Sequences

A view down the ridge from the top of Prairie Mountain, near Calgary. This hike’s a local favorite because of its easy proximity to the city, and gets enough foot traffic to keep it accessible through most of winter. Its main trail had recently been redone to improve grading, so the whole family went up to check it out. Dad and I went down the back and did the full loop, where he kicked my ass with an aggressive downhill pace (partly due to an unwise choice of footwear on my part – trail runners seem nice right up until you’ve got serious ice/snow to contend with). It felt great being out in Alberta’s crisp, winter air, especially after so much time indoors for the holidays.

The frozen half of the Bow river off of St. Patrick’s Island Park looking towards downtown Calgary, with plenty of hoarfrost decorating trees on either side. Taken as I was offboarding from Bridgeland’s LRT station on the way to Shiki Menya for ramen. The day’s a little chilly (I’m bundled up), but nowhere near as bad as some years in Calgary around this time. The privilege of being able to wander outside shouldn’t be taken for granted around these parts.

101 California St’s Christmas display, with giant bulbs taller than men. What they’ve done in their lobby is neat too, with colossal ornaments hanging all the way from distant ceilings overhead. This photo taken a month ago after an overnight rainfall softened San Francisco’s streets.

The beach near Fort Funston, a popular paragliding spot in SF. Taken on a foggy day as I was making my way from the middle of the city down to San Bruno, one of the best long walks in the region.

A photo from Chelsea Market (near Google’s giant HQ) from a visit to New York last year. You’ll never believe this, but turns out, New York is pretty cool.

An absolutely gorgeous shrine in Kanazawa, a city on the west coast of Japan. We’d just visited Kenroku-en garden, famous for its roped yukitsuri trees and oversized two-legged stone lantern on the water, and stumbled across this shrine after leaving. It started to rain, but it was well-timed. We’d gotten most of our outdoor sightseeing out of the way, and it lent even more ambience to the incredible scene.

Poster for River: a Fast, Robust Job Queue for Go + Postgres.

One Montgomery in the morning, midway up Market Street in San Francisco. APEC’s in town, and this part of the city is a little calmer than usual.

Poster for Nanoglyph 041: 15, 16.

It’s APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) week in San Francisco, with both Biden and Xi in attendance.

There’s been significant protests outside the Hyatt Regency on 3rd. This is close to where Xi is apparently staying (the St Regis a block down), but it’s not clear if they have their hotels mixed up or (with checkpoints in place) the St Regis is too hard to get to.

Falun Gong protestors in yellow rain rainjackets, holding big banners, and playing relaxing spa music, are present around the clock. And on the other end of the spectrum, big red CCP flags welcoming Xi hang along the same street.

This photo is of a small group of anti-CCP protestors that pushed their way through police lines towards the Hyatt Regency before being sent back. The various police forces did an admirable job of deescalation – the protestors got their word in, but were eventually ejected. In the end, no one was hurt, and no one arrested.

Another from Paris. This one from a scenic water feature nearby the Louvre called Le Grand Bassin Rond (the big round pool, very apt) located in the Jardin des Tuileries. It’s amazing how old these places are. The garden was created about 500 years ago in 1564, opened to the public in 1667, and made public after the French Revolution.

It’s a lucky companion for the Louvre because the large open area acts as pressure relief for the Louvre and other major landmarks in the area. It’s a big park, but busy.

A photo from my trip to Paris a few months ago, taken as I was slowly making my way over to Notre Dame. While not exactly beautiful, Parisienne apartment blocks certainly have style.

A photo out to the ocean from Camp Reynolds on Angel Island.

It took me a long time to get over there, but I learned that Angel Island is easily one of the best places to go in the Bay Area. Beautiful views, with a lot of neat WWII architecture, and completely car-free. I spent the day there hiking first around the perimeter, and then up and over the top. You can camp on the island, which I want to try next.

At the Heidnisches Dorf (pagan village) this year at WGT. I’ve never been to a Renaissance Fair in North America, but I can’t imagine that we take it as seriously as the Germans do.

The area consists of a music stage, food and drink vendors (roast pig, mead, many items that I can’t name), various boutiques selling archaic goods like this one, and activities like archery and axe throwing. It’s on all day from morning until late in the night, and this year I found that there’s a really nice way to walk to it around the back from an alternate train line that goes through one of Leipzig’s many beautiful parks, and avoids the fairly crowded tram line.

A bird’s eye view of our booth at Rails World, at the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. I’ve now worked in a couple different expo halls and so far this is the best set up that I’ve seen. More often than not, the expo hall is off on the periphery of the conference somewhere, and you’re competing with a lot of other vendors for attention. Here, the expo hall was the same room where everyone took their meals and came to for snacks and drinks. There wasn’t much in the way of seating, so we ate and drank standing up, which had the effect of encouraging people to intermingle. We had people stopping by constantly. It was a small conference and the first of its kind so there weren’t too many other sponsors, and we also just lucked out, assigned a great spot by chance.

Poster for Nanoglyph 040: Rails World, 7.1, Amsterdam.

The mist over Kings Canyon National Park. We’d gotten rain overnight, and the whole valley was giving off very Ansel Adams vibes as we made our way to the top of Bishop Pass.

Poster for Nanoglyph 039: Trails, Charleston, t.Parallel().

The Hermit, a gorgeous 12,000+ foot peak in the Sierra Nevada. We camped under on a long slab of granite next to Evolution Valley before making our way up and over Muir Pass.

See my longer write up on the John Muir Trail.

A photo from Paris a few months back. My first full day in the city, I’d been traveling in random zig zags to see what I could see.

To my surprise I came across a police checkpoint – one of about a dozen within a few blocks radius. I thought about turning back, but remember consciously thinking, “well, when in Rome Paris.” My bag was searched more thoroughly than at an airport checkpoint and with the presence of a large camera, I was asked whether I was a journalist, to which I replied in broken French “non, je suis un touriste”.

I walked into a square full of people and reminiscent of a block party, complete with music and food vendors in every corner. Except in this block party, people were climbing on the city’s multi-hundred-year-old statues and setting off fireworks and other incendiaries with a loud BANG every minute or two.

I remembered that this was May 1st, or May Day, and was instructed by Google Maps that this square was the Place de la Nation, which I’d later find out had a storied history for having the most active guillotines during the French Revolution. The demonstrations were related to the ongoing unrest from Macron raising the country’s retirement age from 62 to 64 years, and I’d stumbled right into the city’s hottest spot that day, entirely by accident.

I took this photo as I was walking away from the square, traffic along the road stopped entirely, with protestors, French police, and spectators like myself littering the area.

From an all-too-brief stopover in Berlin a few months ago. What was supposed to be a week was compacted to two nights after a nightmare flight cancellation and canonball run across four countries to get back on schedule.

Almost three months since I published one of these, but time moves so quickly that it felt like only a blink of the eye. Falling off the wagon is easy. Staying on, now that’s hard.

Lately, when selecting hotels in a foreign city that I don’t know much about, I try to optimize for proximity to what looks like a park with a reasonably long, unbroken trail that’d be good for walking or running. In some places this is quite a task as the urban landscape is chopped up into a million tiny sections, and it’s hard to go more than a few hundred feed without having to cross a road (looking at you Atlanta).

Others are easier. This photo is from a run in Bath (in the UK) where one could run south from the city center to the river Avon, and from there long distances in either direction on paths that followed its winding flow.

When you go early, once in a while you run into something cool. Here, I randomly came across two Virgin hot air balloons being inflated in a wide field along the river, witnessed by only myself, another couple who was also out trail running, and a few early morning kayakers.

I was impressed by how quick the launch process was. I was wondering whether I should make a stop to watch them go, but I didn’t have to – they were up in the air and on their way towards town only ten minutes after this photo was taken (a far cry from the three hours I spent trying to get aloft from Paris Orly a few weeks later).

Hyde Park in London. Poster for Nanoglyph 038: London, Gardening 500s.

York, United Kingdom. The city is home to the National Railway Museum, where I’d stopped by in the morning. It was gargantuan in size (given that it houses dozens of full-sized rail cars and engines), and yet out of everything an outsized part of it is devoted to a showcase for the Flying Scotsman, one of the fastest early steam locomotives that was the first train to break the 100 MPH barrier, and which is a particular point of pride among locals.

Despite occupying a full section of the museum (and being owned by it, after a winning bid of £2.3 million in 2004), the Flying Scotsman wasn’t actually present because, after being furloughed and spending the 70s on tour in the United States, it’s since been rehabilitated and travels around the UK on a semi-regular basis. I spoke to a museum volunteer and he said that although I wouldn’t be able to see the Scotsman itself, they were expecting a steam locomotive to come into station later that day.

I didn’t wait around for it, but as I was exploring the rest of the city, I found it by accident. Parked on the track just a few hundred feet from my hotel, steam billowing from its chimney and a full load of coal in the hopper. This is SR Merchant Navy Class 35018 British India Line, built in 1945 and restored 2012-17.

As I was crossing the bridge to take this photo I came across another man who was using a 90s-style handheld camcorder to carefully record footage of the old steam engine in action. In the UK trains have fans. I love it.

I got a strong recommendation to head west of central Paris to a district called La Défense. I didn’t know much about it beyond the recommendation, but what the hell, I started walking a few hours before sunset, and before I knew it, had arrived.

I could see a few impressive looking glass buildings in the distance, but what I found turned out to be far better than a few mere pieces of modern architecture. Starting at the Esplanade de la Défense, the area opens up into a wide park and pedestrian promenade, and which continued on for kilometers.

Just as the sun was going down I arrived at the district’s singular feature, La Grande Arche de la Défense, a megalithic cube that gives the Eiffel Tower a run for its money in conspicous city landmarks. Part of Grands Projets of François Mitterrand (along with the Louvre Pyramid and Musée d’Orsay), it was one many architectural projects completed near the end of the 20th century (1989 in the Arche’s case), specifically built as a testament to France’s post-WWII role in the world’s art, politics, and economy, and meant to reshape Paris’ already impressive skyline.

Trying to take the Metro back home I found that my brand new Île-de-France Navigo Easy card wouldn’t let me through the fair gates. Apparently, I’d walked myself out of the Paris city limits.

The Musée de l’Armée (Army Museum), located inside l’hôtel national des Invalides (originally a hospital and retirement center for military veterans), just south of the Seine in central part of Paris.

The WWI and WWII exhibits are temporarily closed, but there’s a lot to see even without them. As with many museums in the city, it’s easy to lose perspective as you browse showcase after showcase of priceless historial artifacts. I tried to remind myself that any one of them would’ve been a signature centerpiece in most North American museums, even if lost in a sea of equally impressive items of the French capital’s rich collections.

The street where Claude Monet’s home is found in the rural town of Giverny has been largely repurposed to serve the hordes of tourists who travel to the area every day to see Monet’s home. In fact, it’d become so single purposed it was renamed to “Rue Claude Monet” to drop the pretense.

It’s a pleasant walk strolling from Monet’s estate on one end to the old church where he’s buried on the other. Along the way: French Impressionism museums, the style of low key outdoor cafe that France does better than any other, and gardens framed by flowering purple lilac. May is a little in advance of the high season, but it’s a great time to visit provided you don’t get unlucky with too much rain. Gorgeous weather, and not too hot.

A photo of a leafy seadragon at the Georgia Aquarium in Georgia. Poster for Nanoglyph 036: Atlanta, Job Queues, Batch-wise Operations.

The state of Notre Dame in 2023.

Ironically, a team ostensibly renovating and restoring the old church managed to accidentally light it on fire, whereupon it burned for 15 hours, not only destroying large parts of the edifice, but contaminating the site and surrounding area with lead, which had been used heavily in the construction of the old building’s roof. That was 2019. A rebuild’s been underway ever since and scheduled to finish in December 2024.

I’ll tell you though, most visitors didn’t seem to care one way or another what state the church was in. Tourists (including me) mobbed the surrounding area to the point where it was painstakingly slow trying to make your way through what mostly amounted to a maze of tall walls surrounding the reconstruction effort. A grandstand had been built facing the front of the church for viewing, despite it not being especially renowned for being particularly active. But the crowds were enthralled even so – every seat was filled.

At a conference about Rails in Altanta. The conference and conference hotel are connected via an elaborate interlinking of skybridges wherein by the time you arrive at your destination, you’re not sure which part of downtown Atlanta you’re in anymore.

This photo is from the second floor of the Westin, a tall glass cylinder that projects itself straight into the heavens, and whose interior’s clean lines put to use a surprising amount of raw concrete.

The Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. Definitely a cool place. Although located in a landlocked city, for almost a decade it was the largest aquarium in the world, not surpassed until 2012 by the S.E.A. Aquarium in Singapore and Chimelong Ocean Kingdom in the PRC. Its signature exhibit is a gigantic 6.3 million US gallon tank with viewing wall and submarine tunnel, filled with manta rays, enormous groupers. appropriately named bowmouth guitarfish, and of course, whale shark(s) (along with many other species, but as in open-water diving, it’s usually the big stuff that gets the attention).

You may be wondering why I write whale sharks(s). I was curious how and when the aquarium was sourcing whale sharks, and started looking into it. All six sharks have come from Taiwan, where it’d been legal to capture them for consumption up until the practice was banned in 2007.

The first set of four named Ralph, Norton, Alice, and Trixie arrived in 2006. Unfortunately Ralph and North didn’t take well to the new environment and passed away in 2007, but the same year the aquarium sourced two more named Taroko and Yushan just before Taiwan’s ban came into effect. Trixie had quite a long life in Atlanta, but passed away recently in 2020, and Alice in 2021.

Six minus four would suggest two remaining whale sharks, but I spent a good half hour at the tank and for the life on me could only count one. I observed a feeding session in which a caretaker started dropping chow from an overhead boat which attracted one whale shark multiple times, but not two. It’s very possible that I’m just bad at counting, but the aquarium itself seems to be quite cagey in talking about anything too specific on whale sharks besides that a species by that name definitely exists. I trawled their site with a number of targeted search terms and got nothing. Everything I sourced above was from third parties.

Ethics of keeping whale sharks in captivity aside, if you have the opportunity and are interested, it might not be the worst time to drop by Georgia Aquarium to see this magnificent beast(s). Absent a new way to source them – probably not particularly forthcoming in 2023 – this might not be the kind of exhibit that lasts forever.

A photo from the Forest of Nisene Marks, used as my poster for Nanoglyph 035. The state park is named for a nature-loving mother who bought the land 1950s, and whose children donated it in 1963 with the provision that it never be developed.

Another one from skiing last month. Silver Star has a run called Spirit Bowl, named such because its length on each side is rimmed by the remains of trees scorched by a forest fire that happened a long time ago. I’ve always liked this one. So tall, so straight, and despite its circumstances, standing as long as I can remember.

HQ for the Summit Patrol at the top of Silver Star in inner BC. This shack’s been standing longer than I’ve been alive, and I’ve been seeing it almost every year since. Hop on the Comet Express, take a hard left at the top, and you’re there.

Great ski week this year. We’re not quite getting dumped on in quite the same way as the Sierras back in California, but I’ll take the more interesting terrain and more sparsely crowded lifts any day.

The late afternoons of many days this week looked like this one, with extensive cloud cover (with luck to bring some flakes in the coming hours), and a dim sun showing through above. It’s BC, and although not warm, it wasn’t too cold either.

A nice example of a living wall down near the Salesforce offices, hidden away off the street in a pedestrian alley that’s infrequently used, a block from Salesforce Park and a few blocks south of the waterfront. Most publicly accessible privately-owned spaces are designed defensively by necessity, and come off unwelcoming and sterile. This one’s a rare exception.

An aside, but this is the type of photo that I like especially for the Sequences format. We’re so used to looking at most images we see as thumbnails or on pocket-sized iPhone screens, but it’s only by looking at it in large format that you can really appreciate the full detail in a photograph.

Today, 10% headcount reduction and total office closure from GitHub.

For the 10%, I’m sorry. Despite all the talk from CEOs of “hard economic conditions” bullsh*t bullsh*t, the reality is that you were caught in an opportunistic dragnet of the executive arm to trim the (perceived) cruft. When everybody else is doing it too, negative press is diffused.

Another signature San Francisco office gone. I’d been there a number of times over the years, and it was a contender for top two best offices in the city, which implied top two in the world. They had a secret speakeasy, a replica of the oval office, and every kid’s dream – a frikkin’ secret passage in a bookshelf. The Octocat seal on the floor of their oval office originally read “United Meritocracy of GitHub” before “meritocracy” was deemed an illegal word and the seal replaced.

I looked back through my photos of the place, and to my great regret, seem to have taken only two. One was of the bar (of course). The other is above, wherein GitHub hosted a roguelike conference back in 2017 (I wonder if that wifi password still works?). They were great about community events, also having let us host an API hackathon in 2016.

Rewinding even further, way back in 2012 I had the honor of visiting GitHub’s original office in SOMA. Nowhere near as elaborate, but spacious, and with the look of a cool, unfinished loft. All of us loved technology so we had beers and talked about technology. I have a distinct memory of being introduced to ChatOps for the very first time.

And the era continues to shift.

It was a beautiful night in San Francisco. The city got a light sprinkling of rain all day which left it clean and glistening. The temperature was perfect, with only a light jacket needed, and I could’ve even left the umbrella at home since it turned out that the sky wasn’t holding much in reserve.

When I bought my first camera, it frustrated me that in low light conditions it couldn’t see what I could see. What’s wrong little device, why are all these images so dark and blurry? It was partly an equipment problem and partly an optics problem, and one that I’ve since spent my way out of. This shot was taken with a full-frame sensor and fast f/1.2 lens from Canon’s RF series, and at this point, it’s collecting more light than my eye is. This photo was partially darkened for effect.

Canon’s glass is absolutely flawless, but it’s got a downside. Everything they make is so goshdarn big, leaving me always on the look out for a system with comparable fidelity, but lighter and not so dramatically conspicuous.

The other day I stopped by the site of THE BIRD SITE as aspirationally-but-didn’t-quite-stick Mastodon users would say, home of the latest public enemy number one for San Franciscans, temporarily stealing the crown from Ron DeSantis, presumably until the run up to 2024 where MSNBC will put them back on target again.

Unknownst to most, Twitter isn’t only the latest front of the culture war, but also one of its first. A big reason that Twitter HQ is located in the midst of San Francisco’s mid-Market blight in the first place is that the city’s last mayor incentivized the move back in 2011 by erasing the 1.5% payroll tax the company would normally pay in hopes that its presence could help revitalize the neighborhood. San Francisco’s resident regressive population screamed at the perceived giveaway to big tech, and would spend the next ten years fighting an ever escalating war to keep the city frozen in time, a war that they eventually won as tech fled in 2020.

I take these photos to capture a moment in time – my guess is that this sign isn’t around for much longer. The latest news is that Twitter’s office space has been downsized from six floors to two, and given Musk’s history of moving companies to more friendly and lower tax states like Texas, I’d be surprised if this isn’t San Francisco’s newest empty building sometime soon.

Feast your eyes on this impressive post-it note art as observed from Salesforce Park across into Slack’s adjacent office. A nice gesture, and consider that this would’ve taken a little time to get right – not only does the artist need to paint their canvas backwards, but instinct would lead them astray to create one that feels big standing next to it, but which is accidentally miniscule viewed a hundred feet away. This masterpiece is probably close to ten feet tall. Also, welcome to your overanalysis for inconsequential things of the week.

As far as I could tell peering in through its mirror-like windows, Slack’s office is absolutely vacant mid-afternoon on a Tuesday. Dare I say likely another candidate for ejection once the lease comes due, and becoming a new contributor to San Francisco’s 30% office vacancy rate (and counting). Don’t think it’s possible for a city of only 800k people to run a budget deficit of a billion dollars plus a year? Don’t test us.

Yesterday I posted about 510 Townsend St office, the third Stripe office I worked at after Pioneer and Ivy.

Here’s one that I never made it to – HQ 4.0 or 5.0 (depending on how you count) at Oyster Point in South San Francisco. These are the central stairs that run up the middle of the building, an idea that came out of Pioneer and faithfully recreated at Townsend and on the new campus. Stripe’s idea is they were a central point to be cross-pollinated by people from all parts of the company, and would allow random, serendipitous meetings between people who normally wouldn’t see each other as part of their normal work.

Stripe made the right decision to move out of San Francisco, but while the new office is absolutely gorgeous, it’s impossible to miss how sterile Oyster Point feels outside the buildings. Beautifully architected concrete and glass, surrounded by wide roads, promenades to nowhere that nobody uses, and active construction on multiple sides. No grass or parks in any direction. I wonder whether if the new HQ hadn’t been locked in just a little later (closer to 2020), if the whole project wouldn’t have been cancelled in favor of remote and offices in more vital cities, like what happened with Pinterest’s planned SF building which they paid a whopping $89.5M to back out of.

I picked up the journals on the making of Prince of Persia from Stripe Press on the way out, a beautiful book with an unconventional format, and handwritten notes scribbled in the margins.

There was a time when the hustle and bustle at the front of of this building was palpable. Lyft served as the primary mode of transportation for many well-heeled employees, and frequent rideshare pickups and dropoffs competed for space with a busy bikelane and a street which was rarely not in gridlock during any core hours of the day. Now, the streets and sidewalks are so empty that you can practically see tumbleweeds blowing down them, and like much of San Francisco’s SOMA district, the building is too, and won’t be occupied anytime soon. No longer with the benefit of full-time security, the whole courtyard’s been boarded over to prevent it from becoming a full scale encampment.

This was my last Stripe office, fourth (I think?) in the series after an early startup one that I never visited, Pioneer) in the Mission, and Ivy in China Basin. By the time I left it’d already been slated for closure for some time in anticipation of the upcoming campus being constructed down at Oyster Point in South San Francisco.

It was one of those years. Step out of the airport and straight into -30C (-22F) weather. The air is biting. The roads are quiet (even in Canada few people venture out in this).

This view is from my room at the Marriott Delta downtown. Front and center below me are the conspicuous Brotherhood of Mankind sculptures, which although small from this vantage, stand more than 20 feet tall. Walking down amongst them gives you an idea of what walking amongst giants would feel like (a few more photos). I grew up with the installation as an ever-present part of the background (every Calgarian will instantly recognize them as the iconic logo of the Calgary Board of Education) and took it for granted, but looking it from a more objective perspective today, it’s one of the best pieces of modern public artwork I’ve seen in any city worldwide (and far more inspired than what passes for art in Calgary these days).

With bags jammed full of Xmas stuff I elected not to bring a camera, so this photo shot on iPhone 14. The iPhone’s camera gets better every year and is orders of magnitude better than the first phone cameras, but especially when you zoom in on detail, you see that it’s still got a long way to go. Everything looks so soft. I should be reevaluating my gear choices. If your kit is expansive enough that you’re finding yourself leaving it at home when you vacation, then you have the wrong kit. I learned this lesson ten years ago, but apparently have to learn it again.

Columbus Tower’s so close to the tourist parts of San Francisco (Chinatown, North Beach) that it’s a building that many visitors to the city have accidentally seen before just by virtue of being here. It’s a conspicuous fixture on Columbus St a few short blocks from North Beach, and when viewed from the famous Columbus and Broadway intersection, the Transamerica Pyramid towers up behind it.

Not so obvious is its notable history – built right around the 1906 quake, it was slow to open after extensive damange to the construction site. It housed a corrupt San Francisco politican (even moreso than the ones we have today – convicted 14 years for bribery) and a famous stand-up comedy club before being sold to Francis Ford Coppola, upon which it became the post-SOMA headquarters for American Zoetrope, co-founded by George Lucas.

Zeotrope was responsible for production only for Lucas’ pre-Lucasfilm movies like THX 1138 and American Graffiti, but most of the Coppola family films, including The Godfather series, Apocalypse Now, and Lost in Translation by Sofia Coppola (still my favorite movie).

Yesterday was the grand opening of San Francisco’s new Muni line, the Central Subway, connecting Chinatown and SOMA, ending a few blocks from the Giants stadium.

Along with many other locals, I went down to give it a test run. The new stations are deep, spacious, clean (for now), and built with a keen eye for design – the mural at Chinatown (main image) is particularly nice.

I used to joke that this is the subway I’d never see. Having started in 2010, before I got to the city, and which seemed like it’d only finish after I’d left. It was supposed to open in December 2018, which was pushed to December 2019, then to February 2020, then to mid-2021, then to late 2021, and finally to 2022. And although the city is claiming to have hit the 2022 target, it’s on technicality at best. It’s running only as a pilot through the end of the year – available only for weekend service, and not connecting to other lines.

The good news is that it’s a useful route, and had it finished closer to target, I might’ve been a daily rider over to Stripe’s old Townsend office. The bad news is that despite ambitious plans for future extensions that’d take it all the way to the Presidio, between major time and budget overruns on it and the Van Ness rapid lane (3 years behind schedule) and a struggling budget, this might be San Francisco’s last major infrastructure project for a long time.

I’ve got to hand it to Amazon – they might be evil, but they sure build some nice buildings. Wandering around downtown Seattle, a particularly well-designed building jumps out at you, all glass and steel with a modern look at nice highlights. 8 times out of 10 it’s one of Amazon’s many corporate offices littered throughout the area.

Famously, instead of building out a sterile office park out in Redmond or Mountain View, Bezos committed to downtown Seattle, and the South Lake Union are in particular. And as much as old hand Seattleites hate it, it’s actually pretty nice, and Amazon’s work force of well-heeled twenty-somethings bring a youthful energy that’s long gone from many downtown areas.

These are Amazon’s crown jewel, The Spheres, a pair of miniature biodomes in the middle of the city. Unfortunately, they’re only open to the public two days a month, neither of which were during my stay. Next time, maybe I’ll get to see them from the inside.

citizenM South Lake Union, my hotel in Seattle. A tad more affordable than other places in the area, you quickly find out why – the rooms are modern and space-efficient, but they’re the size of a tack – maybe a hundred square feet. Perfectly stackable rectangles, a full fifty of them fit on one floor of the modestly sized building.

But it’s got some nice touches. Self check-in works well, and a full bank of half a dozen terminals means no lines. A generous common room with beautiful decor encourages guests to get out of their rooms and mingle downstairs. Badging into a room brings on all lights inside automatically, so no fumbling for switches. And while each light gets a switch for individual control, two master switches – one by the bed and one by the exit – light or extinguish them all simultaneously. Not exactly trascendant product craftsmanship, but having applied a modicum of thought to layout and design puts citizenM in the top bracket amongst its peers.

Staying in cities is expensive and getting moreso. Predictably, AirBnB has equalized in cost with hotels, and hotel prices are going up, showing ~8.5% inflation YoY. Thanks to the absence of Prop 13, Seattle uses its inner city land better than San Francisco, but it still got me thinking about how the lion’s share of revenue produced by an increasingly productive city ends up going to land owners and rent. A piece by Lars Doucet on Georgism (podcast form) makes the case that land value tax is a superior model to property tax.

Yesterday, drove from Seattle to Westport, a small town on Washington’s coast.

I was lucky to join what’d been a prearranged trip for none other than … mushroom foraging. Our target was Amanita muscaria, which even if you’re a mycology novice like myself, you’ll recognize by its distinctive red and white spots, made unforgettable by Super Mario and the Smurfs.

Amanitas have some pscychoactive properties, but between their toxicity and the relative mildness of the effect, outlawing them was never a priority like it was for psilocybin mushrooms.

We spent the rest of the day walking around the beach and swinging by the harbor for fish and chips and crab melt. Westport is a quaint town with a rural feel, and I found it darkly amusing that this would be prime real estate up in ill-weathered Canada, but goes largely ignored in America despite being only a few hours drive from Seattle (metro population ~4M).

Later, continuing Spring ‘83 implementation, I wrote neospring-bridge, which cross-posts this feed to neospring as a board (try curl https://neospring.brandur.org/2c98169d0b6fa73cab5a830be8dde53c5f388d5c6f8e6f756b6b6dbcc83e1124). I still need to do something with layout, federation, and a frontend, and it’s far and away the most likely outcome that this project doesn’t get traction, but it’s been a great hack project.

Not Waterloo, Washington. Today, investigating Seattle neighborhoods, I did a grand loop of inner Seattle – starting on the University of Washington campus, up through the University District, west to Green Lake and onto Phinney Ridge, then down through Fremont and back along the west shore of Lake Union until I was back in Amazon central (South Lake Union).

Seattle’s a nice city, but wow, also a busy one. From Belltown to Ballard, every road is loud and fast, and apparently a thoroughfare to somewhere else. Walking around West Lake, I’m not sure I’ve seen a busier park in my life. Looking at a map it makes sense – hundreds of thousands of adjacent residents with only a handful of local park options to choose from, and falling back on what they can.

There’s got to be a slower-paced neighborhood around here, but one that’s not too far out in the ‘burbs right? I have another half dozen yet unexplored recommendations. We’ll see what the next few days yield.

This morning, got most of a Spring ‘83 server implementation done. It deploys automatically to GCP, but it took a couple hours of futzing around to get there. GCP’s inscrutable, debug-by-trial-and-error ACL model is one of the most nightmarish things I’ve seen in 20+ years of programming. I’d originally intended to have it persist to Postgres, but after thinking about it over breakfast, realized this was a perfect use case for writing tiny 2217-byte blobs to an object store. It’s running, but I’m still not publishing anything to it – more to come.

You’ll have to give me a break on photo quality for this one – it’s hard getting something good through the foggy glass of a plane window.

This is Mount Rainier, the tallest mountain in Washington state and the Cascade mountain range, and also one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. It’s on the list of Decade Volcanoes thanks to its history of large, destructive eruptions and near proximity to a dense populzation zone. Wikipedia almost notes that it’s the most topologically prominent peak in the contiguous US, dwarfing everything else around it and having quite a striking effect on the eye.

I just landed in Seattle. It’s colder than expected. Like colder than it rightfully should be in any west coast city. Luckily, I learned from my mistake in New York and came equipped with a variety of cold weather gear this time around. I haven’t had a chance to do much yet besides check into my hotel and head over to the flagship Amazon Go store, which was quite busy, but appeared to be about 5% shoppers, and 95% senior Amazon staff chatting in small circles, lauding each other on their own ingenuity. Still, it was nice seeing a downtown that’d regained some of its lost vibrancy.

I got a coffee, along with a note saying that Amazon is “working on my receipt”, but nothing since. I suspect it might be a Mechanical Turk who ends up piecing together my bill from video rather than the finely tuned neural nets of a hyper-sophisticated ML cluster, but I might be a cynic. On my way out, someone handed me a free banana from a cart parked next to a geodesic dome.

Last weekend I wrote a Spring ‘83 key generator, and on the flight got maybe halfway to a working server implementation. Tomorrow, more Seattle, more Spring ‘83, and work time spent on SSO and polish on a forthcoming metrics product for Bridge.

People have an outdated assumption that it rains a lot in San Francisco. Maybe it used to, but it hasn’t been common for years. It’s mid-November, and I’d call this maybe our third “serious” rain day of the year where we’re actually getting more than a few millimeters of precipitation (although I’m sure I’m off by a couple days).

I made my way downtown, and getting off at Montgomery, randomly ran into Mark, an old API buddy. We talked API DSLs, OpenAPI, and tooling for generating workflows and libraries for a good half hour – maybe my first IRL API discussion in years.

I stopped by Salesforce Park afterwards to shoot some rare photos of its grounds empty and in the rain. but made the error of bringing only a prime 50 mm, which turned out to exactly the wrong lens for the job. I didn’t do it justice in the above, but it’s a remarkably great park.

Charleston again, continuing from 024. A few of us arrived a day before our on-site officially started, and intended to spend the day sightseeing in downtown.

We did, sort of. We took the water taxi in, walked around for half an hour, but just like the night before, the sky opened up. Taking refuge in a nearby coffee shop, we hoped to wait the problem out, but in Charleston, the weather can stay irritating longer than you can stay patient. We timed out after about an hour and went to lunch instead, and even by the time we finished that, the rain wasn’t done. I called the water tax to see if we could still take it for the return trip and their response was, “technically yes, but you might not want to” (it’s a small, flat, very exposed type of boat). We took an Uber instead.

A side effect of the plethora of rain is that it left me with few photos of Charleston overall – our on-site started the next day and we spent most of it in meeting rooms. I’m looking forward to making my way back to Charleston somewhere down the line to correct that.

The first ever Stripe Sessions in 2017, which I don’t think I think I was supposed to be attending, but for which I was given a spot at the last second.

As I was looking at these, I was wishing that I’d written more down about the period since I didn’t remember much anymore, only to realize that I’d been good about writing journal entries around then, and had a long one from that day. Most of it’s unpublishable, but here’s an excerpt about employee orientation:

They gave us the usual spiel about how we should never get more specific than saying that we process “billions of dollars for hundreds of thousands of businesses”, and said that we shouldn’t say anything about the technology behind Sigma (to add mystique and imply that it’s built on a powerful, secret platform proprietary to Stripe).

It was the launch day for Stripe’s Sigma, which would be announced as part of a Jobs-esque event keynote.

Stripe’s Increment magazine had just launched a few months earlier, and you can see a few of the issues of On-call (#1) laid out. I’d thought Increment was a mangificient idea, but my instinct nowadays is more akin to finding the nearest shredder. The whole issue was written about on-call in an organizational sense, but with very little input from the people who actually were on-call. This was reflective of Stripe’s top-down attitude towards engineering resources, which were interchangeable cogs whose worth went as far as the specific functions they performed. An engineer’s on-call wasn’t a service to be respected by the org – it was a mandated duty, and one with a 5-minute SLA.

These photos are five years olds, but I’ve had Stripe on the mind because they’ve been in the news recently.

Technically, these days I work for a company headquartered in South Carolina. Charleston specifically.

A team on-site last August was the first time I’d ever visited the city. After getting off a rare direct flight from SFO, we ventured inwards, and were delighted by the charm of its old French Quarter, finding this bar semi-randomly as we shopped for venues along the street.

Along with the picteresque old buildings, we got to experience another aspect of coastal life the same night as the sky opened and rain came down in sheets. Driving into downtown, the streets had been bone dry. Driving back out only a few hours later, our Uber forded against a torrential flood flowing down the streets.

Taken high above Calgary on the day after Christmas in 2018. As with 021 and 022, I found these in a test sequence that I’d created, and they were too good not to republish.

It was a cold day (-10C) that was part of a cold winter, and not much of anyone was out and around. Calgary at its most romantic.

Another old one from a visit to Portugal in 2018, but a photo I like enough to repost. Below is what I’d written back then.

My first 24 hours in Lisbon – my internal clock is so wildly askew that that I wake up around 4 AM and have trouble getting back to sleep.

Trying to make the best of a bad situation, I unpack my camera, and start walking down the hill towards the center of the city. Here we see the entrance to Lisbon’s famous Rua Augusta, a wide pedestrian avenue and one of the most beautiful streets in the city.

If you walk further along it in the direction of the ocean, you’ll arrive at the Rua Augusta Arch. Already impressive, it’s made even more so by the history it was built to commemorate. In 1755, the city was flattened by a monster of an earthquake in the 8.5-9 range, still one of the deadliest in human history. The colossal arch symbolizes reconstruction as one of the world’s greatest cities was reborn from its own ashes.

As I was going back to do some general clean up after the recent Sequences refactor, I came across a draft line that I’d forgotten about, and originally written to test the layouts of the new medium. It’s not rendered anymore, so I’m porting some favorites back into the main series.

This one’s of a snowy trail up in St. Albert, near Edmonton, Canada. This is where my grandmother lived for many years after moving out of Edmonton proper and before moving down to a facility near my parents in Calgary. One of its most distinctive qualities was a small nearby lake surrounded by some nice trails, and which I have some fond memories of walking during various season with the rest of the family.

A few photos taken along one of those trails as the season’s first seasons were starting to arrive.

A favorite fallen tree in Golden Gate Park, findable near the California Academy of Sciences, not far from the National AIDS Memorial Grove.

I recently consolidated the couple Sequences I’d done over the years into a single feed that’s easier to update, and am returning to my back-archives to add a few things that I’d meant to put somewhere. I’ve written about the independent web and the importance of curating content off major platforms like Instagram, but my own contributions to it over the last six months or so have been embarssingly small – here’s to turning that around.

The steps right below the summit of Buena Vista Park near the Haight. This park has the benefit of being quite vertical, so there’s generally a little more room to breathe up top compared to some of the others in the area (not as many people are willing to make the trek).

Some great landscaping out in the Sea Cliff neighborhood, located between Lands End and the Presidio, where every house is worth roughly the same as a modestly sized town in most other countries. Looping north from Golden Gate Park and up and around the whole coast is one of the best walks in San Francisco.

Precita Park in Bernal Heights in its full weekend glory. The park service has taken to drawing “isolation circles” in some of the city’s more popular parks to keep groups adequately spaced out. Not one case of Covid is prevented, but they do serve their purpose in keeping hyperpolitical San Franciscans apart.

Some photos from a cloudy Sunday at Fort Funston. An old military base that lasted through both world wards and the Cold War, it’s now a popular dog walking and hang gliding spot. Wikipedia has a nice shot of one of the enormous 16-inch guns that used to be mounted here.

Most park users don’t make it far from the parking lot, but walk all the way south, then keeping walking south some more, and you’re rewarded as the trail starts to climb, eventually mounting a cliff hundreds of feet up from the beach (bottom left). It’s not flying, but it’s the closest you can get to it on the ground.

Walzwerk was the first restaurant I ever went to in San Francisco when I moved here years ago. After 21 years in business, this was their last night. Walzwerk has the special distinction of not only being a German restaurant, but specifically an East German restaurant, with authentic signage and DDR paraphernalia spread throughout.

I talked with one of the owners for a few minutes as I was ordering. I was somewhat gladdened to hear that although Covid was indeed the final nail, they’d been thinking about moving back to Germany anyway so their child could spend a few years in the German school system. They promised to open something new upon returning to SF.

Stairs to the peak of Mount Davidson. Towards nightfall, and on a cloudy evening.

Ocean Beach, looking out towards Cliff House. Most things in San Francisco are miniature versions of their counterparts elsewhere – houses, bars & restaurants, parks. Ocean Beach breaks the mold. Not only is it long – running 3-4 miles from the Sutro Baths to Fort Funston – but also wide. It takes about five minutes to walk from the Great Highway down to the water. Its sheer size has been a huge boon during the quarantine, with thousands of people visiting on weekends, and all the while able to maintain ample distance from one another.

Sutro Tower, almost 1000 feet high, an old TV and radio tower. Quite possibly San Francisco’s most notable landmark if you take the Bridge out of the running. Here I caught it near sunset on a day when clouds had settled onto the mountain. The sun’s rays hit it from behind. Its skeletal shadow projects forward.

Friday afternoon – a view of Twin Peaks from the adjacent hill of Corona (“crown” in Spanish and Latin) Heights. There’s a unique charm to San Francisco’s densely packed urban plan, running up and down hillsides, architecture doing whatever needs to be done to conform to uneven terrain. But live here too long, and it starts to blend into the background. I stared at this photo for a good long time to remember what it looked like.

Teufelsberg, a man-made hill most famous for being the site of an enormous NSA listening station during the cold war. The key equipment’s all long since removed, but the old structures and domes are still there to see.

I accessed the site by walking up through Barssee und Pechsee, a beautiful nature reserve west of the ring. Access is easy from the Grunewalk S-bahn station. The paths will bend and twist, but with a little commitment, get you to the right place.

Unfortunately, getting to the top of Teufelsberg’s towers to get up close and personal with the the domes used to be possible, but access has since been shut off. Walking around the area’s periphery is still interesting, and I found a lot more to see than I expected, but modern propriety concerns have removed the best aspects of the site.

Berlin’s best breakfast – located in Friedrichshain, Silo Coffee’s Australian-inspired menu features some dishes that are simple-yet-delectably assembled like poached eggs on toast with bacon and avocado, all the way up to more exotic fare like chorizo sausage baked in tomato sauce and served in a small cast iron pan.

This photo was taken just a few minutes after opening during one if its quieter moments, but it’s easy to see that Silo is a neighborhood favorite. Half an hour later all its blocky little benches inside and out would be full – and this was a weekday.

I spent my first few nights in Friedrichshain, and there Silo was an obvious breakfast choice, but regardless of where I was staying later in the trip, I often found myself commuting back to visit once again. Just one more flat white before I go.

Some portraits of monkeys in the hot spring outside the rooftop Monkey Bar in the 25hours Hotel in Berlin. Yes it’s crappy Photoshop, yes those precariously positioned drinks are in serious danger of being knocked over, yes those monkeys are probably too young to drink. I don’t care. Great concept. Great bar. I want to believe.

I previously published a section in Passages & Glass about going to see Japanese macaques near Nagano. It was amazing, even if as bad luck would have it, they weren’t enjoying drinks at the time.

Park auf dem Nordbahnhof (“Park on the Nordbahnhof”) – one of the more beautiful legacies of the wall. The area was originally part of a train line that led to the since demolished Nordbahnhof station. By 1961, the line was completely shut down as it became part of border fortifications for the new wall nearby. After the wall’s collapse, it became a park.

It’s highly reminiscent of New York’s High Line, except with a more raw nature, fewer Blue Bottles, and far fewer people (finding green space in Berlin isn’t quite the same level of competition as it is in New York). Similarly to the High Line, it’s elevated three meters above the surrounding streets, and that vertical separation creates an effect of peaceful isolation from surrounding traffic.

I came across Nordbahnhof purely by accident as I was touring the area northwest of mitte, and was glad I did. Along the way: an overgrown rail bridge, old paving stones stacked into megalithic cubes, and the most dangerous-looking amusement park I’ve ever seen, complete with gutted cars suspended 80 feet in the air.

One of the best parts of cities with long histories is the repurposing of derelict properties for more creative uses. Berlin, with artist squats in old department stores and night clubs in power plants, is the ultimate example of this sort of organic urban evolution in action. Leipzig isn’t far behind.

One of the city’s curious penchants is to convert old public pools into live music venues. Last year I ran into this in Stadtbad, Leipzig’s old three wing central bath complex. This year: Westbad, the roof of which is pictured below – a mix of amazing bath art, and modern metal frameworks to suspend speaker stacks. Taken during Escape With Romeo’s show on the final night of WGT.

Sometimes a series of historical accidents leads to something amazing that never could’ve been planned from the top down. Moritzbastei is one of those.

Originally the ancient city fortifications for Leipzig, it lost its military function during the Seven Years’ War and was relegated to storage. In 1974, the students club of the nearby University of Leipzig uncovered it and began a reabilitation project. The work took years and involved some 30,000 students – among them a young physics student named Angela Merkel.

Today, it’s a night club and cultural space inside a fortress, and runs from dusk until dawn every night of WGT. Photos often use optical tricks to make small places look larger, but this one does the opposite – it’s only a narrow glimpse into a huge space that spans a dozen rooms in a labyrinthine complex spanning many floors.

Berlin has some nice parks and trails, but they pale compared to Leipzig’s, which for money must be the running capital of Germany.

Head south out of the city center, through lively city parks containing beer gardens and stark Cold War era playgrounds. Help disoriented morning revelers still out from last night with directions back to their hotel. Follow the river. Notice how well-used paths turn to trails through tranquil forest smelling heavily of garlic (collecting wild garlic is a signature activity of springtime Leipzig). Keep an eye out for overgrown cobblestone roads, abandoned tram lines, snails in the long grass, and wild boar (wild only in sense of the species – wisely fenced off).

Photo taken at my southermost reach near Agra – just a few hundred feet from hundreds of tents housing sleeping festivalgoers at the WGT campground.

The Volkspalast (“people’s palace”) is a big, circular space built under a dome to be reminiscent of the Pantheon in Rome commissioned by Marcus Agrippa under Augustus’ reign. With the honor system being the only thing that separates stage from crowd, the concerts held here are as intimate as you’ll ever find.

This is Darkher performing her particular brand of slow doom metal, and there’s no venue more appropriate for it (the original Pantheon wasn’t available). It’s the first day of WGT down in Leipzig, and I’ve hopped down here from Berlin for a few days to attend.

Back home packing, I waffle over whether I can get away without bringing a jacket. Finally, I decide to try it. I know it’s risky, but keep it light.

Fast forward 24 hours: I land in a Berlin that’s not only hot, but so hot that the city is skimming temperature records, with daily highs like 34 degrees (93F). Thoughts of jackets are quickly forgotten; replaced with brainstorming on how to strip off as many layers as possible while avoiding arrest for public indecency.

Berlin has some amazing running routes, but this year even a few kilometers are oppressive. A painful workaround is to go early – like really early – ideally 5:30 or so, when the mercury’s “only” in the high teens/low twenties. Long daylight hours (the sun rises before 5 AM) combined with jet lag make the ambitious schedule possible.

This photo’s of the wilderness along my favorite run – follow the Spree southeast out of Friedrichshain, into northern Kreuzberg (say “hi” to the people still partying), passed the sunken MS Dr. Ingrid Wengler and Molecule Man, through Treptower Park, and then south by and around the ruins of Spreepark (scroll down at that link for some great photos, and hundreds of anecdata points from people sneaking passed the fence). This year, the fallen tyrannosaurus is gone, but the creaking old ferris wheel still stands.

The first few days of my stay are spent in Friedrichshain along the Spree. Jetlagged beyond belief, I take a walk at 5 AM and realize that I’m staying next to the longest continuous section of the Berlin Wall that’s still standing, known as the “East Side Gallery”.

The wall, or officially the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart by East Germany’s GDR, wasn’t built to repel invasion as the name suggests, but as an emergency effort to keep their own population in. Flight to the west was so bad that it was compromising the viability of the country’s economy, with departees disproportionately of working age and professionally skilled.

Khrushchev and Ulbricht conspired to close the border in August 1961 despite the inevitable damage it would do to communism’s PR. The wall started life as barbed wire entanglements on August 13th (“Barbed Wire Sunday”) and a few refinements later would became the Grenzmauer 75 (Border Wall 1975) of 45,000 prefab concrete blocks that we recognize today.

At the begining of 1989, GDR leader Erich Honecker predicted that the wall would stand stand strong for 50 or 100 more years, but that same year, a refugee crisis pressured the East German government to revise crossing regulations with a provision for private round trips. Miscommunication in the party’s hierarchy caused a spokesman to suggest that the new rules would come into effect immediately, when they were supposed to activate the following day to provide time for border guards to be briefed. Televised broadcasts prompted huge gatherings at the wall’s six checkpoints demanding to cross. As pressure continued to build, the vastly outnumbered soldiers would eventually allow it as no one was willing to authorize the use of lethal force.

Since then, sections of the wall have been exported around the world and can be found everywhere from Manitoba to Indonesia to Estonia. Graffiti had been a common fixture on the west side of the wall for some time, but graffiti on its east side, like that pictured below is new, appearing only after the ‘89 collapse.