RasterWeb: Rambles: sanfrancisco

I know. I vowed never to go to California. It's a vow that held some meaning back in the early 90's and if you knew me then, you'd probably understand it. If not, you won't. Anyway, I went to California. Not only that, but I flew on a commercial airline, something else I said I wouldn't do. (We're all hypocrites, some more than others...)

The reason was the Seybold Seminar 2000. They (the man, etc.) sent me out there, and it was indeed interesting. Below is my long and rambling story about going to, and being in, San Francisco.

I left RasterWeb H.Q. and headed for the airport. I had to stop at the local drugstore to pickup a stronger prescription for my ear infection. They were closed. I ended up flying to Dallas and then S.F. without my medication. Oops. All was well though, flying doesn't bother me too much, though I've only flown on privately owned planes previous to this, so I got a crash course in airport protocol from a coworker who I managed to convince I would be mugged and killed if someone didn't make sure I did things right. On the Dallas to S.F. flight I ended up sitting next to an Australian woman whose husband works at CollabNet. She said they would hang out with Brian Belendorf, and probably dropped some other open source names I can't remember. I asked if she knew Cameron Barrett but she didn't. I asked her how to get from the airport to the hotel I was staying at, and she said if I split a cab to her house she would drive me there. So I said "Sure" being a trusting midwesterner. We get to the airport and I walk towards the baggage claim area, then happen to turn around and notice that she's nowhere in site. You can't trust those Australians....

I did get to the hotel ok, and the next morning I noticed that I could not hear anything in my right ear. Now I freak out, since I have no medication, I'm nowhere near home, and I can't hear. Luckly my balance was only slightly affected. I didn't actually fall over, although I probably came close. I ended up walking around the city a bit, well, the part I was staying in anyway, around Mission and Market, near the Moscone Center. When I first left the hotel and walked about three blocks I saw someone sort of stagger a bit, spit out a butt, and then lean over and puke. It was at that moment I realized I was really in San Francisco! I also saw real live homeless people. Well, I suppose the ones in the midwest might be more hardcore as we have hellish winters here, but I'll leave it at that. I'm pretty sure none of them were members of Crimpshrine. I ended up giving food to a number of homeless people, since I usually tried to order big meals (big for McDonalds/Burger King anyway) If I couldn't find a homeless person, which does sometimes happen, I'd just leave the food on top of a trashcan or newspaper box. I think I read in Cometbus that that's what you should do. At one point I was walking for a few blocks carrying a bunch of french fries with no homeless person in site. So I fianlly put then down and then 1/2 a block later saw a 'pregnant' homeless woman. She missed out on the fries, because just like real estate, the most important thing is: location, location, location! I did notice one homeless guy holding out a Starbucks cup asking for change and I said "Sir, if you can afford to drink coffee from Starbucks, you're doing OK in my book!" I didn't really say that, it's just a joke. I have more to say about homeless folks, but I'll save if for another ramble.

Seybold was neat, I atended a bunch of sessions and learned a few things. The weird part for me was that even though I was in the center of news, press releases, and industry announcments, I felt out of it, as I usually rely on the web for these things. I ended up reading up on some of the Seybold news from various web sites rather than actually hearing about them. It was a little surreal. Lucky there were a bunch of iMacs with net connections. Whew... Mac OS X was the big news of the day, so at the Apple booth I got to fiddle around with it a bit. One of the Apple employees said "I'd uh, prefer, if you didn't mess around with the command line." I really should have typed rm -rf and then said "What did you say?" but I didn't. I later looked at an iBook, and launched an application named Apple VPN, which I thought was perhaps a VNC client. The guy standing around said that it was his iBook and would I please not launch that application. Alright, one more try. I found another OS X machine and looked under the hood. I actually telnetted to my *nix account to check my mail, this time the guy standing around this machine said "Hey, you found the terminal!" (It wasn't really hard, it was under the Apple Menu.) I said "Is that OK?" He said "Well, sure... it's late in the day..." He left and another Apple person stopped buy, I asked him some questions about Apache that he couldn't answer, and I told him that the clock was the old NeXT clock. He seemed to realize that I might know more that him and just smiled alot. Anyway, OS X is scheduled for public beta in a week and a half (at the time I'm writing this) and it does look cool. BSD and the Mac OS? Now that's cool in my book. I also met Dave Winer, and thanked him for creating Frontier, as I still use it and think it's a cool product. He told me to try Radio UserLand. I said "I have."

I ended being all expo-ed out by midday Wednesday and no longer had a hotel room, so I went to the airport around 7 PM. My flight didn't leave until 11:20 PM. Hmmm, well, I could do some work on the PowerBook, right? Uh, the power cord is in the suitcase which was checked already... ugh... I ended up doing a lot of reading. Flew to Chicago and ended up sitting around for two more hours. Took one more flight and then spent an hour driving home. Yay, that was San Francisco.

P.S. Is there only one Blondie's Pizza? I know it represents some weird historical footnote in the history of the Bay Area scene of the early 90's, but I can't remeber what it is. Then again, I could be completely wrong.

  Last Modified: 04.02.2001 by rasterboy