The Bay Area has an amazing variety of interesting people with interesting ideas. There are a ton of meetups that bring these folks together, like the salons of old (I know, pretentious, but a fair comparison). Here are some that Abe and Irina either have attended and liked, or will attend and expect to like:

Hacks and Hackers - journalists, coders and folks interested in news. Great group so far, super friendly and engaging, LOT of interesting (to me, anyway) ideas.

SuperHappyDevHouse - down in Palo Alto-ish, basically just a ton of folks (very programmer-heavy) get together for a day, work on whatever they’re working on, show stuff off, eat lunch, drink, etc. Only been to one for a few hours, but it seems very cool.

AR Dev Camp - bunch of folks interested in augmented reality ideas. It was a one-time conference, but I have a feeling there’ll be follow-up events coming out of it over the next few months; I’d be surprised if they didn’t do anything else in the Bay Area in 2010.

Hacker Dojo - not really a meeting, just a space for hackers to get together, work, play around, whatever, down in Mountain View. It’s where AR Dev Camp was, and I think they host events like it pretty regularly. Cool space.

Bay Area Real-Time Web - tends to be an East Bay thing, apparently gets a lot of great speakers.

SF Augmented Reality - another AR meetup, this one recurring and in SF.