| |
Copyright |
|
 |
 |
|
| |
| |
|
©2005 Jason Cross
All Rights Reserved
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Thursday, November 28, 2002 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Sunday, November 17, 2002 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
| |
|
A new addition to JasonCross.com - "Legends of Ian" recounting tales from the world of elusive Ian Morello sightings. More elusive than the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot and a good Steven Seagal movie...it's Legends of Ian!
Submitted by G. Bitzi Baker of Roswell, NM:
There I was eating at the Sip and Slurp (hot dog and chips for $1.99 at the Sip and Slurp!) along Highway 9 after my dancin' shift when the most frightening thing happened! I was finishing my third dog (eating for two, you know how it is) when the lights suddenly went out. Well Jimmy Joe tells me "don't worry G. Bitzi, probably just blew a fuse" but the next thing you know there's this GIANT BRIGHT LIGHT outside! The next thing I knew there were these little grey men coming in the door, kind of like on those books Jimmy Joe is always reading! They stood by the door for a second holding these little silver flashing thingies in their hands when I realized that they wanted my baby! Jimmy Joe had hightailed it into the back room so I was real scared, but the next thing I knew, they were gone. To this day I don't know why they left. At least they didn't take my little Nancy Lee, who was born 2 weeks later.
As for your friend, I think he's out east somewhere.
So there you have it, my five readers. According to G. Bitzi Baker of Roswell, NM, Ian is "out east somewhere". |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Saturday, November 9, 2002 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
I spent most of Thursday at the convention in downtown San Jose. The turn-out was tiny but there were a few highlights. The best part was meeting Craig Dodge and Duncan Crawford from Advantage Communications - our tech support company. I've been talking to Craig for a few years now and to Duncan for the last year, so putting faces to the voices was really cool. They're from Prince Edward Island, Canada, so their scottish accents really stood out.
Matt and I went to Fry's Electronics that night. For those who have never been to Fry's, it's like a Best Buy on steroids. TONS of software, games, movies, music. Hundreds of computer components ranging from the mainstream to the hard-to-find. I've been ordering parts for my new computer over the last week where at Fry's every part is readily in stock. "Sports Night: The Complete Series" was on sale and newly released, so I bought the DVD while I was there. We then ate dinner at Over The Border, a Mexican restaurant with great Fajitas. I believe they are a chain (owned by the same company that owns Chilis) but they're not around Iowa.
As was bound to happen, Friday came - departure day. Matt and I went to Intel and visited the Intel Museum where they have several displays on the history of the company and how they manufacture their chips. It was pretty interesting, seeing silicon wafers with hundreds of Pentium 4 chips uncut. Plus it was just neat actually being AT Intel.
Following Intel we stopped at Jamba Juice for a smoothie as it had been highly recommended by Laura at work, our marketing director and a former resident of San Jose. I had a Grapeberry Splash that combined grape, blueberry and raspberry. Very tasty, and of course I had to call Laura and tell her I was there while drinking it!
We then went to Nasa's Ames Research Lab, a facility where Nasa has a wind tunnel and does much of their aerodynamic testing. To tell the truth, there wasn't all that much for the public there, but it was neat getting my picture next to an actual Titan missile.
We then drove down to Palo Alto to see the Hewlett-Packard garage - the place where HP was started and now a California state landmark designated as "the birthplace of Silicon Valley". It's funny because it literally is this little detached garage next to an ordinary looking house in this residential area. Except it has this huge rock next to the driveway with a metal plaque from the state declaring it a landmark.
As we were in the area, we decided to walk a bit through downtown Palo Alto again. There we visited the Apple store and browsed around the iMacs, iPods, and iBooks. It really presented the Apple lines well and works in their positioning as a great place for a Mac person or computer layperson to learn about and buy a Mac.
For lunch we stopped at World Wrapps - another place recommended to me by Laura. There I had a GREAT chicken caesar wrap. I really wish they had a World Wrapps in Des Moines. :(
Finally it was time for me to catch my flight and say goodbye to the bay area. The week certainly flew by and I know I wan't to come out to the area again before too many years pass by.
Favorite: Pleasure Pizza in Santa Cruz - the food, the atmosphere, the staff - all perfect California
Runner-Up: Tie: Stanford/Palo Alto and Downtown San Francisco
Sorry I Missed: Monterey and Carmel |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Wednesday, November 6, 2002 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
Yesterday was spent in San Jose exclusively. Going around downtown, you can't help but get the feeling that San Jose is a city in the decline. The downtown is mostly empty, even compared to Des Moines. Most activity in the area centers around the convention center circled by hotels and The Tech Museum as well as the light-rail and bus center where some small businesses are located around the way. I can't help but wonder what the city was like at the height of the Tech surge when everyone thought that sky was the limit and money flowed through the city.
A homeless man asked us for 50 cents. I believe he might have been the former CEO of Pets.com! :)
Yesterday was also a day for work as it was day one of the ISPCon show. Arriving at the show, I was surprised to see how large the convention center was compared with how small the convention itself is this year. I was last at ISPCon in Spring 2000 - Orlando - and it was easily 4x as big as this year. My guess is that both the economy and next week's Comdex Vegas show play largely into the size this year. I did have a chance to meet some vendors and do some passes through the vendor floor which gave me a good idea of what technologies and vendors I want to talk to at greater length when I return tomorrow.
That evening Matt and I met up with his friend Josh for dinner at Faultline Brewing Company. It was pretty typical brew pub fare with great shrimp bisque and a spicy chipotle ravioli.
The weather report last night gave a very high likeliness of rain on Thursday and Friday, so Matt and I decided to step up our plans to drive along the coast up to Muir woods – the area north of San Francisco where there are giant redwood trees (and also where they filmed Return of the Jedi). We started off by driving south-west through the mountains to Santa Cruz. The mountains in northern California are interesting in that they are smallish compared to the greater mountain ranges but are very scenic with dense evergreen forests, rock faces, and many twists and turns.
In Santa Cruz we started at the Boardwalk, an area along the beach with many rides, shops and arcades. Unfortunately it is off-season, so most of the Boardwalk is shut down. It was still a nice area to see – it looks like it would be lots of fun in mid-summer when everything is open and teeming with life. Walking along the beach I found a sand dollar and a shop where I bought a Santa Cruz t-shirt giving me two souvenirs of an interesting area. I love simply walking along a beach, smelling the salt in the air and listening to the rhythm of the waves along the fine sand.
Going further into Santa Cruz we stopped at the Surfing Museum to find it closed. The museum is a little lighthouse-shack on a cliff pointing out into Monterey Bay. There were a handful of surfers in the water at the base of the cliff waiting for waves. They would jump right off the cliff into the water fifteen feet below, sit on their boards until the right wave came, and then ride the wave along the coast for a ways before either getting out of the water or paddling back to start the cycle over again.
For lunch we stopped at Pleasure Pizza, a nice little local pizzeria. It was the perfect Santa Cruz place to eat with lots of surfboard décor, a cute little California girl serving the pizza calling out the names of the pizza as the slices were served up (“Santa Barbara!” “Hawaiian!” “Vindicator!”), and these huge specialty pizzas sold by the slice. The most interesting was a pizza with large prawns on a pesto sauce though I stuck with a slice of Hawaiian and a Sausage-Salami.
After Santa Cruz we headed north up Highway 1 following the coast. The drive offered many scenic Pacific beaches along with several little beach towns. We eventually passed through Pacifica and reached the south side of San Francisco where we took the Great Highway along the west edge keeping to the ocean. This really gave a fascinating view of San Francisco’s many attached yet disparate buildings. We passed through north San Francisco, an area that seemed to be comprised of Chinese restaurants, houses of worship, and beauty salons, drove through the Presidio, and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge.
On the north end of the Golden Gate is a spot for cars to pull over for a scenic view and to walk across the bridge. Matt and I grabbed our jackets as the wind off of the ocean was somewhat chilly and walked halfway across the bridge, watching out for bicyclists and crazed drivers. The bridge is massive and impressively high. Walking underneath its red-painted cabling really gave me a sense of how exciting it is to be out here in this classic American destination at the edge of the continent.
Following the Golden Gate, we drove further north past Sausalito until we diverged further west to Muir Woods. Muir is a redwood forest – some trees reaching as high as 380 feet! By this time it was reaching four o’clock giving us one hour until the park closed and allowing for about two miles of trekking through the forest. The forest was very peaceful with other quiet travelers taking in the paths around the giant trees while breathing in the pine-scented air.
Something to note – Muir Woods is where they filmed the Endor scenes for Return of the Jedi! We didn’t see an Ewoks on our trip though.
We continued our trip north until we reached San Rafael and turned south, crossing the bay again though this time on the very long Richmond Bridge. We continued south along I-80 (the same I-80 that passes through Des Moines), stopping in Berkeley for dinner at Genki Japanese restaurant. Finally we crossed the Bay one last time, this time on the Bay Bridge, catching 101 south to San Jose.
All in all it was a great day, a fitting good bye to San Francisco as I will likely remain in San Jose for the rest of the week for the conference. I would have liked to visit the downtown areas again, but I guess that gives a good reason to come back to the bay area one day!
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Monday, November 4, 2002 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
I left for San Jose on Saturday afternoon. My plane took off at 8:30 am, but 30 minutes into the flight we received a message from the ground crew that a diagnostics panel door had been left open forcing a return. We landed for half an hour and then took off for Salt Lake City once more. The plane was only half-full letting me get an aisle to myself. Another surprise was in store once we reached SLC - we were minutes from landing on the runway when the plane took off again! The tower signaled at the last minute for us to circle once.
I got into San Jose around noon Pacific time. It struck me that the San Jose airport was small - not much bigger than the Des Moines "International" Airport. Josh, my cousin Matt's friend, picked me up so we could hang out at his apartment until Matt's flight arrived.
Saturday night we went to the Imax theater at The Tech museum to see Star Wars Episode II on Imax. The large scale was impressive, though having so much action take place so high up on a curved screen became pretty painful on the neck. I highly recommend taking a small pillow should you go see it.
On Sunday we drove to San Francisco. Along the way we stopped at Stanford to visit the beautiful campus. Tne combination of palm-lined streets and spanish-influenced architecture makes the campus quintessential California. We stopped for a bit at the Rodin Garden where I had my picture taken by the Gates of Hell sculpture.
Once in San Francisco we checked into the downtown Marriott where we had a room on the 27th floor. We dropped off our luggage, let valet park the car and walked down to Fisherman's Wharf. Downtown San Francisco is impressive - fairly clean with lots of style and stores similar to the Michigan Avenue area of Chicago. We stopped at the Trolley Car museum along the way to the wharf seeing the machinery that ran the four remaining cable cars (which work by attaching to cables that run under their tracks to go up hills). We then caught a trolley the rest of the way to the Wharf.
At Fisherman's Wharf we took a boat tour of the bay. The boat went out for an hour passing under the Golden Gate bridge and circling Alcatraz. At Pier 39 there is a large group of sea lions that apparently showed up during the 90s and have never left. After the boat tour we made the long walk back to our hotel, stopping at and walking up Lombard Street, the curviest road in America.
On Monday we went back to the shopping district where I bought some sesame sticks at Harry and David. We then watched a bit of a large political rally for Governor Davis and some other Dems. It was interesting seeing a large public rally coordinated for television with announcements telling people to make sure that all signs were double-sided for the camera to view them.
We walked through China town where I looked for a green stone dragon for my living room - a dragon brings luck according to Feng Shui. I had been looking for one for a while and had yet to find one that quite fit exactly the style I was looking for - but in Chinatown it was found! Chinatown is a funny little area with lots of little souvenir shops, Chinese restaurants, and major chains in pagoda-style buildings. We found that dozens of stores were selling little chirping metal crickets that are powered by solar energy making a warbling high-pitched noise throughout the area.
We then walked on to Rockstar Software, creators of our ISP connection software. Gregor (aka The Pizza Archangel) took us to a great little italian restaurant hidden away nearby. I've been dealing with Rockstar for a few years now so seeing the office and meeting the staff was interesting.
After walking around downtown some more, we drove a few miles to the Castro area to visit Chris, the Lockergnome and a friend who moved out here from Iowa. Chris and his wife Gretchen live in a great apartment on the second floor of a side-street that's near a wide variety of stores and restaurants. We ate dinner at a place called Squat and Gobble - a bistro-style restaurant with great food. We then got coffee at Peet's - a Pirillo must! - and then went back to Chris' to mess with his computer and just hang out a bit more.
Finally we got back to San Jose and checked into the Hyatt San Jose where I will be staying the remainder of the week. More on this place once it's light and I can get a better feel for the place.
Pictures and more to come! |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
