Acts of Volition

Still recovering from the red-eye flight back home, here is the PowerPoint summary of my trip to San Francisco. Beware of blatant and shameless namedropping.

Though my itinerary varied somewhat from his, one of my travelling companions, Stephen DesRoches, posted a great overview of the trip. My complete photo collection from the trip is in my gallery.

• Drove Ben Goodger’s car (not the Infinity, but still cool). It has a XUL license plate.
• Hung out at the Mozilla Foundation — met all the great people there. It felt a bit like stepping into a dot-com company in 1999 — they were really working the stereotypes. The crowning peice was a soda-can suspension bridge.
• Went to Mozilla Developer Day — stole all the credit for the work of the talented Mozilla Visual Identity Team, got a round of applause for the Firefox icon.
• Had dinner with Andy Ruff who works on Entourage for Microsoft.
• Saw Pedro the Lion (fuzzy photo) play at the Great American Music Hall. The venue was beautiful, the band was great. The opening act, The Advantage (fuzzy photo), played instrumental versions of the soundtracks from Nintendo games (MegaMan2 and Contra — props to my friend Nick to identifying Contra before they announced the name).
• Drove to Monterey to meet up with a friend at the TED conference. Missed Mitch Kapor and Matt Groening by five minutes (name dropping of people I almost met — totally lame, I know).
• Met (very briefly), Mark Hurst from Creative Good.
• Visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium (with free passes from the TED conference — yo!). I took a comprimising photo of a starfish.
• Rode a cable car — it seems absurdly dangerous, but was fun.
• Walked through the Muir Woods, across the Golden Gate Bridge. The enormous sequioas provided the transformative spiritual experience I had hoped for — a 300 foot, 800 year old tree is great at putting your tiny little life in perspective.
• Met up with Doug Bowman from Stopdesign — we had a great chat — he was very gracious.
• Met up with a really cool web developer from Yahoo, got a great tour of the Yahoo campus (which is eerily close to Lockheed Martin). I got the impression that Yahoo does whatever it can to keep the yahooligans from leaving the campus — you can get dental work done, get your hair cut, work out, eat, play any number of sports, all on campus). We played Bocce Ball on the campus — it was surreal.
• Ate at the Betelnut restaurant on the (good) recommendation of Ian Williams.
• Checked out (the drive-by-stalker style), Google, Sun, Apple, AOL, and a bunch of other tech campuses. I hate flying — the red-eye back from San Francisco was brutal — I whine a lot (as my travelling companions can attest). The movie selection wasn’t bad though, School of Rock on the way out and Something’s Gotta Give on the way back. Sure beats the Thomas Crown Affair I saw on my last long-haul flight.
• The Postal Service is good music to listen to on a plane. Particularly, the track Recycled Air (“I watch, the patchwork farms / slow fade, into the ocean’s arm / and from here they can’t see me stare / the stale taste of recycled air”).
• Airplane food deserves it’s reputation.
• It was a great trip, but I’m glad to be home. Feeling good about being home again seems to be a nice affirmation of a good life in a good place.