:: gia’s blog ::

Last year I did a run-down of my year and thought I’d do the same again this year.
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There’s an article about Brian in today’s Sunday Times. We read it about an hour ago when we woke up here in San Francisco, I said, “It makes it sound like all you do is eat, drink wine and talk about physics.” There was a pause where he just looked at me and I realised how silly I sounded, “Oh yea… that is all you do.”

He’s currently in the bedroom on the phone with a journalist from Wired magazine. They’ve been talking for 45 minutes or so about CERN… though I did hear Brian say, ‘Yea, it was a bit Spinal Tap’ which must have been when he was talking about how his first band Dare broke up having a fist fight in a hotel bar in Germany. :)

Today, we are going to take it easy in order to get over the last of our jetlag and the cold we’ve both had this week (thank Christ we were in business class on the flight) then this evening we are going to meet up with a bunch of people including Mike and Jess who are over from London, as well as some Seesmic people, Jasmine, Maryam and Robert, hopefully a physicist from Berkley and several other people! If you’re in SF and want to pop in, we’ll be at Medjool from 8.30 for drinks and whatnot. Come say hi!

**EDIT** The Wired article is here.

Well, we’re having an odd day. I needed to call my bank twice to get my bank card working… but it’s working now so that’s all good. Macy’s department store was having a big sale and with the dollar so weak and the visitors’ card which gives 11% off, I got quite a lot of clothing today. Which was desperately needed cos, well, I didn’t really bring any clothes with me (couldn’t get the whole packing thing together). I’ve now got at least *something* halfway decent to wear at TED next week. Now, photos…

On the monorail from the airport to the car rental place.

On the corner of Haight-Ashbury.

An iPod vending machine in Macy’s department store.

I’m in bed in San Francisco, awake, 5am, crazy jetlag, Brian’s asleep next to me. I’m on my Nokia n810 so I don’t disturb him. I can’t type very quickly which is slightly crap.

My bank froze my card, clearly they thought a purchase in the UK, followed by one in Germany, followed by an attempt at one in the US was suspect.

Later: call my bank. :-/

First off, thanks to everyone at Walking With Robots for such a brilliant 3 days. You guys rule! Also, thanks to all of you blog friends for visiting the Walking with Robots blog and saying ‘hi’. We all really appreciated it. A super, special thanks to Jonathan Sanderson for asking me along. Nice to finally work with you after all these years!

Now, I am mental busy.

I’m heading off to San Francisco first thing tomorrow. Brian has been invited to speak at TED which is the initial reason for our trip. We are also going to meet up with friends and people from Seesmic (who are friends, too, but I wanted to give them a special link :).

Apart from the whole, boring ‘cleaning stuff from Bristol, cleaning stuff for SF, getting 12 days’ of stuff ready for my son who’s here while we’re away’ domestic rubbish, I also have a lot to do for Water Lilies (yes, that’s an invitation to check out the site!:). I suspect I might be ripping DVDs and putting clips up online from Business Class on the Munich to SF flight tomorrow… cos I don’t think I’ll have time today.

Broadband on planes is a life-saver.