13/01/26

San Francisco Reflection: 3 full days

-Simon Owen

I figure California is one of the most beautiful states in the U.S., and that San Francisco is its most beautiful city.

The transportation was one of the main attractions: streetcars, cable cars, trolleys, and Waymos.

Streetcars: colourful streamline tram-like vehicles from the 30s and 40s, collected from all over the world and transported to act as a living transport museum integrated as practical public transport in San Francisco.

Cable cars: brown old-fashioned behicles pulled by a system of cables just below the surface of the road. They started in 1893 making them over 150 years old.

Trolleys: electric buses with tram-like arms connecting to over-wire power lines.

Waymo: Google's self-driving service to replace Uber, currently operates in Phoenix, San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Austin, and Atlanta.

PRETTY SIGHTS IN SF

Check out these pretty boats.

There's A LOT of stuff to post, going way back to my two nights in L.A. on October 19th and 20th. My next post may be the Mexico City stuff including El Dia de Los Muertos de Alebrijes. I accidentally learnt that word as Alejibres so now I have to learn the actual word. Anyway, signing out.

11/12/25

Slight update to site + end of Mexico/U.S.A trip

-Simon Owen

> Today I uploaded a small update to my site, including launching this page so I can add text and image updates. Two days ago I received an offer letter from the University of Melbourne to study a Masters of Screenwriting at VCA (Melb Uni). I enrolled last night and very excited!

I'm in Crescent City and I should have already been in San Francisco for a day now, but I was 2 minutes late for the bag checkin at the tiny Del Norte Regional Airport. So I spent another day here. But it turns out it was a great decision as I got to walk the short but beautiful Fern Canoyon Trail Loop.

Davison Rd: The drive to and from the carpark was beautiful

Fern Canyon was used in Jurassic Park 2. The dinosaurs which attack the guy are Compsognathus, aka Compys, which are important in the start of the original Jurassic Park book but didn't appear in the film adaptation until number 2. Click here

Sometime a good few months ago (today: 11/12/25)

Updated movie blog

-Simon Owen

> I recently updated my favourite movies page which is the first page under the Movies section of my Blog.

The design is sort of a prototype for how my blog content might look across the different sections.

I’m using Figma for the first time to prototype before coding, which saves me time as I can test the design before spending hours on CodePen. I’m slowly learning HTML & CSS as I go along and it’s super fun! Sometimes frustrating when I can’t work stuff out but that’s part of the process.