Electronics Stores in the Bay Area
I purchased the Microchip PICKit 2 PIC programmer not long ago with the hopes of programming some PICs to do fancy tricks with LEDs and stuff. But I've yet to acquire a PIC that I can program with my Mac OS X computers or the PICKit 2. This has been bugging me for a while, so I decided to take a trip to the Hobby Engineering store in Milbrae this afternoon in order to buy the components I've been hankering for. Unfortunately, it isn't open on Saturdays...or Sundays...or any day that someone who actually does this stuff as a hobby would be able to make their way to Milbrae (near South San Francisco). This got me down.
I think that hobby electronics has always had the potential to draw people into a friendly setting where they can exchange project ideas and advice. The Internet has a number of message boards and mailing lists, but none of them really appeal to me. I'd love to be able to drive to a nearby electronics store and be able to exchange conversation with someone who shares a similar interest in the field. Bookstores are a good analogy: you can buy a book online if you're concerned about price and raw data, but it's hard to compete with the environments afforded by brick-and-mortar bookstores.
So, in the interest of time, I'm going to order my parts on-line. Mooo....