I had a pretty cool weekend. Spent Friday night hanging out with Robey. The Valley puzzles me. Filled with tech companies that presumably have at least some people working late, but practically impossible to find even simple food at 10pm, since Mountain View / Los Altos seem to close down around 9pm. I ended up going to this little sports bar / restaurant called The Boardwalk down on El Camino. Nothing spectacular, but at least you can get a decently sized burger and fries when the rest of the neighborhood has been plunged into darkness! Are there any other good places open late around this area? Email me at rupe at metro dot yak net if you have any recommendations...

Since late-food is a staple of good free software development, I'd make this an actual article, but for the fact that I'm not an Apprentice anymore... lerdsuwa certified me as an Apprentice recently, which for some bizzare reason dropped me back to Observer level. I've read raph's explanation of the trust model, and I can't see why this would be so. Has this happened to anyone else?

Saturday, had a great dinner with Robey, Greg, and fair, who's become a sort of offbeat tour guide and guru for me recently, and has deepened my knowledge of topics as diverse as Internet history, DNS server arcana, and Bay Area history.

I'm slowly getting settled into my new place. No actual furniture yet, but no shortage of computing power. The room came with a DSL connection, which was a goddess-send, as I didn't have to bang my head against the wall with Pac Bell in order to get hooked up. I don't have much space, which is a bit annoying, but the location is fantastic, which (mostly) makes up for it I can wander down the road and look out over the Pacific Ocean, which is something I've always wanted to be able to do.

I made some additions to my MP3View software. New features include sequential play of songs (the previous version wouldn't increment to the next song and start playing it, which made using it in the car distracting), and a more generalized version of the draw_screen() function, which should be useful for adding additional control screens later on. I need to do a little more testing, so the new version should be posted around lunch tomorrow.

Tonight was the first time I'd been in a laundromat since college... and it was a direct result of a computer failure. The temperature control board in our dryer failed, so I went down to 15th and Geary with a big pile of wet laundry to get it dried. Amusing sitting on a laundry bench watching the Oscars and waiting for clothes to dry! I'm glad Gladiator got Best Picture. Some of the CG in the film was amazing (especially in the fight sequences), and the plot had enough twists and turns to keep things riveting the whole way through.

When I was hauling the (now dry) laundry back to my car, I walked past a coffeeshop that caught my eye. Not having seen very many open-late (sense a theme?) establishments of this type in SF that looked like they had any soul whatsoever, I stowed my laundry, and went back across the road to try it out. It was pretty quiet, but the coffee was good, and the people seemed nice. It's called the Royal Ground, and it's just across the road from the Alexandria theatre at 16th and Geary... I sense I'll be becoming a regular before too long.