Yesterday, my family and I headed into the city to check out the California Academy of Sciences, in Golden Gate Park, which reopened recently for the first time in decades. Sadly, other people had the same idea. Parking was impossible, the lines rivalled Disneyland, and they started metering admission - one in one out, like a night club - at 11am.

Needless to say, we didn't wait around. After regrouping at the tea gardens, we went to the de Young museum next door and caught a few of their new exhibits instead.

The first one we saw was a chronology of Asian American artists. It had a number of beautiful scrolls, but overall, the aesthetics of the different pieces were too scattered and jarring for the exhibit to come together as a whole.

When I got to the end of the exhibit, everything fell into place. It had all been a prelude to a stunning collection of geological sculptures by Maya Lin, best known for the Vietnam war memorial.

The mediums ranged from plywood to bent wire to bas reliefs embedded in the walls, and the sources ranged from the Dead Sea to Hetch Hetchy reservoir. They were strikingly beautiful. Each one was devoid of detail, little more than a sketch, but still managed to convey an arresting sense of place and physicality. They were surreal, and at the same time, utterly grounded. I loved them. A few fell flat, but even those were interesting, and worth seeing.

I enjoyed the other exhibits too, especially the Yves Saint Laurent retrospective and a collection of exploratory photographs, but for my money, the Maya Lin pieces were the highlight. Maybe the Academy of Sciences has something that can compete. I guess I'll find out next time - but only if the lines are tolerable!

Pictures from a couple holiday parties are up! Yahoo's and my apartment building, the President Hotel's.

I've already written about a few cloud computing services here - Azure, SimpleDB, the Facebook data store - so I might as well continue down the list. Next up is Yahoo! Open Strategy aka Y!OS, a collection of services and APIs that let developers integrate their web applications with Yahoo. I've done a separate deep dive into YQL, the query language for Y!OS; I'll skim the rest of the platform here.

Y!OS is an umbrella that includes a number of different APIs and services. At a high level, Y!OS is similar to platforms like OpenSocial and the many gadget APIs. It allows third party web applications to be distributed, discovered, and live inside Yahoo. Y!OS apps may be installed by Yahoo users, run in various contexts on Yahoo sites, use Yahoo's custom markup language, integrate with Yahoo's social network, and access data from Yahoo's various properties, including private data - if permitted - via OAuth.

There are three runtime models for Y!OS apps: JavaScript via Caja, Flash, and traditional server side. Apps may be displayed in either small or canvas view, depending on the device and context. Both modes have a conspicuous Yahoo container, including a header, footer, and banner ad. That last part is notable, since there's no mention of revenue sharing.

Y!OS isn't really in the same league as full-fledged cloud offerings like Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, and Google App Engine. It doesn't directly run third parties' code, nor does it host their data or static files. It's a more of a full featured web container and set of services. Still interesting, of course, just not my field.