Tuesday morning we woke up early and headed over to Blue Bottle for some state-of-the-art-of coffee. If you like coffee and you're ever in San Francisco, it's simply a must-visit. When Apple events are in town, the line out front of Blue Bottle is often a long and filled with geeks as the lines to get into the sessions.
Once we were fueled up, we drove up to Petaluma to the TWiT cottage. It's about a 60 minute drive from San Francisco, and if you've ever heard of a little movie called Star Wars, you might recognize the area you pass by as Skywalker Ranch country, where George Lucas lives and works. Sadly, no Wookies, Ewoks, Hutts, or Storm Troopers could be seen from roadside.
We got to Petaluma early so hit up Hallie's Diner for breakfast. It was good and the staff was friendly, immediately asking if we were there for TWiT. I guess our geek-force betrayed us. At around 10:30, we headed over to the TWiT brick house.
Tech News Today was still shooting when we arrived, with Sarah Lane and Iyaz Akhtar talking about the future potential for DRM-free box with Tom Merrit who, sadly, wasn't in studio today.
Pretty soon we set up for MacBreak Weekly and I got to feel what it was like sitting at the table in real life, as opposed to as a disembodied head floating above it. In a word, spectacular. Leo Laporte, Alex Lindsay, Andy Ihnatko and I then spent the next couple of hours talking about everything Apple.
Following the show, our producer, Chad Johnson gave us a tour of the TWiT facilities, which look like something out of Industrial Lights and Magic. There are a bunch of sets upstairs in the main studio, along with a few offices and a kitchen. Downstairs there's a tricaster room and a server room. TWiT's brains.
Alex gave us a tour of Pixel Corps, which shares the same building. Pixel Corps looks like Seal Team 6 of video production. Almost any way of pushing motion pictures through digital pipes is there, and they're continuously working on ever more bleeding edge, absolutely McGyver-like solutions for doing it better. You can almost see them grabbing a pack of cameras, laptops, and interconnects and jumping out of planes while Alex yells "Go! Go! Go!""
On the way back from Petaluma, we stopped off on both sides of the Golden Gate Bridge to take in the sunset. No words can do that justice, so...
I did manage to sneak an epic meta shot of Martin doing one of his epic "The Stance" self-portraits. (Note the iPhone and Gorilla Pod in the foreground).
Martin took a bunch more photos with his Canon 5D Mark III, both at TWiT and at the bridge, as well as some video of me hijacking the MacBreak Weekly set and going on the tour. Look for it soon, right here!
Tomorrow we're heading out to Cupertino. Again, I'll blog about that later, or you can follow me on Twitter to watch it unfold in real -- sometimes farcical -- time.
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