It has just been one of those weeks. Somehow, all the best events in a month seem to just fall together in the same week, and this has certainly been one of those for me.
Tuesday was another fun-filled trip down to Equinix Great Oaks to swap out some machines for work and beef up our firewall setup a little.
As always, Equinix is a great place to visit. It’s a really well-built colocation facility, and I think the best looking one that I’ve been to. It’s the lighting that really does it for me. They have these purple floodlights on the colo floor that have this strange hue to them. It’s almost a blue, but not really; it’s an effect one just has to see for themselves. The whole place makes me think of what a datacenter for Network 23 must have looked like.
On Wednesday, I had the extreme pleasure of running into Leah and Daniel at Macworld for the Diggnation taping there. A surprising number of people showed up; there must have been at least a couple hundred in attendance. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a good chunk of them came just to watch the show. We managed to sneak in a good ale from Wisconsin, and some assorted other libations. And I for one certainly enjoyed the mischievous feeling of doing so.
After the show, I got to talking with Jay Adelson, who founded Equinix, and so I had to ask him about the interior of Equinix Great Oaks. He was telling me that when they were designing the cooling systems, they realized that it would be infeasible to have private rooms in a multi-tenant setup and still meet the cooling requirements they’d need; necessitating the use of cages. So, since there could be a potential security issue of having other tenants looking into and at cabling and labeling of other’s space, he used some film school training that he had prior to starting Equinix to craft a cool diversion. The purple lamps are used to draw visual attention away from the inside of other people’s cages, and when I thought about it, it really made quite a bit of functional sense. I certainly couldn’t recall looking into other cages in passing. Pretty smart.
Later that evening, while visiting with David at the Flatmate Meetup, I noticed through dodgeball that Halsted was out and about downtown, so I pinged her and we met up at an interesting cafe/bar place called Cafe Royale. I met a couple of her coworkers and we chatted for a little bit over a drink and then we left to walk down to Muni. But as we were coming down Powell at Geary I heard, “Jonathan?”. And right behind us was Megan on her way to the party at Adaptive Path / Rubyred Labs in South Park. So at this point, I parted with Halsted and went with Megan to go pickup Nick Douglas and Leah and head down to South Park. By the time we got there, the party was pretty much already winding down. We met up with Buzz, grabbed a bunch of leftover burritos from the party from Pancho Villa (there were probably hundreds) and drove out to Alembic in the Haight. We were hoping to hand out some burritos to hungry folks in the Haight, but pretty much everyone had gone somewhere by then, so we just left them out, and they were taken by the time we left.
Alembic is a really chill spot. With warm lighting and an eclectic mix of decor, they mix up some very original and tasty cocktails. I had a nice long chat with Megan and Sanford, and afterwards Megan was really nice and drove me all the way back home on her way back down the peninsula.
Thursday was quite an interesting mix of experiences. For “lunch”, most everyone from the office went down to University Chicken in Santa Clara where a couple of us were competing in the 911 Challenge. Basically, the idea is to eat 12 insanely hot chicken wings in 10 minutes. I thought it sounded pretty easy, so I figured I’d have a go at it. Well, these were really, really much more hot than I had envisioned. They came absolutely smothered in a hot sauce that could best be described as tomato paste and mace. Amazingly I was the only one that finished, and all i got was a lousy t-shirt 
Well, I suppose there’ll be an embarrassing Youtube video soon, but that’s beside the point. The aftermath however, was not so friendly. I was toting a bottle of Pepto with me for the rest of the night.
I wasn’t feeling very well after the whole ordeal, so I skipped out on the January SFlickr meet and felt pretty bummed about doing so. It’s really the one time I get to see the local Flickrazzi and see how they’re doing, as well as meet up with pretty much my most favored person ever.
Feeling a bit better later, I stopped into the Your Mac Life party at the Great American Music Hall in hopes of running into some folks. By the time I had got there, I though everyone must have already left, or that it was a mostly out-of-towner kind of affair. After deciding to leave. I took a cab down to 111 Minna to catch the tail-end of the EFF birthday. And the moment I opened the cab door, there was Christian and Leah who were just leaving to go to the Your Mac Life party. So we all split the same cab back up to the Tenderloin. We grabbed a couple drinks and chatted for a while amongst ourselves and some Macworld Expo folks before heading home.
On Friday I rang my friend and ex-flatmate Tristan who was going back to school in a couple days to see if he wanted to grab some dinner. I didn’t really have anything in mind, so I ended up taking the ferry up to Marin and dining at his house. It was lovely to catch up and just do something outside of SF for once. On the ferry ride back to the city, I had the whole boat to myself. The city looks really great at night from the bay, and it’s a vantage point on SF that I don’t get to see too often. Definitely a lovely solitary moment.
Somewhere along my way back, I got a dodgeball from Christian to invite folks over to see Idiocracy. How could I say no?
We ended up talking for quite a long time after the movie finished. We were quite surprised to realize that we had been talking until almost 4:30am. Pretty much my usual MO really, but I realized that really late/early hours are a time that I don’t really spend around other people. Twas really nice.
On the cab ride home though, I got a total speed demon driver. He wasn’t unsafe about it anything, but seriously, what’s with cab drivers and talking on the phone with Bluetooth headsets? It’s a little unnerving sometimes.
I’m so happy for this week. It was a really fun series of accidentally running into people and fun events. I’m just trying to figure out how to top it next week.