I’m from Chicago. So you may think I’m just being spoiled when I say this, but aside from the occasional painted lady, I find San Francisco architecture uninspiring at best.
Not so the slew of new buildings going up in and around the future UCSF Mission Bay campus. That area contains some of the most interesting examples of modern architecture I’ve seen outside of magazines. The new Madrone residences have extensive rooftop gardens, and there are innovative uses of material everywhere. Even the parking garages look cool. I’d love to see the neighborhood when the work’s all finished, but that’ll take years yet.
If you live in SF and dig architecture, the next time you have a free hour or so, do yourself a favor and walk around down there. There are far worse ways to spend your time. Oh, and be sure to check out the Chihuly in the lobby of the Nektar/Bayer building. Nice.
Kings of Leon a lot more if I hadn’t heard so many mediocre covers of their songs before I’d heard the originals. But then again, maybe I wouldn’t.
with my own money, from my very first full-time job, was a Titanium PowerBook. It was insanely beautiful, powerful, and just wow.
For my entire computer-using life until then, I’d been a die-hard Windows user. I was about as anti-Apple as you could get, talked with a faintly mocking openly scornful voice when I spoke of Macs—conveniently forgetting that the first computer I’d ever been really excited to use was the shiny new Apple IIgs in our junior high school computer lab, or even the comparatively ancient IIe that sat next to it. Exciting because they were different.
Fast-forward to about 10 years ago, and Mac OS X had just come out. Having been exposed during my college years to Unix—the first computer science class I took was learning Scheme in a lab full of gorgeous and much-missed NeXT machines—and having had a ridiculous amount of trouble with my custom-built Windows box, I was ripe for a change. But what I was really excited about was trying out a real, user-friendly consumer OS based on Unix*.
So, the TiBook. From the moment I opened that box, I haven’t looked back. Every computer I’ve bought since has been a Mac. For the last ten years, I have spent probably more time with my various Macs and iDevices than I have interacting with humans, or doing anything else. I have worked, played, procrastinated, produced, entertained myself, connected, communicated, laughed, taken a reprieve from fear and grief, escaped, found my way, lived with one of these devices as a constant companion. And Steve Jobs made that all possible.
It’s a little crazy to think that someone you’ve never met can have such a profound impact on your life, but Steve Jobs and the work he did had that impact, for me and millions of others. So thanks, Mr. Jobs.