Today is the last day here in San Francisco for a few months. Just enough time left to go down to my favourite newspaper shop and get tuesday’s edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The coffee house opposite offers free internet, monday through friday. As I went in to get a coffee, I counted 12 people in there, each one in front of a computer. I couldn’t really take a proper photo without it being embarrassing for myself or the guests, so I just shot one from the hip without looking at the camera or the subjects. It shows five people and five computers on one side of the room.
Starbucks across the street also has online access, but only if you have a T-online account. The city of San Francisco plans to have free online access across the city very soon, so people can once again pick a café for the quality of the food and drink offered.
Erik, check out this funny post about San Francisco on Stuff White People Like.
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/91-san-francisco/
This has to be the first shot I’ve seen of people using computers in San Francisco in the last few years where they’re not all Macs!
I think the lady three in noticed you. It makes me feel a bit odd when I take public photographs innocently, then later on I notice people staring straight at the camera :)
a manure fan way in san fran? world domination awaits!
Couldn’t help noticing, as a long standing admirer from the days before blogs, that your page design uses neither indents nor vertical space between paragraphs. I find this on more and more pages (even the best sites), and I know it to be characteristic of the way content management systems are set up (hardly unavoidable given a little effort, but there it is) and is outside the user’s control unless he is finicky.
However, I find in the last few years the same defect–am I old fashioned to call it thus?–with printed pages, where the effort involved is zero, and is certainly in the user’s control. Doubtless we are influenced by what we read; and admittedly the odds are against the last line of a paragraph finishing in such a way that the paragraph break is lost to the eye and the sense is lost–but I believe that God and Spiekermann don’t play dice!
And yet if it was 12 people with newspapers and books you perhaps wouldn’t have noticed, remarked?
Where is it by the way, I love hanging out in San Francisco’s cafés and I’m due there soon.
this is on Polk Street, between Vallejo and Green – opposite Smoke Signals, the shop with the biggest choice of magazines in town.