The San Francisco Call, Saturday, November: Fill & Download for Free

Here we go! A ton of ideas to help you plan an epic weekend in San Francisco.Take your date sailing on a catamaran under the Golden Gate Bridge. I recommend Adventure Cat - they have extremely affordable tickets.Trouble Coffee! Here's the thing to do. Buy a coconut. Buy a cappuccino. Buy a Texas French cinnamon toast. Then, take a bite of the toast, followed by a sip of cappuccino, followed by a sip of fresh coconut water. It's amazing.Grab a bottle of Bruce Cost's Ginger Ale and a fresh peach at Bi-Rite Grocery. Head towards Dolores Park on a sunny Saturday afternoon and plant yourself at the corner of 20th & Church Street where you can sit, enjoy your drink, and contemplate life as you take in some of the most gorgeous and relaxing views of the city.Buy a cigar at Grant's Tobacconist. Walk up Nob Hill from California Ave and when you reach the classy Huntington Park, light it up and enjoy while sitting on a bench in front of the fountain. Then check out Grace Cathedral next door and the side-courtyard with the fountain.Take your date and walk up to Russian Hill Place (Vallejo St. & Florence St.) and check out the lovely mansions and their manicured gardens. Walk all the way to the end of the Cul De Sac, stand on the balcony, and take in the views. Then peek around the corner and go down the staircase - you'll see even more houses and gardens. Keep going through Ina Coolbirth Park until you reach Vallejo St. Grab dinner in Chinatown or Little Italy - whichever strikes your fancy.Continue through Vallejo until you see Caffe Trieste (Vallejo & Grant) - my favorite North Beach Cafe. If you make it here on a Saturday afternoon you'll run into an Italian instrumental and operatic performance.If you're in SOMA, check out South Park. It's a cozy, quiet alcove filled with lovely trees and benches. Perfect place to have a weekday lunch. Grab an espresso at Caffe Centro and walk around the oval. This park is famous for all the start-ups that originated in the area and serves as a quiet and peaceful escape from the bustle of King St.Also in SOMA, drop by Ritch Street during a week day around noon. On one end, there's Cafe Cento. They brew blue bottle and I recommend their Iced Cento drink. Next to Cento is Farmer Brown's Little Skillet and people tend to like their chicken & waffles, but I prefer the grits and sausage. Enjoy your southern comfort food and blue bottle in the sun while sitting on the ledge outside.On the other end of Ritch Street there's a high-quality cafe called Cafe Darwin. Everything on their menu is fresh, local, organic, prepared with attention to detail and downright delicious. They have a thing for French cuisine. I guess you could call it "Frenchfranciscan"! If you're feeling "healthy", grab one of their famous kale salads. If you're feeling cold from the fog, grab a cappuccino and a nutella-mascarpone baguette.Get legitimate off-the-beaten-path Asian food on Clement Street. Burmese, Indonesian, Malaysian, Cantonese - it's all there. Also drop by Green Apple Books (check out their Used Book annex if you want to save money and buy a book in top condition) and lose yourself in a book while enjoying bubble tea.Mojo Bicycle Cafe! If you are by Alamo Square Park, be sure to drop by Mojo Bicycle Cafe, an incredibly cute coffee bicycle shop that really comes to life after 5pm. The neighborhood comes here for beer, sangria, and great conversation in the evening.Corona Heights! A pretty hill with a gorgeous vista that doesn't get many visitors outside of dog owners chilling in the adjacent doggy park. I recommend walking down Masonic Ave to get there and enjoying the beautiful mansions along the way. I love this park, it's surrounded by a lovely stair-cased part of town filled with cherry blossoms.Anthony's Cookies on 25th and Valencia! I highly recommend Cookie Dough, Peanut Butter, and Toffee Chip flavors. They go well with a bottle of Strauss milk.For a great night out in the Mission, I recommend Revolution Cafe on 22nd and Bartlett. Grab a beer or wine and enjoy live music and performances every night of the week. It's an intimate, fun, lively setting - where all us locals go. :)MISSION DISTRICT ESPRESSO BAR HOPPINGGrab a few friends and get one drink per place to taste.Ritual RoastersThe baristas at Ritual are extremely skilled and make everything incredibly well. If you've never had a non-Starbucks macchiato and you're feeling adventurous, Ritual is the perfect place to try your first one.Otherwise, I recommend any of their sweet tooth espressos and their heavenly pour-over coffees.Philz at 24th and FolsomGet a Jacob's with medium cream and medium sugar if you're there for the first time.For your second time, try a Tesora.For your third time, try a Philtered Soul.If you're a Philz connoisseur and Phil is there, ask him to make you one of his secret blends. If not, ask for a Four Great Horses.If you're a Philz connoisseur and a patisserie lover, drop by Knead Patisserie next door and enjoy a pastry. Knead is hidden in the very back of Local: Mission Eatery. On weekday mornings they often have a cart right outside the restaurant. Every single thing I've tried there is made in heaven.Four Barrel - Caledonia AlleyOn the weekends, get your macchiato from Caledonia Alley in the back of Four Barrel.Grand CoffeeIf you're by the 24th St BART station, I highly recommend Grand on Mission and 23rd. They often make four barrel coffee better than four barrel.They also have amazing pastries from Knead Patisserie.Rodger's CoffeeHidden on 20th and San Carlos is an incredible Philz-style pour over place called Rodger's. They have pretty incredible coffee here.I highly recommend Morning Ritual, Fog Lifter, and Jet Fuel (in that order). I have tried every single blend of theirs and these three are the best!NIGHT LIFE: CLASSY LOUNGESHere are three swanky lounges where you can impress your date with your great taste in cigars and hard liquor. Herradura, anyone? :)Cigar BarCigar Bar is a lounge, bar, and restaurant with - yes - cigars, latin dancing, and live music. Lively ambiance, high energy.25 LuskA swanky lounge in SOMA with a great ambiance, no cover, wide selection of drinks, and lots of comfortable places to sit. Great place to sit close to your date.Chambers Eat + DrinkI love their BE AMAZING lights at the bar. I also love the heterogeneity of the crowd here - lots of different people from different places. Chambers feels like your classy friend's swanky living room and they also have a pool in the back. Great place for a group or a date, no cover at the door, and you can dress fairly casual, too.JonesJones has an incredible outdoor patio and garden lounge. Jones really comes alive and is very sexy at night. I asked the bartender to surprise me with a mixed drink and I don't remember what it was (yup, it was a good night) but it was damn good. And it had a thin orange peel on the bottom.

I’ve been meaning to write something up about this Meetup since it happened, sitting on drafts of this answer for going on six months now. Hopefully my thoughts have not lost relevance in the intervening time.The people I met at the San Francisco Quora meetup in November 2017 were great. I had met Kyler Murray and Leonid S. Knyshov previously in 2016 at Pre-Holiday Meetup: Tues, Dec 13 at Quora HQ in Mountain View; there were perhaps half a dozen other folks I hadn’t met before: Miral Patel, Thomas Ulrich, and some others whose names I no longer recall.However, I have to admit that I came away with a feeling of disappointment — not for what this meetup was, but because of what it could have been. I’m sure it wasn’t the smallest of the World Meetup events, but it feels like it might have been, relative to the number of active and prominent members of Quora in the area, right here in Quora’s own backyard in the heart of Silicon Valley.To begin with, organization of the Meetup on Who is going to the Quora World Meetup in San Francisco, CA on Nov. 11, 2017? was kind of a fiasco. I saw this coming in the days leading up to the event, and commented upon it in a blog post here: Meetup Organization. No one in the community sprung forth to take charge and organize the event, though I can’t criticize anyone too badly for this, because neither did I. I was surprised not to see any activity from any of Quora’s Writer Relations staff, given that this even was likely closer for some of them than their own office was. However, as I described in my blog post, competing proposed events sprung up in San Francisco and Mountain View, competing epicenters of the Bay Area some 40 miles apart. The questions establishing these proposals then saw repeated merges and un-merges, with mindless involvement from the Quora Content Review bot, and also without comment by Hannah Long from Quora’s Writer Relations team. Quora’s question-answer platform is really not a great solution for this kind of discussion and organization process, even with the Answer Wiki functionality to hopefully capture the conclusions.Ultimately, the Mountain View meetup activity seems to have evaporated, and a venue was selected in San Francisco, at a restaurant on the waterfront in the Dogpatch called “The Ramp”. As soon as I started to look into it on their website, this set off some red flags for me:The Saturday night in question was listed as “Salsa Night” at the restaurant, which meant:There was a $10 cover charge for each person just to get in.The restaurant would be restricted to ages 21+ rather than all-ages, preventing younger members of Quora from attending at all.There would be loud music playing, which would not be conducive to the kinds of conversation expected in a Quora Meetup.A large portion of the restaurant would be taken over by a dance floor, likely pushing our group outside on a November evening.This location was not particularly convenient to any of the transit services in the Bay Area, which would have been nice to help draw farther-flung members into San Francisco.However, there was no effective way for me to bring up those concerns, because the user Ryan Borker who selected it had Quora messages disabled (and ultimately never showed up to the meetup?), and the question was locked within 24 hours by Quora Moderation because “meetup week”(?), preventing any subsequent edits to the Answer Wiki. This action by Moderation is particularly baffling because it doesn’t seem to have occurred on any of the other Quora World Meetup event questions; I suppose arbitrary and capricious and un-appealable actions by Quora Moderation are par for the course, though. I was still surprised to see the utter lack of involvement from any Quora employees, for whom this Meetup would be right in their backyard.Despite my misgivings, I made my way to Caltrain on Saturday evening and walked the 15 minutes to the restaurant from the 22nd Street station. I was carded and paid my $10 cover charge (as I feared), and wandered in to the edge of the dance floor. I thought I spotted a likely group outside, but I wanted to grab a drink before getting drawn into conversation, so I headed to the (crowded) bar and waited a bit to get my beer. Between the sparse train schedule and this activity, it was probably just after 6 P.M. when I pulled up, after the official start time of 5:00, but I think well within the “fashionably late” realm.Catching up with the group outside, around a couple of round tables awkwardly pushed together, labeled by some of the “Quora swag” (a logo-printed reusable shopping bag) spread out, I pulled up a chair and introduced myself to everyone. As I mentioned above, I had meet Kyle and Leonid previously in Mountain View (and was actually briefly mistaken for a Top Writer on that account, though the previous event had not been Top-Writer exclusive and I have never been so “blessed”).I don’t recall all the details of the conversations, but a few highlights remain, and speak to some of the challenges with this meetup:Kyle went around the table in an attempt at an icebreaker, asking about what other Quora users each of us would like to meet. However, since most of us write on very different subjects and have very different circles of followers and people we follow, the response to most names people offered was, “Sorry, never heard of them.” This is not a productive start to a conversation.There actually are quite a few prominent Quora members in the Bay Area I would have loved to meet, some of whom actually listed their names on the meetup organization page, but most of whom were ultimately no-shows.About the only Quora-wide topic we could even begin to discuss was the then-current drama regarding Kanwal Anuvind[1] — but even then nobody at the meetup was particularly engaged in the matter, it was just the one thing most people had at least heard about.I brought up some of the meta-Quora discussion I’d been involved with, on Topic Gnomery and The Insurgency and Bug? or Feature? and (formerly) Space. I figured this might at least be a common thread among us, but between the variability of Quora’s UI-change rollouts and peoples’ level of attention to these matters it didn’t really take off.The real kicker was when I excused myself to go get a second beer, a little after 7 P.M. I returned from the bar perhaps 5 minutes later to find that the Quora group had entirely evaporated! I never did find out what happened, other than guessing that perhaps my stepping away acted as a catalyst for everyone else to find something better to do with their evening. I think I did briefly see Leonid engaged in salsa on the dance floor (as he describes in his own answer here), but he was engrossed in that and I didn’t see anyone else around. I nursed my fresh beer looking out over the Bay (which was a nice, if chilly, view), and started to head back for the train a little after 7:30. Not a great showing for an event scheduled to run until 9 P.M.As I mentioned above, I was disappointed in this Quora World Meetup, as nice as it was to talk with the people who did attend. A bad choice of venue, bad organization and leadership, and a lack of ways to actually tie together the Quora Community as it stands today, were all contributing problems. Despite the great number of prominent figures on Quora here in the San Francisco Bay Area, on balance Quora does not form much of a focus for an identity in this environment, perhaps different from other regions around the world that had more successful meetups.Enthusiasm for this event was also likely dampened by Who is going to the 2017 Top Writers Open House at Quora HQ in Mountain View on Friday, November 3? happening just over a week prior, satiating those users’ interest in participating in the Quora community, and leaving the rest of us relatively adrift. The arbitrary system of recognition for Quora Top Writers very much leaves the community fractured into Haves and Have-Nots.Footnotes[1] Breaking News: Kanwal vs. Pratik

Interesting Youtube Statistics and Facts you should know:1. Parents of YouTubeYouTube is the mastermind of Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. They created it in 2005 when they were all employees at PayPal2. How YouTube was bornThe idea came to its founders at a dinner party at Steve Chen’s place in San Francisco when due to some email attachment error they were not able to share the videos of the party that night. It is also said that the infamous wardrobe malfunction of Janet Jackson also set the launching point of YouTube as Jawed Karim was not able to find its footage.3. Funds for YouTubeAs mentioned above the three founders of YouTube were PayPal employees. They used the bonuses that all three of them received during the EBay buyout of PayPal.4. Original intentionNote that initially, YouTube was meant to be a dating website but as the destiny played its own games, what we got today is simply amazing.5. Domain name misunderstandingThe domain name YouTube was registered on Valentine’s Day in 2005 and the name was all goofed up as “ **Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment**”. Later the company changed its domain name as **UTubeonline** and the confusion among the customers/users of both the companies was cleared.6. Grabbed by Big fishBeing a smart player in the market it was Google who could catch the potential of this video sharing website and offered huge $ 1.65 billion in the very next year of the inception of YouTube. They sealed the deal in November 2006.** **7. First videoMe at the zooThe very first video on YouTube was launched at 8:27PM on Saturday April 23rd, 2005 where one of the co-founder Jawed Karim posted the video of his visit to the San Diego Zoo. Karim talked about elephant’s trunks in this video titled “Me at zoo”.8. April fool’s day prankRick Astley - Never Gonna Give You UpYouTube started April fool’s day pranks in 2008. Post that every year they successfully do it. In 2008 prank, all the links to the videos on the main page were redirected to Rick Astley’s music video “Never Gonna Give You Up”, also known as “Rickrolling” prank. Prank of 2009 was classic; they turned the page upside down when user clicked a video and they call it a new page layout.Similarly down the years, this year they tied up with a newspaper satire company “The Onion” and claimed that the video sharing website was launched as a contest and now it is over. Winners will be announced and you won’t believe the video of two presenters announcing all this was streamed live for 12 hours.9. Most Poplar video (musical)PSY - GANGNAM STYLE(강남스타일) M/VThe most viewed video (music) on YouTube is the music video of the song “Gangnam Style” by PSY which was posted on July 15, 2012. It became the first YouTube video to receive over 1 billion views on December 21, 2012. Number of views currently is 1.7B and is still growing.10. Number of hitsYouTube crossed 1 Trillion hits in 2011 which means 140 views per person alive on earth11. Length of videosThere are over 7,000 hours of full-length movies and shows on YouTube and its continuously growing.12. BusinessYouTube has signed over 10,000 advertising partners to date, including Disney, Turner, Univision and Channel 4 and Channel 5. Thousands of partners are making six figures a year. Currently, there are over a million members of the YouTube Partner Program.13. UsageYouTube usage is tremendous; YouTube videos of length around 500 years are watched every single day on Facebook.14. UsersMore than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month.15. Audience nationalityOnly 30% of YouTube’s traffic comes from USA. Other countries contribute 70% of the traffic.16. Uploading frequency100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. It has been found that more videos are uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years.17. High Definition contentYouTube has more HD content than any other online video site.18. Time needed to watch all videosIt is said that it would take over 1,700 years to watch all the video content on YouTube.19. Global SpreadOwing to its high global presence, the site is localized in 56 countries and available in 61 different languages.20. Top most superhero of YouTube till todayBatman is the most popular of all superheroes on YouTube, with more than 3 billion views of 71,000 hours of video.Source : 21 Mind-Blowing YouTube Facts And Numbers