Caffe `Roma Early Saturday Morning

Got up at 6, came into city early (thru foggy coastal dawn) to hang out at Caffe `Roma before going to a 9:30 Rolfing appointment (am in dire need some structural integration). And here, folks, at this moment, is the essence of nerd-dom, I’m wi-fi’g it with a MacBook Pro (13″) laptop and listening to first bluegrass, now blues via Sirius satellite radio playing on an iPad with earphones. A long time comin’ but it’s all working now.

The above pic is a combo of two panoramas shot with a Sony Cybershot in my favorite North Beach cafe.

I tell you, this is so much fun, to explore the world, shoot photos and broadcast them like this. Baby, I’ve come a long way since I caught the essence of journalism from Captain Jack Patterson, our Lowell High School journalism teacher. Get the 5 “w’s” in the first paragraph,etc. The bug bit.

Two things:

1. The tiny houses book is already way more than I anticipated. The material is more diverse than a book of just my photos, and it’s opening up new layout avenues. Got maybe 44 pages more or less ready. Putting pages together totally randomly. The book shapes itself.

2. The iPad is just a marvel. With 3G I can get on anywhere there’s cell phone reception. The battery is 8-10 hours. 24-hour non-commercial music alone is worth the price of admission. As I am ready to hit “Publish Post,” Junior Wells is singing his tribute to Sonny Boy Williamson,”Help Me,” a beautiful song!

Greetings from San Francisco…

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

2 Responses to Caffe `Roma Early Saturday Morning

  1. In so many ways we're living in some kind of incomprehensible magic.

    Who woulda thunk it, back in the old days?

    And yet, I think the kids of today who are used to all this tek might be using cast iron cookware and wood stoves with nary a wifi signal on the planet, fifty years from now. Maybe.

  2. After I showed my husband your video about 'Shelter', I mentioned that you had a blog and he wondered if you were as good with technology as you were on the longboard.

    I guess his question has been answered.

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