As promised, here is my first San Francisco landmark photo. You might recognize Alamo Square Park from the opening credits of Full House, actually I’m almost positive you’ll recognize it because it’s been burned into my mind since early childhood. The park is right off Hayes Street and entails an almost 45 degree walk uphill (over exaggerating a little) to get there. Since it’s only a half mile from my house I think I might head back more often to hang out on the grass and read a book.

You know you want to hear it:

If you know me well, you’ll know that Marc Chagall is one of my favorite painters of all time. I was floored when I first came face to face with “I and the Village” in person at the MoMA in New York City. Today, July 7th is Chagall’s birthday and to celebrate Google has put together this awesome logo including the works “Birthday”, “I and the Village” and “Lover’s with Half Moon”.

Thanks Google for appreciating such a creative mind.

Photo credit: Madhu

I’m here, I made it! It was rough at first - flying into SFO with two gigantic bags and making it up to my friend’s in Berkeley was an unbelievable hassle, especially when you don’t understand how BART works. I spent the first week checking out apartments that I found on Craigslist and not a single one was how it was described. “Renovated kitchen with stainless steel appliances” translated to renovated in 1984 with yellow appliances and a strange odor permeating the carpets. I’ll spare the gruesome details. As I was starting to become pretty glum, thinking all was lost, I met up with another friend who took me to his buddy’s house on Haight to chill. His buddy mentioned that he was taking off for the summer to do some traveling and half-jokingly I asked if he was interested in subletting. To make a long story short, I got hooked up randomly by a friend of a friend who by some weird circumstances was best friend’s in high school with someone I know back in Philly.

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Last week I attended IgnitePhilly an amazing event at Johnny Brenda’s that brought together a variety of speakers who talked about inspiring ideas or projects that they are working on. One such project that is close to my heart is Bike Share Philadelphia. If you aren’t familiar with bike share programs then I wouldn’t be surprised because they are very rare here in the U.S. Overseas however and in cities such as Paris, Barcelona and Oslo particularly, bike share programs have grown to an incredible size.

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It’s literally been a month since I last posted on here and I am really ashamed with myself. At the same time in my own defense I have been astonishingly busy. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t put my trip to Israel into words. I have a ton of pictures to prove how unbelievably breathtaking the trip was and I will post them on here soon. If you are friends with me on Facebook then you can check out the photos right now.

I’ve spent the past two weeks working on packing and moving out of my apartment in Philly and booked a flight to San Francisco for this coming Saturday the 21st. As I mentioned in this previous post I’ll be out in the Bay Area through September interning, but what I didn’t mention before is where I will be working. I’m going to be splitting my time between two companies - Vivaty a web start up with an exciting distributed platform that allows users to immerse themselves in different virtual scenes and LaunchSquad a public relations firm with deep roots in technology and social media. I can’t even express how excited I am to get out to the west coast and work with brilliant, new people.

San Francisco is going to provide a lot of motivation and some great experiences that I will most definitely be blogging about as much as possible, so please check back to see how things are going!

I have to be at the airport tomorrow at 10am. I’ll be back Friday May, 30th. While I’m out there I’m going to try to phone updates into my Utterz account which will automatically post to my Twitter.

Lots and lots of photos to come.
Shalom!

I’m sad that the blog has been a little stale lately but I’ve got a lot of stuff going on recently. First off - I’m traveling to Israel for 10 days on a birthright trip through Sachlav. The entire trip is paid for by Taglit-Birthright and we have an outrageous itinerary planned that will take us throughout the entire country and on trips such as kayaking in the Jordan River and visiting the Kotel (Western Wall). Also, I decided to rent a cell phone in Israel so I won’t use use my BlackBerry while I’m there. As I mentioned in this post awhile back I want to enjoy my vacation and stay away from e-mail and Twitter.

For those of you that haven’t heard, when I return from Israel I’ll be moving out to San Francisco to pursue internships at both a PR firm and a software startup for the summer. I’ve visited the city by the bay several times over the past few years and fell in love. I can’t wait to get a feel for the lifestyle out there and figure out if it’s somewhere I’d want to be when I graduate next year.

I plan on taking an unbelievable amount of pictures in Israel and I will be sure to post them here when I return.

Just updated my Muxtape with tracks I’ve been listening to recently. Notable tracks are “Pity and Fear” off the new Death Cab for Cutie album and “Echoplex” from Nine Inch Nail’s latest free album The Spin which was released last night. Also sprinkled in a few tracks from Ghostly Swim which I wrote about recently.

The full tracklist:

• Nine Inch Nails - “Echoplex”
• Michna - “Triple Chrome Dipped”
• Death Cab for Cutie - “Pity and Fear”
• The Beta Band - “Number 15″
• Santogold - “Lights Out”
• MSTRKRFT - “Easy Love”
• The Roots - Criminal
• Ben Benjamin - “Squirmy Sign Language”
• Mux Cool - “Night Court”
• Cut Copy - “Nobody Lost, Nobody Found”
• MGMT - “Kids”
• Vampire Weekend - “Exit Music (For a Film)”

Busy month, so I didn’t get to watching as many films as I would have hoped. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is as beautiful as it is poetic, quite possibly Julian Schnabel’s best piece. Lars and the Real Girl only reinforces my love for Ryan Gosling’s acting, putting two of his films (Half Nelson and this) in my top favorites. I also watched Annie Hall again, it’s been years, and can’t believe how similar Larry David’s comedic prose are to Woody’s. To think the two will be in a film side-by-side next year really gets me excited.

• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly ★★★★
• Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead ★★★
• Lars and the Real Girl ★★★★★
• Atonement ★★★
• American Gangster ★★★
• Reservation Road ★★
• Annie Hall ★★★★★

This eclectic release from Adult Swim and Ghostly International has seen some heavy rotation on my iPod in the past few days and I wanted to share. If you don’t know Ghostly, they are part record label, part art gallery with an emphasis on digital forms of creation and distribution. Here’s what they have to say about the compilation:

A genre-busting 19-song collection, stretching the entire Ghostly International galaxy, Ghostly Swim explores the Avant-Pop style that the Ann Arbor/New York City label has been been championing for the past 9 years. Ghostly Swim features artists like Matthew Dear, Dabrye, Tycho and Aeroc and features new signings like UK cult band The Chap and NYC producer Michna.

I highly recommend giving this thing a listen, it has introduced me to some great artists and a new approach to music in general.

Check it out »