I feel like I’m just starting to get the hang of San Francisco, I’m finally finding good sources to upcoming events, just starting to find the hidden nook and cranny spots, and just starting to feel comfortable in a city filled with so much stuff to do it would take me a lifetime to feel like I know the city through and through. I really and truly love this city, and I don’t see how anyone couldn’t. San Francisco is frickin’ awesome.

But at the same time I miss my friends from Milwaukee ever so dearly. Luckily, I’ve been pretty busy this past month. I’ve had a couple of my roommates from Milwaukee visit and my girlfriend Cassie visit again. I even went back to Milwaukee for a long weekend to go to a crawfish broil my girlfriend’s dad has every year (definitely worth it) and to find an apartment to live in when I come back. I’ve had a few small doses of Milwaukee and its definitely help me keep me sane. And I can’t wait to be back.

So now that I’m starting to look back on what I’ve done here I’ve found that I have DEFINITELY learned a buttload from this experience. I want to share it all with you, maybe if you’re considering studying abroad or making a new start in a city all by yourself this can help you out!

1. IGNORANCE IS NOT BLISS. BE AWARE. BE SAFE. BE SMART.

San Francisco is one giant pot of culture, new trends, and general ‘out-there’ness. It is easy to take one quick look at the city and think that everyone is so happy, so friendly (and probably so stoned) that they could never hurt you. NOT TRUE. If you’ve read my past blog posts you should know that I know better than anyone the moment you let your guard down, you’re likely going to be taken advantage of.

Whether you believe it or not, walking by yourself through the Mission, Market District, or really anywhere after a bar at 2AM is dangerous. It doesn’t matter that it rarely happens. The fact of the matter is that it can happen, and you don’t want to give anyone the opportunity.

Just be aware of your surroundings. Don’t carry expensive electronics around with you if you don’t have to, always hold on to your bag/purse, and don’t go out without making sure 100% you know how to get home. It’s really common sense but its easy to be taken in by the awe of the city and assume that you are safe. Just be conscience of your surroundings and never present the opportunity for someone to take advantage of you.

I <3 SF Stolen Bike Shirt from Headline Shirts

2. IT IS GOING TO BE UNCOMFORTABLE AT FIRST.

When I was getting ready to move to San Francisco I expected to come out, meet tons of people, and basically have crazy party fun time every night. Now, not to say I haven’t had crazy party fun times, but it hasn’t been as easy as I thought it would be.

When I moved out here, I literally knew NO ONE in the city. I have a relative that lives in nearby San Bruno, but nobody in the city. Going out and meeting people without having any connections can be awkward. Its really easy to plan something and back out the last minute because you feel uncomfortable or scared its not going to be what you want it to be. You really have to just put yourself out there and go DO stuff. You’ll never make friends by hibernating inside of your room. I know I’m not the only one that feels this way, but honestly just go out and do stuff, its almost always going to be worth it.

Annie Gaus (former intern, current part timer) and I representing

3. EXPLORE. EXPLORE. EXPLORE.

Find the resources as soon as possible for you to get the pulse on what’s going on in the city. Here are a few of the places I check for events in San Francisco.

• Twitter: Follow as many people as you can in the city. You never know who’s going to have a spur of the moment meetup or who’s going to tweet out an event you’d enjoy.
• Daily Newspapers: There’s a daily newspaper that I grab everyday on my way to work on the bus. There’s listings for at least 4 or 5 events EVERY DAY. You’re bound to be able to find something you like.
• Social Networking/Event Websites (SFist, Thrillist, Yelp, Facebook, Going, Last.fm, Etc.): Find the websites that broadcast events that are close to you. I have yet to find the one definitive place to find everything I want in one place, so your bound to need to do some deep investigating to find the websites that you’ll want to look at. I found lots of websites through Google Reader’s recommendation blogs, but a lot of the other websites is just through searching and exploring the internets.
• Local Postings: Keep your eyes open when you’re on the streets for signs, little pamphlets, and bulletin boards where you can get find many hidden gems In fact the coffee shop I’m at right now has a bulletin board I’m going to need to check out before I leave!

And hey, if you somehow manage to not be able to find anything, just GET OUT! Grab your camera and just walk, take the bus, anything to go explore the city. Its rewarding, trust me

4. MAKE CONNECTIONS.

Whenever you DO get out and go do stuff. Introduce yourself to people and make connections with them. Get their twitter username, add them as friends on facebook, whatever you can do to stay in contact with them. Even if you don’t know them very well or feel stupid doing so, connect with them. You never know when an opportunity might arise to go hang out with them again.

From a Cali Lewis/Geekbrief meetup I went to

5. FOCUS ON THE POSITIVE.

If you ever do get down, and chances are that you will, don’t dwell on it. It was especially very easy for me to get down when I was reminded everyday by my girlfriend of all the stuff I was missing in Milwaukee. You can’t let the reminder of what you’re missing at home ruin the experience you are having. I really did have to sit myself down sometimes and just say out loud all of the positive things I had going on for me. “Ryan dude, you’re in San Francisco, working for REVISION3, you’re life is frickin’ awesome!” Just don’t let homesickness take over, because its easy to let it.

6. ITS EXPENSIVE.

Before I came out here I calculated how much money I would need based on my rent ($900/mo for a place in SoMa), food expenses (like $200/month), car payment ($300/mo), and random purchases I wanted to make out here. I was pretty close but I really thought that I was overestimating how much I was going to spend, but I ended up spending about a grand more than I thought I would. You’re going to want to have money for special events, going out to eat, going out for drinks, etc. If you want to do whatever you want, be prepared to spend a LOT of money.

7. WORK HARD!

If you’re going to be doing an internship or something, you’ve got 3 months to show the company what you’ve got. When I started at Revision3 I was officially working like 20 hours a week. I still came in every day of the week from 9-5. I just wanted to be there and LEARN. I wanted to work there just for the fun of it. When you really care about your job, it shows. And these are the sorts of things you want to be remembered for. And don’t forget to have fun too! If you have the chance, go out with co-workers after work, stay at the office late and help out if you can, get involved in more projects. Part of the reason I was upgraded from part time to pretty much full time at Revision3 was because I put myself out there and started asking if I could help around the office. Ron saw my eagerness to help out and once the other intern quit I got the job no questions asked. Pure awesomeness.

Whatever… Comic Book Store

Well, hopefully that was mildly interesting and helpful. See you all in Milwaukee on after August 18th!

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So pretty much the entire time here I’ve been working on their network monitoring system, trying to optimize the way it displays things and take advantage of all the different features the system has to offer. I’ve also been helping encode and upload the actual shows that we put out. I love all of it. Not only have I learned a lot of really cool stuff about unix and network monitoring, but I mean its frickin’ Revision3! In my opinion, the best and most comfortable workplace to work of all time. I love it here

A couple of other special notes about what’s been going on at work…

I went bowling with @camillastenmark, @jollyroger, @grahamhancock, @cam8 and @serafina. That was awesomely fun, and Camilla made a little video to commemorate our time there.

I had my photo/name dropped on Tekzilla. WOOT!

While the live Diggnation was going on in NYC, I was featured in a ‘We Miss You’ Rev3 video made by @maubrowncow

Also, I appeared on the Brian Brushwoods live video podcast, BBLiveShow.

I think that pretty much covers everything! I’ll try to keep this updated more often from now on…

Much much much much more at the Original Post

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My first day at Revision3 was yesterday, May 18th. I can already tell that I’m going to love it here this summer. Yesterday was mainly a ‘learning’ day. I spent time getting set up with my e-mail account, learning my way around the servers, and watching a few of the other editors work their magic. I also sat in the studio while they shot this coming week’s Tekzilla. (See Below).

Today (Day 2) was completely different. I jumped in head first and started to edit next week’s TekZilla Dailies when Mau (one of the staff editors) came by and asked me to do some edits to this week’s Diggnation (#203).

The edits were quick and it didn’t take me long, but the second task was to censor out some nudity in one of the videos that Kevin and Alex discussed in the episode, this ended up being pretty tedious–requiring a lot of tracking and rendering.

Lastly, the guys just got confirmation that they’re doing a live Diggnation in New York on June 4th, and I created a quick info billboard in Motion with a VO from Alex that plays just before the episode starts.

The office/studio was really busy today because Kevin and Alex were shooting next week’s Diggnation in the studio (Kevin and Alex hung around the office, too which was cool!) And then at 5pm Kevin and Jay went live with the Digg Town-hall in the studio.

All in all a pretty productive day. I almost hate that I have the day off tomorrow because I was just starting to get into a rhythm; I wanted to stay in later to finish-up the Tekzilla dailies!

Thanks for following!

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We were supposed to meet my renter to let us in, but since he was out to lunch we decided to get a bite to eat as well. Unfortunately, this is where we screwed up BIG TIME, because we left our stuff in the car. Starving from not eating breakfast and being on the flight from Wisconsin, we went to sushi down the street. Literally 40 minutes later when we were done eating, our car was smashed in. Both mine and my dads laptop bags were gone. Pretty much all of our electronics, my passport, my blank checkbook, and countless other things I can’t remember were gone.

I can’t tell you how violated, depressed, and disturbed I was when we saw the car smashed in. I felt scared, angry, and actually pretty damn surprised. We literally parked directly in front of the door of the loft (the door and the wall to the loft lobby are completely glass), with two security cameras pointed at the vehicle, in the middle of the day. Fortunately for the thief though, the security cameras just so happened to be in the middle of a 15 minute maintenance, and didn’t capture him doing the deed. A coincidence? I’m still wondering that…

So, after screaming profanities in the street and laying down on the sidewalk for a few minutes, my dad and I came to our senses and called the police. Apparently in SF if someone doesn’t see the crime, the cops don’t come to you, you have to go to them. And even more fortunate for the thieves, no one saw the crime. So my dad and I drove to the police station with one window smashed out and filled out a police report. In our panicked state of mind we tried to recollect what was stolen from the car in a police station full of people complaining about their spousal abuse, parking tickets, and pretty much anything you could think of. We felt worthless, the police were so burned out from the massive amount of people there that really a couple of travelers with their laptops stolen was yesterdays news and didn’t really matter. Regardless, we filled out the report, moved the rest of the stuff that was left in the car into the loft, and spent the entire night panicking about identity theft, calling our credit card companies, banks, and fraud bureaus. A quote from my dad, “Welcome to fucking San Francisco”.

We really didn’t sleep too much during the night, my dad told me that all he could think about was how bad he felt about the whole thing. He felt like it was his fault because he should have known better. But I don’t blame him, we were both hungry and just weren’t thinking. And we really didn’t know that the area we were in was as bad as it was. We found out later from the security guard that there are drug deals, pimps, and prostitutes just down the street. Cute.

Luckily for us, insurance is going to be able to help us with about half of the damages. Only one of our laptops is covered, my HD video camera is covered, and the various other stuff is covered too. We are probably only losing a grand worth of stuff. Only. Hah. Isn’t that sad? What’s important though is that I learned my lesson. If you give them the opportunity, the asshole thieves of San Francisco will be on top of it within minutes. You have to be on top of your game, and aware of your surroundings at all times. These criminals are desperate, and they will take advantage of you if you slip up.

In an attempt to relax a little bit, my dad and I spent the next morning in Fisherman’s Wharf. We walked all along the piers, and it actually was slightly relaxing and gave me a little hope of happiness to come at my stay here. We walked around Pier 39, saw the sea lions laying on the docks, and even checked one thing off my to do list in San Francisco! We visited the Musee Mecanique! It was awesome, I got my fortune told by a wizard gypsy, arm wrestled a mechanical wrestler, and watched one of Marilyn Monroe’s first films.

After walking around for the entire morning my dad and I were pretty exausted, both mentally and physically from the stress, so we just went back to the apartment and chilled. Still without laptops, we were disconnected. It freakin sucked. We went out to eat at a Buca di Beppos down the street from where I lived, I had a nice glass of wine, and went back home to sleep. On the second day of being in San Francisco, both my dad and I were freaking depressed. We had just been screwed so hard and our minds still hadn’t recovered yet. I wanted to go home, see my girlfriend, and feel comfortable again. Living in the middle of the hood was scary as hell, and the neighborhood wasn’t what I expected of San Francisco. I was ready to meet awesome, exciting, happy, and friendly people. What I got was a mixture of bums that piss in the middle of the street and thugs selling drugs.

Needless to say, my dad and I felt it was probably a good idea to get out of the area as soon as possible. The first thing we did the next day was go to the Apple store on Chestnut street to get my laptop back so we could reconnect and start changing passwords on all of our online accounts. We met this awesome dude that worked there, and he told us that I should look around the Sunset district for a place to live and that getting a new place would most likely be a cinch. He even gave me his number and offered to show me around if I needed the help. A frickin AWESOME guy. He was our first glimmer of hope in the hell that we had been living. My dad and I literally walked out of the door with smiles on our faces. We were soooo happy. We drove around the sunset district, by SFSU, and really felt a whole different atmosphere. It was actually the hilly, sunny, and happy San Francisco that I wanted. I loved it. And I wanted to live there.

After that we went home, emailed a bunch of people on craigslist, and got a response within an hour. We drove to a couple places and landed on a really awesome place right across the street from SFSU. Right next to the Muni line (public transportation), its a little far from where I work, but the community is incredible. Students are constantly walking around, it just feels right. Not to mention the people in the house are extremely friendly, one of the girls that live here is a huge transformers fan and I think my geeky personality will fit right in. We put an offer on the place that night.

On Thursday, my dads last full day in San Francisco, we went to the Apple store to replace my iPhone, and met another AWESOME dude. He gave me his card as well, and told me that he was leaving the Apple store and that he would vouch for me if I applied for a position in the store. I’m really hoping I can get a part time job there. After that my dad had a business trip across the bay bridge, and then we spent the afternoon at the bank trying to open a new checking account and get money to put down on the new place. We went to target and the food store, got all my essentials, and set up base camp at the new place.

Today my dad left and I’ve spent most of the day trying to get all of my data on this new computer, cleaning and organizing my room, and actually writing this blog post right here. I hope to get some video up at some point. Hopefully my next updates will be more frequent and not quite as long. And hopefully less depressing. Damn.

I think I got jipped on my first week, and I really think and hope that I got the wrong impression of San Francisco. This can’t be it. I’m hoping that once I start my internship at Rev3 next Tuesday things will start coming together and everything will be all happy again. I’m already feeling better sleeping in the new place. And hey, I’ve got a pretty positive attitude, I’m going to make this experience awesome no matter what. I’m frickin’ living the dream!

I miss and love you all! I really do!!!

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I can’t begin to describe the number of emotions that are going through my head. I’m about to live my dream, getting my foot in the door of my favorite industry where I feel like I would fit in and thrive. I’m going to be working at the company where some of my idols are everyday! But after all my giddiness and excitement passes, reality starts kicking in. I’m moving to San Francisco, California, by myself. I don’t know anyone there. It’s not like I’m studying abroad or living at a university where I’m going to have people my age and in my situation all around me. I’m taking what little money I have saved up and some loans and I’m doing everything completely alone. I’ll be leaving my family, my friends, and an incredible relationship which has just started to blossom. I’m going to miss everyone so much. I hope that I can stay connected with everyone while I am gone. I’m going to need your support!!

One of the ways I hope to keep connected is through this website. Just before I went to Guatemala I bought a nice video camera which I’m going to bring to SF and hopefully keep at least a weekly video update up. Who knows, maybe I’ll also start a little mini podcast! So please keep checking up on my website for updates. I leave on the morning of May 11^th and I’ll be gone until mid-late August. Oh and if you haven’t heard about it already, I have a going away party on May 9^th. Please come and visit me! Wipe my tears away as I say goodbye to everyone!

One of the ways I hope to keep connected is through this website. Just before I went to Guatemala I bought a nice video camera which I’m going to bring to SF and hopefully keep at least a weekly video update up. Who knows, maybe I’ll also start a little mini podcast! So please keep checking up on my website for updates. I leave on the morning of May 11^th and I’ll be gone until mid-late August. Oh and if you haven’t heard about it already, I have a going away party on May 9^th. Please come and visit me! Wipe my tears away as I say goodbye to everyone!

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the mullet from michael baca on Vimeo.