A giant version of the bop-it device. I haven’t seen / played a bop-it in over ten years… its still fun!

Powered by humans, the giant wheel moves a finger up and down into the nose of the sculpture.

A hang gliding simulator.

This drum set was completely automated by the computer. Very cool.

The catapult contest was fun to watch.

The Microsoft Makers area had a fully automated beverage setup. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this before, but its still cool.

These two guys are trying to play some Mario Brothers game on a giant NES controller.

This year, the San Francisco Chinese new year parade was held on the 3rd of March. I have participated in many parades, and when I think of the SF Chinese new year parade, I tend to think of rain. But since it was held a few weeks later than usual, there was no rain in sight, and there were crystal clear skies. And because it was such a nice day, I think more people showed up to watch the parade live. Hopefully the parade organizers realize this and will have it around the same time next year.

While waiting for the parade to start, I tried to visit every participating group of the parade to take pictures. Its the year of the pig this year, and there were a lot of cute costumes worn. I certainly had a lot of fun this year, and hope to participate in more festivities next year (I would love to get an invite to shoot the Miss Chinatown pageant).

Yesterday I met up with Thomas Hawk and many others at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. Robert Scoble has done a few photowalks featuring Thomas Hawk for his ScobleShow, and this was the first time they announced it so anyone could join in. There were over twenty people that showed up, and I met several interesting folks like Martin McKeay of the Network Security Blog/Podcast and Kristopher Tate of Zooomr.

Since there were so many people at this event, I’m sure there are a ton of pictures online at flickr and zooomr, but you can find the rest of my pictures here. There are some good writeups of the event from Thomas Hawk, Robert Scoble, Shel Israel (who accidently spilled water on me), and Martin McKeay.

Robert Scoble had several 8gb CF microdrives to give away from Seagate (who sponsors ScobleShow), and I was one of the lucky winners. Thanks Seagate!