We’ve been lucky the past couple weeks to have some of our friends from the East Coast in the area on separate occasions — living on the other side of the country, we don’t get many opportunities to see my friends from back home, so it’s always nice when they come to visit San Francisco.
A couple weeks ago, April and Ed came to visit. April and I were close friends in middle school, and although we lost touch after we moved on to go to separate high schools and universities, she got back in touch with me right before I moved to California and she and Ed were able to make it to our wedding two years ago! April and Ed live in gorgeous Georgetown back in DC, but April just got accepted at UC Berkeley so she has decided to get her PhD there starting in the fall. They were visiting the area to see the school, so we caught up with them over dinner in Berkeley. They will both be moving to the Bay Area in August, and I’m so excited that I’ll have one of my dearest childhood friends nearby again!
Having dinner with April and Ed at La Med in Berkeley.
This past weekend, we got to spend a whole day on Saturday with our friends Kathleen and Carlos. I went to both middle school and high school with Kathleen, and they were in the city this weekend for a conference that Carlos was attending.We spent the day at the farmer’s market by the Ferry Building and at Pier 39 before meeting up with Greg, another one of our good high school friends who lives in the city, over dinner. Here are some pictures!
Dan and I with Kathleen and Carlos at the Ferry Building in San Francisco
Enjoying some mouthwatering rotisserie chicken from the Roli Roti truck!
Dan with a Scharffen Berger mini-cake from the Miette bakery. So round and cute!
Walked over to Fisherman's Wharf... it was a windy day at Pier 39.
Kathleen and Carlos -- cute couple!
Kathleen and I at Pier 39.
The boys.
With a lobster at Fisherman's Wharf...
Greg took us to dinner at Nirvana, a delicious Burmese restaurant in the Castro.
It’s always nice to see some familiar faces from back home — it makes me feel a little less homesick. I love that even though it’s been well over a decade since middle school and high school, we can still pick up right where we left off. 🙂
Whether it be here in the Bay Area or the next time we’re back in DC, I can’t wait to see more of the friends I left back East. I miss everyone so much!
On Saturday, I attended my very first WordCamp! My coworker Estella has been before and strongly recommended it, so our boss graciously paid for our registration costs and so that we could go and learn more about all things WordPress. WordPress is currently the most popular blog software in use, but it is more than just blogging software — it is an open source content management system powered by PHP and MySQL. It’s very powerful, highly customizable, and has a rich plugin architecture that allow for users and developers alike to extend its functionality far beyond the features native to the base install. I am relatively new to WordPress, only having worked with it for two and a half years, but I’ve increasingly become a fan and the more I learn about it, the more impressed I am and the more I love it. We run a lot of our clients’ blogs on WordPress at our company, and I’ve begun to use a lot WordPress as the CMS for many of my own freelance clients as well because it makes it so easy for them to update and add content on their own. I’m hoping to revamp my portfolio site within the coming year, and I am already set on running it with WordPress. WordPress sites are everywhere — in fact, 8.5% of websites on the Internet today are powered by WordPress (including a handful of notable government sites!). This blog that you are reading right now is run on WordPress!
Anyway, I can go on and on for hours singing the praises of WordPress, but I will save you the geeky lovefest and focus on the conference:
WordCamp San Francisco 2010 was held at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF. WordCamps are held all over the country and the world and there are more and more every year as they are informal and community-organized — they can be put together anywhere, as long as there are enough WordPress enthusiasts to make it happen. But the San Francisco WordCamp is the flagship, since it is organized every year under the direction of WordPress co-founder and lead developer Matt Mullenweg. Hundreds of WordPress users, developers, designers and enthusiasts descended upon San Francisco yesterday to hear from a great lineup of speakers at sessions that run throughout the day. Each of the sessions I chose to sit through were very interesting and informative, but the highlight was definitely the “The State of the Word†keynote delivered by Matt Mullenweg, in which he highlighted some amazing new features that are going to be made available with WordPress 3.0, to be released soon. Some notable changes are that WordPress will merge with WordPress MU, custom menu functionalities, the ability to create custom content types, and the new default theme (the first in 5 years!), pithily named Twenty Ten.
(CC) Eva Blue
(CC) Eva Blue
Matt is an amazing speaker, and it was truly an honor to get to hear him speak. All the sessions were great, but it would have been worth paying for and going to WordCamp just to hear Matt’s keynote. It blows my mind (and kind of depresses me at the same time) that this brilliant genius is a year younger than me and is behind such a force behind this open source empire, and that his efforts have done so much for the web world. If you ever have an opportunity to hear Matt speak, he is so smart, natural, witty, personable and just seems like an all-around nice guy (not to mention he’s pretty cute!). The guy is incredibly solid and such an inspiration to all developers.
Here’s an interview with Matt on Tekzilla from last June in which he discusses some of the history and vision of WordPress. (Please note that there have been a few updates to WordPress since.)
Here’s a video from yesterday, in which he discusses the platform’s future.
A huge thanks to Estella for recommending that we attend WordCamp, and to her and Brent for driving me over to the conference! I had a great time and definitely look forward to attending future WordCamps.
The Northern California Cherry Blossom Festival was held the past two weekends in San Francisco’s Japantown. Dan and I took my sister on Sunday, the day of the Grand Parade, since Miwa had never been to the festival before.
I love going to the Cherry Blossom Festival, and haven’t missed it once since moving out here. This was my third year attending San Francisco’s festival, and although a lot of things are the same, it’s always great to see the celebration of Japanese and Japanese American culture and heritage.
The highlight for me, as usual, was the taiko. If only I had better rhythm, I would totally want to take on taiko lessons. It’s a great workout for your arms and I just love the sound and energy of taiko drums…. Can’t wait to see Taiko Dojo again next year!
I am so behind on updating our blog. The beginning of the year is somehow always so busy. I promised myself that I would make some solid New Years resolutions but I haven’t even gotten a chance to sit down and do that yet. Is it too late? It’s still January… maybe as long as I can get them figured out by the end of this month, I will be okay.
So another fun thing we did earlier this month was attending the Mochitsuki event at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Once essential to the Japanese New Year celebration, the practice of mochitsuki (mochi pounding) is now rare even in Japan, as people tend to eat store-bought mochi rather than make their own in today’s hustle and bustle society. San Francisco-based Kagami-kai is a group dedicated to maintaining the Japanese tradition of mochitsuki, and this was their sixth year performing and churning out mochi for the masses at the Asian Art Museum.
My friend Akiho was visiting from Virginia Tech because she was interviewing for an internship position at UC Berkeley, so she, Dan, and I went together with some of our friends from the San Francisco Bay Area Japanese Language and Culture meetup group. It was quite an experience — the Kagamikai’s mochitsuki performance was very impressive, and the taiko drumming accompanying it was equally breathtaking. We even got to have a bite of mochi at the end. Growing up with Japanese traditions, it really doesn’t feel like the New Year has come until you have some mochi. 🙂
Below are some photos and video footage of the mochitsuki action:
For more information on this yearly event, please hop over here.