Month: November 2008

(sorry, but I’ve been waay late in my posts for a variety of reasons)

Last week, the Love of My Life called me, asking if I could help her paste up her (mostly) annual calendar, featuring her photographs in and around Port Costa, CA.

She came out to meet me in Cotati, unfortunately when she got here, she didn’t have her photo files along with her, and we decide to go out to Port Costa so she could retrieve her photos, and take some more photos around town while there was still daylight.

We drove the scenic route to the Carquinez Bridge. This is a picture from the Highway 37 bridge over the Napa River (and those two peaks in the background on the left are Mt. Diablo):

She had to stop at her bank in the town of Crockett on the way, so it was getting pretty late in the day when we got to Port Costa.

We arrived in Port Costa, and used the remaining light to take pictures of the town. And when we arrived at the downtown, a few friends informed her of some “band from Ireland” whose name they could not seem to remember (their name is Seneca, and I will be posting about them next), but who are supposed to have a couple of songs in the Top 25 in the UK, were playing that night at The Warehouse.

The downtown:

 

We headed back to her house, where we went through her photo files (she apparently had lost several when her old computer crashed), and when she wasn’t able to find the material she was hoping to find. We sat at her kitchen table, mostly in silence, as the light faded away outside, and tried to decide what we were going to do: get a bite to eat, and whether she wanted to drive me back to Cotati that night (which is a fairly long drive), or whether I would just crash on the couch.

We decided to get something to eat in town at the Bull Valley Inn (below), a bar and restaurant she used to manage a couple of years back.

 

She ran into a few of her friends there, and talked with them as we ate dinner. Then we headed over across the street to The Warehouse to see Seneca, a band from Limerick, Ireland.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve gotten pretty busy the last few days (alternating with bouts of huge depression).

Thursday night, I attended a meetup of the North Bay Ruby Users Group, which is a group of people working with, developing, experimenting– or just plain learning– Ruby on Rails, which is an up-and-coming web application development framework, using Ruby as the programming language, and Rails as the framework (Rails can apparently also be used with other programming “languages” like AJAX). I was having trouble getting my Rails Server to run on my laptop, and I received hands-on assistance in working out the bugs. Now I have to learn how to use the framework to develop web applications.

I’m just getting started in this endeavor. …

Here’s a picture of the people attending the meetup (I’m absent from the phot because I’m the one taking the picture):

For more photos, click here; and…

For those living in the North San Francisco Bay region, here’s the website where meetups are announced. Sign up today! The more attendees, the more opportunity to host these gatherings where we can further our knowledge of web development, and socialize with some very helpful and nice people.

PC bumper-stickers in a vast Suburban Wasteland

 

(for more pictures, click here)

When I was in High School, in a little Hick town in an inland valley (soon to be part of the greater San Francisco Bay Area Suburban Sprawl – SFBASS) called Livermore, most of my cool friends (all six of ’em, more or less) were a year or two older, and about half of them ended up going to Sonoma State University in Cotati. I didn’t visit there much, but it was discribed as a cool little college town. There was also a “planned development” to the North (soon to metastasize) into a bloated generic-looking suburb called Rohnert Park (which unfortunately spread to infect the town of Cotati itself). …

Cotati still retains some vestiges of the quaint little college town it once was, but now it mostly consists of a suburb of Santa Rosa (which, having no actual industry to speak of, is itself a vast suburb of the San Francisco Bay Area). Which currently makes Cotati a weird little town. There are still some very cool people here (I found out about a local Zen Sangha from a gentleman at a local cafe). Sonoma State University is actually (although I really haven’t checked this out lately) a fairly hip college. Project Censored, a nationally renowned center for media research and First Amendment issues, and the advocacy for, and protection of, free press rights in the United States, was founded, and is headquartered at Sonoma State. Unfortunately, the town in general has a very “hick” vibe to it– as do all of the towns in Sonoma County along the Highway 101 corridor.

At this point it appears that the University crowd seems to pretty much stay to itself, and avoids the “townies”– a term I never heard of until after college. Probably because Humboldt State University– my alma mater— was built high into the redwoods on the slope of some pretty tall hills, and the University crowd pretty much took over the downtown from the “townies”, who at one time worked in the local Lumber Mills– now mostly defunct (according to Government statistics, the #1 industries up there appear to be pot growing and alcoholism)– and who confined themselves to an area of town disparagingly referred to as “The Bottoms”.

Here are some grapevines taken at the foot of Sonoma Mountain. I absentmindedly left the ISO set to 1600 (I took some pictures of the moon the previous night). And through the magick of Fotochop, I came out with a photo that doesn’t look entirely like crap.

Before:

 

Voila!

Ta daaaah!

Also, I’ve started a new album in the 365 photo group. Let’s see if I can keep this up!