My second twitterstalk was Andrei at Caffe Trieste in North Beach. Andrei is someone everyone should be nice to for reasons I mentioned before. He’s trying to get me back into photography.

I think it’s because he has a photoblog now…

from Andrei’s photoblog, 9 august 2007

and probably figures that getting my competitive juices flowing will be the photography equivalent of dollar-nassau. But I hate to compete and the only thing that motivates me is, quite frankly, intense fear. And besides, what chance do I have? As Ed Finkler says, the man’s got scary amounts of kevorka:

This White Russian smiles
CNET Headquarters
SOMA, San Francisco, California

Nikon D200, Tokina 16-50mm AT-X PRO f/2.8 DX. SB-800
1/60sec @ f/2.8, iso 100, 38mm (47mm)

Go subscribe to his blog now (besides the pictures are good, quite unlike mine).

[cats, coffee, photography, ruby, and women after the jump]

(I humor him because of the PHP 6 unicode stuff.)

im in ur endginn, playing wif ur strings
College Park, Atlanta, Georgia

Leica M8, Cosina-Voigtländer NOKTON 35mm F1.2 Aspherical
1/500sec, iso 320, 35mm (47mm)

Ace up my sleeve

Andrei caught my ace in the hole when Chris Shiflett told him that the I had configured the Nikon D70 he was shooting to put my name in the copyright field metadata—p0wning all his killer photographs.

But what Andrei doesn’t know is that I have another ace up my sleeve. I’ll just flickr photos of women. Heck, it worked for Jeremiah at the Plaxo Lunch 2.0:

This photo of my ex-coworkers got Jeremiah 300 views, double that of the other photos in the set

An idea takes shape

The idea actually comes from a comedian named Alan Coren who said if you if you ever want to sell any books, they should be about either cats, golfing, or war. He then proceeded to write a book entitled, Golfing for Cats that had a big swastika on the cover.

Since I seem to have lost two of the eleven of you who actually read this blog, I guess I should adopt a similar strategy. Viewing my stats, that means I have to blog more about either Ruby, photography or (my embarrassing interactions with) women.

A first attempt

Back to that twitterstalk. Since I was headed that direction anyway, I stopped by Caffe Trieste. Andrei was done with his coffee and reading one of many books about photography I own but haven’t read.

By the time I got my coffee, there was a not-unattractive woman sitting at the table next to us. Being a messy kid, I asked her where the napkins were and she politely pointed out that they were right behind me. By the time I started drinking and chatting with Andrei about his latest photowalk, another not-unattractive woman sat down across from the first, and I began to feel uncomfortable.

The social situation is two single guys pointedly ignoring two nearby single girls when one such guy (me) already committed the social faux pas of acknowledging the existence of the other party. I hate these situations as talking to women involves a Diffie-Hellman key exchange where God forgot to clue me in on the shared secret.

That is exactly the intense fear that causes your introverted hero to be confused with a social butterfly. So even though the only two things ever to come out of my mouth are either swear words or something I’ll definitely regret, I decided to ask the women if they knew any places nearby that were good to shoot the street photography that Andrei likes to do.

“We’re not from around here.” they said in a clearly English and Australian accent.

If I had any common sense right now I’d shut up, nurse my cafe americano and let Andrei, with his kevorka and clearly Russian accent, cover for me and my crass American accent, but no… “Oh! How long are you here for?”

“We’re here for Burning Man, like last year. Do you go?”

That is when I had to go into a long boring explanation on how, in addition to never having gone, I’ve been too sick and therefore am too behind at work to go this time, despite the fact that all my friends volunteered to help me. No doubt, they, having missed my first goatse, were helpful only so they could gauge my reaction the first time I sight a bunch of naked bicyclists or eat my first ‘shroomed pizza.

Yeah, the conversation went nowhere from there. Thankfully though, the uncomfortable feeling of being rude subsided into the comfortable feeling of knowing I’m still a total geek. Andrei, was unfortunately too tired from spending the morning photographing to bail me out.

Andrei relaxes before his keynote
College Park, Atlanta, Georgia

Leica M8, Cosina-Voigtländer NOKTON 35mm F1.2 Aspherical
1/250sec, iso 320, 35mm (47mm)

Oh yes, and since I forgot to ask those girls’ names, we’ll pretend that one of them was named Ruby just so that I can tag this article and get a couple more gullible people to read this blog entry.

Yes, I waited until after Labor Day to post this. Now that the Ruby developers are back in school, maybe I can get some of them angry enough to tell me how I would have “totally nailed those two English chicks” if I had used Rails instead of PHP.

(“I’m sure you could have wowed them into a night of late static binding if only you had a more elegant Active Record implement(ation) to show them.”)