oddgirl’s blog

After my plans got cancelled late in the afternoon yesterday, I IMed another pal to see if she and her boy wanted to get together for a quick dinner. Back and forth until we decided to meet up in the Ferry Building at the Hog Island Oyster Co.

If you haven’t headed down to the Ferry Building to hang out, you should. They did a great job renovating it and there are lots of great specialty foodie shops and restaurants and it just feels San Francisco-y. Hog Island was closed for a private party so we went next door to The Slanted Door for Spring Rolls and Sazeracs. Yum.

But for dinner we headed down to The Tadich Grill. Somehow I’ve managed to live and eat out in San Francisco for almost 15 years and I’d never been to the oldest restaurant in SF.

So on a Wednesday night where we planned on a quick dinner, we ended up eating Cioppino (that actually rivaled my rendition of this classic SF dish) and Crab Cakes and putting away a wonderful bottle of Silver Oak Cab while thinking about the deals made and the crimes planned in the private booths in this classic SF spot since it opened in 1849. After they seated us, the Twins walked by and stopped to talk to a man at the next table who turned out to be the owner of John’s Grill. Classic.

great food, great wine, great friends and SF history. doesn’t get better than that.

I usually wait a generation or two for a new gadget to get the kinks worked out, but I was in line at BestBuy by 6:45 am on Thursday to get myself a brand spankin’ new PSP. And yes, it was me and about 200 22-year-old asian boys. After getting into the office it was apparent that I was among my people since there were 6 or 7 PSP’s floating around the office within the next 24 hours.

So far I’m enjoying it, mostly playing Lumines, Wipeout Pure and Tiger Woods. It came with a copy of Superman 2 and movies look absolutely amazing on it. My biggest complaint is the same complaint I always have about Sony stuff – proprietary media formats. And the thing I like best is that it feels like playing a video game. I like my GBA for certain games, but it feels more like a toy and less like a platform. This is a viable platform for game development in a portable game system.

And most of all, it’s nice to be able to play games and still have basketball on. cool…

I’ve known that I was moving to Spore (it has a name now) for at least 6 months before I could even talk about it. I started spending one or two days a week there around the beginning of January. And tomorrow will close out my first full week on the new job. And so far it looks like it is going to be as great of a project as I was imagining it would be. I hope it’ll also be a great game. It’s a big project. It’s complicated.

The feedback from the GDC has been pretty positive and being there was really incredible – Will did a great job of communicating the game and the audience appreciated that they’d seen something new and different.

It’s going to be an exciting couple years for me.

I’m back in SF. Cheese has been retrieved from PetCamp and I actually forced myself to unpack right after getting home instead of fishing socks out of my suitcase for a couple weeks.

I’ve put up pictures of my trip. In the olden days, you’d have to sit through my slide show, but this here’s modern times, so you can either check out my online photo gallery or not. Look at just the pics you’re in, all of ‘em or none of ‘em. And hey if it was the old days, and I made you sit through my slide show I’d probably buy ya a beer or twelve.

Notable things:

• Timberlakes is the bar I worked at when I lived in DC and many of my old friends and co-workers were still there.
• Julia was a college sweetheart when I was at Maryland. Got to have dinner with her and her husband and met her kids.
• As an offhand joke, Eric and I told the front desk clerk at the Hilton that we were on our honeymoon and consequently Eric got a room upgrade. We didn’t really get married, and the trendy hotel in SoHo where I was staying woulda never fallen for it…
• Most of the pictures I took at the MoMA were experiments – I want to try and print them out and get some frames and improve the starkness of my apartment.

Saw two plays – Dame Edna and Avenue Q. Both very fun. Go see Avenue Q if you’re in NY.

As always, after the first couple days I really, really wanted to live in NY and by the last day, I couldn’t imagine ever living there. I loved visiting, but I loved coming home.