My family just got back last week from spending a month in San Francisco. While we’ve lived (quite happily) in Boulder over the past three years, we spent 17 years in the Bay Area and like to get back there on a regular basis for an extended stay to reconnect with old friends and to reconnect with the great cuisine the Bay Area has to offer.

Any of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook probably saw me post status updates as we did our food tour, but I didn’t always remember to do it at each meal. So I looked back at my calendar (and my news feeds) to try to reconstruct a (mostly) comprehensive list of where we went out to eat during our month in the Bay Area. While we tried a couple new places (La Ciccia and Range), our destinations were more oriented towards old favorites, honed over many years of living in Northern California. Here goes:

7/18 – Yank Sing, San Francisco (lunch)

7/18 – Kokkari, San Francisco

7/19 – Pizzeria Picco, Larkspur (lunch)

7/19 – Taylor’s Refresher, San Francisco

7/20 – Sushi Ran, Sausalito

7/21 – Golden Flower, San Francisco (lunch)

7/21 – Slanted Door, San Francisco

7/30 – Tres Agaves, San Francisco (lunch)

7/30 – Mijita, San Francisco (dinner)

7/31 – La Ciccia, San Francisco

8/01 – The Village Pub, Woodside

8/02 – Tacubaya, Berkeley (lunch)

8/02 – Little Star Pizza, San Francisco

8/03 – 21st Amendment, San Francisco (lunch)

8/04 – Quadrus Cafe, Menlo Park

8/04 – Spruce, San Francisco

8/05 – Sancho’s Taqueria, Redwood City (lunch)

8/06 – Stern Dining Hall, Stanford University (lunch)

8/06 – Straits Cafe, Palo Alto

8/07 – Tres Agaves, San Francisco (lunch)

8/08 – Ame, San Francisco

8/12 – Yoshi’s SF, San Francisco

8/13 – Gialina Pizzeria, San Francisco

8/14 – Fish, Sausalito (lunch)

8/14 – Isa, San Francisco

8/15 – Yank Sing, San Francisco (lunch)

8/15 – Range, San Francisco

We also made numerous trips (in person and takeout) to Pizzeria Delfina (Pacific Heights location), Bittersweet Cafe and La Boulange (Fillmore & Union St. locations), but I can’t recall the precise days we visited those fine establishments. The careful reader no doubt noticed my pizzeria and taqueria fixation. What can I say, they are two of my favorite food groups.

We also hit the world’s best farmer’s market (the San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market) numerous times during our stay. Late July and early August are prime season for heirloom tomatoes and peaches and nectarines. And the king of all purveyors of stone fruit is, of course, Frog Hollow Farm.

The stand-out dinners for me during the month were La Ciccia, Ame and Range. The restaurant I’m most disappointed we didn’t make it to was A16, which we really enjoy, but somehow never made it there.

I’m always looking for suggestions of new places to try when I’m in SF (which is often). Please mention your favorites in the comments!

I’m a big fan of my Kindle 2, and I use it nearly every day. I like to read, and I like to read several books at the same time. I also travel frequently, and often I find myself reading new releases, which meant I’d find myself trying to cram multiple hardcover books into my shoulder bag, which was bad for my shoulder bag, not to mention my shoulder. I’m even contemplating acquired the new, larger-screen Kindle DX.

But, the feature I really want will have to wait for the Kindle 3: I want a touchscreen on the Kindle that responds to a stylus so I can write on my Kindle. This could mean allowing me to take notes on the margins of a book I’m reading, but the main reason I want it is so I can get rid of the last analog vestige of my day-to-day-life: the composition book. I simply want the ability to create blank pages on my Kindle and then scribble upon them.

I started using composition books back in 1995 to take notes, jot down ideas and generally manage my day-to-day life and have continued using them to this day. If memory serves, my inspiration for using the composition book came from Vinod Khosla, who at the time was at Kleiner Perkins and was an investor and board member at Excite. If the lowly composition book had any part in making Vinod so effective, I figured I couldn’t go wrong by trying to integrate habitual note-taking into my life. It turned out to be a remarkably effective tool for me, mainly because I find that (for me, your mileage may vary) the simple act of writing something down really helps organize and cement that thing in my mind. I still keep a stack of all my old composition books in my office drawer and sometimes refer back to a filled-up book months or even years later.

If I could simply take notes on my Kindle with a stylus, I’d be a happy man. I’d effectively have a composition book with an infinite number of pages, and, ideally, it would be backed up online and accessible on the web as well. I’d ditch my composition book, save a few trees and have a digital archive of my life available online. I don’t even need the Kindle to give me character recognition or anything like that. My handwriting is so bad anyway, I doubt any algorithm could ever be up to the task. But as long as I had the ability to tag pages, search and browse through them on my Kindle and online, possibly share individual pages with others, and perhaps even farm out some of the pages to be transcribed (no doubt via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk), I’d be even more enamored with my Kindle. Amazon, are you listening? This is my number one feature request for the next-generation Kindle. Whaddya think?