This past Saturday was beautiful and the rest of this week hasn’t disappointed either. After services in the morning we ended up at The Elite Cafe on Fillmore for a great brunch. From there we headed to Golden Gate Park to visit the Conservatory of Flowers which we’d recently gotten a membership to.
I have to admit that it was the Plantosaurus Rex exhibit that tipped the balance in my decision for membership.
Step back in time … WAY back in time as the Conservatory of Flowers transports you to a real life land of the lost in its newest exhibition Plantosaurus Rex. It’s a prehistoric paradise of plants from the time of the dinosaurs when giant ferns, spiky horsetails, and primitive cycads grew in lush abundance and fed many of the monstrous reptiles that roamed the earth millions of years ago. Under a canopy of primordial conifers, visitors encounter model dinosaurs like the armored Stegosaurus foraging for the vegetation they loved best while learning about the symbiotic relationship between ancient flora and fauna. But beware — the predators have come to Golden Gate Park too! A giant T. rex has smashed through the roof of the Conservatory to look for potential snacks!
The exhibit was small and I wish some of the plants had been marked better, but quite fun overall and nothing beats the dinosaurs they included in the exhibit:
The rest of him is inside the exhibit, along with an Allosaurus.
They had a pond with real turtles swimming and enjoying the rocks, and of course a lot of plants and some beautiful flowers.
After the dinosaur portion, we took some time to peruse the rest of the Conservatory. It’s truly a beautiful place, and I suspect we’ll be dropping by more throughout the year as time allows.
More photos from our visit here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157630028301243/
Sunday I headed out to BerkeleyLUG for a couple hours to enjoy some pizza and Linux company. I was really happy to get some time with Grant Bowman to review some of what we had installed for the Partimus website hosting account (which is provided free for our little non-profit from Dreamhost) and brainstorm how to move forward documentation-wise using both our existing docs that we’ve shared and an internal wiki. Sunday evening MJ and I finally got to see The Avengers Our schedule hadn’t really worked out to see it previously. Amusingly, after months of not seeing a movie, we’re also going out to the movies this upcoming Saturday to see Prometheus at Sundance Kabuki, my first time actually going to a movie in their cool auditorium with the balcony!
I’ve had quite the busy week. Monday morning my dentist’s office called to let me know they had a cancellation and were able to move my rescheduled appointment that conflicted with an upcoming weekend event to that morning. Tuesday I started work early and then it was off to my annual physical in the late afternoon, where I also got a tetanus shot (recommended since it had been 15 years since my last), my arm is still hurting from it. Wednesday evening I hosted the San Francisco Ubuntu Hour and then a Debian Dinner. It was great to see some new faces and have great conversations at both events, including some talk about how SSL for web is broken and some of the cool ARM boards and devices that have been popping up lately and what everyone is using them for (or planning on). After the meetings I ended up having more computer fun by finally applying the latest update for my CR-48 and was delighted to see that the new Chrome OS UI has made it down to the stable channel for it. It’s much more desktop-like, has a new interface for Netflix and crosh is now a separate tab in the browser rather than a separate window in the interface (which always seemed a bit hackish), I’m already liking it.
Tomorrow and Saturday I’ll be attending the ACM A.M. Turing Centenary Celebration here in downtown San Francisco. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while, even if I fully expect to have to take a lot of notes to do some research afterwards to get the most out of some of the talks. While on the topic of learning, I decided last night to sign up for the Stanford online Cryptography class, already the number of videos for the first week is a bit overwhelming (particularly with his introductory caution “I will go fast, pause and review content often”), so we’ll see if I end up having the time for it that will be required for a certificate of completion. This evening I need to run to the gym and I then think I’ll have to spend the rest of the evening catching up on email ad sifting through my todo list for tasks to complete before the conference takes over my life for two days.