Tag: @San Francisco_CA

The future is ALMOST now…or what’s normal in the SanFran Bay area is freaky everywhere else

You know you’re in Silicon Valley when… Didn’t happen to run into any of these in while attending my friend’s 50th wedding anniversary in the North Bay (i.e., north of SF) but as SOON as I got south of San Francisco …. BOOM… these suckers seemed to be everywhere ….  Google’s beta test versions of self-driving cars (i.e., the car drives itself) … there are testers seated in every vehicle who are there to make sure it doesn’t do anything stupid or kill anyone, but for the most part these cars are driving themselves.

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They’re easy to spot because of the radar type things on their roofs.

Welcome to the future!!!

That said, I wasn’t there but a day when I noticed one of the “hiccups” in the system of these new cars… as of today, they drive like your 80-year-old grand mother… in particular the one in the upper right hand picture was in the left turn lane and took for bloody fucking ever to make up its mind that it was in fact safe to make the left turn.

I’ve seen this happen more than a few times now, and then I heard a TV commentator talking about how drivers in the south bay are starting to get pissed off at the Waymo’s blocking traffic in left turn lanes.

The pics I took while NOT driving, were taken on a quiet suburban street in Sunnyvale, not far from Google headquarters…  outside the home of my friend where I was staying for about a week or so… Every day, almost like clockwork…  this Waymo showed up, would pull to the side of the road, stand there for a bit, then go on its way. One day I ran out (grabbed the pics) and got the girl inside to roll down the window. I asked her WHY were they doing that. She said, “I have no idea, the car does what it wants to do, I just sit here and take notes.”

A few days later I went to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California and saw this display on the topic, about the not to distant future (hopefully) where they’ve managed to test all the bugs out and fully self driven cars are ready for prime time (a future that I for one look forward to, as I’ve never been one to drive for the fun of it).

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Golden Gate Bridge & Muir Woods: San Francisco Bay area, California

Hello from SF. After Pennsic I spent the last two weeks road tripping across America on I-80, in large part so that I could attend the 50th wedding anniversary of two dear friends (and former employers) of mine, up near the north/east end of Maine county (north of San Francisco). I had booked an Airbnb up as near to the venue for the party as possible, a local restaurant called Rancho Nicasio (apparently they’re popular for weddings too) — which I have got to say put on an impressive event.. and then made plans to stay with various friends who lived down in the south bay (which is about an hour and a half drive south of the party).

The next day I intended to take advantage of that location and go to Muir woods, which was one of my favorite places back when I used to live in Marine, only to discover that just a few months ago they instituted a reserved parking rule. You now have to book your visit 90 days in advance!!!! Either that or you have to do it 5 days in advance which means you’ll only get access to the handful of spaces that they’ve held back. The night before I got on-line and found that ALL the spaces were booked up till 4:30 in the afternoon.

That said, APPARENTLY, probably because Muir woods was someplace I went to every few weeks back before iPhones were even a product (I think I was still using palm pilot back then) — I do not have any digital photos of the place:

So instead I was like, “oh, I’ll just stop by the Golden Gate and get photos there… but normal daily fog (especially in summer when the air is hot and water is cold) had rolled in a bit early and very thickly (it was just noon, usually it wouldn’t be quite this thick till 1 or 2pm)… so I didn’t bother taking the time to pull over, and this was all I managed to snap:

IMG_5024 So I am posting photos from a 2005 visit (which apparently I do have a few of — would have taken them with a digital camera) but back before the selfi was a thing:

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