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Just by chance I got an opportunity to head out to San Francisco for a few days in mid August.  I wish I had been blogging about he whole experience while I was there but a little recollection never hurt anyone.

I was asked by my friend Marianne whether I wanted to come out for WordCamp 2008 and while I have been chomping at the bits to head back out there ever since I was there in February it seemed a far cry from possible due to some of the costs I accumulated from my car accident and some other bills.  I was out there for the first time earlier this year to help with the planning and setup of the BIL conference and had an absolute blast.

I told Marianne that I wasn’t going to be able to go at first until she mentioned that there might be a little work out there for me if I come.  I’m glad I listened and did what I did what I was telling myself was probably a very fun, but very bad idea.  To make it all even better, I was joined by my very amazing friends from Austin, Cesar, Kristine, and Dane.

It was a fairly hectically planned weekend trip that took a turn for what most would consider an unbelievable turn for the awesome.

We all flew out of Austin on Friday the 15th and Kristine and I were booked on flights back on Wednesday, while Cesar was booked for Thursday.  Kristine had bought her ticket first and was returning on Monday until she found out I was staying through Wednesday.  Poor Dane had to be back to work on Monday so his flight was scheduled for Sunday afternoon.  I can’t forget Bill Erickson either, because he decided to make a detour to SF when he found out that a group of us were going, and he is one the other members of the Creative Space

WordCamp was on Sunday and we all set up and did a little volunteering for the event under the rule of Marianne who has an awesome job with Automattic out there in San Francisco.  We all took in a lot of information aout the ins and outs of WordPress and how to use it in a more efficient way.  Lots of talks over different topics such as micro formats, SEO mistakes, and occasionally we would make our way into the developer room where talks were given on more technical subjects.  All in all it was a great conference and I have to give it to Matt Mullenweg and the rest of the Automattic crew for putting on such a great event.
The Texas crew however found that we were exhausted from the previous night and we needed to make a quick run to a coffee shop to re energize.  Things started getting interesting when we walked outside and Dane found a large metallic WordCamp SF 2008 sign sitting out in the driveway of the building.  We couldnt resist taking the sign with us on our quest to find a coffee shop, which just happened to be on Texas street about 6 blocks from where we were at the time.  Along the way we found random and funny situation to take pictures with the Wordcamp sign which can be found in my Flickr stream.  Matt apparently found this hilarious and posted it to his blog and it was all over twitter when we posted the link to the set.  It was all in good fun except the people who were sent out to fetch the signs sort of freaked out when they though it was stolen.

The very next day Marianne was hosting a WordPress Scavenger Hunt charity event which the three Texas boys gladly agreed to join in.  Marianne had actually gotten me hired to shoot the event, but also said there was no reason I couldn’t be on a team as well.  I spent the hour before the event shooting all the teams and getting some of everyone networking and having fun.  Once we were given directions the teams were sent on their ways to collect as many points from the list as possible, but after looking at the list ‘Team Tejas’ was dumbfounded.  We had no clue where anything on this list was, because most of it was riddles that pointed to very specific locations.  Being the adventurous team we were, we decided we were going to win this event any way we could.  We hopped on a train heading towards what we thought was Fishermans Warf, but somehow ended up in the middle of downtown near the Apple store.  It as here that we figured the only way we were going to win this was as the locals.  We found two extremely nice girls to help figure out most of the clues, and point us in the directions we needed to go, but what we quickly found out is that if we wanted to get a huge boost is we could get everyone we met to sign up for a WordPress.com account and we got 80 bonus points.  For the next hour and a half we spent half our time finding landmarks, and another half talking to people our age inside of Urban Outfitters about what WordPress is and why they should sign up.  Point just started racking up rather quickly and it was hard to not notice us carrying around 15 helium balloons and a hula hoop in the middle of downtown San Francisco.  In the end Team Tejas ended up winning the event by a fairly large margin, and won some really nice shwag from WordPress, Icanhazcheezburger, and iTunes.  I then set up the camera and took shots of all the winning teams, and everyone had a great afternoon.

Tuesday night we got 9 tickets to Giants vs Marlins game and watched the Giants get absolutely destroyed.  That really wasn’t the point though in my opinion.  I just enjoyed the company of everyone getting together and having a good time, which I think we did.  One of the girls we met on our scavenger hunt, Sadie, even joined us and we covered her ticket for helping us so much on the scavenger hunt.  It was fun hanging out with Daniel Brusilovsky, the 15 yr old podcaster, blogger, and head of Teens in Tech, outside of one of the various tech events going on.

At this point, Dane had already decided he is going to extend his flight till Wednesday like the rest of us, and just work out of his companies office Monday and Tuesday.  Kristine is doing the same since her company has an office in downtown as well, which left Cesar and I to do a little exploring for the next few days during the day. Our friend Karen, events coordinator for Mashable.com mentioned to me that she would like us to stay through Thursday night for their Mashable Monthly event, and that if I could stay, they would cover my change of flight and then pay me for the event, so Tuesday night, 6 hours before my flight is supposed to leave, I change my flight to leave Friday.  When Cesar and Dane show up over at Marianne’s a few hours before their flight, a sadness overcame the group knowing that everyone had to go home, but eventually the peer pressure from Marianne, Karen, and myself had them all on the phone calling Southwest airlines changing their flights until Friday.  I think one of the statements that was spouted was, “this is highly irresponsible”.  For me it wasn’t irresponsible to stay and get paid, but I can see from their positions where staying was putting each of them in different situations.

Wednesday night we decided we wanted to go over the Golden Gate bridge, because it was a pretty clear night aside from the fog in the city, and I wanted to get some good pictures of the bridge at night.  This turned out to be one of the most spectacular views with the moon shining down over the water and the city covered up in fog, made the bridge look like it was expanding out into nothing.  Everyone had a great time, and I had a couple awesome images come out of the night.

Thursday during the day we spent our time down in the Mission and Haight districts hanging out at coffee shops such as Ritual Roasters, making appearances in many of the local fashion stores, and checking out specialty stores such as Giant Robot.  I was upset at forgetting to go into the Pirate store at 826 Valencia while I was down in the Mission although, as this place has a very interesting back story.  It was the topic one of the TED prize winners in 2007, and what makes this location so interesting is that they technically shouldnt even be residing in the Mission at all.  To my knowledge the Mission requires that the street level shops along Valencia must be retail type shops, and what resides inside is a wonderful tutoring program for young school children.  How did they get around this?  By selling pirate gear of course!  Thats right, they sell various pirate paraphanalia and it has made them pretty famous in the process.  I love the idea, and I’m glad this project is working out in such a wonderfully diverse location such as the Mission district.

The Mashable Monthly event was thursday night, and I was in charge of running around and taking pictures of all the guests with the founder Pete Cashmore.  I have say i got this gig, mainly because I shot the Summer Mashable Tour in Austin a month previous and the pictures from that event turned out great.  I loved meeting everyone at the event and got to know quite a few people in the area.

Its nice when you have some wonderful friends in the tech industry who you just cant overlook.  Erica O’Grady has been extremely helpful to me in getting me in contact with a lot of people and Marianne Masculino was basically my instantaneous best friend ever since we met at Barcamp Texas.  I would consider my trip to San Francisco impossible without the help and guidance of these two wonderful women.

Friday rolls around and of course all of use are wondering why on earth we decided to fly home on Friday, back to the Texas heat when there are still so many fun things to do in San Francisco on the weekend so we all extended our flights again until Sunday, making the trip 9 days overall.  We took Friday and visited CNet, or what is now known as CBS Interactive, and our friend Andrew Mager gave us a tour of the place.  I have to say I was impressed at the size of the building, compared to the number of people who actually worked inside.  Apparently it isn’t a necessity to come to the office unless you need too do a recording or get work done that required you to be in the building, which is in my opinion very smart.  It saves your employees travel expenses, you just have to monitor that their work is getting completed, and yet you have all the room available to do whatever you want and need to do inside your offices.  I do imagine however that the gaming division of CNet is probably at work every day.  We walked into their office and each employee had 40-50 inch lcd displays testing all sorts of games.  The game floor also has every game ever made for computers and consoles in a huge library that stretches down the halls.

Saturday Marianne got us a Zip car, which happened to be this really awesome Mini cooper, and we zoomed off to the Muir Forrest for the day, with a detour at Sausalido for brunch and some sightseeing from some beautiful views back towards the city.  The hike through Muir forest was absolutely amazing.  I have never seen trees so large in my life, and I’ve been told they get bigger the farther north you go up the coast, which leads me to believe I’m going to be taking another trip soon.  The weather was beautiful, we hiked about 4 miles through the forest and took some pictures, and just enjoyed being the crazy group that we are.  Dane stopped with a tour group for about 20 minutes and learned how to make tea, so he was gathering up dead yellow leaves the entire hike in hopes that he would have some delicious tea in the evening.  Kristine thought it would be a good idea to carry my camera backpack since i was hauling other gear with me as well, I’m not sure if she regretted that decision or not, but I do know she wouldn’t give it back until we were done hiking.

After the woods we headed back into town because we were supposed to drop Marianne off at Golden Gate Park for a music festival, but she wasn’t having any of it.  She insisted that she stay with us since it was our last night which was incredible awesome of her considering the amount of money she spent on that ticket.  Dane was driving the Mini up Lombard street so that we could get the chance to go down the craziest road in the city, but getting the Mini cooper up the hill with 5 people in the car proved to be a challenge. We had to hold the brake in while mashing the gas pedal to the floor and then let off the brake easily in order to keep from smashing into the car behind us. After we got down we had our fix of In-and-Out burger and made our way to see the sea lions near the pier. It was a good cap off for our trip and I can’t wait to go back. I’d move there if the cost of living wasn’t so high, so until then I’ll happily visit 2-3 times a year.