every. single. day. Colby finally convinced me to go and see it because it was "cool".

When you finally climb to the top, there's this crazy ridiculously amazing view of the ocean and San Francisco:

Admittedly, the sun is out of control in that picture.

And I have more pictures and stories, but my hand hurts from using a trackpad incorrectly, I think. Thus, this will have to wait for another day to be complete.

Hackbright Day 5 and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

Friday was the first Friday of Hackbright and the last day of our first week. (You still following?) Fridays are generally more relaxed, so we started the day out with a skit from the performers of Hackbright Theatre on the differences between tuples and lists. Very entertaining! We also talked about sets. Tuples are immutable and good as data structures. So basically, they're like the array-like things in IDL. That aha moment stuck with me, but I decided to keep it to myself because I'm guessing that there is no one else in that room who ever used IDL because OMG NO ONE USES IDL WHY DIDN'T I LEARN A USEFUL LANGUAGE IN GRAD SCHOOL???????

We're going to revisit this later.

We then did a skill exercise to see how quickly we could get through something. It was actually pretty easy because it did not go over my nemesis (that would be list slicing). What I've found is that if I've seen something in Fortran/Supermongo/bash/IDL/somethingelseuseless, I'm mostly okay with the concept. I just need a refresher. My Fortran-honed instincts tell me to build everything from scratch, though, so it's kind of a huge roadblock for me. In addition, my HOLYCRAPPANIC-o-meter goes off if I don't immediately understand something (AHH. LIST SLICING). I'm going to thank grad school for that.

In the afternoon, we had a brief lecture from one of the founders of Hackbright. He's usually an intstructor, I think, but this was the first lecture that he led. He told us about how google figures out where you are from your laptop. Google street view vans used to drive around and record your wifi names. They would then remember where that was located and then could tell if you were connected to it. However, moving across the country, but keeping the same wireless network name doesn't update automatically... until! they started using phones that hooked to wifi but also had GPS enabled to determine your exact location. So every time your phone asks if you want to enable wifi for better precision and you connect, Google is thanking you.

The rest of the afternoon was spent working on the skill exercise and then completing all the other items we didn't finish from earlier in the week. I should probably look at the "extra" stuff that we could have done if we had time (but no, LIST SLIIIIIIICCCCCCCCIIIIIIINNNNNNGGG). One of the instructors was kind enough to give another lecture on list slicing, which was great and helped me better understand it.

Finally, around the built-in break time, all these bottles of champagne were brought out and a butter knife was brandished. Hackbright was congratulating us on finishing up the first week of classes and the lead instructor was about to attempt to saber the champange bottle with a butter knife. It turns out that you can't really saber a champagne bottle like that, but you CAN do it with a spatula. All of the rest of the bottles were opened in the usual way. Surprisingly, no one wanted to drink out of the spatula-opened bottle.

It turns out that glass shards do not provide the mouthfeel that most people seek in a good champange.

It was a good week. It was frustrating at times, but mostly I felt like I learned what I needed to. I really need to do some soul searching and become better at pair programming. I probably also need to unclench a lot. It's hard to do, though, because this feels like the highest stakes schooling I've ever done and it's in the shortest amount of time.

And here's where all the Hackbright stuff ends. So keep on reading if you're super interested in random things that I did this weekend. ;)

The summer of 2005 was pretty rough. It was the summer between my tumultuous freshman year of college and the (unbeknownst to me at the time) equally tumultous sophomore year of college. I applied to a bunch of internships for the summer, but was rejected, mostly because those internships typically went to students who were a year or two further in school. My undergrad advisor got me into the summer program at MSU, and so I spent the summer splitting my time between East Lansing where I worked M-F and Harper Woods, so I could go home and fight with my awesome boyfriend. I remember so very, very little of that summer. Partly because I blocked it out and partly because it was 9 years ago. (HOLY CRAP I AM THE OLDEST WHO EVER OLDED IN EVER!)

I did form some friendships, though, and "maintained" those friends through facebook. Here's to never cleaning out my friends list! I actually met up with one of the people from the program last summer when I went to Boston to work on my thesis. Interestingly enough, she knows the person who let us crash at her place in the first night we were in the Bay Area. BUT! I was introduced to that person by one of my best friends in Austin who went to undergrad while the pad-crashing-allower was in grad school. (Wow, talking about people without names is difficult.) What I'm trying to say is that astronomy is an incredibly small community and everyone knows everyone else. You don't play 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon in astronomy because everyone is Kevin Bacon. But i'm getting off track.

There was another person who I maintained a facebook friendship with from that long-ago MSU internship. She moved to San Francisco with her fiance a few months ago and is doing a different coding bootcamp. We met up at The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Fest in Golden Gate Park on Saturday, and it was great! I got to meet her fiance, she got to meet Colby and we reminisced about the very few things we could remember from the summer of '05 and talked about San Francisco, tech, and life in general. It was awesome getting to see her again and I hope that we can hang out more frequently than every 9 years in the future.

Right, so let's talk about Hardly Strictly. It's a nominally a bluegrass festival, but the first act we saw was Deltron 3030 and the 3030 Orchestra, who were very much not bluegrass. I think it's a rap superband, but I could be totally mistaken. A typical fan was frat boy with dreads with a joint in one hand and a bag of Franzia in the other. We left after a couple songs because the area was in the sun and Colby melts in the sun because he's pretty much as pale as you can get before you get rickets.

We then headed towards the Rooster Stage, where we stayed for most of the rest of the night. It was great, and mostly alt-country. The whole reason why I wanted to go was to see Robert Earl Keen. Every time I'd hear a country-sounding song on KLRU that i liked, it was him. My homesickness for Austin was briefly alleviated to the tune of Gringo Honeymoon, Merry Christmas from the Family, and (of course) the Road Goes on Forever. The MC called him the "Poet Laureate of the Rooster Stage" and everyone was super into it. The crowd at the Rooster Stage was generally a lot older and a lot less trashed. I posted a bunch of pictures on Instagram and twitter from the festival. All in all, it was a great day and I'm glad that we decided to brave the crowds and the terrible public transit situation.

San Francisco Eats

Having been in San Francisco for less than a week, I am clearly an expert in the food scene. We tried to cook at the place that we're staying, but it's hard because all of my cooking stuff is packed away in the car or in Michigan. We even decided to leave our spices in the car, so when I decided I was going to make tacos tonight, I realized that it wasn't going to happen. We've been eating out a bunch, probably more than we should, but here's a list of some of the places that we've eaten at that I've enjoyed.

We went to La Oaxaqueña in the Mission District tonight for dinner. Colby got a "spicy pork" taco (he's super awesome at details), I got a sundried tomato + goat cheese pupusa and we split a tlayuda. I had never heard of a tlayuda until we went there. It's essentially a Mexican pizza-like dish, with a crispy tortilla as a base, covered in refried beans, cheese, salsa, lettuce, and (in our case) chipotle chicken. Colby said that the taco was the best thing he's had since we've been to SF. The tlayuda was similarly delicious and I am completely angry that I didn't know those existed until now. We almost didn't go there because they sometimes cook with grasshoppers and I was terrified of cross contamination, but I'm glad that we went. Only later did we find out that it's a "hipster hotspot" and "super sketchy". 

This also satisfied my avocado craving

Truly Mediterranean is in the Mission District. It serves schwarma and falafel on lavash. Colby got the lamb and I got the chicken kabob and it was wonderful. While we were waiting, one of the cooks gave us a sample of falafel. Those were incredibly delicious and definitely worth a trip back.

This is the only picture I have of that

Pakwan is also in the Mission and it serves Pakistani and Indian food. it was a little strange in that you have to buy the rice separately, but we ended up just splitting a huge piece of naan instead. I got the saag with chicken and Colby got chicken tikka masala because that's the only thing he ever gets. They were both really good and Colby would have probably enjoyed his meal more with rice.

Nothing look as delicious as blurry spinach, AMIRITE?!

Sugar Cafe and Coffee Bar is in Union Square, right next to Hackbright. My hackathon team (I swear I'm going to post about it soon!) met there to discuss ideas. I had a super delicious latte and a tuna salad that was also very good (and super low carb, might I add). I am 90000% sure that I'll be making a return trip because I rely on coffee the way python uses white space. Or something.

latte + chromebook = instagram picture

prettiest tuna salad ever

Hopefully I'll get out the DSLR and take real pictures of actual food I'm eating again. Or better yet, I'll get back to writing about the food I'm making at home when I finally have a home in which to make food again.

San Francisco Things: Clarion Alley

The first apartment that we're staying in backs up onto Clarion Alley in the Mission District. It's actually incredibly spacious for San Francisco standards, and I kind of wish we could stay here for the duration. Clarion Alley is known for the colorful murals that cover its buildings. The Clarion Alley Mural Project has been around for over 20 years and the murals are updated and changed frequently. We walked down the alley and took some pictures while we were out and about today.

The stairs in the second picture actually lead up to the apartment we're staying in right now. I guess it's the only apartment that's painted as part of the CAMP.

There were a lot of memorial works up.

Imma go out on a limb here and say that this artist is not a fan of gentrification.

That's actually on the sidewalk. On the other side of the alley there were giant piles of human shit. Lovely.

That might be my favorite one, it's incredibly intricate.

Another interesting piece

And now I should probably finish up my pre-work since tonight and tomorrow are my last days where I can really do anything about it.