Around 11 I went down to Polk and North Point to catch the 30 Stockton, and my timing was serendipitous. It was idling a block away on its half-terminus on Van Ness, and shortly revved up to set about its appointed route, as did I. ;-) My pleasant chore: to get to downtown, near the Moscone Center, and find Central Computers, where to obtain a cheap wired USB-A keyboard for my M1 Mac Mini (given to me by Fed some years ago) which had been lying dormant for a while now (since when my time at Finalis came to an end, in the spring of last year). Lately, I thought... why not go all-out on the agentic/coding aspects of the frontier models and use it as a platform/substrate for IM? ::chuckle:: And so, finding the old bluetooth keyboard I used with it as well and truly defunct, I needed a new one. Hence today's walkabout start.

This is on Columbus Avenue in North Beach, just before the turn right to Stockton Street and Chinatown proper; thought the ziggurats of the Transamerica Pyramid and the Salesforce Tower an iconic thing to capture for posterity, at this intersection. A block further down is, of course, the legendary City Lights Bookstore, beating heart of the Beat Generation, even as Lawrence Ferlinghetti is no longer with us (he passed away soon after I returned to the Bay Area, and I recall making a pilgrimage to the bookstore to see the memorials for him on the sidewalk and storefront.

A thing I enjoy doing is to stick my iPhone out of the bus' small window (the one near the ceiling), having set my Camera app to wide-angle, to capture the passing panorama outside. The frame on one edge is, of course, the side of the bus itself, capture by the horizontally ample angle... but most of it is the scenery outside the bus. This one was of a block of Stockton Street, as we passed through Chinatown; pretty typical, with the shops and Asian pedestrians and all but, looking back on this one now, I'm thrilled with the serendipity of the name "Sun Sang," given recent uhm... solar... developments hereabouts. ::chuckle::

All I needed was an inexpensive, uber-functional USB-A keyboard to use with my M1 Mac Mini, and Central Computers was, as its wont and legend, open on Sundays. Hooray! There were many a type and model of keyboards, but I browsed the discount rack and found these UNITEK ones, the least expensive of which was $14.95 in shekels (!). The kind salesguy opened the sealed box for me, when I said I wanted to feel its action first, if they had a floor model of it (which they didn't); and it turned out just fine... no wobbles or cheap looseness of keys. This'll suit me juuust great.

I hadn't gone looking for an embrace... but one found me anyway. The city gave me one, in the form of that plinth there — a street corner cultural display depicting a word in Tagalog, yakap and rendered in Baybayin, the ancient script of the language. This 3-4 block square area of downtown San Francisco was a cultural hub of Filipinos and Filipino-Americans back in the early 20th century and as such the city had local artists memorialize it with these linguistic artifacts, scattered around the various intersections here. There are even streets nearby named after Filipino national heroes such as Rizal, Bonifacio, Mabini.