Last night I uploaded some pics of the legendary Bay to Breakers running/drinking event in San Francisco, which also happens to run almost directly past my house.

I just logged into my Flickr account and saw that loads of people were looking at my pics. How come? The stats tell the whole sordid story. Yes, you dirty sods on the Internet are all going for the naked pictures – even when each one comprises of quite old, really quite out of shape naked people running.

That said, I think my absolute favourite picture is pure comedy nakedness. See below for the glorious weirdness of this pic. Only in San Francisco, my friends.

Week before last, I was in Washington DC to see and play a small part in the signing of a new agreement between ICANN and the United States government, called the Affirmation of Commitments.

This was an important moment, not just for ICANN but also for the whole future of the Internet and its domain name system. It has been somewhat simplistically summarized as the United States letting the Internet navigate its own course, rather than decide that somehow one country’s lawmakers had a better idea how to deal with this global communications network than any other country’s. Unless you are an Internet governance addict, that explanation should suffice.

More importantly from a personal perspective, it was an extraordinary achievement after two years of hard work by ICANN’s staff, especially my boss Paul Levins. I recall very clearly people dismissing the very concept of the affirmation out of hand just 20 months ago, and then a fair few people being aggressively anti a new agreement until even just a few weeks earlier.

But in the end, it was a great piece of work, and that was reflected in an across-the-board positive response from the community, the US government, the Senate and House, the European Union, the registries and registrars and, unbelievably, even the most dedicated ICANN haters.

But I’m not going to go into any details here. I just came across some snaps I took with my iPhone on the Wednesday the Affirmation was announced so I thought I’d stick ‘em up while the mood took me.

Is this a flower reaching out of my Bird of Paradise – or just another leaf?

One of the things I love about Los Angeles (well, Southern California) is the abundance of the Bird of Paradise and its extraordinary bright orange (though sometimes black) unfurled mohican flower.

So when I moved to my new flat and had room, I bought one, with the salesman telling me it would flower in July/August (i.e. a few months’ time). It’s now mid-September and nothing. But the plant(s) do occasionally shoot out a long green stem that promises to provide one, only to unfurl across its length rather than at the top and reveal another enormous bright green leaf.

Anyway, the shoot in the picture looks promising to me and I am keeping my fingers crossed. Incidentally I am thinking of using the first flower from my plant as the buttonhole thing for my wedding. Not sure how that works – presumably it would have to be very fresh.

One more vaguely interesting thing – this whole post has been put together through a Wordpress iPhone app – interested to see how it fares.

I arrived in Sydney very early this morning in preparation for an ICANN meeting next week. Took a stroll around the city to shake off the jet-lag and took some pics:

So I was in Palm Springs this weekend in an effort to get out of Los Angeles and relax a little. We stayed at The Riviera – which was apparently where Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe etc used to hang out when Palm Springs was full of young Hollywood stars rather than old gay couples.

The Riviera was great. Palm Springs was great. But the highlight of the weekend was an art show on a patch of grass that we stumbled across while having a stroll on Sunday. This is no doubt a famous show and I’m showing my ignorance, but I have to say I was impressed – the quality was very high and the prices very reasonable.

There was an artist called Greg Clarke who did some great work, using different chemicals to stain a huge piece of copper according to this designs. Mostly he drew women – faces and forms – but filled the outline with lots of other faces and people. You could spend hours looking at it – very precise and neat. Unfortunately they were also huge pieces of copper and cost a few thousand dollars each so I took his name and decided that if his pieces kept playing in my mind, I might have to do something about it.

So we wandered around some other work – lots of pictures printed on canvas, some nice landscapes, some bright and colourful cartoon-like pieces. And then I turn the corner of one of the lines of stalls and was struck dumb by a number of walls of striking beautiful Asian art. I’ve very glad they were priced reasonably as I have no doubt I would have walked away with one of these pieces, no matter what.

In fact, I most wanted a gorgeous blue lotus flower on a white background for $600 but it had already been sold. And then I got the strange sense of panic that I get when I come across something I love – I got a unreasonable and irrational fear that I had to buy one now in case they were all suddenly bought by someone else. In fact, I nearly bought several but then my brain kicked in and told me to calm down. Anyway, fortunately there were another two I particularly liked – one had also been sold already – so I snapped up the other.

And that’s how I met Andy Anh ha – a very nice American bloke who told me a bit about his work and where it is displayed and he gave Sapna a postcard with examples of his work and his website. I bought the piece for $250, he wrapped for me and I left unbelievably satisfied with my purchase.

It’s now been on my wall for five days and I love it. So I took some pictures today and have stuck them below. I’ve also offered to do Andy a better website. I hope he takes me up on the offer. I can highly recommend his work. My photographs were only quick so I’ve not really captured the work’s beauty but if you are looking for a piece of artwork, check out http://andyanhha.com/.

I’ll be taking pictures at DOMAINfest today and sticking them on Flickr – and possibly here – with a CreativeCommons license (free non-commercial use; attribution required). The stream is below: