Billboards and signs as far as the eye can see. And in New York, last call is at 4am, not 2am like all those other wussy cities …

It’s been less than 12 hours and we’ve already spent over $100 in taxi fares. Ugh.

JetBlue used to be my domestic airline of choice. They’ve got decent seats, each-to-their-own LCD screens, and all-you-can-eat snacks, including blue-corn chips.

But Richard Branson has got David Neeleman beat, hands down. On our first Virgin America flight, we experienced every cliché you could possibly imagine:

• Techno music to greet us upon boarding, and to see us off upon landing.
• Lots of neon blue and neon red ambient lighting to match the mood music.
• Obligatory metrosexual Asian steward and exotic Asian stewardess, and in general, flight attendants under the age of 60 whom you don’t have to feel bad for every time you see them walk by.
• High-five greeting upon exiting the plane, instead of the David Spade “buh-bye”.
• They fly out of SFO; no more trips to Oakland.

There was also some heavy-duty geek-friendly stuff going on:

• A/C power to each seat. My MBP’s legendary 4-hr battery-life prowess was not required for this 5-hr flight. When I was finished marveling at the presence of A/C power in coach class, I simply plugged in and recharged.
• The in-flight media entertainment has much to offer (movies, TV shows, music, games), and on top of all that, seems to be Linux-based to boot. I didn’t bother asking the flight staff any questions about it, but with game selections like “Penguin Command” and “Circus Linux!”, and with a distinct X-like hourglass cursor appearing every now and then, I had no doubt.

Virgin America, my new favorite domestic carrier. The bonus on top of all that, in this day and age of $4/gallon gasoline, was their relatively-bargain $389 round-trip price for SFO-JFK on the same weekend His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI was visiting New York.

Finally, the first nice weekend of spring:

Sausalito is your typical waterfront community; Bridgeway (the main drag) is lined with boutique art galleries and kitschy tourist shopping. There is a stretch where there is nothing but a walkway next to the water; it reminds me of a similar walkway near the Newport Mansions in Rhode Island.

Patrika succumbed to the tourist shopping and bought a puffy white coat for $20:

If you have nothing else to do and it’s nice and sunny outside, it’s worth a trip.

Winning a Super Bowl requires dedication, teamwork, and 110% from every player involved. We are speaking, of course, about the Newcastle Brown, 2007 champions of the Armchair Generalz Fantasy Football League, and winner of the coveted El Guapo trophy (nice job, Commissioner!):

El Guapo stats:

• Height: 5½”
• Weight: ½ lb.
• Base: marble
• Noggin: bobble

The secrets to success this year:

• Key double-up-combo big weeks of Big Ben to Hines Ward.
• A big-play go-big-or-go-home San Diego Chargers defense.
• Reliable TDs from Chris Cooley in our peculiar TE-favoring scoring system.
• T.J. Houshmanzadeh.

Busts this year:

• Frank Gore.
• Ronnie Brown and the ineffective Jesse Chatman handcuff.

But that’s not all. Winning El Guapo was only half the battle. Bringing El Guapo home required Sisyphusian effort as well. The trophy was sent to my home address (ask me for my work address next year, please), which resulted in a “We Deliver For You!” slip left at the door and a 5-day delay to wait for the weekend to get a chance to go to the post office for pickup.

I’m sure that the USPS, FedEx, DHL, UPS, Airborne Express, etc., all have similar hub systems where packages go to some processing center before final delivery to its final destination. There ought to be a way for recipients to somehow register with these delivery services so that:

• I register with USPS or FedEx or UPS or whomever.
• If someone sends me a package, the delivery service sends me an e-mail telling me something is coming my way.
• I go to their website or something and provide instructions on what to do: continue delivery, deliver to alternate address (e.g., my office, where I am every day), or hold because I’m on vacation for three weeks and won’t be around.
• Everybody wins: the recipient doesn’t have to make a pickup run, the delivery service doesn’t have to make a wasted delivery run, and the planet wins because of less wasted gas and traffic.

Hyde St. Pier is actually part of San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. The highlights for me:

• Enough for locals to see, if you like looking at beaches and boats and national historical park kinds of stuff.
• Enough for tourists to see (it’s very close to Ghirardelli Square).
• Not as crowded as Fisherman’s Wharf.

In unrelated news, I’m migrating my photos over to use Gallery. I’m not very happy about it, but I think it’s inevitable. The main reason for going to Gallery is that I want to get some kind of commenting system in place for the photos. But everything else that made me like QuickyPix still makes me sad:

• Gallery: 1810 files, 307599 lines of PHP and “smarty” template code. QuickyPix: 10 files, 2500 lines of Python.
• Database backend is required for Gallery, but that’s not a big deal since I’m running WordPress anyway.
• Gallery themeing looks like it will be a huge pain. I’m already thinking I’m giving up on getting the photos to look integrated with the rest of the website.

On the other hand, I gain:

• Comments.
• Lots of other nice little features that I don’t necessarily care about that much, but are neat: random rotating photo, and a few WordPress-related plugins that I might check out someday (I’m pessimistic about my prospects here).
• Addressability of single photos: individual photos can be linked to; my QuickyPix setup only allowed addressability of whole albums.

We got to work out of some law offices downtown for about a week because our normal office headquarters was subjected to lots of construction noise. I’ve always thought that the offices of my various tech companies were kind of nice, but the Orrick building blows them all away. I have no idea if this building would be considered “nice” or run-of-the-mill for a law firm.

The neighborhood around the Orrick building is all glass buildings:

That last photo was taken by a coworker from inside the lobby looking up, during a fire-alarm building evacuation. A security guard told us we couldn’t take pictures without building management permission and made us put the camera away, before we could take more pictures.

This earned me a picture on the Muni this morning:

Happy Halloween!