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…

So if you’ve recorded some interesting soundscapes on one of your trips or from around your hometown, please check out MapSkip and I hope you’ll consider adding a story – and your recording – to the ever-growing map.

The Sinclair ZX81 came with an exemplary programming manual that made it very easy to start programming immediately in Basic. Those first small programs – in 1K of RAM, no less – were eye-opening for me.

I had only programmed a Casio calculator with 32 steps before, so the fact that I was writing a program on a TV screen in real words was all by itself mind-blowing. But the implications of many of these small sample programs made my heart beat faster… I knew, just knew, that this was the future. Each of the small listings pointed to something much bigger, endless possibilities…

The future was programming, and I wanted to be there!

After a few months of doodling around with Basic – and after a much-anticipated 16K RAM expansion module was bought with my Christmas money – I started to see the limitations of the Basic interpreter. Clearly it was not the fastest way to do things on a computer. I had typed listings into the machine that came with long sections of hexcodes, and those programs were much faster than Basic alone.

So I ordered a Z80 reference book from a much bewildered old lady in our local bookstore and tackled Assembly programming. I still remember the days I spent in late spring of 1982 on my parents balcony, deep in the 500-page reference book.

One thing that I had completely forgotten until now (probably an attempt of self preservation by my brain) – I had no Assembler back then! I very clearly remember now how I sat there with the reference book on my knees, writing long lines of hex codes onto sheets of paper, creating my first Assembly programs by hand. That any of these programs ever worked at all must have been a minor miracle!

But the bug took hold in my mind… Assembly programming was – and is – somehow different. Every other programming language, from Sinclair Basic to C to Java to Perl to JavaScript always felt removed from the hardware – no doubt part of the intended function of these languages. But with Assembly you really get down to the dirty details of the computer. There are registers to write, bits to set, interrupts to catch. It all has to be done just so, or the machine will probably crash spectacularily on the first run of the code.

So while Assembly can be very frustrating, it also comes with a very special feeling of power. Nothing will ever run faster on any given computer than a well-crafted piece of Assembly code, the CPU dancing along to the very specific, exacting and – hopefully – flawless instructions of a human brain.

But now I’ve got a new phone – a Palm Centro – and I’m quite excited about the possibility of taking pictures with the Centro and to post them online in the blog while I’m on the road!

Below you can see the first post that I’ve made completely from the Palm Centro. I’m using the PostMaster plugin for WordPress to upload the posts to the blog and after some hiccups with the original wp-mail code, it is now all working great.

So be ready for more historical, whimsical and bizarre street copy from the streets of San Francisco!

It’s quite amazing – I would have not expected to be able to keep this blog going for so long (the blog is now just a month shy of 5 years old) at a pretty steady rate of at least one blog post every week, and often two or three.

Originally, the idea was to add to the growing wave of outrage around the beginning of the Iraq war. I didn’t really have much of an idea what else I would post here (and there was no shortage of outrage!), but just by its existence, Pacific Tides has forced me to come back again and again and to put my thoughts into words.

I’m glad I started the blog and kept going with it, not just as some newfangled form of self expression, but much more because of you, the readers.  And I’m very thankful for all the great reader comments and emails that I have received over the years and it’s still a thrill to check the statistics for the site and to see a steady stream of users from all over the world pouring into the site.

Welcome again, everybody! Just stick around for a little while, blog posts are bound to happen every 4.48 days!