Friday evening I wrapped up work and needed some fresh air so I hopped on a street car (#1893) and headed down to visit the sea lions at Pier 39. On my way I was browsing Twitter and saw an article from The Marine Mammal Center: Rescue Efforts for Two Sea Lions Entangled in Ocean Trash Continue. It turns out I had snapped a photo of one of these sea lions when I was there a couple weeks ago (here, little guy on the right). Poor critters, I hope they get the help they need to get untangled.
The sea lions were as awesome as always and proved the perfect after work adventure. I took a street car (#1060) home too… well, most of the way home, it got stuck on Market behind Critical Mass. Ah San Francisco.
Saturday morning we woke up ridiculously early to head out to the San Francisco Zoo for their annual “March of the Penguins” where, having graduated “Fish School,” the new baby (born in May) penguins for the year waddle their way through adoring fans (and the press!) to finally join the rest of the penguin colony. I wanted to go last year but the timing didn’t work out, I was quite excited about the opportunity to go this year!
It was the awesomest thing ever. Chalk lines were drawn around the penguin island giving the penguins about 10 feet of space to waddle through, giving all of us an amazing view of the young penguins as they walked past.
They were so cute! I love penguins!
MJ took a video:
Later in the day I also got to see the five of them swimming on the far end of the pool together.
We took the opportunity while at the zoo to visit the rest of the zoo for a couple hours, and while standing near the monkeys there was an awesome view of the giraffes and the ocean behind them.
More photos from the zoo visit are up on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627322937500/
After the zoo we did some shopping and on the way home MJ suggested we take a route that would bring us up to the top of Twin Peaks. Neither of us had been all the way up there before, the view of the city was truly stunning.
Yesterday evening was spent reorganizing our network. Several weeks back we had a pretty severe Comcast outage which greatly impacted my ability to work for over a day and we decided then that we had to get a second Internet connection. We went with Webpass, which offers a 100Mbps connection to buildings which support it, of which ours is one. The 100Mbps is shared among subscribers but has still proven to be quite fast. Unfortunately due to wiring in our condo setting us up as multihomed proved to be more difficult than originally anticipated. To get around the problem MJ did some research into both Ethernet over coax and power – and we went with using both. He installed a Netgear MoCA Coax-Ethernet Adapter Kit and a Netgear Powerline Adapter Kit. The MoCA is certainly slower than native Ethernet speeds would be, but it’s still far more bandwidth than our TV will ever use so it’s a great solution. The powerline kit under performs the MoCA, but we’re running it on the same circuit so given the available Webpass speeds it’s more than sufficient. Next we need to work on the power situation in the office so we can get all our devices put where they belong and then get MJ’s servers installed and up and running.
Today is full of project work, laundry and other tidying up. Weekends should be longer.