Saturday 5th August 2006 - San Francisco

Met Catherine Argus from the Library while waiting for the plane at Sydney International. She was on her way to Washington. Also met Nigel Kersten (friend of a friend) who works as a systems administrator at COFA in Sydney - he was booked on the same flight from Sydney all the way through to San Francisco to present a paper at the Apple Developers conference. Began talking about one of his projects which is to further utilise the capabilities of Spotlight software (search software that comes as part of the latter Macintosh operating systems) to utilise the metadata and to group (?) by other associations and relationships - rather than where they lie within the hirachy of the file structure.

Plane was delayed - ended up leaving about an hour late.

Slept and then watched the Australian Indigenous new release film (the first film shot in language) Ten Canoes. Also was able to watch part of the new Australian film Jindaybyne - but was unable to finish watching it as we started to land.

Almost missed the connecting fight from LAX to San Francisco as the first flight out of Sydney was so delayed. Luckily the connecting fight seemed to also be delayed.

Arrived in San Francisco, caught the BART train to downtown San Fran. Met up with Shannon O'Neill from UTS in Sydney and we went to have brunch - or really it was lunch by this time.

Shannon is starting a PhD that has similarities to the Library's People Australia project and we talked about the necessity to build on what is already available and to not rebuild the wheel if you don't need to. The conversation flowed onto the nature of email lists (their predominance from the mid-90s and how this is fading away) to blogs. He's also starting up a netlabel (a music label) run in collaboration with the Internet Archive - so we had lots of things to talk through. (Funny how sometimes you have to come halfway around the world to have this conversation and yet he lives in Sydney...)

Then visited the infamous City Lights bookstore...


Then took another train to the north of San Francisco and a long wander up the hill (which was deceptively steep. now i understand why everyone talks about the hills in san fran) and down to the Haight Ashbury area. Went to Amoeba records... hard to get out of there it's so huge (And i was lucky that i only bought a handful of CDs)

Looking pretty jet-lagged too...

Then in the evening I headed off to visit the place where Shannon is staying - in Twin Peaks. We were picked up by his friend Mark (in a black and white striped hearse) who drove up to the lookout so that I could get a view of the city.


Had a drink at Marks place and saw the media projects he's working on in his studio and then took a cab back downtown. (by now, feeling deliriously tired as I'd forced myself to stay up all day.) Then crashed out in my cute little room at the Hotel des Arts (where each room has been designed by a different local artist - mine, the map room.)