San Francisco Gay Pride

San Francisco is a very gay city year round, but in June with the Gay Pride march, it becomes ... um ... well, GAY. The rainbow flag replaces the American one throughout the city (or sometimes the American one m orphs mysteriously into a rainbow-hued variation), and thousands of people flock in from all over to party. There is a woman's march on Saturday lead by the awesome Dykes on Bikes, and the bigger main parade on Sunday.

Marriage was a big theme this year - not that I saw much of the parade itself, because I marched with the Google group (which had huge balloons, swarms of crazy bikes, and included the lead engineer as a friendly gesture from management). I was a contingent monitor, and also helped out with some of the monitoring during the celebration afterwards - essentially pushing people out of the way so that ambulance carts could get through to people who needed help.

Gay Colours

Its that time of year again - San Francisco is awash with the rainbow flag as first the Frameline Film Festival and then the Gay Pride Parade party their way through the town. And Google has gotten in on the act - if you search on certain terms, like 'Gay Pride', the resulting page is not quite the normal one. Try it out. Its something which only happens on a few terms, and is in place for about two months.

Asymmetric Flights

Getting out of the USA was quick and pleasant; I was at the airport an hour ahead of my flight and it wasn't a problem. One look at the grimly pulled mouth of the Alaskan Air representative assured me that me leaving only an hour to get back into the US was not funny at all. And she was right. As in Shannon airport in Ireland, the US has staked out is immigration and customs office in a foreign international airport, all the better to refuse you entry with, and that meant queues: queue to check in (small, I was late) and then another queue to let good ol' Uncle Sam take my good ol' fingerprints and then onto the next queue for immigration and then finally (just when I thought I was in the home run, and was about to start running because my plane was about to take off) the mother of all queues through the off-with-your-shoes-belt-and-laptop-in-a-separate-basket bit.

I made it back. Yeah. Always so much excitement and will-they-wont-they fun. And the silver lining was that I (on the waitlist) got put into the side of the plane that I didn't want to be on, but it turned out to be just the right one: the plane passed over the series of giant volcanoes which I'd previously blogged about from the ground level, stretching from southern Washington State all the way into Northern California. Then it flew right over the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco downtown before making a U-Turn to land over the crazy coloured salt fields in the south side of the Bay. It was a beautiful flight.

The sunset photo below was taken on the outward bound trip, the others from the return one:




So for the joy of asymmetry, here is my list of the most striking differences between the USA and Canada:

• Canadians are even more polite than Americans. They stop for you if you're jay-walking across a road.
  
• the public transport in Canada is both usable and used, although cars are only marginally smaller than America's hulking monsters
• coins for dollars, and attractive money
  

And here's what's the same:

• checkerboard street grids with exciting names like "5th Avenue" "Broadway" and "64th Street"
• Fast Food Nations
• quarters, nickles and dimes
  

GoogleShare

Google had a volunteer day today which took me up to the top of the San Bruno Mountain State Park battling invading aliens with about 40 other Googlers. The photograph is my fellow intern, Altaf, from Bangladesh. The invading aliens were hemlock and monstrous tendrils of ivy; i'll never see this plant in the same way after the experience of ripping out 8 meter strands of it from the side of the mountain.

City Fjord

Today I discovered that one of the beauties of Vancouver is that with a short bus ride and about half an hour in a kayak, you're out in a gorgeous Fjord, the Indian Arm, with steep forested sides with snowy peaks behind them, and the illusion that you're in the heart of nature. Its gorgeous.

I had to do an eskimo roll in the sea kayak to prove that I could take it out by myself - the first time I failed, but they let me try again, and it worked fine. All those pool sessions in Columbia were worth while.

I kayaked for 5 hours and can feel it in my arms. I can hardly type, so I'm keeping this post curt.

Vancouver

I've been in Vancouver since Tuesday night at the SigMOD Conference on databases. When I told friends that, they said "wow, database conference, that sounds like fun" (that needs some heavy sarcasm punctuation of some sort). Actually, it wasn't half bad - stimulating and perplexing for me at the same time, some of the presentations I only half understood. But there was some good stuff. It was my first academic conference.
















The city is beautiful - verdant green, with snow-capped mountains off on the horizon over the water. At the same time, its eerily quiet, to the point that I find it disturbing. Its not a small city but it sounds like a quiet village. About the only sound is the buzz of the seaplanes taking off constantly. Large parts of the city are encrusted with tall condos of green glass which adds to the feeling both of its greeness and its sterility. I guess after New York, any city is going to seem sterile. You can't get less sterile than New York.

Renoogling

Back in San Francisco, at the house I was living in last summer (yeah! Stefanie! Laurie! Nicki!). And back at Google (which makes me a born-again Noogler) where I am working on the adwords backend. That's the system which supplies the Google web page with appropriate adverts - and helping out on it is a lot more interesting than it probably sounds. I never thought I'd say that about advertising.