I'm perched by the windowsill outside Brenda's French Soul Food as I reflect upon this grim reality: only two weeks remain in the fantastic ride that has been (and, for now, still is) my last co-op term down here in San Francisco. (Why Brenda's? I yelped reasonably-priced breakfast joints and sorted by top rated, and this is what I got.) Two weeks - not enough time to seriously launch into a new project at work, nor enough time to truly complete my haphazard exploration of this most multifaceted of cities. Every end-of-term comes with equal parts trepidation and excitement, and this one is no exception.

What next? I'll be heading back up to Waterloo to cap off my undergraduate education. Before that happens, though, I've got (in no particular order) a company holiday party to attend, a certain club by the name of DNA Lounge to pay one last visit, a game of Capture-the-Flag to play, a bottle of tequila to buy (so I can take advantage of the token customs allowances!), a work term report to write, two presentations to give, a couple of projects at work to bring to a satisfactory close, a handful of friends in Vancouver to visit...the list goes on; as usual, it's so much to do, so little time. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Then what? I've studiously ignored this question for much of the past four years, pausing only briefly to give it any thought whatsoever. As I approach graduation, however, this question seems to be popping up with exponentially increasing frequency. According to the hard-earned wisdom of generations past, it is considered Unconscionably Short-Sighted to not have A Plan - and yet that wisdom seems quaint now, politely antiquated when faced with the constant upheaval that has come to characterize modern life. It has never been so commonplace for best-laid plans to go awry. Insofar as I have made any post-undergrad decisions, here they are:

• My decision to spend a while travelling after undergrad is absolutely non-negotiable. I will have spent the better part of five years in the teeter-totter rat-race training ground that is co-op, flipping like high-voltage AC between work and school, and I desperately crave the opportunity to sample the other possibilities offered by this short existence we have on Earth.
• That said, I'll be signing up for the next round of GREs - why not? - and making the round of grad school applications at some point.
• I'll also keep contacts at the places I've worked for. This is rightly considered Good and Smart, and I've no qualms with jamming my feet into as many doors as humanly possible.

Context switch - having finished my breakfast in the cramped temple to tastiness that is Brenda's (Yelp does not lie - the beef cutlets and grits are indeed both packed with deliciousness, and the bottomless watermelon iced tea is wonderfully pulpy), I've meandered my way over to Ferry Building to borrow wireless and power off Peet's. The hallways are packed on weekends, tourists and locals alike buzzing around in the frantic search for produce to the reverberating refrains of street performers - a lucrative profession in this part of town, where no one sets foot without consciously agreeing to part ways with their gold. This may very well be the last time I set foot in this building for quite some time; next weekend is decidedly busy, and the weekend after is earmarked for the aforementioned jaunt up the coast to Vancouver.

Anything else? I still haven't seen Alcatraz, but I consider this no great loss; the only proper way to see it would be late at night, a sort of reverse infiltration that would ideally be carried out by boat. This is my first real post at the new site; it remains to be seen whether this will precipitate a noticeable shift in writing style. I should start posting more regularly, if only to prepare for my travels next summer - my less itinerant friends and relatives will demand compensation for my absence in the form of chances to live vicariously through me, something which I certainly owe them more of.

Anyways, that's it for now. Owing to my unusually pensive state, I've rambled on for far longer than I had hoped - and so, my fingers having reached exhaustion, I shall leave you all with a simple exhortation: keep posted!

San Francisco - nexus for the industries of silicon and logic, erstwhile hub for countless wide-eyed Flower Children and their pharmacopoeia of psychedelics, and home to the most efficient army of hunter-gatherer recyclers known to mankind. These scavengers rove about the city filling carts of all descriptions with aluminum, plastic, and glass gold, pausing only to swig the last dregs of partially re-fermented beer from that hastily-discarded PBR. There's a lesson in here somewhere about economics: by raising its bottle deposits to the point where serial bottle-returning becomes a decent source of quick cash, California has effectively crowd-sourced recycling. As a result, they're able to post 74% recycling of beverage containers.

(I can hear the Hounds howling - this wealth-redistribution racket is straight-up capital-C Communism, a conspiracy perpetrated by Obama and his sleeper-agent terrorist-Jew-Illuminati cohort ever since the Dark Time of Marx to pave the way for such unimaginable horrors as public health care and tighter bank regulations!)

The bottle deposit is an effective tax on laziness, which is perfectly fine by me. After all, it's a fair bet that even if we taxed the beverage companies for making these containers in the first place, polluter-pays style, we'd end up paying this portion anyways (unless, in accounting for the total cost of production, that can of Coke became prohibitively expensive...)

Any event where you wake up the next morning with two free shirts, a deck of cards, a jar of bubble soap, a stack of business cards, and a video of yourself ziplining across an office hallway is a resounding success. Enter Startup Crawl, an open house on some of San Francisco's hottest startups. It's part pub crawl, part power-speed-networking, part tech-speak geekout session, and 100% SF-style general hilarity. Where else can some lowly Canadian undergrads walk in off the street - in jeans and T-shirts, no less - and end up throwing back Don Julio with the CEO over talk about scalability and the startup life within the half hour? Where else can you climb out a window to have rooftop beers with high-wired entrepreneurs preparing for next morning's Y Combinator pitch? The list of such meritocratic hedonist enclaves is short indeed.

This event deserves to be ported elsewhere - where's the beef, Waterloo?

Another morning, another wireless hotspot courtesy of the thriving West Coast coffee-shop culture. This one is located within the confines of Cup Of Java, a fairly standard joint that just so happens to have a Casio CTK-471 sitting around - any instrument on the keyboard-piano spectrum, even a cheap MIDI-spewing plastic-encased Casio, earns bonus points. I order the Greek Omelet, which comes nestled between a bed of -

Actually, never mind that. I'm no food critic; that's what we have Yelp for. (Hooray for externalized memory!)

In San Francisco, every coffee shop comes with its very own resident Bluetooth headset-wearing intravenous-caffeine-drip work-from-home maven; the more popular ones boast entire armies of these laptop-toting soldiers, each one vying for a slice of the ether. (I'm taking more than my fair share with Transmission (more proof that the highly publicized takedown and subsequent sale of The Pirate Bay does jack-all to staunch the, er, torrential (yeah, I winced too, but it seemed like most appropriate adjective) flow of information), and am watching nervously over my shoulder for the legions of RIAA men-in-black that are no doubt waiting to haul my recidivist pirate ass into court.) I'm half tempted to whip out Wireshark to see what exactly these people are doing, but that would most likely cross the line between harmless curiosity and feline genocide.

...and I'm off to scour a couple of thrift stores before grabbing the bus into work.

Need one more reason to be proud of your elected officials? Here you go. While we're at it, here's another epic fail courtesy of our beloved civil engineers.

What else? I went ATVing at the Pismo Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area, an unnecessarily obtuse moniker for what amounts to a giant outdoor sandbox filled with off-road vehicles of every description. As a testament to its rugged nature, the area is rife with Second-Amendment freaks on oversized rollcages-with-wheels proudly festooned with Southern Confederate flags. If you've ever wanted to live out those Mad Max post-apocalyptic fantasies of petrol-fueled villainy, this is most definitely the place.

Found a super-chill haven of hippie-dom sandwiched between Mission and Valencia. The Oz Hookah Lounge delivers drunk revelry, multiflavoured smoke haze, cushions, and a panoply of psychedelic patterns at nearly every hour of the night. This particular visit was punctuated by a host of inebriated Iranian expats carrying beer-laden ice buckets and gin-and-tonics from a nearby bar, which they promptly distributed amongst the crowd.

Halloween's coming - get your costumes together! Photographic evidence is requested, lest the veracity of your respective accounts be called into question.

Yeah, it's been that long. 28 Days Later, stuffs and things at varying orbitals of excitement have been happening with acceptable regularity:

• Not only am I the proud owner of a longboard, but this particular plank of my comprehensive transportation platform now bears the inimitable insignia of one Randall Munroe. (I can only wonder what joyous blasphemies #666 will bring.)
  
• Finally made it out to the infamous DNA Lounge; this SF institution has the peculiar distinction of being owned by ex-Netscape programmer Jamie Zawinski.
• Canadian Thanksgiving shindig, complete with full turkey and pumpkin pie. Need I say more? (No, but I should probably add this: there's another Canadian Thanksgiving dinner this Sunday hosted by the Stanford Canadian Club; despite what their (apparently infrequently updated) site says, it really is this weekend.)
  
• Pretty Lights at The Independent last night. If you haven't seen them, you really should.

How's Facebook? (Come on - if you care enough about me to read my pithy musings, you're probably expecting an answer to this question.) Intense. It pains me to say it, but Facebook has so far provided much more in the way of personal development and work-related awesomeness than Google ever did. How can that be? It comes down to recruiting strategy: Google casts as wide a net as possible, hoping to grab what it considers to be the best of the best before someone else does. In my opinion, this strategy is bound to backfire. You end up with a zillion interns and, well, less than a zillion interesting and/or useful projects; it doesn't take a math major to see that you can't pair each intern up with something worthwhile to work on. (It does take a math major, however, to look at the whole situation and start rambling about bijections.) Here's the point: half of the interns coming out of Google are extremely wary of returning, and that can't be good. ("Half" here is an extremely unscientific guesstimate, but several co-interns (who will obviously remain nameless in such a public forum as The Internet) have expressed similar sentiments.)

Shelled out a wad of cash today for a longboard, which I've been (painlessly (so far, at least)) riding around SF on. My goal is to cut door-to-door times in the city core by 60-75% compared to the estimated walking time on Google Maps. (I'd estimate 80-90% for cycling, but this is immeasurably cooler - not to mention far more prone to catastrophic failure.)

And, yeah, I promised pics a few days back. I have yet to deliver on that promise, but I'll definitely post here when I do!

Where "you" is TechCrunch. Long live engineer humour!