Aw, I just found out about this on Twitter and it’s kind of romantic! A guy (@WalterCMay) made a video for his girlfriend and instead of just, you know, sending her a link and showing it, he’s waiting to see if it will reach her just through tweets and blog posts alone. Here’s the video:

After my girlfriend moved away for graduate school, I wanted to create something different to express my feelings for her. I secretly created a song and video with my friends the Daylights in hopes that it would be passed around and get to her organically. WITH YOUR HELP, we can meet this goal and it can stand as a symbol of what we can do as an digital social community. This is dedicated to anyone who is separated from people they love.

So spread the word on Twitter!

I’m so in love with this dress from Louche, but I just know I’d never wear it:

The practical me completely realizes how tricky this dress is (how do you wear a coat over it? how far can you raise your arm in it?), but it’s so pretty! It’s available at the Joy store for £45.

Me want COOKIE!

So what can you do to help get Cookie Monster on SNL? Go to the Cookie Monster Should Host Saturday Night Live Facebook page and find out!

This is cool:

The Ancient Greek geek in me really wants this! It’s on Etsy for $300… bit too steep for my tastes, but still pwetty!

You all should know by now how much I loved Duncan Jones’ Moon (if you still haven’t seen it, why the hell not?), so it should come as no surprise that I’d be interested in his next movie. Well, we now finally get a trailer:

Right. So army guy wakes up in a secret base and is forced to relive the same event over again to try and stop a future terrorist attack. Any theories so far?

You remind me of the babe (What babe?)
The babe with the power (What power?)
The power of voodoo (who do?)
You do (do what?) remind me of the babe…

Do I really need to explain this tee after those lyrics? Me really wantz this one:

The T-shirt is available on ThinkGeek for $18.99.

I’ve been looking for a new pair of boots for some time now, and I finally found a pair I liked in San Francisco. I’ve been wearing knee high boots as my main shoe wear for a solid 8 years now, and decided that I should change it up a bit. I’m so happy with these new boots I found:

I didn’t realise these shoes were so high, when I bought them; they make me taller than my sister! They are a whole lot higher than what I’m used to, but I think I manage to look semi-stable on them. They were $90, but I got them with a 30% discount. Yay me!

I’ve been now almost a week home and still hadn’t blogged properly about San Francisco! This might be a bit boring to some, but I thought I at least needed to write this all up somewhere, just for posterity’s sake.

The first two days in San Francisco I went to the PayPal X Developer conference, the reason why we got flown out in the first place. We decided to enter the hackday they were running during it with something completely new (unlike some of the other teams that just entered some product they already had with an added PayPal feature to it). The idea was to make an Affiliation app where PayPal sellers who already used the PayPal “Buy It Now” button could easily turn it into an affiliation button and we’d do all the affiliate tracking and money splitting magic for you.

Again another evening and morning of hard work (although most kudos go to Cristiano and Caius who were doing all the difficult stuff, and Dom for coming up with the idea, I just helped out where I could) and we finished a rough version of the product. We already knew there wouldn’t be a lot of entries and we were right: only 15 entries, 4 of which would win $1000… During the final keynote we found out: we WON! Yay! $1000 shopping money (well, split 4 ways so $500 shopping money for me!).

The third and fourth days we visited a couple of the big tech companies in the area: Apple, Yahoo, PayPal, eBay, Google and Mozilla. I ended up getting tshirts at Apple, Google and Mozilla, although I was pretty annoyed that Yahoo’s “code like a girl” tee was only available from size XL or higher! It was pretty fun having a look at the different campuses these companies had and comparing them. And it was great catching up with people who I hadn’t seen for ages.

The final three days we spent sightseeing and shopping. Of course with our luck, on Saturday when we did most of our sightseeing it was rainy and wet. We started that day with a ride in the cable car; Cristiano, Dom and Caius got to hang outside on the car, while I got a great spot standing behind the driver. It’s pretty cool to see how they have to operate those vehicles. Plus I had the perfect spot to snap photos!

We got out at Lombard street, the “crookedest street in the world” (it’s pretty twisty, but is that really THE crookedest street?). After taking the obligatory tourist snaps, we walked towards the bay to see Fisherman’s Wharf and Pier 39. I can see that it could be interesting on a nice, warm summer day, but it all seemed pretty dreary and miserable that day. After that, Cristiano and I took the bus to the Palace of Fine Arts. It wasn’t as impressive as it I thought it would be, although we couldn’t walk actually in it, cause of renovation works. We then started a stroll along the beach to see the Golden Gate bridge, but actually ended up walking completely to the bridge. Pretty glad that we did, cause the view there was awesome!

On Sunday and Monday I mainly did shopping (shoes, books, clothes and makeup!), but we did take some time out to do one of those guided the tours. We chose Ride The Ducks, an amphibian bus that gave a tour part on land and part on water. I wasn’t too sure about it when we started, but the tour was hilarious! Our “Captain” was awesome, giving cool facts about the sights we saw, but also mixing it up with hilarious and silly jokes. I was a bit disappointed that we didn’t get to go in the water near the Golden Gate, but it was still awesome to do.

I’m kind of annoyed with the amount of photos I took during the entire trip: only 240 for the whole 7 days! And most of them aren’t even that good (I ended up uploading about 70 of them). I’m really regretting not having taken more photos. Also: I always hate it when people take photos of their food, but I kind of wish I did in some cases. I ate sooo much during this week, and there were some great restaurants we went to (I think that deserves it’s own blog post though).

My trip to San Francisco was awesome, and I’m still so chuffed that we got to go! Thanks again to PayPal!

I tried to do a bit of book shopping in San Francisco, but the books weren’t as cheap as I expected them to be (the UK Amazon is most of the time cheaper). I did come across a couple of books though of which I wonder whether I would have found them here in the stores.

I had to groan when I saw the title of this book, but it actually looks pretty interesting:

The NorseCODE genome project was designed to identify descendants of Odin. What it found was Kathy Castillo, a murdered MBA student brought back from the dead to serve as a valkyrie in the Norse god’s army. Given a sword and a new name, Mist’s job is to recruit soldiers for the war between the gods at the end of the world—and to kill those who refuse to fight.

Journeying across a chaotic American landscape already degenerating into violence and madness, Mist hopes to find her way to Helheim, the land of the dead, to rescue her murdered sister from death’s clutches. To do so, she’ll need the help of Hermod, a Norse god bumming around Los Angeles with troubles of his own. Together they find themselves drafted into a higher cause, trying to do what fate long ago deemed could not be done: save the world of man. For even if myths aren’t made to be broken, it can’t hurt to go down fighting…can it?

Near future, Norse gods, sounds good to me!

Norse Code by Greg Van Eekhout is available on Amazon.co.uk for £5.06.

So… yeah, my cunning plan of blogging more while in San Francisco didn’t really pan out. I’d like to blame it on the stupid sucky wifi (which really was stupid and sucky), but it was really me just being too lazy and attempting to enjoy San Francisco. I haven’t replied to most of my emails or done any work since the Monday I left; it’s actually felt like a proper vacation!

San Francisco though was an interesting experience. Somehow with how some people described the US, I always imagined I’d have the same reaction to it as I had with London: that after a couple of days I could imagine moving and living there (I had the same with Paris and Rome actually, but the language thing has always stopped me from actually really wanting to do that move). But that didn’t happen. While it’s great to visit, both San Francisco and Silicon Valley don’t feel like something for me. During the trip I really realized how much I love living here in London.

So: happy I finally went on holiday for the first time in 4 years! But also happy to be back home!