Hello Golden Gate
sanfrancisco
Golden Gate
Cable Cars
Echoes
Alcatraz
Musée Mécanique
BART sounds
Last week when I was in San Francisco I took a BART train from the airport into the city. I took a sound recording at some point to catch a distinct hum the train has as it gets going. Here's what I heard:
Leaving San Francisco
I'm sitting in an Internet cafe in Skagway, Alaska. The geography is amazing here. I heard someone paraphrasing an early explorer who said, "California has spectacular Yosemite, but Alaska is filled with Yosemites." It's true. The scale of the landscape is like being in Yosemite...everywhere.
On the ocean
My favorite part of the trip has been spending hours just watching the ocean. It's an extreme difference being out on the ocean compared with land; it's a completely flat landscape apparently without life. (Except the occasional bird, whale, or pod of dolphins...they're few and far between.) It's been a rough ride at times, and we've heard the crew mention this is the roughest ride they've had in years. It made sleeping difficult a few nights, and even though I'm on land now I can feel myself rocking. The rocking motion of the waves gets under your skin.
Approaching Juneau
We're about halfway through the trip. We saw land for the first time in two days yesterday at Juneau where we took a trip to the Mendenhall glacier. We're headed for the glaciers of the Tracy Arm tomorrow.
A canoe in front of the Mendenhall Glacier
The Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau
Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class was interviewed in Salon about cities that attract creative people: "[San Francisco] became very early on a kind of capitalism that recognizes that you don't have to have all this bullshit organizational, bureaucratic nonsense to be successful. San Francisco was a place where weird people could find a place...The best thing that happened to San Francisco was the damned NASDAQ collapse and the high-tech recession. That was San Francisco's saving grace." [via MeFi]
