San Francisco

Wherever I go in San Francisco, I find an average of 10 open networks. Two or three of them are free, and not encrypted. If I prefer, I can go in a Cafe’ as a Bedouin and work there. There I can call for free everywhere in the world. If you have grown up with the Italian telephonic fares, with the local calls time-based (TUT), then you see this as heaven.

Two years ago Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco, said: “We will not stop until every San Franciscan has access to free wireless Internet service”. From 2008, there will be a big, free wireless network that will be open and free for everyone.

Rome

In Italy, a little bastard law says that everyone should have the copy of the ID of the people that are surfing the web with his network. This way the Italians close their wi-fi networks.

Sometimes, one of the Italian crazy politicians says something good. Then you can hear Walter Veltroni, mayor of Rome, telling us that, in the center of Rome, there is wi-fi connection free for everyone. Great. Then guess what? It is limited to one hour a day. Guess why? “Because people can illegally download music from the net“.

Palermo

I want to rush it, but then I find another news from Palermo. Diego Cammarata, mayor of Palermo, meets a lot of people with Silvio Berlusconi. Can you guess what he said? That “In five years everyone in Palermo will have water at home 24/7“.

Photo credit: vkdir

Photos: here. Videos: Critical Mass, Massers, Bicycle Accident, Golden Gate Park Cork e Tunnel Adrenaline

In the last 15 years, on the last Friday of the month, San Francisco’s bicyclists meet up to demonstrate that cities can be for bicycles, too.

The event is called Critical Mass. The main idea is easy: meet up as a group and go around in the city. But when the cyclists are 4000 or more and they ride all together, there is the chaos: a critical mass that blocks the city. The critical mass movement has no leaders. At each corner in the ride, the group decides where to go. Everything seems to be casual.

Media coverage is intense: six television trucks, five helicopters, an airplane and a fixed television cameramen at the start.

I’ve seen every type of bicycle, I think (A bird, a bmw bike, a rickshaw, bikes that can be ridden lying, an old bicycle ridden by the world famous soccer player Zola, High bicycles and double bicycles). A lot of people wear strange costumes or hats like this hammer hat and this petroleum field hat. The cops were riding, too. I made a video with a patchwork of massers: video

If you ask the massers why they are causing all this traffic, they just say: “We do not cause traffic, we are traffic”. The base idea is to go around the city riding a bike. But what can they do with red signal lights? The way they developed is what they call corking. Only the head of the big mass halts on red lights, then some massers block the intersection, staying in front of the cars. Other massers give change to the corkers, until every bike in the group is passed. Some people were asking the police to stop the corking of the massers, but most of them are happy with the massers. Sometimes a driver will start to become afraid and will start to honk their horn. If it happens, all the riders start to laugh and scream.

Sometimes, all the massers stop in an intersection. Yesterday, it was two times. The first was at an intersection with an highway. The second was when the riders met a motorcycle group. There began to develop a little tension then, because the motorcyclists started to burn their tires on the road. Then, each biker went down and started to lift the bicycles up, often with much screaming. Here is the movie.

The whole event was 4 hours long: We started at 6 p.m. from Embarcadero heading to Fisherman’s Wharf along North Beach. Then we headed to downtown and then to Golden Gate Park and finally back in the Haight neighborhood. Then two or three laps around Union Square, screaming like Indians in battlecry. At the end, we were still along Market Street heading toward Mission, where we ended tired on the grass of Dolores Park. At the end, it was 9:30 p.m.. We had ridden 20 miles. Video.

When the world famous San Francisco’s slopes descend, it is very fear-provoking. Everyone goes down very fast, screaming. You think that if one cyclist crashes, then everyone can go over the top of him. At first, I started to film the descent, but at the first down slope, I had an accident. Here is the movie of the accident. I hurt my right elbow and my left leg. My jeans were torn (I’ll not send the photos of injury). At that point I decided to put two hands on the bicycle and put away the camera, but at night there was a great descending tunnel. I filmed it here.

It’s great to think that the massers say that they want a city better for bicycling. If you hear it and you come from the metropolitan Roman Jungle, you want to laugh. By the way, next big critical mass is the 25, 26 and 27 of May: The Rome interplanetary Critical Mass.

Still events 2.0 waiting the big one: Web 2.0 Expo 2007 that starts Sunday.

Wednesday I went to the Google Campus to attend a Usability 2.0 conference. Today it seems that if you don’t call something “2.0″ , then you are a nerd. There I heard Sean Kane with Netflix, Jon Wiley with Google and Luke Wroblewski with Yahoo. A lot of the guilty came from each part of the Silicon Valley. One asked me if I was coming from Rome just for this event. Politely I said that it would be a little too much. Here are the event photos (a nice one is the sushi on surf).

Thursday night at Crossroad Cafe’ there was the Sflickr meeting: the meeting of the San Francisco’s Flickr users. At a photographer meeting, one should take photos, but I thought that a lot of photos would have to be taken and that a video was more original.

My jacket without sleeves let people think that Iwas a real “pro” photographer, but when they saw my photo machine everything became more amateur.

Last weekend I attended a lot of events.

Thursday I went to hear live music: Richard Buckner at Cafe du Nord.

Friday I spotted the Grand National Rodeo at Cow Palace, followed by a country music performance. The rodeo was really funny and Gary Allan’s music wasn’t bad.

Saturday I was riding around in the neighboorhood of the AT&T Baseball Park and I decided to go to see the game. I’ve played Baseball for years in Italy but I had never seen a live American game. When I went in line, a man gave me an extra ticket as a gift. I tried to give some money to the man, but he politely said no. When I left the game, I found that I had attached my helmet to a pole without the bicycle that was standing there free of the chain.

Then at night, I went to see The Frames, an Irish band that was really great. If they come to your city, go to see them. I think that Saturday was my lucky day, because when I was in line outside of the historic Fillmore, another man gave me an extra ticket as a gift, just the same as happened in the morning at the baseball game. I tried to pay him but he too did not want money. I don’t understand but maybe here in America, people always take an extra ticket to give it at someone in the line…