Three-Letter Acronyms & Four-Letter Words

We ate at Nick's Lighthouse last night. As it turns out that is the same place that Gina and her friend Brenda ate at when she was in San Fran last time.

I started out the crab adventure looking to eat a crab all by myself, but the idea of clam chowder inside of a bread-bowl was too much for me. I ended up ordering the sourdough bread-bowl of clam chowder, Gina ordered a full crab and we split an order of fried calamari (which was EXCELLENT).

My chowder was good, the bread-bowl was really good. I also had an Anchor-Steam, a local brew that is quite popular and tasty. Gina had a Corona with her crab. I stole a couple of the smaller pieces of her crab for myself.

I am not a crab hater, but it isn't the first thing that I crave when we hit a seafood place like the Fisherman's Wharf area. But for me the trip to the Fisherman's Wharf area was more about the experience of eating down in that area (being a bit touristy) vs eating fried fish or shrimp.

Gina loved the crab and as always with crab had a great time cracking it open (with little use of the utilities they provide).

During our trip down there, Gina thought we were going to miss the wharf and had us get off the street car early. As it turned out I think we were still about 2 miles from the wharf at that point. We enjoyed the walk, but the last block or so we definitely felt it was time to sit down and eat.

We were accosted by a street salesman along the way, trying to pitch us on a weekend in Napa Valley at some swanky new $100M hotel that has the USA's first, only and largest 'wine cave'. His pitch was nice and informational at first, but then he cranked it up into the high pressure area, Gina hates sales people, particularly the high pressure kind. I sort of have an affinity for sales people, I love to see how well they do in their pitch.

I love talking with a good sales person, someone who knows their product and is a true practitioner of the craft. I HATE and have no issue being a bit rude to BAD sales people. Often BAD sales people reek of desperation or just flat out don't care about what they are doing.

Gina gave me the perfect out as she just sort of said 'OK, I am done.' and walked away. I told the guy that I had to leave as I had 'lost my wife'. He continued his hard sales push and ceased to be a good sales guy. In part, yes a sales person does need to have a level of persistence that one can call 'annoying' but a GOOD sales person knows when they have lost the (immediate) opportunity and knows when to stop, as not to damage what (little) relationship with the prospect might exist.

Anyway, the food was GREAT.

We grabbed some taffy from a store there across from restaurants.

Along the way over to the Trolley cars I saw a 'Trader Joe's'.

I have read about the store and wanted to witness what it was all about. It sort of reminds me a of a miniature Central Market.

Another one of the things I had read about was 'Two Buck Chuck', which is apparently a good wine that is only $2/bottle. However, I wasn't sure the name of the wine was actually 'Two Buck Chuck' or something else.

We wandered around the store until we found a wine that was $1.99, the name is Charles Shaw, and the nickname for Charles is Chuck.

We bought a bottle of Shiraz and Cabernet, I will let you know how those turn out.

Well, my laundry is done, so I am thinking that we should pack it in and head back to the hotel, drop off the laptops and head out for the next adventure.

I think we are going to hit up the Timbuk2 retail store and see if we can find the ASPCA while we are here.

Laterz

Gina has arrived from Austin.

She stopped by the booth as Brian and Bill were packing up the booth (I helped a little but, I guess you could say I was supervising).

We are preparing to take off to the Timbuk2 store or maybe just down to the wharf for crab and beer. (we are not completely sure yet)

Apparently the Internet provider here set a cookie on my laptop or recognizes the MAC address from my room earlier today, as I am able to get on the Internet here in the NEW room without having to pay for the Internet again.

The wife says we have to go, so this is a short and sweet post to just let y'all know that Gina has arrived and we are taking off for the day.

Hopefully we will snag some pics along the way.

Laterz

I am not sure what I was expecting in regards to how busy the trade show floor would be.

Last year the trade show seemed to be about 1/2 the size of this year. And since I was attending the conference last year (vs exhibiting) I honestly didn't go down to the trade show floor except for when they sort of forced us down there (lunch and free beer).

There was a mad-dash when the trade show doors first opened, everyone was going for the free t-shirts. Which reminds me I need to try to get mine tomorrow.

I spent a good chunk of today in the booth. We have a schedule and I was there when I wasn't schedule, but I am not complaining, I was stuck there because I was talking with people. It was not as if I was stuck there waiting for someone to come and 'tag-out'.

I had some very good conversations and some conversations that ultimately won't lead to any business, but at least the conversations were interesting.

Well I am done with email and looking to grab a snack (read dinner).

Jack called me a little bit ago and told me that he was heading to the Pub nearby.

I think I will scoot on down there.

Laterz

I have been working throughout the day here during the sessions, but as Stowe Boyd might say I have been practicing 'Continuous Partial Attention', I am listening to the conference presenters and typing away at a couple of different things.

However, I am in between projects and starting to (finally) run low on power, if you can trust the power gauge it says I have 27 mins left, I am going to see how correct it really is.

But I will say that I have managed to be on the laptop for almost 4 hours so far (maybe going on 5).

I am current sitting in 'Building Next Gen Web 2.0 Apps', the material is good and speaks true to some of the stuff that I have experienced at Jaduka over the last 12 months.

But one of the things that I wanted to post before shutting down is that I am sitting near the wall, near the outlets and there are several folks camped out along the wall and on the seats near the aisle next to the wall, all tethered to the wall, in (you guessed it) the eternal search for power.



** Low Battery Warning Just Kicked On *** (says 15 mins)

Gotta go.

(Update: The laptop went into sleep mode at about 3% remaining approx 11 mins remaining.)

Laterz

I made it to San Francisco just fine.

I am a little tired, in classic fashion I managed to only leave enough time to take a cat nap before having to get up and head out to the airport.

A colleague, Brian Haverty (San Fran Local), picked me up from the airport and we headed off to lunch. I unfortunately forget the name of the place, I will try to find it later. But it is a taqueira that seems to specialize in burritos.

I had a carnitas burrito with black beans and I asked for some cilantro to be thrown in there too.

It was a good lunch. It is a little chilly, so Haverty drove home to grab a coat. He showed me his house, it is very nice. I had the opportunity to meet his wife, Karen, while we were there.

After grabbing his coat we stopped at a Starbucks and got some coffee (very useful as I was starting to get rundown right about then).

After talking a little shop and finishing up the coffee, Haverty drove me over to the hotel. It is a swanky hotel.

As I was checking in the front desk clerk (think her name was Charlene, might have that wrong) she informed me that the mini-bar works on a new system (think she called it the 'sense-o-matic') and will charge me for anything that gets moved, so that even if I tried to store some leftovers in there I would likely get charged for a $10 tin of almonds (or cashews).

I asked her if I happened to accidentally hip-check the mini-bar fridge if I would just end up owning everything in there. She laughed and informed me that the mini-bar is housed in a larger cabinet. I told her that I can be a little clumsy in the morning and wouldn't want to end up with a HUGE bill.

I signed up for Internet ($14.95/day, ouch) and have started catching up on the fact that I have been traveling all day.

Here is a pic of my MSU hat on the window seat.



Laterz

PS. The Juno Movie Soundtrack is fscking sweet.

I can't remembered if I posted up here about the CDs I bought while in San Fran.

I don't think I did (and I'm too lazy at the moment to do a search on my own blog).

I bought some Sinatra. I have to say that I was never HUGE fan of 'Old Blue Eyes'. But I can honestly say that I have never heard a Sinatra song that I hated. Maybe it is the singing, maybe it is the horn section but when he belts it out, it is just inspiring.

There was a Virgin Megastore on the way from the hotel to the Mascone center. They had a $10 CD sale going on. I picked up a few new CDs, Sinatra being one of them, the Cure being another, some Eddie Izzard (comedian) and a band called the Fratellis (I think).

Anyway, I'm going to hit CostCo on the way home.

Laterz

"I came to the conference and think of words. Words like ..."
-- The pause between "... and think of words." and "Words like ..." was a little too long. It was sort of one of those, 'And your point is ?" type of moments.

"Architecture 2.0" -- And 'Web 2.0' and 'Office 2.0' and 'Voice 2.0'. But hasn't architecture been around long enough to be like 300.0 ?

"I love Data!" -- Who doesn't? He was a great addition to the Star Trek crew.

"... huge data-fest." -- As long as it isn't a sausage-fest.

"Swivel Preview" -- Not an Alpha, not a Beta, but a 'Preview'. I loved that.

"I started thinking about usability." -- I don't know why exactly I wrote this one down, but I just liked it.

"... Desire based thinking ..." -- Most thinking is about some form of desire

"... Psychographics ..." -- Pyschotic demographics?

"It's all experimentation." -- Isn't that true about everything?

"... Merging Research & Design ..." -- Notably different than Research and Development, so R&D becomes R&DD or R&D&D?

"... Scrum Master ..." -- The speaker was talking about 'Scrum' a form of project management, but the name just sounded too funny.

"... Feng shui for your app ..." -- I heard this and thought back to a VP who used to bring in plants to move the energy around, thought about how one would do that in PHP. focus_chi_energy() ?

"... creating more of a closed web ..." -- Seemed sort of an oxymoron type statement. Because the web typically means that it is open. The comment was in related to not being able to do a 'view source' to see how someone did something.

"The power of view source." -- 'View Source' really is powerful, one would also say 'View Source' is a driving force behind 'Open Source'.

"... army of minions ..." -- I love the words 'minions', 'lackeys', 'underlings'.

"Most advanced social platform out there." -- Bold statement by the Facebook guys. But fortune does tend to favor the bold.

"... webscale ..." -- First time I heard this was Jeff Bezos (CEO, Amazon). Another thing that sounded like an oxymoron. Because, isn't everything on the web, webscale? I mean I know he meant 'scaled to be able to handle the web traffic of Amazon, Flickr, etc.

"... programmable warehouse ..." -- This just seemed really cool. The idea of programming a warehouse.


I need to shutdown to conserve power.

Laterz.

(To better reflect my time spent studying Journalism, I will come back and accredit these quotes. I will need to check the schedule for that though and I just wanted to get a quick post up between sessions.)