On Thursday, I broke. I started to panic in the morning. I realized later that it was because I hadn’t had a second to myself since Monday, Feb. 20, because I went to BeMyApp, Angelhack, and PyCon on all the weekends, and had events and classes on all the evenings. I am also doing a lot, and learning a lot. Last week Curtis said, “you are in a growth phase. So much sun! So much water!” (He is a farmer.) And it’s true. But I also have to rest.

Yesterday, I volunteered at blackgirlscode (alice!), and I decided to walk home from the M stop. I walked through Stern Grove, and discovered that the dog park is absolutely ginormous, that there’s a duck pond at the end of it, and that if you come out the other side, you end up at wawona and 34th just north of lakeshore plaza. The duck pond had a lot of mallards, a few black ducks with a white bill that were smaller than mallards, and two bigger gorgeous white ducks with black feathers on their wings and tails.

It was good to walk around in semi-nature for a while. I took a thousand pictures of a banana slug, paths, some blossoms, and of a park bench in front of eucalyptus trees.

Then Elvin came over and we got milk tea, and a whole bunch of us programmed all night. Peterson worked on his graphics engine, Fritz worked on his iOS app idea, and Elvin and I got set him up with rvm, mysql, and rails on ubuntu. We’re starting our new project =) One of our prizes for winning BeMyApp was a free GitHub Bronze organization for a year, so I redeemed it last night, and had to think of an organization name. Judy And Friends seemed too … JudyCentric, but we kind of liked the acronym, so I came up with Just Another Flamingo. So that’s what we’re called on github now. I’m looking forward to working on our logo. Haha…

This morning I woke up panicking again. So Fritz took me to archery at golden gate park, where they have a public range. I haven’t gone to do archery with them for months… not since the last time I wrote about it here. They’ve gone a lot, and acquired new equipment. I think archery is really good for me, because I love form. haha.

I’m trying to relax, and get some perspective back. Also, I have to not fail at Iron Blogging. I almost couldn’t write this post because I have to write about BeMyApp, Angelhack, PyCon, Women Who Code, Sean’s CSS class, and so much more. But if I keep on operating that way (not writing posts because of all the other posts I haven’t written yet), I’ll just continue to never write posts, and that would be terrible, not to mention costly. Just write!

Just live! I’m not perfect. I feel really stressed about that. I need to be okay with being not perfect, and then I’d be able to do so much more.

We won the SF edition of AppOlympics, the BeMyApp weekend hackathon, and are now competing against the winners from Berlin, London, Paris, NY, and Boston! Vote for PlayPitch here: http://appolympics.bemyapp.com/!!!

I have GOT to go to bed, but not before posting about what the heck just happened. PlayPitch is our iPad app that teaches basic music literacy by showing you a real score and using the built-in microphone to listen to you as you play along with any instrument (or voice or whistling), giving you real-time feedback about whether you’re playing the right notes. =) We’ve even got an expressive lion conductor mascot named Gustav Mauler.

It was an incredible weekend… Far and away the BEST thing about the weekend was how well the team worked together. Chiu-Ki and Elvin had never written for iOS before, so Peterson got them up to speed and they were hacking away at full throttle. Peterson and Bosco got elbow-deep into pitch-detection algorithms and FFTs and iOS tools. Late, late, late on Saturday night, we were able to link the two sides together. Here’s the result:

Check out Chiu-Ki’s AMAZING post here: http://blog.sqisland.com/2012/02/bemyapp-hackathon.html

Follow us at:

• Website (for now): http://playpit.ch (I just got playpitchapp.com too)
• @playpitchapp
• facebook.com/playpitch
• On the AppOlympics voting site

I went through an ordeal last night.

I was at Eudemonia for BATLL IX (Starcraft tourney!!) all day, and caught the last BART home. I got off at Daly City and walked towards the cab line. I was fourth in the group of passengers. The first two passengers got in to taxis without incident. The third passenger waved me ahead of him, so I was up, but there were two taxis at the “front” of the line — it seemed that one of the taxis was trying to cut (or maybe he was just trying to save space since there was a big influx of passengers coming out of the last BART) so the driver of the taxi closer to the curb was really pissed. He yelled at the passenger in front of me (who was waving me forward) to get in the car, saw that he was waving me forward, then yelled at me, “where are you going? Which of you is going farther?”

This made me not want to get into his car. I mean, I understand that in order to survive in a capitalist society, you have to take the fare that’ll get you more money instead of wasting your time with one that doesn’t go very far. It was just really abrasive.

I told him where I was going. He yelled at me to get in again and repeatedly. I got in. Instead of taking off, he cussed out the driver immediately to his right (the one that looked like he was “cutting”) and ended with “get the fuck out nigga”. This incensed the other driver such that he pulled ahead suddenly to block my taxi from leaving, effectively pinning us to the curb. So my driver got out of the car to cuss him out some more. I considered getting out of the car, but was paralyzed. Driver got back in the car. Other driver didn’t budge (so we couldn’t move anyway). My driver got out of the car to yell some more obscenities at the other guy.

At that point I finally got out. I walked away quickly and turned my back on the driver who was yelling at me to get back into the car. At this point, passenger #3 (the one who’d waved me forward) was still just waiting passively, and there was a fifth passenger who saw an opportunity to play the two warring drivers against each other. “He’ll take me to Oakland for $60,” he said to the allegedly cutting driver. “What’ll you take me there for?” Then he said, “This guy’s cutting,” pointing at the guy he’d just been talking to. “Nobody get in this motherfucker’s cab.”

I walked briskly away and went out of line of sight so that the driver would stop yelling at me to get into his car. I briefly considered going backwards in line but the other drivers were getting out of their cars to see what the commotion was about. It wasn’t worth it. I walked to the now-closed bart-station and yelled through the grate at the departing station agents: “What should we do if the taxi drivers are fighting?” Their receding backs said, “If they’re fighting, call the police” and zero fucks were given. I guess it happens all the time. And I can’t really blame them, they were off shift. I felt scared and alone.

I called Fritz to get him to pick me up. He hurried here. But as I was waiting, the driver whose car I was in briefly kept yelling at me, so I walked farther away. He went around the station to get closer to me and kept yelling for me to get in his car, so I walked across to the other side of the station. He then went around AGAIN to yell “I’m so sorry,” and try to get me to come to him, and I was freaked the fuck out. He left right as Fritz arrived.

I’m done travelling at night. I’m also buying a fucking car.

Also, this is cutting it really close for Iron Blogger, but I made it in before 3am!