First and foremost, understand that this is not a psychotherapy blog. Once I was a psychotherapist with a private practice in Austin, Texas. The blog began then and focused on psychology, therapy, and general well-being. When I moved to California in 2004, I moved on from the profession, and the blog became more personal in nature (although I try to cover my diverse interests). I’ve attempted to notify sites that linked to me as a therapist, but not all may have dropped my listing. There is a rising interest in the West in mindfulness, meditation, and Buddhism. At times, people reading this blog have mistaken me for a practitioner and claimed (or inferred) that because I use the word “mindful,” what I post here represents the face of Buddhism to the world.
Kathryn Harper is a Renaissance woman; she has worked as a librarian, psychotherapist, and community advocate. She grew up in the snow belt of Syracuse, New York, and headed to Austin, Texas, in 1994 for the sunshine, job opportunities, and barbeque. In 2004 she moved further west to the scenic and culturally diverse San Francisco Bay Area. Kathryn is also a self-taught artist, poet, and an omnivorous, voracious reader. Believing passionately in the innate creativity of all humans, she dedicates her life to igniting curiosity, promoting creative and critical thinking, and inspiring enthusiasm for lifetime learning. Kathryn can always be persuaded to savor a good meal, play board games, or dance. She lives in Santa Clara, California, with her husband, her amazing daughter Claire (born 9/8/07), and Stella the cat.
Welcome to the new site.
One year ago today I started a blog on a lark. There was no motivation, no purpose, no theme. The blog became a straightforward, if opinionated, record of daily life in a small neighborhood of Oakland, California.
Today I’m happy to say A Rockridge Life will remain just that.
The new portfolios hold photographs and writing from the blog that I’d like to return to, and you might too. Today we start with flowers and food, two of my passions. In time, more of these portfolios will be added, and the existing ones refined.
I am a freelance writer whose interest has always been drawn to what people do when they are not working. But really. The blog tells all.
To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common -- this is my symphony. - William Henry Channing
Alameda is a charming island city and sometimes confused with the name of the county to which it belongs (Alameda!). Perhaps the city/county founders were so enamored of the name, they christened it twice (along the lines of New York, NY?) But I digress …
As a long time resident, I have watched the city evolve over the years in an attempt to keep pace with the ever changing times. Whilst change can be good, it has certainly not been easy for Alameda as witnessed by the passionate debates over growth vs. preservation. This blog will attempt to chronicle some facets about life in Alameda and perhaps this might help explain why there is no other place quite like it in the entire bay area.
I am at: alameda.blog@gmail.com
I work at Bay Area News Group-East Bay’s Contra Costa Times, a 160,000-circulation newspaper that covers much of San Francisco’s East Bay. As the Times’ online coordinator, I offer best-practices advice on blogging and social media, moderate site forums, polls and reader-generated content; and create a daily “link and load” list of daily-buzz stories for budgeting awareness. I was born and raised in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and earned a bachelor’s in mass communications (concentration in newspaper journalism) from Bowie State University. My first newspaper job (not counting several years as a Washington Post paperboy in Silver Spring, Md., and a year or so as editor-in-chief of Bowie State University’s Spectrum student newspaper) was a Chips Quinn Scholar internship at the Oakland Tribune. That led to schools and general-assignment/nightcops reporting stints with the Tri-Valley Herald in Pleasanton and a stint on ANG Newspapers’ universal copy desk as an editor and paginator; later came online copy-editor shifts at thestandard.com and salon.com. I joined the Times in 2001 as a copy editor and paginator and then as the paper’s first morning online reporter.
Richard Friedman lives in Oakland, CA, works as a tech writer in Silicon Valley, is a Director of Other Minds, wrote his first computer program in 1962 for the IBM 650. It played dice. He is also a ham radio (AG6RF) operator, and he also takes a lot of photographs, composes music, and does a weekly radio program on KALW called Music From Other Minds.
He is not Kinky.
Anna lives in Mill Valley California and enjoys writing about her food and travel adventures in and out of Marin County.
"...what I would like to capture aren't thoughts but the scent of my happiness!"
- Jacques Henri Lartique
"There is more to life than increasing its speed."
- Mahatma Gandhi
When Anna and I were first dating in the mid-1970s we lived in Oakland and occasionally went dancing with friends from the theatre where we performed during the summer. (Woodminster Theatre in Joaquin Miller park.) There was a club down near the Oakland coliseum that allowed those of us who were not yet 21 to dance to the funky music that was popular in Oakland at that time.
One of the groups setting the tone for the Eastbay music scene in the 1970s was Tower of Power. They released an album in 1974 called Back to Oakland, and when we decided to move back to our old stomping grounds, I thought it would be fitting to pay homage to that record by naming this humble blog after the album. There’s some good music on the disc. Check it out!
Cuz the rent keeps going up, the taxes keep rolling in, and the grocery store NEVER doubles your Qs!
I've been online for about fourteen years now, since the days of Lynx! Ever since text-browsing my first website, I have been hooked on the internet and the vastness of its potential.
Walking can be a form of transportation, a means of meditation or exercise, or a great way to explore a community. Writer/photographer Keith Skinner offers intimate glimpses of Berkeley life, in word and image, as well as reflections on the joys and challenges of a modern urban walker.
Sylvia Paull entered the technology revolution when she accidentally applied for a job with Software Ventures, developers of the first commercial telecom software for the Macintosh called MicroPhone. She was soon elected to the board of BMUG, started hosting parties for Will Hearst III, John C. Dvorak, and Jerry Pournelle at Comdex (a pre-blogger event), and eventually started her own parties, known as Cybersalons (www.berkeleycybersalon.com). An independent high-tech publicist and velvet feminist, she started Gracenet, a group for women in high tech (www.gracenet.net), and various other groups revolving around her desires to eat out, take long walks, and shake things up.
Art-Culture-Tech-Sex-Beats-Words: Life. A left coast, black futurist take on art, life, culture, and randomness. Heavy on the randomness.
Burritos, taco trucks, The Mission, technology, Macs, iPhones, Canada — so much to discuss.
One of the most common sorts of questions we get about this house is its history.
The house was built in 1876 by a man named Robert M. Holt, and is listed in the City of Alameda historical society as the Robert M. Holt House even though he doesn't live here any more. The style is Italianate, which is said like "ital-yan-ate" rather than the "ital-ee-ahn-tay" we hear a lot of people say. 1876 is the very very tail end of the Italianate period in Victorian houses, which was centered in the 1850's, so this house was very conservative in style when it was built. It was originally, like most Italianate houses, painted entirely white to look like stonework.
Robert M. Holt was an architect/builder (they were the same thing back then) and built several other houses on the island, including a bunch of identical Victorians further down the island. At the time he built this house he owned the entire block and presumably several others that he developed.
Christopher Null has been an entertainment and technology writer and editor for more than 17 years. Null founded Filmcritic.com in 1995 and has worked as Editor-in-Chief of Mobile magazine, Editor-in-Chief of New Architect, Executive Editor of Smart Business (formerly PC Computing) magazine, and Managing Reviews Editor of LAN Times magazine. Today he can be found blogging daily for Yahoo! Tech. As a freelance and staff writer, Chris has penned entertainment, business, and high-tech pieces for Wired, Business 2.0, PC World, Men’s Journal, San Francisco Magazine, Yahoo! Internet Life, Working Woman, Maximum PC, The Austin Chronicle, The Austin American-Statesman, and numerous other publications.
This blog is an attempt to chronicle our adventures living in a small 1915 bungalow in the heart of Oakland, California. We’ve got a big dog, a little garden, and a 94-year-old house about a mile from the city’s center that we’re slowly trying to restore and update. Most of the time this blog is about our house and garden, our neighborhood, and our city. Occasionally, I write about bigger picture issues and ideas, usually around urban planning and policy, food systems, or other things I think are fun and interesting.
Cyrus Farivar is a freelance technology journalist, a freelance radio reporter/producer, and is a wanderlust geek who lives in the city of Oakland, California. Previously, he has lived in Lyon (France), Saint-Louis (Senegal), Melbourne (Australia), and in a small village 20 km from Geneva (Switzerland). He is currently working on a book, The Internet of Elsewhere, about the history and effects of the Internet on different countries around the world, including Senegal, Iran, Estonia and South Korea. It is due out from Rutgers University Press in 2011. He regularly reports for National Public Radio, The World (WGBH/PRI/BBC), and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Comment and content on this blog are the sole opinion of Edmundo Delmundo. Edmundo Delmundo takes all responsibility for his comments and musings. Credit is given where credit is due. Fact checking and journalistic integrity are not hallmarks of this blog.
Edmundo Delmundo gives consent to aggregators (e.g. Alamedans) simply to get the word out. His association should in no way be construed to suggest any editorial collusion.
Yeah, I said it. I'm challenging you. I'm challenging you to collect gently worn shoes from your friends, your customers (if you're a business owner), your mom, your dad, your kids, your hair stylist, your co-workers, your neighbors, etc. and then I'm challenging you to bring those gently worn shoes to my store (by February 20), or take them to your local Finish Line where they will be donated to Soles4Souls, a non-profit organization whose quest is to collect 1,000,000 pairs of shoes for the victims of the Haiti earthquake. Go ahead. I dare you
A child of back-to-the-land hippies, I grew up in rural Idaho and Washington State. I went to University of Washington in Seattle where I majored in Biology and English. I’ve had many odd jobs including: assassin bug handler, book editor, media projectionist, hamster oocyte collector, and most recently, free-lance journalist.
I studied under Michael Pollan at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism for two years. My journalistic work reflects my interests–in farming, food, the environment, and culture. In a nutshell, I like to tell stories about people who follow unconventional paths.
This is one tag-driven blog, oh yes. (492, at last count). I suppose you could say I am one tag-driven writer, but in fact there are so many fascinating associations between all these great people and moments and the vast collection of asshats, the web is really tag heaven.
I write, not for a living, thank god, but for my own sanity’s sake. To think, which is to say, to write your thinking is to order it and, usually, discover something new. Truth is, the outer situation improves not one bit … but the mind loves thinking, everything feels a tad more orderly and understood after the act of writing.
i live here:SF is an open invitation to San Francisco residents to enjoy and participate in, sharing many facets of life in this city with each other and the world at large. The project was also featured in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Julie Michelle is one of the founding members of the photographic collective CALIBER.
Her website is femmefotographie.com. Her writing and personal blog is julieliveshere.com. Julie is also the photographer for the band Magic Christian.
So, here they are. Five life lessons that can be inferred from the guitar:
1.) Be Light As a Feather | Use the minimal amount of finger pressure while fretting to attain faster playing speed. It’s not how hard you press, it’s how efficiently you move.
2.) Find Your Balance | Relax and focus on what you’re doing now. Keep the future in mind but don’t wander too far or you might get lost.
3.) There Is No Wrong Way | Mistakes are only deviations from your desired path. Push through and don’t let these deviations bring you down or you’ll end up straying more. Don’t sweat the small stuff or you’ll end up drenched.
4.) Be Inspired | When it comes down to it, the goal of pursuing any artistic endeavor is to create something meaningful, expressive and aesthetically profound. Try and hold onto whatever it is that inspires you.
5.) Don’t Forget to Have Fun | Life is short, after all…
Dan Brekke: "In the news business since 1972, longer now than some of my colleagues have been alive, and I'm still learning." One journalist's take on everyday life in the Bay Area.
I used to have one of these up but it went away during one of the many redesigns over the years. So, instead of digging out the old one, I thought it would be a good exercise to revisit About Me and see if I am the same person I was when this blog coughed to life four years ago.
So, what About Me?
Who am I would be a good start. I'm not really a guy named Johnny Huh but he is a character I've written with for a number of years and forced anonymity gave me Johnny Huh rather than some of the other folks I've written. Anyway, the Huh part works well with my general incredulity at the never ending descent (or seeming descent) of our nation and culture.
[Update: The astute will have already noted this but I thought it should be noted here as well, I'm no longer going to be blogging as Johnny Huh. I have decided that I will be blogging under my real name, which is Erik. I'm still working on adding my last name to the disclosure but this is a significant first step out behind the anonymity curtain.]
Because I do believe that this nation is being poisoned from within. That it is being led by people who do not care a whit for nation or a united people, they care for themselves and their friends to our collective detriment.
So I guess its fair to say that I've got a reasonably well developed sense of justice and fairness. I also tend to prefer reasonable people over raving nutfuck lunatics with nothing but axes to grind and spittle to spray. Though the nutfucks aren't so bad if you're out of range, sometimes they come up with a good line or two.
I get on political tears from time to time when the incessant stream of bile posing as news from the White House just gets to be too much. But I try to not be a full-on ranting bastard without cause. I write about marketing and public relations concerns because that's what I do for a living. And I like to discuss advertising that works and advertising that does not work.
I also like words, I like coming up with new ones, I put them here and on another blog called the Fictionarium. I'm sure I didn't invent that term but I like it well enough to pretend it's mine.
I take a lot of photographs, some of them are pretty good. I'd like to get a nice full sized SLR someday to see what I could do with it. But portability is key to me and my SD450 fits into my pocket easily.
I will try to add to this About Me as time and circumstances permit. But for now, I'm going to post it and get it added to the template to make it easier to find. Oh yeah, I'll also add pictures at some point too because photography is pretty important to me and I love to show off pics of my two beautiful boys.
I fell in love with Alameda in 1974 on the first day we drove through the "Tube" on to Webster Street, and have been walking Alameda streets nearly every day since then. The city is a treat for the eyes and the imagination. Here is what I see...
I'm just your average 30-something year old guy who likes to eat and cook (not necessarily in that order.) I currently live in the San Francisco Bay Area with my partner Dean and our two dogs. Over the years, I've amassed quite a collection of cookbooks, taken a few classes, and used many friends as guinea pigs for my culinary experiments. On this site, I'll share with you some favorite recipes and some funny stories from my numerous attempts to discover "is it ED-ible?" Contact: IsItEDible AT gmail DOT com
We seek to promote and develop music, arts, and cultural activity in the San Francisco Bay metropolitan area with special focus upon the East Bay by reporting on selected events and activity as whim and whimsy offers.
I’m a writer and multimedia producer living and working in the Mission. You can find my work all over the place — I’ve contributed to Twitter Wit, NBC Bay Area, Penthouse, PC World, FastCompany, Hispanic Business, Valleywag, Curbed SF, SFGate, Young Manhattanite, NewTeeVee, Web Worker Daily, Other Magazine, GigaOm, Fleshbot, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, SFist, mcweeneys.net, CNet, Sams Publishing and Osborne-McGraw Hill.
I’ve also turned up incidentally at Time, Metblogs San Francisco, Mediabistro, The Fart Party, Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits, Red Eye, Black Eye, KPIX, Ryan is Hungry, Slashdot, San Francisco Unscripted, the San Francisco Examiner and Grade the News.
I’m not to be confused with other awesome people named Jackson West worldwide, like the home-staging professional in Vancouver or the personal mail courier in Canberra.
This used to be Unofficial Meredith Brody and Marc Sandalow Fan Club, but the SF Weekly let her go and the Chronicle bought him out. We're left reading Phil Bronstein, "American Thinker."
Hi, I’m Ernie. I’ve had a blog and/or website, in one form or another, since 1997; you’re looking at the current version.
Some of my blogging adventures have been featured in a book, humbly called The Very Best Weblog Writing Ever By Anyone Anywhere In The Whole Wide World, Vol. 1 along with a bunch of other bloggers.
I am also the editor of 8 Asians, a collaborative blog catered to the Asian American community. I’m based in San Francisco, and you may contact me via e-mail at ernie@littleyellowdifferent.com.
As there is more to anyone than just a list of bullet points, the rest you’ll just have to read for yourself.
Please note that the views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
When my husband, Alejandro, and I moved from Brooklyn to Berkeley, we knew we’d find warmer weather and greener pastures. We had no idea we’d be in for year-round produce, the likes of which I’ve only seen in Italy.
The decision was not an easy one, with family and friends living in New York – but something about the daily subway ride into Manhattan and the supersonic speed of life told us it was time for a change. So, we quit our jobs, packed our things and set out on a two-week cross-country adventure that brought us to our new home in sunny California.
One of my favorite things about Berkeley, besides the food, is the smell. Every time I walk outside I breath in citrus and roses – hence, Local Lemons. It makes sense that a place with such sweet air would produce amazing food.
I have been reflecting a lot on where I am now, where I have been, and where I want to go. It has been 22 weeks since I began teaching. 6 long months. 22 frustrating Sunday nights. 6 months of stress and strain. But now that the 2nd semester has started, I am able to finally look ahead: 15 more weeks of teaching (not including STAR testing, and finals week). 4 1/2 months to go until year 1 is done. I am excited to finish this roller coaster of a year, but I am terrified that my students will not have learned everything I promised that they would in the next 4 months. That is not a lot of time to re-teach new material, AND the 6 months of material that they didn't get because of poor teaching on my part. Apparently the 1st semester for new teachers is just b.s.
The Myrtle Street Review is a West Oakland-based blog about slightly sideways things. Or slightly sideways reactions to things. It is written by Susanna Varestus. You can send feedback and ideas for things to write about by email.
I spent the day with my friend BHboy today and we had experienced so many good sides to Oakland just this weekend alone, but the news always seems to pick up the more negative aspect. I LIVE IN WEST OAKLAND AND LOVE OAKLAND for its diversity (despite all the talk of corrupt politicians, crime and poverty) and have always tried to get people to see that it has a lot to offer. Anyway, BHboy in his youthful wisdom suggested I should blog about all the cool things this city has to do. Bare in mind that as geeky as I am, I am not into the web social scene (even my boss is dumbfounded that I don't have a F*c#book profile) and only carry around a mobile phone because I have to for work.
news outside my glenview window
Tales of my utterly surreal San Francisco existence.
Susan Mernit is the founder of Oakland Local, a news & community hub for Oakland, CA focused on environmental, food, development and social justice issues, and the recipient of a 2009 New Voices grant from J-Lab at American University. She is also the consulting web strategist for The Center for Investigative Reporting's California Watch project.
A former VP at AOL and Netscape, and a former Yahoo Senior Director, Mernit was the consulting program manager for The Knight News Challenge in 2008-09, as well as a consultant to organizations including Salon.com & TechSoup Global, where she led the re-design of their portal.
Living in a Tamale World cuz I am a Tamale Girl
Tina Tamale Ramos' Life, Adventures and Projects in Oakland, CA.
Observations and commentary from an over-fifty financial planner.
The markets had a second consecutive week of gains and are showing signs that we may have the first monthly gain in stocks since August. The last two days of the trading week had investors trying to interpret the Fed's plan to buy treasuries.
Well it is unlike a blog.
That’s where the “un” part comes from.
A blog is the “unedited voice of a person” (someone said that).
This is the voice of no one. Still unedited though. :-)
The blogroll is called an “unblogroll” but unfortunately WordPress does not let you edit that so it must say it’s a blogroll, which is part of the un-ness of this thing. Don’t trust your eyes. Things are not what they seem!
It seems like Berkeley would be the place where a blog is un. Hence the un-ness of it all. It’s probably being written in Albany or El Cerrito. Places that claim not to be part of Berkeley, but we know better!
I'm a writer, editor and Web site builder. My new book is Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters, now available from your preferred bookseller. I was co-founder of Salon, where I served as technology editor and later managing editor and VP/editorial operations for many years. I'm also author of the book Dreaming in Code.
