Today, taking a break from the credit crunch madness, we paid a visit to the newly opened California Academy of Sciences. The admission is free every third Wednesday of the month and since we are starving entrepreneurs, we jumped at the opportunity.
When we finally arrived at Golden Gate Park we were greeted by a huge mass of people. The new Academy building is next to the De Young Museum and the line snaked all the way to its neighbor. We got lucky as some of our friends were already in line. So we cut in line. Fortunately, the people around us were rather gracious.
The museum was quite crowded and the tickets to the planetarium were already exhausted. So we spent most of our time in the aquarium in the lower level. We saw a few very cool things.
First, there was this albino alligator. I have never seen an albino alligator before, didn’t even know they existed. I guess they must live in very clean swamps, otherwise he would stick out like a thorn. He (I’m guessing it’s a male) lives in the swamp pit with a regular looking alligator and two giant turtles. I guess he was really tired today, he didn’t move very much.
Then there’s this giant sea bass. You can’t tell from the photograph but its head was about the size of mine. Now this fish isn’t exactly pretty, but I think I got the optimum angle for the portrait. It was swimming around pretty fast in the tank. I think it was looking for something.
Next to the sea bass, was a very dark tank. At first, I didn’t see anything. Then I saw it in the very bottom corner. A huge octopus! Yep and it was moving along the glass portion of the tank so we all got a good view of the suction cups on its tentacles. I was afraid the picture wouldn’t turn out, but I was pleasantly surprised.
At the same time there was this show where a scuba diver in the tank was talking with the audience. The lecture was on biodiversity in the ocean. I couldn’t get very close as you can see, the place was pretty packed.
After lunch at the museum cafe, which was surprisingly good (probably because we were starving at this point), we visited the Living Roof of the building. This building has the largest living roof in the world. The roof is completely covered in vegetation and they act to cool the building. Also the roof contains enough solar panels to provide up to 10% of the building’s energy needs.
All together, we had a lot of fun. It’s been awhile since all of CLZ went out and did an activity together, and since the October weather in San Francisco is absolutely gorgeous, it was a trip well worth the time.
On Friday, I went to see Eddie Izzard perform at the Orpheum Theater. For those of you not familiar, Izzard is a comedic genius who usually does his stand-up routine in drag. His jokes are extremely sophisticated and usually draws a very intelligent crowd.
This time, however, he did not appear in drag and was immediately heckled by the audience. Yes, San Francisco is full of demanding assholes. But like a true professional, he handled it very well and made jokes on the hecklers. Then he launched into his routines. It actually took me awhile to get up to speed to what he was saying because he was talking extremely fast and in his British accent (and my seat also was far away in the Mezzanine). In the show he basically ran through natural history from the beginning of the earth to the Romans. He did running jokes on the Bible and religion and it was unbelievably sophisticated and hilarious.
The funniest routine, in my opinion, is when he made fun of the Latin language and its complex syntax. He pretended to be a messenger bringing the news of Hannibal coming around the mountains with elephants. At various points he was speaking in German, Italian, French, and probably some other language I didn’t catch. It’s just too funny. You had to be there.
Here’s a little sample of Eddie Izzard’s humor. It is funny and the funniness increases exponentially the more you know what he’s talking about. In this case, French.
Last night I went to Cobb’s Comedy Club in San Francisco’s North Beach to see my favorite comedian Russell Peters perform. This was my first time at Cobb’s, it was a lot bigger than I imagined. Since I got there late, I had to settle for a seat at a table way in the back.
Russell Peters did not disappoint. I was also surprised that it was all new material, all of it stuff I haven’t seen or heard before. The man is a comic genius. Most of his material consists of ethnic jokes, and he makes fun of everyone. Chinese, Indian, Jews, Latinos, and Blacks: no one is safe, not even white people. But he did say some stuff that also made me pause and think. One such example is when he said, “I’ve always told people that I’m Indian. It’s really easy to define ourselves ethnically, but no one knows what they are culturely… I look Indian, but I never realized how not Indian I am until I went to India.” For the most part however, I was ROTFLMAO.
The audience was mostly Indian and Asians with a smattering of other ethnic groups thrown in. I found it really funny because we really responded well to the self deprecating ethnic jokes. There were two warm up acts for Russell Peters and it was a study in contrast. The first, a Filipino guy was hilarious and set the atmospheres. But the second, a white guy, told mostly really hardcore sexual jokes. That totally didn’t hook with the crowd. Most people were like “huh?” which was funnier than the jokes. I felt sorry for the guy.
But… then Russell Peters set everything right. He’s still here for the rest of the weekend. So if you’re lucky, you can still scalp some tickets (they’re officially sold out). In case you don’t, here’s a sample of his old material:
This weekend I attended a friend’s birthday and it made me realize just how old I am getting. In the twenty six years that I have roamed the earth I have learned many important life lessons which I think I should start sharing. These aren’t going to be philosophical life lessons but instead a series of practical tips that have helped me so far. So without further ado…
Life Lesson #1 – Public toilets
We all know the situation; we’re out in public and then have a terrible stomach ache. Being nowhere close to the comfort of your own home, you need to find a clean public toilet.
Most people think the best place is to find a restaurant. However, often times you can’t find a clean one where you can just walk right without getting accosted by a host/hostess. Instead what you should look for is a hotel. Hotels always have great bathrooms and you can shamelessly walk right in, pretend you are a guest, and do your business.
Now I do agree that hotels are less abundant than restaurants but if you spend an extra five minutes in the car looking for one, you’d be surprised, there are more than you think.
Okay so once you get into the bathroom, I always have this problem. The way the toilet seat covers are designed it makes it so that the bottom flap (see picture below) always touches the water.
As the water soaks up the paper, it drags the whole cover into the bowl. This means you probably have at most 30 seconds to take off your pants and sit down.
The way to avoid this problem is to simply tear off either the bottom half of the flap so that it doesn’t touch the water. I can’t stress this enough because it will save you so much time in life setting a new cover.
That’s it for now, stay tuned for other life lessons…
I really like Krav Maga. It’s one of the few martial arts that was invented after guns. It teaches you practical self-defense against realistic threats such as chokes, knifes, and assault rifles. It was designed to be easily learned, but difficult to forget. The movements are natural and for the most part instinctive.
In my first class, we did bunch of warm up drills, lots of punching, palm strikes, kicks, then for the last part, I learned a easy choke defense. I am completely sore… my back is killing me, but it feels good. I’m going to try to do Krav Maga twice a week… and see how far I can get with it.
I found an awesome Krav Maga video on youtube… enjoy.
Today I went to open an investment account at Charles Schwab. Instead of opening an account online, I actually went down to their offices and talked to a real person. Since I live in San Francisco, I went down to their headquarters at 101 Montgomery Street at 8:30 am.
After I finished everything and on my way out, I took the elevator. Waiting with me, was an older man, with white hair, in a very elegant blue pin-stripped suit. We got in the elevator together.
We were the only ones in the elevator and the old man asks me, “so, how did Schwab treat you today?”
I looked at him and answer, “good, good. I just opened my first account.”
He looks at me and asks, “how old are you?” (For some reason, I get asked that question all the time)
I reply, “25.”
He goes, “ha… that’s a good time to start.”
Then we arrived at our floor (we took it for only 1 floor). We then went our separate ways. And I was thinking to myself: who was that guy? Could it be… nah… really? Did I just talk to Chuck?
So I went home and googled Charles Schwab (the man). And this is what I found. Sure enough… that was the old man I saw in the elevator.
For those of you who don’t know Buzz Aldrin - he’s the 2nd man on the moon!
I became a space fanatic when I was 12 years old - okay, I admit, the coolness wore off when I realized that my bad vision would prevent me from being an astronaut. (tear) But nevertheless, I pretended to be an astronaut by looking at a bunch of pictures and watching NASA WebCast (this was ‘98 mind you and webcasts were ‘rare’ and ‘difficult’ to get working).
Oh - and the most important part of the entire space excursion was playing Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space. This was by far the most difficult game I have ever played. The goal is to do a moon landing and make it back alive while racing against the USSR. There were a great many quirks about the game - if your rocket blew up, you to start R&D on rockets from the beginning. You train your crew, and then have to keep them motivated by putting them on missions. I’m not a gamer at all, and this was one of the only games I really liked.
So - Saturday we went to Yuri’s night Celebration at Nasa where we actually got to meet Buzz Aldrin. That was awesome. I asked him what he thought of the space program - interestingly, he said “We should stop putting out the fires of today, and instead take a longer term look into the future” Wow - digging a little deeper, I found that from Buzz’s point of view, NASA can do a lot better than it has in the last 2 decades.
Delivering on visions such as going to Mars - I asked Buzz what he thought. His response was “We have to think about today - not how to get to Mars, but once we get there, what we are going to do and plan R&D accordingly” One example is rapid deployment of teams - it takes 6 months to get to Mars with a crew of 6. We are definitely going to need to think about how we can do ANYTHING with 6 people. That’s so little!
Today the team took a trip to go see the Olympic torch! We really wanted to take advantage of the benefits of living in the city.
We arrived at the planned route at the right time but unfortunately no one was there. The only people to be found were pro-China demonstrators on one side and China protestors on the other. Though it was quite an event, after 20 minutes or so we realized there was no way the torch would ever come through where we were. In addition the live blog feed we received from our phones said the torch had gone “missing” in a warehouse near the ballpark. Deject we headed back to the office.
To make matters worse, we took a wrong turn on the way back, which landed us in traffic gridlock. Curious as to why a usually free flowing street was suddenly at a standstill we looked around and saw the street in front of us had been closed. Well, we all put two and two together, parked the car in a random lot, and immediately ran towards the street closure.
It was a fortunate coincidence that we just happened to bump into the new path of the torch! Here are some pictures:
