Sunday: Japantown and leaving.

Today was my last full day in San Francisco.  We never got around to some of the things to do here, but I'll be back for New Year's, so we can try again then.  However, Japantown sounded like a good option.

Since we were actually in Alameda, step one was getting to San Francisco via the Bay Bridge.

You can see the Golden Gate far off in this picture.

And here's downtown.  Why isn't the rest of San Francisco built into high rises?  Because they have really stupid building and zoning regulations, I guess.

Pikachu was here.

Japantown!

Peace Pagota.

There were also crepes (which I didn't take a picture of) and ramen (which I did take a picture of, but which I can't get my phone to transfer back so I can post it).

And then we stopped for ice cream, but I never actually got my ice cream, so I just had my Macau pudding.

Here are the things I've learned on this trip for use on future trips:

1. The battery on my phone sucks, to the point where on this trip I'd take the phone off the charger in the morning, have it die during the day, charge it again, and if I didn't plug it in at night, would wake to it being dead again in the morning.  I'm thinking a Moto X is the replacement I'm going to go with.
2. Doing the hotel the night before flying home means I don't have to worry about traffic in the morning.  Assuming this wasn't too difficult, it's probably the current best strategy for staying in San Francisco.
1. Oakland airport might be located closer, but it doesn't do Star Alliance flights.
2. Even if the internet is technically not free, you can usually get free internet if you have to wait in line.
3. This hotel doesn't have conveniently placed outlets around the bed.  Even a few USB port chargers would help, and should really be a standard feature.
3. I probably shouldn't buy books when I'm travelling with carryon luggage.
4. Even though travelling with just the tote and lappy bag is nice and convenient, this was probably the longest trip that it would work on.  If NYE is going to run ~9 days, I'll probably need to bring my regular suitcase (or do laundry).

My ramen finally uploaded so I could use it.

Saturday: Alameda

Technically, I'm not staying in San Francisco, I'm staying in Alameda.  Anyway, here's things around Alameda.

There was a farmer's market.  We had crepes.  Then we went to have breakfast.

Ham and cheese croissant with Thai tea.

This largely sums up what a lot of the older parts of Alameda look like.

 Then we had lunch:

Maple bacon and chocolate/peanut butter ice creams.

 We also bought books, but I didn't take a picture of that.  We went to the beach.

Which is managed by this near sighted crustacean.

 There was a beach.

Yep, that's a beach.

 Also some squirrels!

Parking lot squirrel!

Tree trunk next to a trash can squirrel!

A that same squirrel, but higher up in the tree!

Friday: Thanksgiving part two

I can never remember to take pictures before I start eating.

Even though we did the "crash somebody else's dinner" yesterday, it still didn't feel quite like we did everything correctly. To fix this, we went out to get all the thanksgiving stuff to do our own private dinner. We did:

• Turkey. This was cooked to long, as the thermometer was reading between 180 and 200, when it should have been around 165 to 170.  Somehow this was still juicier and tastier than the turkey yesterday. Plus there are infinite leftovers now.
• Mashed potatoes. Not as fancy as yesterday's, and there were some complaints that I didn't mash them as thoroughly as possible. They still trashed just fine.
• Stuffing. It wasn't a big homemade one, so it was generally just passable.
• GBC. Not terrible. I'm not sure what would have made it better.
• Rolls and cranberry sauce/jelly.
• I think that's it.
• Cheesecake.

Thursday: Thanksgiving!

I again forgot to take pictures.  Instead of doing our own private Thanksgiving, we went to the party held by (I think) the friend of the parents of one of Julie's friends from Hackbright.  Being only tenuously associated to the people at a party is always odd.

We brought mashed potatoes (with bacon, cheddar and leeks; so delicious) and Julie's cranberry chutney (also delicious, and not gross like a lot of other seasonal cranberry sauces).

We're thinking of doing our own "post-Thanksgiving" tomorrow, partially to have another chance to have tasty Thanksgiving foods.

Wednesday: An actual day in San Francisco.

Unfortunately I didn't take many pictures.

There was a sushi-rito (giant temaki that you're supposed to treat as burrito, but really just tries to have too many flavors).

There was boba tea (where I instead got a fruit juice/tea combo because tapioca is weird).

There was a Chinatown:

Which is mostly full of tourist shops, which I obliged by buying a tiny carved owl.

 There was a church near the park near Chinatown:

That we stopped at so the tiniest member of the team could run around at the playground.

Tuesday: Night flight to SFO

After a regular full day of work (and heading to Macy's before work to buy a new tote, so I didn't have to worry about packing things), I took the late flight to San Francisco.

Before leaving work, I stopped by Fendu to get a turkey sandwich.  This was a wonderful idea, as their bread holds up well, making the sandwich as good four hours later when I was on the plane as it is at lunchtime.

Honolulu from the plane.

This was also the first time I've been able to try United's new inflight entertainment package.  They've disabled the arm rest radios and are phasing out the headrest screens (and the older public screen systems) in favor of tablet based systems they can run over their wifi.  This hasn't been available for android until recently, so I wanted to at least look at what they had.

You can do the "where is the plane" map thing.

Or watch Frozen in all the languages.

They have TV shows and various foreign movies, but it seems like the selection is much smaller than the old head rest based systems.  Plus, without power available at every seat, this isn't really a great solution for longer flights.

In any case, I was able to get to SFO, and take the BART from the airport.  BART is not even close to as good as the Tokyo subway system.

Monday: Once upon a time, I had an overnight bag.

It wasn't super big, but if I remember correctly, it would have had just the right extra volume to complement my backpack to make packing for this trip easy.  Maybe I didn't bring it with me when I moved to Hawaii?  I thought it ended up packed in a box, but since I can't find it, I guess not.  I found the strap that belongs to it, so I can at least be sure that I didn't imagine the thing entirely.  Googling around suggests what I had is called a "tote bag."  I assume this is short for "I totes brought that."

Because the news today sucked, here's a sleepy koala.

• Wonder Woman is who we should all try to be.
• Not Alice Walton.
• I disagree with this, because some of us eat all of our meals alone.  I don't get free food for not having people to eat with, why should you for pretending you don't have someone to eat with?
• I am also curious as to why this would happen.  I wouldn't think that undergrad degrees would be influenced by a funding drop, although I could imagine such a trend at the graduate level (tl;dr reason: people are horrible).

Sunday: The most powerful medicine of all.

After spending yesterday trying a pile of different drugs that I had at home in an attempt to not be sick, I decided to head out today to get the best thing possible to fight my stuffy nose.

Ramen.

I added enough shichimi to put a bit of spice into the soup, and as you can see from the oil slick, I added lots of chili oil to my gyoza sauce.

I then went to buy a bunch of kleenex, of which I've had to use like three.  The ramen cure is delicious!

• All of this discussion of Buffalo in the news lately has made me think about all the food I had when living there.  This was our default pizza place, although it looks like the location we went to has closed.  They had a galaga table unit.
• Oops.
• They played this on NHK world today.
• Fox.
• Cat Mommy.

Saturday: Fucking wonderful.

I've spent the entire day sniffling and sneezing.  I am going to be seriously pissed if I'm getting sick.

Cup of squirrel.

• Periodically I look at new thinkpads.  I am still waiting for the next redesign, in the hope that it isn't stupid.
• No.
• Neko punch.
• Lego.

Friday: At least I got to have onion rings today.

See?

Unfortunately, today I had to flip off a UPS truck parked in a no-parking zone, a bus parked in a no-parking zone, three people who had a crash on the offramp from H-1 home and didn't bother to get out of the highway, the mustang who thought that the lines are painted so you know where your wheels go, and the guy at the stop light who took off the brake when the light turned green, but didn't hit the gas despite there being no one in the road ahead.

I also looked at the weather, and realized that San Francisco is going to be twenty degrees colder than Honolulu next week.  I think that means that tomorrow is the day I go out to find a new hoodie.

• This is a good movie.
• adb is a better way to copy things to my tablet.  I shouldn't bother with the shit GUI program.  The important thing is that the regular directories really live in /mnt/sdcard/.

Thursday: I should probably remember that I'm going to be on vacation in a week.

I could go for some waffles and bacon right now.

• Scooby Doo.
• I kind of feel bad for Anna.
• I would watch pretty much any Natasha Allegri show.
• I want to ride in the panda seats.
• Walmart is still horrible.

Wednesday: Wait, Wednesday?

That was faster than I expected.

As was the final episode of macaron time.

• Dog.
• Pikachu.
• Dog.
• Pikachu.
• The full story has more details, but the main point is clearly stated in this one.  "Universities are grossly underfunded."

Tuesday: I've deleted 132 terabytes in the past day or so.

This is 3:30pm.

And it was.

• FFS, Barbie.
• Conservatives are basically scared of everything, and because of that, people can't have health care or get married if they're gay.  No, this doesn't make sense, but that's how things work.
• Poor Pikachu. :(
• Dog.

Monday: I hate Mondays.

So I was tempted to spend $7 on macarons.  I ate the pumpkin pie one (not bad, not super pumpkin-y), and I'm saving the chocolate and strawberry ones for the next two days.

• Now I want hot dogs and pretzels.
• Squirrel thief.
• I always felt bad for the kodama in this scene.
• Fox.

Sunday: I still miss the calamari steaks.

Because even though I like Portuguese sausage, the fact that I have to get eggs for it to be cheaper is silly.

This song keeps coming up on the radio, and is just catchy enough to get stuck in my head.  This isn't the full song, but you can still see the pig and frog that are in the video.

• Cat.
• Cat.
• Thor.
• "Wait, no.  I don't think I'm explaining this correctly, let me try again."  "Could we start with something simpler?  Like, why am I 19 shades darker than the two of you."  "Look, see..."  "Or, hey, why my hair is just fucking all over the place.  Am I going to need to be making a rope or something?"  "See, this is all about the fruit.  That's all you need to remember, don't eat any of the fruit that's not here."  "Yeah, I'm sorry.  This whole thing just doesn't seem like it makes much sense to me."

Saturday: This was too much food.

I decided I wanted to be angry about parking, so I went back to La Tour Cafe after three years.  Parking is still a problem, because people are stupid.

Read the post title.

I went to get their chicken meatball banh mi (no cilantro), which was very good, even if the carrots could have been cut thinner.  However, I was not expecting a full 12-inch sandwich, and so the very cheesy mac&cheese made this far too much for a lunch.

They also had a coke freestyle machine there, so I was enthused to be able to get coke raspberry.  Unfortunately, all the cool coke flavors were out, so I was forced to settle for a poorly flavored cherry/vanilla/dr. pepper, a raspberry fanta (not quite the same), and then a peach fanta (which you can only taste after you swallow and the flavor goes through your nose).

• Possibly NSFW, but hilarious.
• Dog haet Roomba.
• This video again.

Friday: Guess who doesn't have tuberculosis?

"Hopefully everybody?"

Yes, sure, but I have an official "No TB" paper now.

• Whoops.
• Yeah, I think the new Thor will work out.
• It's weird seeing an ad like this for something I actually buy.

Thursday: Thanks for breaking things, jerks.

They took two days to fix their computer, and when it was finally done, they'd broken the firewall rules that allow me to actually transfer data to and from it.  Good job, jerks.  You suck.

That fucking horse.

• The joke being that when the game was announced, they claimed that they couldn't possibly put a female player character in, because that was just way too difficult and would delay the game too long.  It turns out they still did a half assed job anyway.
• Surprise dog.
• I saw this on a youtube video yesterday.  A corned beef sandwich with latkes for bread.

Wednesday: Hello Kitty and Superheroes

Today was part two of the never ending chain of doctor's appointments that always starts with a single doctor appointment.  For reference, this was number two of five.  The goal for today: vaccines and test part A.  I'm pretty sure I ended up in the room that's usually used for kids.

For some reason.

I can't quite put my finger on it, though.

• Today I learned that the ESA doesn't have a PR rep on hand when they live stream events.  Honestly, isn't this the kind of thing that is obviously something you'd want to stop ahead of time?
• Just in case you weren't sure how much money is being extracted by the wealthy from corporations, the answer is 91%.
• Which is part of the reason that Walmart is in this position.  Hiring more people and paying them wages to prevent waste would directly cut into that wealth extraction.
• That is a nice clock.
• Yoshitaka Amano's art is a bit reason why I like the Vampire Hunter D books.

Tuesday: Days off are better when you don't wake up to emails about things being broken at work.

Because then you have to work out a solution when all you really want to do is go back to sleep.

Then I went to get a burrito for lunch.

I also noticed something today.  PBS here shows NHK world.  That led me to looking at the schedules for BBC, Deutsche Welle, and Russia Today.  All of these have some sort of half-hour of news on the hour, followed by a half hour of various subjects.  This made me miss the days before Headline news became absolute shit.

• Kansas will continue to be fucked for the next four years.
• I would vote for President Cookie Monster.
• Owl.

Dear ResearchGate,

Fourteen fucking emails in less than a week? None of which were at all helpful or anything other than "are you this person you clearly aren't?  Please tell us, because the mystery of 'middle initials' confuses our parsing code!"

My response to "why I was deleting my account"?  "I can find no other way to tell ResearchGate to go fuck itself for being a useless spammy piece of shit."

Monday: I think that's the problem.

If function A is basically a flat plane, and function B is basically a possibly different flat plane, then attempting to find the solution B = \alpha A + \beta is effectively a degenerate system.  As a result of this, if A does have a deviation from the flat plane model, then the minimization process fitting \alpha and \beta are very likely to set \alpha to a very small/large value to effectively smooth that deviation out, using \beta to compensate for the introduced DC offset.

I'm 90% sure that this is the cause of the bad fits I'm seeing, and why I can't find the deviations I expect to exist.

Random red panda.

• Dog wants tater tot.
• Bob's Burgers is better than all the other shows on Fox Sunday.
• How Mississippi screwed themselves to ensure people didn't look at them as a success.

Sunday: I get a bonus day off on Tuesday, so it's ok to waste today doing nothing.

I did go to get lunch, going with the idea to try something different at Nico's.

I saw a gecko.

The fisherman's stew is not what I was hoping for.  It has too much of some herb I don't like.  Dill, maybe?  I did have backup calamari, though.

I like boats.

• I have no clue what this comic is supposed to be saying.
• This should really be a main aspect of our international relations.
• This story would be better.
• Why cats are jerks.

Saturday: It's cold today.

Sure, it's still 70, but there's fairly steady trade winds.  Plus, it's been 80 something for a long time.

So I went to get curry.

And then doughnuts next door, where I found Squirtle.

• And this is unacceptable.

Friday: Ugh.

I'm beginning to think that there might not be enough useful information to do what I thought.  It should be possible, but my math keeps not working.  Stupid math.

• So it's going to preferentially hurt people who voted for Republicans.  Great job, guys.
• I'm not sure exactly how "fine, I'll just bankrupt my country, then," is a viable strategy.
• I thought this was funny.

Thursday: Yeah that works.

I think this sums up today pretty well.

• Bee and Puppycat.
• Reminder that people are horrible.
• As are corporations.
• Bunnies aren't though, so at least we have bunnies.

Wednesday: Basically, everyone is stupid.

The person who was arguing on the bus parked in front of me so that it wouldn't move.  The bus driver who didn't bother turning on the blinkers so we would know that the bus wasn't ever going to move.  The cop who was sitting right there doing nothing about it.

This is the graphic NHK used to present the election yesterday.

• Voters are stupid.
• Voters are stupid for different reasons, and National Review thinks continuing to not actually govern is the best strategy for the Republicans.  Why? you might ask.  Because National Review is filled with some of the worst people in the world.
• Mew2.
• New Pikachu balloon.

Tuesday: Fucking idiots.

Summary of election things:

1. If you're afraid of random things, you shouldn't be allowed to vote, because you're an idiot.
2. If you vote for a minimum wage increase, and then also vote for someone who opposes minimum wage increases, you're also a fucking idiot.
3. We can all be happy that old people will die, leaving behind a less stupid country.
4. We can also be happy that the country is become more diverse, despite how much this panics horrible racists.
5. The Republican congress now has to craft and pass an immigration bill.  The options on this are all pretty wonderful:
1. Don't pass an immigration bill.  Lose a large chunk of the population permanently.
2. Pass a harsh immigration bill.  Lose a large chunk of the population permanently.
3. Pass a reasonable immigration bill.  Add a large group to the population while simultaneously alienating the most racist part of your current voting base.
6. If I remember correctly, the 2016 senate races are not expected to be favorable for Republicans.
7. At least my senator isn't going to be a fucking idiot.

Since it was election day, I had a nice day off to do a bunch of errands.

I voted, but didn't get a "I voted" sticker.

I went to buy googly eyes.

I went to work to move the door of my work refrigerator to the other side, and to put googly eyes on my roomba again.

I got gas, but couldn't put more air in my tires, because some crazy lady was washing her car by hand, blocking the air pump.

And then I got a carwash.

• Owls.
• Sweater squirrels.
• Unhappy river squirrel.
• I still like the old Harley.  I really hate the new Harley costume.
• Yeah.  God forbid a movie be fucking good, jackass.
• Joe Kernen should be fired.  There is no reason that someone reporting on finance would not know the currencies of the UK and Ireland.  This is such a fundamental lack of knowledge that I can't even come up with an analogy.  I guess this is like a doctor being surprised that people leak red juice when they're opened up.
• Subtle this time, Onion.
• Statistical proof that people who vote Republican are bad people.

And they just put out the preliminary results: Ige@53%; Takai@54%.

Schatz was called almost immediately.