SF by night

Bob’s is dead, long live Bob’s …

It was with sadness and a slight pang of regret that I noticed on returning from my recent Europe trip that in the 3 weeks I’d been away, Bob’s diner on Polk St has closed down. I wonder what devastating event had happened in that short time to cause this result.

Sadness, because I look back fondly at those 3am food adventures we had after some heavy work checking out the local musical talent in SF clubs; regret because I never had my last supper there and also friend of mine never achieved her questionable ambition of becoming the foursquare Mayor of Bob’s. Wondering what happens to all of my past checkins now. I guess they go to the big checkin in the sky – no bad thing, as I always felt it was a bit naff that my first ever foursquare checkin was at 2:30am at Bob’s. Sigh.

Catfish

"Someday"

Just saw Catfish, a film from this years’ Sundance festival, followed by a Q&A with directors/producers/cameramen/editors/and everything else Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. I was at work so couldn’t cry like a baby at the end but it was so sad, massively down to the fact that it’s true. In the spirit of this review, I won’t give any of the story away, and besides on paper the idea wouldn’t really work–but this documentary-style film really does.

It’s also very well made; film spliced together with all sorts of other media as illustrative aids to the narrative.

Go see it, when you get a chance–looking forward to the ‘DVD extras’ alluded to jokingly by the filmmakers at the Q&A, because there will definitely be some interesting side anecdotes there. I realise this sounds ridiculously mysterious, but I promise you’ll find it fascinating, at worst. Writing a ‘proper’ review for this just wouldn’t do it justice.

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Nexus One Day

Nexus One, the new Android device from Google

Or, Nexus 45 Minutes, to put it more accurately. So now I can talk about this devastating event, because enough time has passed for me to heal and because the new Nexus One Android device from Google has been announced, I’m officially allowed to.

11:00hrs: I picked up my shiny new Nexus One
11:45hrs: It gets run over by a truck

The events in between involved a large Christmas tree and running for a bus across a busy road, and that’s as much as I’m prepared to say.

So I tentatively approached my poor phone which was still lying in the road like roadkill (feeling a bit like this mother who let go of her child’s pushchair in front of a Melbourne train, I imagine), almost too scared to look, and at first glance it still looked perfectly fine. “Great!”, I thought, “this phone really is amazingly durable”. But on closer inspection, the screen was delicately crushed into a million smithereens, which kind of renders the entire device useless, given that the most spectacular feature is the beautiful resolution of the large touchscreen.

*Sigh*

Busy times at Google …

Out of everything that’s happening at Google this week, there are 2 particularly Cool Things:

1. Google Goggles, or “visual search”: Having lots of fun playing around with this on my Android phone. Although it doesn’t have face recognition (granted, this would be a world of trouble), pointing your mobile at every object in sight so it can be scanned and matched against a Google search is incredibly addictive.
2. Google Chrome for Mac (and Linux): About time!

Favourite Android apps

Had an interesting discussion with some colleagues about our top 3 Android / mobile apps recently, mine being (and as I warned the colleagues at the time, the names are a little strange so bear with me):

• gStrings – this is a great little chromatic guitar tuning app which is useful for newbies who want to learn basic chords (free)
• QuickDic – German/English dictionary, best one I’ve found on the Android market so far (free, but sometimes the install is a bit buggy)
• Sky Map – quite literally wow your friends and everyone else in the bar with this star-finding app. Just point your mobile towards the stars and see the map of constellations and planets – you can even point downwards to the sky map on the other side of the world, guaranteed to shut any resident smart-ass who claims to know their constellations up (free!)

Some thoughts from the Android forum (common favourites seem to be the Bubble spirit level app – why?? And Shazam, which I’m also slightly confounded by. I just don’t get it, yet.)

Girl Geek jewellery

Silicon Gallies Next Generation Glass Tile ring from etsy.com

Not sure what I think about this yet.

It would probably be cool for 5 minutes, until the edges snagged my stockings and I then had  to explain to some technophile why this was funny, when it probably isn’t. Or is it? Argh.