Shanghai Gold is of course still available at Amazon (including a Kindle Edition), Barnes & Noble and your local bookstores – and I very much would like to encourage everybody to go out and buy a copy. But in addition there is now also a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licensed version of the book at shanghaigold.net.

If you weren’t sure yet if this is a novel for you, start reading right now. Enjoy!

Life with Luke is definitely interesting – it’s pretty clear that nothing will ever be the same and whatever else happens, he is certainly the most amazing thing that has ever happened to Kazumi and me.

But as the title implies, other changes are afoot. After almost exactly 12 years, I’ve quit my job.

Yeah… I know! 12 years feels like a crazy long time to have been in a job in the web industry, but as Groucho Marx liked to say, “Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana!”

I had a good time at my now-previous employer and I wish all my ex-collegueas only the very best – they are a talented bunch of people and it was fun working with them. But it is time to move on. I’m looking forward to the challenges in my new job and I will certainly learn a lot of new things very quickly, which is really what life as a web developer is all about.

2011 is shaping up to be a year of huge changes in the web development world. HTML5 didn’t just knock on the door, but rammed in the door, kicked out the wall and took the roof down, too! It’s exciting to be a small part of this change to our industry and one of the reasons for a lack of postings here has been that I spend whatever free time I have on learning things. There have been much more frequent updates than here to my project site Stories in Flight.

But I felt bad about neglecting Pacific Tides for so long, and I will now try and post more frequently again. After all there is more to life than babies and HTML.

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve successfully finished NaNoWriMo with a mostly completed novel, and it took me all the way through the rest of the 2000s to edit my work.

There was also the subject of how to actually publish the novel – and after several unsuccessful attempts to interest an agent or publisher, I decided to self-publish. This is after all the age of the web, where we blow open the doors of encrusted organizations and Just Do It Ourselves, right? Right!

Well, it’s been a busy couple of years, but now, finally, Shanghai Gold has been published!

The book is now out and available at Amazon as well as from your local book store (they’ll probably have to order it for you, but hey!) and it’s making me very nervous to let go of the book and to see how it will do out in the world…

If you pick up a copy I’d be happy to hear how you liked it and please rate and review the book once you’ve read it at your favorite book seller’s website.

There are a few things to talk about, but before I get back to the usual blogging routine, here’s an update on my daily commute: It still rocks!

Last Thursday was a beautiful day in the Bay Area, warm and not much wind, so I was really looking forward to my bike ride back home across the Golden Gate, and I was rather disappointed to see the fog move in from the ocean just before I made it to the bridge.

And the fog was as thick as pea soup by the time I’d made it to the south tower, so I didn’t expect any photo opportunities… near the north tower, visibility was down to about twenty meters, when suddenly from one second to the next, the sun broke through!

It was glorious! Here is a still picture taken from the north tower:

Click through for a large version.

What no picture can can show is the amazing speed of the wind-whipped fog as it blows through the narrow gap of the Golden Gate. Here is a short video of the same scene – sorry for the shaky camera, but the wind was strong enough to almost blow the camera out of my hands.

Also commute-related, I’ve started a Tumblr blog as a little experiment. It’s linked here in the sidebar and it’s called Bay Crossings – I’ll try to post a picture or two every day from my commute across San Francisco Bay.

On March 18 at 1:13am Luke Akira arrived, changing our lives forever. And while he is not always as peaceful as in the picture above, he has already enriched our existence beyond words.

Welcome, Luke. We’ll have an amazing time together…

It’s a evolutionary step from FlickrPoet, and while it removes the interactivity, it certainly adds a meditative quality to the experience: You can sit there for a while and see the words and pictures dance past, with both Twitter and Flickr delivering near inexhaustible material.

I’ll have to work a little on the code that cleans up the tweets, since there is quite a lot of variation in the formatting of the haikus, with links, hashtags and response tags freely peppered across 140 characters.

A few days ago I had an idea that was simple enough to experiment with and since I needed a place for the pages, I’ve started a new site – Stories In Flight – to hold storytelling-related tech demos that I’ve had bouncing around my mind.

The first little project to see the light of day here is FlickrPoet – an exploration of adding photos to a short story or a poem by searching for the words of the text on Flickr. This came out of some random experiments with the excellent Flickr APIs, and took on a life of its own. It can be very random, but every now and then it creates a collage of sheer genius.  From what I’ve found it can work really well with poems and song lyrics. Feel free to experiment!

It is at the same time a big jump and only a tiny little difference in our lives. When we open the front door now, gone are the hills, the constant fog, the noise of Pine Street, the homeless and the cafes around the corner. But we have gained some other things, like the smell of the eucalyptus forest above us on the hill, starry nights, and a rather more peaceful environment…

I will certainly miss my daily walks across Nob Hill, Russian Hill and Telegraph Hill, but my new commute is either a bike ride across the Golden Gate bridge or a ferry ride across the bay. And I have already fallen in love with my daily bike ride, full of some of the most beautiful scenery that this planet has to offer. Here are some early results on Flickr: 1, 2, 3 & 4.

And hey, I still see the parrots every day! Now mostly around Fort Mason in the morning, when a group of them usually hang out in the trees there – I wonder if they actually sleep there and then just join the rest of the gang down at the Embarcadero in the afternoon…

And I will of course keep on writing about San Francisco, since it is still part of our daily life, but I will probably also dig up some stories about the history of Sausalito, which has its very own hectic and eclectic past.

We will see – but I hope it will be interesting to follow along… 

We traveled by sleeper train across the Alps and woke up to a hazy Italian landscape glowing in the early morning light, only a few kilometers away from Florence. We had been to Florence before, and so we just switched trains there to continue on to Pisa, which was a new place for both of us.

Pisa was only a short stop-over on our way to the real destination for this trip, but we did spend a few hours walking around, checking out the sights, and for a late, lazy, second breakfast in a small alley amongst an Italian crowd getting ready for the day. Here is a short audio piece I’ve recorded in the outdoors seating area of this café in Pisa.

After another two hours on a local train we finally made it to Sestri Levante, which is a small beach town north of Cinque Terre, a national park renowned for its picturesque fishing villages that are hanging precariously on cliff sides above the blue waters of the Mediterranean.

Here is a gallery of some of the photos we took in three days in the villages of the Cinque Terre, a few hours in Pisa and, at the end of our trip, half a day in Venice.

Through this all too short time, our hosts and everybody we met was fantastically friendly and welcoming. We couldn’t have hoped for a better time in this sun-drenched country and our love affair with Italy has been renewed for another trip, hopefully very soon…