MJ’s friend Matti spent the week here with us. She arrived last Friday and on Saturday the three of us piled into the car and headed toward Golden Gate Park. We started with lunch at The Beach Chalet. We then heading over to The California Academy of Sciences, where I have a membership but it runs out at the end of the month and I wanted to visit the Snakes and Lizards exhibit before it closed.
The Snakes and Lizards exhibit was great, and unlike the Extreme Mammals exhibit last year featured a dozens of live animals!
We also spent a little time in the aquarium and lamented our failure to visit the planetarium while we had a membership. I love planetariums but the timing never quite worked out for us. Before leaving we spent a few minutes visiting the penguins and Claude, the white alligator.
It was then off to see the bison of San Francisco! I didn’t know there were any bison living in San Francisco (there aren’t any in the zoo) and I learned of their existence via a sad article last month: Golden Gate Park Bison Euthanized (sadly they are all getting old and they lost another just a couple weeks later and are now down to just three bison in the paddock, fortunately there are plans to bring in more, younger bison). Once I knew about them I had to visit!
The bison are awesome. We got really fortunate with our timing after the Academy of Sciences closed, we got a pretty good view of all three of the bison as it seems like they were going away for the evening (or for dinner?).
More photos of CAS and the bison available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627480483118/
On Sunday I spent the day working on projects and running errands around the neighborhood. I also swung by GameStop to pick up the 3DS Zelda game and some used Wii games. This led to me probably spending far too much time this week playing video games, but I think my brain is happy for the break. I also fixed the lingering issues with my Squeeze upgrade on my firewall/second desktop, the good news is that I can finally use my nice nvidia graphics card again (Xen and nvidia didn’t get along in Lenny). The bad news is that the on board Intel card is now unhappy with the Xen hypervisor so I can’t run xorg with the Intel card while running Xen, boo. Nagios is running fine now and my initial fears about instability of synergy turned out to be not much of a problem (it does crash from time to time, but not nearly as often or as annoyingly as I had feared, pretty sure it’s related to this bug).
I played the tourist a bit more this past week, on Tuesday evening I took a cable car down to The Buena Vista Cafe to meet up with MJ and Matti for dinner and then over to Ghirardelli Square for dessert.
Tonight I made about 4 dozen Android cookies and got everything together for the Ubuntu table for Picn*x 20 down in Sunnyvale tomorrow. I’m also on call with work this weekend, which should be interesting with the hurricane heading toward Philadelphia. Here’s hoping the storm doesn’t hit too hard.
And now, sleep so I’m all rested and ready for the picnic tomorrow!