San Francisco 2005 Trip Report - Part 2
As detailed in part one, Sunday was the second day, and the turnaround as far as our attitude toward San Francisco. The one downside to the gay pride parade was that we forgot to wear sunscreen. Usually we're pretty diligent about it, but I guess we didn't think the parade would actually be as long as it was. Consequently, we spent the rest of the trip with sunburned heads and noses. The following is a mostly joke-free summary of days three and four.

Day Three - JavaOne Begins

JavaOne started bright and early Monday morning. I headed out from the hotel and rounded the corner only to see a line stretched around the block of programmers waiting to get into the first key note. I decided to skip the free breakfast and stand in line. It turns out that it was just that they hadn't started letting people in yet. Once they did, the line moved rapidly and there was plenty of room. Most of the speech was a lot of "Yay, Java!" type of stuff. To me, the main point of interest was that the Blu-ray DVD players will ship with a JVM. Good stuff I think. After that and some references to how Java is improving healthcare in Brazil I was off to see some of the sessions and score some free stuff.

Meanwhile, Lisa went to the Metreon, got some food, and went back to the hotel to play VMK.

After a disappointing day of sessions that were glorified infomercials, I took a break before my late night "birds of a feather" session met back up with Lisa. We went up to "the View", a bar on the top floor of the San Francisco Marriott and snapped some nice pictures of the city. We then rode the cable car down to the wharf and ate at a restaurant named the Franciscan based off of good ratings on CitySearch. Gratuitous food shot:

Although pretty, it was some of the worst seafood I've ever had. I would rather have eaten at Long John Silver's. Nice view though.

After a little walking around, we started the long process of standing in line for the cable car. There was a street performer playing while we waited.

He was pretty bad technically speaking (a lot of missed / dead notes, offkey usually), but it was oddly appealing and entertaining. We made it back to the hotel and I went to my late night session then called it a day. Photo highlights:

Day Four - Chinatown

While I did more largely uneventful stuff at JavaOne during the day, Lisa took the cable car down to the wharf and did a lot of exploring on her own. After the daytime stuff was over at JavaOne, we both headed up to Chinatown. As I've already told most of my co-workers, this is where my yellow fever turned into pneumonia. We did a ton of walking around (while I made as many happy ending jokes as I could) and eventually wound up at the Chinatown gate. Certainly anti-climactic. We ate dinner and, after a disappointing bowl of hot and sour soup, headed back to the hotel. Photo highlights:

- posted by Robert @ 7/10/2005 10:26:00 PM