Business and pleasure

It's been a busy and illuminating few days here in San Francisco. After the closing session, Mir Islam and I got together for a few minutes before his trip down to San Jose and while we were discussing impressions from today and our next steps based on what we've learned, he mentioned that this was the most useful conference he's been to in several years. We've certainly got a lot of follow up items to address as we leave here.

The Hyatt Regency is a very nice hotel and I've quite enjoyed my stay. I had a view of the waterfront looking off toward Vallejo and while I've noticed articles questioning the usability of the building (specifically the elevators), I can understand why things were done this way. It certainly makes elevator rides more interesting and the view from various places around the hotel are quite visually intriguing.

Tonight I got to see the last part of the hotel...

I took a taxi over to meet Adam at his dorm room at 6:30 and once he arrived from class we walked down to the Apple store with the intention of adding some RAM to his TiBook. After fiddling around for a while it was determined that they no longer carried that item so we'll need to deal with it when he gets home next week (I can't believe his freshmen year is almost over). So what to do for dinner? I was going to leave it to him, but he didn't have any ideas. There are several restaurants in the Market Square area, and we've eaten there before on family trips to San Francisco. We got to talking about the Hyatt Regency and he'd never seen the inside, so we decided to walk down Market, see the hotel and if possible we'd eat at Equinox. He was suitably impressed by the ride up to my room (to drop off his bag) and walking around the rim. Then we got started playing around trying to get to the top. The trick as we learned is to use the elevators on either end, both of which seem to go up to Equinox. In the end, we wound up doing so from the atrium (lobby) level.

As soon as we got off the elevator, they asked if we had reservations (now I worry). No, sorry; might we be able to get a table anyway? The answer was yes and we were seated without a wait (I wasn't expecting that). The unique aspect is a nice view of the eastern side of the city and the bay in a rotating restaurant. Even though this was the haziest day this week (we've had wonderful weather, something I wasn't expecting after running into rain on the way to Burbank on Monday) it was still a marvelous view and we got to watch sunset from many angles while eating. Are there better views elsewhere? Certainly if you want to see the north side of the city and over the years I've been to a few but this was pretty neat and not subject to where you are seated. In 45 minutes, you will see everything.

After we ate, we came back down to my room where I loaned Adam a Firewire drive until he gets home (he's perpetually out of room) and then took him downstairs and packed him into a cab (Dad, I can walk... Whatever, get in, here's some money).

I think it was an ideal addition to a really good trip. Tomorrow I get to do the airport shuffle (nearly 6 hours door to door, kinda crazy since I can do that driving if the conditions are right).